TTM20.2

Time Travel Machine Has Been Redesigned

After years of hard work, we’ve fixed a major bug

I bought a house second-hand in the outskirts of Dublin, Ireland, and moved in not so long ago. To be exact, two months and eleven days. I live with my wife and our two sons, one with three years old and the youngest six months old. We’ve been enjoying the place, the neighbourhood, it’s a beautiful area. There is a school nearby, lots of green as usual. It rains a lot too, as usual.

Something in the house has been bothering me a bit to the point of losing my sleep. In the shed, in the back garden, right after we moved in, I saw this giant thing in a squared shape, roughly two hundred centimetres high, one-eighty centimetres wide, and one-twenty centimetres of depth, covered in a black sheet.

I’ve been trying to find the time to investigate further what it is, and today is the day. I’m off work, my oldest is in daycare, and my wife is taking care of my youngest. I can’t postpone it any longer.

On one side of the big fridge — let’s call it that — there is a pocket. I reach my hand into it and pull a piece of paper that reads the following.

User Manual

Welcome to Time Travel Machine 20.2 (TTM20.2)

The rules of space and time have been redesigned.

When Marty McFly went to the past, to the year 1955 to be precise,(or back from the future? it doesn’t matter), he accidentally interfered with the meeting of her future mother, Lorraine Baines, and his father George, putting himself and his siblings’ life in jeopardy. As the risk of Lorraine and George not meeting loomed, the people in a family photo in Marty’s pocket started to fade. Even Marty himself began to see one of his hands disappear.

It’s a mistake in the initial design that got out of hand. It’s present in the system since the beginning, and changing it required massive refactoring. But we’ve finally done it. We’ve been working hard to build a new system for the past ten years, and we hope you enjoy it. Here are the new rules:

New rules:

• Space and time are like a tree, made of trunk and branches. All that is happening in your life now is part of the trunk. It’s the live data—the current life (CL).
• Whenever someone wants to travel in time to a particular date (past, future or back to the future), a branch is created, and you start living there. Nothing that is done in it affects the trunk — the current life (CL). In 1955, Marty would be living in a branch. Whatever he would do wouldn’t affect his life in the CL. He wouldn’t disappear off of the risk of their parents not meeting, for example.
• Whatever happens in the branch can be merged to the CL at any time, but you have a chance to see and analyze the implications. We, the admins of the TTM20.2, will also review and make sure nothing major is impacted. For instance, Marty wouldn’t be able (and he probably wouldn’t want it) to merge his “Mother falling in love for him, instead of George” to the trunk.

Here’s a visual representation and a few use cases.

Inspired by Stephen King’s novel 11/22/63, if you wanted to save John F. Kennedy (JFK), you would go back to 1958 and create a new branch named, say: “save_JFK”.

Nothing you do in “save_JFK” impacts the CL. At any point, while living in “save_JFK”, you can get back where you were without any impact. You have the option to merge, see the impacts and submit for review — we’ll approve or reject.

This is not the first time TTM20.2 is to be used. Hundreds of people have already travelled, and below are some of the branches created. None of them has been merged to CL.

• kill_baby_hitler
• prevent_bomb_hiroshima
• avoid_9_11_attacks
• do_not_marry_alicia

and there are many, many others….

More advanced rules and the “terms and conditions” are in digital form. They are available once you turn the machine on.

Have fun.

The Time Travel Machine Team.