Fatally flawed

June 25, 2025

This will be my final journal entry.

After decades of research and endless hopeful results that turned into dead ends, tonight, at last, I will fulfill my destiny.

Over the last five and a half decades, my entire professional life, I have been developing the technology for time travel. I have lost so many on this journey, but I’ve always known my perseverance would bear fruit.

When I was a youth, I visited a fair with my parents. I was drawn to the fortune-teller’s tent. As I gave her the requisite nickel, she grabbed my wrist and looked at the palm upon which the nickel lay. She let go as if my skin burned her. She spat and said, “You will do what you are destined to do and I will have to live with that knowledge. Get out!”

I was confused, hurt and more than a little angry at the time. But as I grew older, and found my calling, I remembered her words with delight: I would prevail.

Why does anyone want to go back in time? Perhaps to change a single, personal action one has lived to regret? A vigorous No, I reply. What a waste of such a precious gift! First, the change may but inflict a worse fate. But more importantly, to be able to twist the fabric of existence and slip into the stream of time in order to travel against the current - it cannot be for such an insignificant moment in the history of man. For never doubt, each life that walks upon the Earth is but a grain of sand on a beach…if that.

Perhaps one would wish to meet some great minds of history? That at least has some merit: to learn from those who spent their lives pondering questions that continue to baffle those who still take pleasure in intellectual gymnastics. Socrates? Plato? Aristotle? Da Vinci? Machiavelli? Russell? Or perhaps some well-known historical figure? One might discover if they were really as they have come to be viewed. Christ? Mohammed? Alexander the Great? Attila the Hun? Queen Elizabeth I? Louis XVI? George Washington? Benjamin Franklin? Abraham Lincoln? I do not deny the exhilaration one might feel gaining first hand knowledge of some historical personage, but the gift of time travel would be wasted in such a venture. Change would be limited, personal and, therefore, meaningless.

Chatting with a writer whose works have not yet been erased by the passage of time might be desired. Shakespeare? Cervantes? Tolstoy? Dostoyevsky? Joyce? Lewis? Tolkien? Dickens? Twain? Wells? Verne? Huxley? Orwell? Garcia-Marquez? How to choose? And really, why bother? Do they not all tickle the brain with the words they weave to tell the same stories, depict the same situations, describe the same feelings that have plagued humanity as long as stories have been told?

Or maybe one has a grand altruistic gesture in mind. Perhaps erase the existence of some murdering tyrant, despot, or prolific serial killer? Remove the scourge before it occurs? Hitler, Stalin, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, King Leopold II. Elizabeth Bathory, Pedro Lopez, H.H Holmes, Dr. Harold Shipman. Alas, each is but an infinitesimal sliver of evil as viewed through the lens of time. What of all that has never been recorded but was? Or that will be.

This evening, I sent my assistants home revealing neither my breakthrough nor my intentions. If I am successful, it will not matter. I will be no more.

I have reviewed the algorithms multiple times to ensure there are no errors. I’ve programmed the portal with the chain of commands that will send me where I can have the greatest impact.

Before the egg. Before the chicken. Before the bang. I will intercept that which precedes all that is.

And I will suggest a rigorous and detailed review of the design blueprints for humanity, for the existing one is fatally flawed.