Wisdom or Consolation to Your Younger Self

You haven’t a prison record yet. But you will have . . . unless you let us help you!

Me, thought the young man. Why, that old man is . . . me.

We are one, the same person: Jonathan Hughes.

You’re going to need a lot of dog food.

Patrick, with this time machine, we can go back to the past and make our young selves wiser!

He told me all the horrible things that would happen if I broke any Time Laws. Worlds would collapse. I would turn inside out. Important people would die and important things wouldn’t happen.

Do I ever find any kind of stability? Or do I live life year after year like some kind of existential hobo?

I might be you, but I’m not a moron.

Young Adam: I mean if this is happening to me, that means that it already happened to you—right?—unless it works more like a multiverse where each ripple creates an alternate timeline—
Middle-Age Adam: It isn’t a multiverse! My god, we watch too many movies.

I sat down next to him and said, “Is she going to be all right?”

“I can't tell you,” he said, in a tired voice that showed another couple of decades of wear.  “That much is against the rules.  I'll be yanked back to my time if I even try.”

“Then what good are you, then?”

My future self emitted a soft wheeze that might have been embittered laughter. “I've been asking myself that question since before I was you.”

She wants to go back more, as far as possible. Maybe before he was sick, even. But two years is the limit the doctor from the company gives her, his voice serious, concerned.

We are told we did not wipe out history. Instead we learned that reality branched at the juncture of the future meeting the past. Whether a new reality was created at the juncture or we plugged into one that already existed is still unresolved and, as a practical matter, immaterial. The point is that our present cannot and will not be changed by time travelers—they will change a reality we are not connected to in any way, except at the specific retrieval intervals.