But before you become a fan of time travel, let me introduce you to a few of the unlucky. You might think the only risk is to pick a bad reference point, and now we know about that we will avoid it. You would be wrong.
The guy in the corner is Michael. We keep him on the project for charity. He is from the second batch of volunteers, selected for specific experiments after we three initial Chrononauts - a term that sadly never stuck, we made it up for ourselves but nobody else adapted it - had laid the foundations.
Michael, in a word, was sent repeatedly to the same point in time. Remember the math I mentioned? That is right, by the time he had his tenth trip done, it took less than an hour to calculate and only a thousand bucks, by his 20th trip, that had dropped to a fraction of a second and, mathematically speaking, about five bucks. Since someone needs to enter the data, press a few buttons, strap the equipment on you and all that, beyond the 12th or so trip, the actual travel calculations essentially disappeared as a factor.
Five of us have gone beyond that number. But nobody has made more trips than Michael, and he is the reason why nobody will, until the psychologists figure something out. And still, about every other week, he goes on another trip. Until we can cure him, that is the only way to keep him halfway mentally stable.
Look at him there, muttering to himself, sometimes scrawling things down. It is impossible to talk to him about anything for more than a minute or two. We had figured out that events of importance to the traveller are a bit easier to get a fix on. So, by his own decision, Michael was sent back to the day he split with his first girlfriend. The original plan had been for the day they met, a bit more romantic, but the psychologists had warned against that, in case he messes up the first date or something. Turns out they were more right than they could have ever imagined.
Thing is, the breaking off was selected because everyone thought it was a done deal. It had been a short summer love, Michael had a couple other girlfriends after, then he had been happily married for years until a tragic accident took his wife and child. By the time he joined the program, he had fully recovered from that and was happy as a single man having occasional affairs. No regrets about that lost boyhood love, no conflict to any current relations.
The first time, Michael went as an observer, to bring back as many facts as possible. He was specifically selected for his excellent memory, you see? He returned after several subjective hours in the past and together with the specialists wrote down half a book about every small detail of that day.
Then he went back three more times to make carefully planned, tiny changes to the timeline and observe their effects. The purpose was to determine whether the splitting timelines follow a chaotic or a stable principle. In a chaotic system, like a dice roll, even if you think you throw the dice the same way as before, due to the smallest differences, completely different outcomes result. In a stable system, like water flowing in a channel, even if you disturb the flow somewhat, eventually the water always ends up in the same place.
By making small changes that could be smoothed out simply by time, the project scientists hoped to discover which model applies and how high the channel banks are. Nothing major was discovered in those first trips, which means no catastrophic chaotic outcomes, so more experiments were lined up. Somewhere around trip eight or nine, Michael avoided the break-up. Accounts differ on whether that was a planned change or not. Well, it was definitely planned sooner or later, but from what I gathered, Michael accelerated the project plan on this part. Apparently, reliving that day so many times did shake him more than he let on. He had been under close psychological supervision as to any man it should be obvious that going back to such a day once or twice might be fine, but to do it again and again? You have to be a special kind of cold to break a young girls heart over and over and over. So they had planned to let him be the hero of that girl and see where it goes, but it went south so much faster and so much deeper than even the most pessimistic predictions.
He returned from that trip normally. Everything had gone according to plan, he simply did not break up with her and let the romance continue and then returned to our timeline to let that other universe find its own way from there. After all, in countless parallel universes, his past self had done exactly that or some variation of it. Nothing new had been added to the multiverse.
But it had to Michaels mind. They sent him back to do it again and again, just as was planned. It must have been around the 15th or so trip that he snapped. The only outward sign was that he stayed in the past slightly longer than anticipated. But time and consciousness make an unpredictable team and so nobody thought much of it and a thorough debriefing didn’t ring any alarms. Here is the thing: Subjective time in the past and time passing in the present do not align. You can be out for five minutes and experience a month in the past. Or you can be out for half an hour and come back with only minutes of experienced history. Nobody yet knows why that is the case, except that your mind is actually not in your body during the trip, and electrodes on your skull register only basic activity. Your real self actually is in another world, another timeline, so you think and experience things - including time - independent of your body. That is a whole other deep hole of philosophy right there. For the moment, let’s not go there, except to say that no, the mind is never without a body. It just temporarily moves to a different one. And yes, that is yet another whole topic to be explored by future scientists and philosophers.
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We later found out that Michael had stayed in the past for three years. He had lived the relationship with his first girlfriend to its natural end, and found that he had rather liked it. For the next five trips, in addition to the assigned experiment, he also did the same, again and again, and each time learning from his previous life with her to improve the next experience. He smartly avoided some fights, thought of better and better presents and surprises, anticipated accidents and mishaps and on his 20th trip, he would marry her, have a child and spend a total of ten years. By that time, he had spent more life time in the past than in our reality.
But an opportunity had opened to Michael and he went rogue. In addition to doing his assigned tasks and faithfully reporting their results, he also engaged in experiments of his own. On his 21st trip, he broke up with the girlfriend again, his assigned task having nothing to do with her, and went to meet his next-girlfriend-to-be early, when she was still a virgin. She had not been in the focus of any background research so nobody, probably including Michael, had understood that the fact she had lost her virginity to one of his friends a month before they met had bothered him. He fixed that. Then he fixed his best friends unhappy relation to the prom queen. Then his own sad story of his third relationship, the one before his marriage. Beyond that, we are not entirely sure as he became more and more unstable and, after 37 trips, was officially removed from the program. His mind had become lost in possibilities. He was beginning to plan eventualities and changes and had difficulties focussing on other things, especially on the present. That was almost a year ago. They put him under supervision and gave him medicine, but he quickly deteriorated. Not surprisingly, when you have limitless worlds of possibility in front of yourself, and you are locked into navigating your way through them, thinking of new ways to solve this problem or that crisis or fix these problems or that mistakes - and then all of them suddenly are closed off, you are one unhappy dude.
They sent him back. Anyway, making him travel is almost for free now. And like an addict, giving him a safe dose of his drug keeps him more stable than going cold turkey. In a drug addiction, you can train the body or the mind to once again work without the drug. But once the endless possibilities of alternate histories are opened up to you, there is no way your mind is going to accept any fate as unchangeable again.
Nobody has a solution to Michaels problem. He is a warning to all of us, as he sits there in the corner mumbling to himself, thinking what would change if he gives red roses instead of yellow ones on that date. You would think that with such a tool at our disposal, we would use it for science, and research, to learn about history and uncover secrets and conspiracies. Solve crimes, understand disasters caused by human errors. We do all of that as well, but when it comes down to it, when you are on your own in a world not yours, what really matters is that which matters to you.
Which in Michaels case includes his wife and child. There were more than ten years between those events, but from what I gathered, he indeed tried. That meant re-living his life for ten years while all the time hoping that nothing would change and he would actually meet her. As a project member, he was of course familiar with all the theories and their current status, so it meant re-living his life as precisely copied as possible. Can you imagine the boredom of ten years without surprises and without decisions, merely trying the hardest to remember every step of every day and replicating it as precisely as possible?
He didn’t meet her on the day that he should have. He went to her house afterwards, now less worried about disturbing the timeline, and didn’t find her there, either. At this point it was already fairly clear she would not die in that accident, but of course he just had to know. Through friends and acquaintances, many of whom he had not yet met in that timeline because they were on his future girlfriends side, he eventually tracked her down, living with another man. A guy that in his timeline she had broken up with two years earlier or something. If we learnt anything in those time travel experiments, it is how often love and relationships stand on knifes edge and some chaotic factor determines which way it goes.
As for the science factor, it remains inconclusive. There is a certain fragility to alternate timelines, but they do seem mostly stable. Traffic is the best model we have for it - most of the time you can more or less predict how it will go, but you can never be sure which interruption, accident or road closure will be smoothed over and which one will cause everything to grind to a stop.