As I write this, it is May of 2022, and the world I stand in is… Unbelievable.
I look around at the people, and how they are behaving. I see the different groups, disagreeing, protesting, yelling, screaming, threatening.
I see the inside of stores, and see the shelves with goods, and the empty ones.
I see people complaining about the prices, and the economy.
And mostly, I just want to cry.
You talk about ‘the before times’, you reminisce of the past when things were better.
None of you have any idea how good you have it right now.
I’m, well, I’m not from 2022, I’m from sometime in the future. When, well, I’d say that it’s not important, but really, the important thing is I’m here, and now.
And that we missed.
I was supposed to arrive more than a decade further into the past, when we had concluded that I would have the best possible chance to alter the timeline.
And before I left, I knew that just by agreeing, just by accepting, just by going on this trip, I was committing genocide on a scale never before seen by the human race. Not just every single person alive at the time I left, but every single person born between my arrival time and when I left.
Death on a scale that makes the worst horrors in your history look like nothing.
But we were desperate, we looked at the cost, and what we saw was a small, thin, hope. And that was worth the attempt. Even if it failed. Even if it dropped me into the vacuum of space, and the project wiped out all of humanity.
Because, right now, you have such an amazingly perfect world that it brings me to tears.
Only… I’m alive, but I’m in the wrong time.
I know exactly what I was supposed to do, when I was supposed to do it. I know the backup plans, the contingencies. The sure bets, and the long shots.
Who needed to die, who needed to live, what inventions needed to happen sooner, and which ones needed to never exist.
And… I’m in the wrong decade for all of it.
So many of the things that will make the world I came from are already in motion. The choices have already been made, the damage that nobody even sees right now has already been done, and the plots… The plots that I was supposed to stop before they were even thought of, have been in motion for years.
And worse, all of the ways I was supposed to acquire resources? They were all for when I was supposed to arrive, not for now.
Oh, I remember some things from history, a few dates, a few events. Enough for some things.
But I don’t know how to stop what’s coming. I don’t know how to keep things from getting bad. Or from getting worse.
I don’t know how to keep the right people alive, and I sure don’t know how to stop Them from coming, after all, They have already found us by now. I can’t undo that from here.