The News From Poughkeepsie – Day 87

Time travel works like this:

You can’t go forward, only back.

The future is at best unknowable, at worst, non-existent. The best temporal mechanics minds in the world cannot figure out why we move forward from moment to moment on our own, but can’t jump ahead in the sequence a bit. The future remains unknowable and unvisitable.

The past, however, is fair game. Thing is, no one ever returns from a jaunt to the past. Old journals have turned up, detailing trips of hundreds of years, but never an explanation of why the machines that took them there no longer function, why they cannot return to their own where and when.

Ingrid Tolafson, however, feels she knows how to break the “time trap.” She’s built a better time machine than any previous, one that will remain in the present and snap her back after five minutes. The test animals she’s sent have all returned alive—save for the one that met with a rock slide in the Middle Ages—and she’s ready to be the first human to have returned from the past.

But after she travels through time, she finds that her temporal tether isn’t snapping her back. Her future is now uncertain, and the only way she can travel to the future is from one moment to the next.

She can’t go back, only forward.