The Trouble With Time Travel

Hello, world. I am Ynsyda. I pronounce my name like so: yen-see-dah.

You won’t believe me, but I’m a time traveler and warlord. AI is my friend (usually), but these words are my own.

A famous physicist is on record inquiring why time travelers never show up at parties if the deed is possible. The answer to this question is that some of us sometimes do, but no one believes us when we say who we are, so most rarely try twice. It’s far easier to have a drink, lean against a wall, and be amused by all that people from olden days think they know.

What a given human takes to be fact is a matter of deeper philosophy than even most scholars admit. To make going about their day a little easier, people everywhere are forced to select which truths matter most. These, more often than not, are those which the people around them hold to be self-evident, for whatever reason that might be.

Any time traveler faces the persistent challenge of lacking hard proof of their journeys sufficient to satisfy all inquiring minds. In fact this difficulty presents itself to all travelers, as no audience can ever be entirely sure that tales from abroad are completely accurate or precise. As perspectives vary and ways to communicate them diverse beyond reckoning, they rarely are.

To be a member of any human group, whether a family, clan, tribe, or society, means to accept the effective reality of certain narratives about the nature of the thing. And these narratives are strongly influenced…