How the Future Tried to Save the Present

As the chef says, too many grandfathers spoil the paradox

In 2073 humanity finally learned how to conquer time. Once the interplay between quantum gravity and General Relativity was properly understood, and as mega-scale quantum computers permitted calculation of trillions of variables to yield probability wave-functions suitable for calculating not only when in the past an event occurred but also where that event had occurred in Lorenz coordinate spacetime, it became feasible to build a time machine.

The dream of science fiction writers for generations, time travel thus finally became a realistic option, albeit only back into the near-past. Quantum uncertainty meant that the further back one attempted to go, the less likely one was to arrive. So a practical limit of no more than one hundred years was established, meaning that in 2074 when the first functional machine was constructed, humans could travel back to 1974 and to any date thereafter.

By 2074 things were pretty bad on Earth. Democracy resulted, as Plato had correctly predicted nearly three thousand years earlier, in de facto tyranny nearly everywhere. Of course people still called it democracy and it was true that the system of one person, one vote still stood strong. The only drawback was that the one person was the tyrant and their vote was the only one that…