Brain Damage Related to Time Travel. A found document.

I found a document in my files today. I really don’t know where it came from. It appears to be a report from the future. Weird! Read it for yourself….

Historic document: 2068.7.21
Subject: Brain damage related to time travel

In the late 2050s, time travel not only became a possibility, but also available to a consumer level. This caused several problems of course, but one curious problem was that of the brain damaged time traveler. 1 in 350 consumer time travelers would come back from their trips with brain injuries. This never happened in purely scientific travels, even though the technology was similar enough that there should not have been a difference. Data was poured over by medical professionals, physicists, temporal mechanics, and the like. No clues were given. This problem did not discriminate on age, sex, or any other biological factor. Brain damage related to time travel was a mystery condition. We couldn’t even decipher it as a symptom, syndrome, or disease.

The idea was floated to stop all time travel on the consumer basis, but the Federal Time Travel Act of 2063 stated that temporal travel was considered a right to every American citizen. Other countries were, of course able to ban time travel all together. Still, something had to be done.

The first action was a series of PSAs – make the public afraid of the idea of time traveling. Of course…..stubborn Americans wouldn’t listen. Time travel did decline in numbers a little, but if Americans aren’t even going to quit smoking, they’re certainly not going to quit going back to see Ramses and Socrates.

The second action was that of control. Sure, every American has the right to time travel, but there’s no stipulations on Americans having the equipment to travel back in time. We could even monitor biological dafa. We wanted to collect biological data – heart rates, oxygen levels, etc. Of course the ACLU stepped in and the courts told us not without the client’s consent. Very few clients gave us consent. No matter – the data we were allowed to collect produced no new insights.

We decided to look at the technical logs – maybe the machinery was giving us brain damage. It was a long shot – as I said earlier, the scientific missions always resulted in no brain damage. While the consumer and scientific time travel machines have always been similar, now that the government had a monopoly of the industry, the machines were identical.

In cases that resulted in brain damage, we compared electrical output, radiation levels – you name it, we compared it. Still – nothing. All technical levels matched those of non-brain damaged travelers.

We found ourselves in the bottom of a well – no way to escape. We didn’t know what to do next. On a lark, we asked a few clients to wear body cameras. This is where we finally got suspicious of the cause. Well….we had a lead at least.

We couldn’t make everyone wear a body camera, but most of the cases that did result in brain damage refused to wear body cameras. A few of the cases would lose the signal for a few seconds here and there. The idea was floated that perhaps it wasn’t time travel itself that was causing brain damage, but rather an activity during the time travel experience.

Our statisticians started pouring over data available. One statistician noted that every single case of brain damage happened during the traveler’s lifetime. No one who went to see the signing of the Declaration of Independence, or to watch Brutus stab Caesar in the back, came back with brain damage.

An experiment was decided upon. There was no law stating that we couldn’t trail travelers. Now that all time travel machines were monopolized by the federal government, it would be quite easy to trail travelers. Of course we couldn’t trail every traveler, not even every traveler going back into their own past – but we could do a few here and there…

The experiment went pretty slowly. Following some travelers after they reached their destinations proved impossible, as they tended to go to private residences. However, that fact alone made a few theories develop. Cross referencing the addresses, most of them would actually go to their childhood houses. So it was theorized that meeting yourself in the past had the chance to cause brain damage. There was no scientific evidence involved, just correlation, so we couldn’t say specifically yes. Still, we did start to warn travelers. Sure enough, this reduced the amount of brain damage related to time travel.

Of course, we still wanted to prove this. It was decided that we should continue to randomly follow travelers, and look for other factors. Curiously enough, travelers who we caught meeting their past selves never ended up with brain damage. And while brain damage as a whole dropped significantly, it still plateaued at a certain point.

Finally, a stroke of luck! While trailing a traveler to a childhood baseball game, we witnessed a man smacking his ten year old self across the head. It was right after his ten year old self had mistaken the mother of one of his teammates for a man….and said so out loud and very loudly. When the traveler got back, they had brain damage, Further trials of travelers also confirmed this! Pretty soon it was evident. The cause for brain damage in time travelers were people going back to a time when their past self had said or done something incredibly stupid or shameful, and smacking themselves across the head. One subject had made an advance on their cousin. One had told his teacher to go fuck themselves. One subject smacked themselves just as they were about to defecate in their sister’s bed.

Of course, the next round of PSAs went out. Brain damage declined even further. It did eventually plateau, but when a traveler came back brain damaged, everyone knew what that traveler had done. The case was closed.

Long story short, if you want to go back in time and smack yourself silly for calling your aunt Frida a “cow mixed with a pig,” just don’t. You might end up with brain damage. That example was totally not from my own memory banks or anything by the way….I totally made that up. I love you Aunt Frida! I’ll bring you donuts tomorrow!