the time travellers story

Everyone knew the time travellers story, they studied it in school, they watched the many TV shows and movies about them.

The time traveller arrived on the 24th of October 1975, she'd walked straight into the closest police station and stated she was from the future and demanded to speak to MI6. The police had sat her down in an interview room with a cup of tea while they discussed what they should do with the obvious lunatic.

They'd rapidly changed their mind about her sanity when she'd started to line things up from her backpack on the table. Two laptops with chargers, five external hard disks, each containing four terabytes of data, a digital camera, a smartphone and a wallet containing a drivers license from the United Kingdom giving the name Jane Doe, the date of birth of the 6th of March 1989, and a place of birth of Cheltenham.

She had shown the police movies, scientific papers, books, and the news detailing the future they were destined for, showing how they destroyed the planet and the wasteland she lived in.

MI6 had turned up within hours and relocated her to their London headquarters.

The best scientific minds in the world were flown in to analyse the contents of her rucksack and to try and pick holes in her story, but they unanimously agreed that the technology she had did not exist anywhere in the world, and they were decades from manufacturing anything even close to it.

She had spent two years with them before the whispers about her existence became countrywide shouts. Every night on the BBC news, a plea was made to allow the documents she had to be released to the public.

These whispers had started from the local police station, with each man going home, having a few drinks, then telling their family about the strange young lady and what their future held, each vowing to live doing whatever it took to avoid it.

The scientists called into the MI6 headquarters all signed non-disclosure agreements, but one by one, they all broke their vows, knowing that carrying out the plan the future had devised to try and change the world was far more important than treason.

Two years after she arrived, she was released from the MI6's custody. She was photographed wherever she went and appeared on every TV channel around the world, telling everyone the plan the future had made for them, the future that if things worked, wouldn't exist.

On the 24th of October 1979, exactly 4 years after she arrived, she vanished during the night. The secret service agents all swore no one could have entered or left the room Jane had been sleeping in, as they had been standing watch all night.

1989 came around, and four hundred families with the last name of Doe lived in Cheltenham, with three hundred and eighty nine of them having legally changed their last names to Doe. The hospitals were overrun in March, two hundred and fifty of those four hundred families were expecting babies. On the 3rd of March, one hundred and fifty nine babies were born; many of them in tents in the hospital car parks, no one wanting to ship these women to a different town and risk the correct Jane Doe being born in the wrong town. The eighty four girls that were born were inspected by government officials; seven were immediately dismissed from the list for being the wrong race, and another three were put on the probably not list for having very obvious birthmarks that hadn't been reported by MI6. So they were left with sevety four potential time travellers.

We all grew up in the same place, as our parents were given houses and money each month to ensure that we all got the very best of everything. The government provided tutors to educate us, and we had psychiatrists and psychologists to ensure our mental health was not affected by the focus of the world upon us.

The scientists made good use of the information the time traveller had brought; by the time I was four, we had solar panels on every building in the UK. We no longer burnt any fossil fuels by the time I was ten. The last oil refinery shut down when I was thirteen, as no form of transport needed the fuel they supplied. But most of all, we celebrated as each year we avoided the man-made disasters that the time traveller had predicted for us.

Every year girls were crossed off the list as they didn't look anything like the photos of Jane until at eighteen, I had to accept it was me. So now I live every day of my life carrying around the backpack with the two laptops, chargers, five hard disks, a digital camera, a smartphone, and a wallet with a driver's licence.

It's strange because the data I carry doesn't even closely resemble the reality that we live in now, as the plan that the future proposed to save us all is my reality. The best minds in the world have analysed the data I had to try and find the research that led to time travel, but they still have no clue; whilst others discuss the possibility that the past changed the future so much that time travel will not be discovered at all. I hope I'll still be here tomorrow, but I never let go of my bag even in sleep, just in case my tomorrow is the past.