prompt: twist, title: one-way only in misc. flash fiction

The problem with time-travel is not that it’s impossible. It’s certainly difficult, sure, but far from impossible. Throughout your entire history so far, a few dozen human beings have managed it on accident and a small handful have even pulled it off on purpose. There are more than a few ways to do it. The Three-Mile-Island nuclear incident was secretly triggered by a scientist testing their theory, for example. A woman in what you’d call Bangladesh some four-thousand years ago did it through focused meditation. A neanderthal in the Pyrenees eons ago took a very specific head trauma that fired his neurons in a perfect cascade to trigger chronal ejection. A moonshiner once somehow got anti-freeze and the concept of freezing to exactly annihilate each other into a pure burst of energy, popping her into the Mesozoic. You could do it. Technically.

“But why have I never heard of this,” you may ask, “why is no one bragging about coming from the future or the past?” And you’d ask this because you’ve been reading too much science-fiction that doesn’t consider how that would actually work in reality. You’ve been watching movies that use “science” as a codeword for “magic” without considering implications. All of these pioneers and freak-accident sufferers alike did indeed travel back or forward in time. Then each instantly flash-froze in the merciless vacuum of space upon arrival. Because Earth orbits your sun, idiots.

They all travelled back in time to that point in the universe at that point in time and of course the Earth wasn’t there to find them, Earth was elsewhere in its orbital path. Not to mention how your sun adds its own twist to the tale, swirling around the black holes at the center of the Milky Way. And your galaxy itself spins! Space is so much more vast than you could imagine, attempting to calculate the precise location of your planet’s surface at one exact moment is akin to trying to hit a basketball with a b.b. from ten-thousand miles away. Transcending the temporal, rare as that is, would only be the first step to actually surviving it. Imagine if you almost got it right, off by just seventeen feet and ending up fused into your planet’s crust. There’d be so many calculations, of factors even we don’t have in totality, let alone you lot, conducting time-travel safely would be a fluke even more improbable than our universe existing in the first place. A thermodynamic miracle no one could ever replicate intentionally, not even us.

How do we know this? We’ve been watching you from the skies since you were still in the trees of Madagascar, of course. But every once in a great while, one of our scouting ships slams into a frozen corpse in the middle of space, wearing clothing that doesn’t make any sense. Eventually, we put twos-and-twos together. Time-travelling isn’t impossible, just impossible to survive. We respectfully suggest you stop trying. Cleaning spaceship windshields is actually quite expensive.