Nothing There to Change
by Caroline Stanton
Copyright© 2026 by Caroline Stanton
Time Travel Story: Charles Patterson has helped accomplish the impossible: time travel. But every journey into the past carries the risk of changing history. His solution is simple. Travel more than four billion years into the past, to an Earth where life has not yet begun. There will be no people to meet, no animals to disturb, no history to alter. Nothing there to change.
Tags: Fiction
The first trip lasted eleven seconds. Charles Patterson disappeared from the platform at 10:14:32 on a Tuesday morning and reappeared at 10:14:43. According to the clock he carried, almost no time had passed.
They repeated the experiment nine times before anyone was willing to use the words time travel. They changed the clocks, checked the power supply, rebuilt the timing equipment and invited two people from another university to find the mistake. Nobody found one.
A steel cylinder went thirty seconds into the future. A camera went five minutes. A laboratory mouse went an hour and returned hungry but otherwise unaffected.
Going backward took another four months. Charles volunteered for the first human test. He traveled four minutes into the past and found himself in the same laboratory, watching through the observation window as his earlier self argued with Karen Patel over the magnetic containment field. Twelve seconds later, the laboratory disappeared around him. When it returned, the platform was empty. Four minutes after that, he watched his younger self enter the machine.
Afterward, the arguments changed. Nobody asked whether the machine worked anymore. They argued about what they should do with it.
Everyone had suggestions: Rome, Egypt, the dinosaurs, the first modern humans. Someone suggested going back a week and buying a winning lottery ticket.
Charles wasn’t interested in any of them. Every journey into recorded history had an obvious problem. Even somewhere apparently unimportant, there were people. Before people there were animals, and before animals there were ecosystems. Kill an insect, damage a plant, carry a disease into a population that had never encountered it—it was impossible to know what mattered.
He wanted a destination where none of that was possible.
One evening he showed Karen the proposed date.
She stared at the screen. “Four billion years?”
“Just over.”
“And you want to go there?”
“Eventually.”
“Send probes.”
“Obviously.”
“Lots of probes.”
“That’s the plan.”
Karen leaned back in her chair. “Why that far?”
“Because there’s nothing alive.”
“As far as we know.”
“That’s part of what we’d find out.”
She looked at the date again. Charles knew what she was thinking. They had managed four minutes backward with a human being. The longest unmanned experiment had been three years. Four billion was absurd, but absurdity had become a matter of degree.
“If we go to Rome,” he said, “we could change something just by being there. Same with the Cretaceous. This is safer.”
“Assuming the planet doesn’t kill you.”
“I’ll be in a suit.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
Charles smiled, but Karen didn’t.
They sent six probes. Four returned.
One landed in shallow water. Another came back with images of a black volcanic plain under heavy clouds. The fourth returned partially embedded in rock and caused enough damage to shut the project down for two months. The fifth never came back.
By the sixth, they had improved the spatial targeting system enough to put the probe within three meters of its intended position. It remained on the surface for six hours.
When it returned, they had their first detailed look at the young Earth. The atmosphere was unbreathable but the pressure wasn’t dangerous. The temperature at the landing site hovered around thirty degrees. There was liquid water, volcanic activity and frequent rain. There was no detectable biological activity.
Charles watched hours of video from the probe. The landscape was bleak, but that wasn’t what bothered him. He had been in deserts before, and deserts weren’t empty. Things flew through the air. Plants grew between rocks. Beetles left tracks in the sand.
Here there was nothing. Water moved, clouds moved and steam rose from fissures, but that was all.
The engineering team spent another eight months preparing for a human expedition. The machine acquired a pressure vessel, oxygen tanks, carbon dioxide scrubbers, emergency batteries, food, water and a chemical toilet. The planned visit was thirty minutes, but Karen insisted that Charles have enough supplies for seventy-two hours. He didn’t object. By then they had both learned not to joke about safety margins.
On the morning of the expedition, Karen checked his suit herself.
“Thirty minutes,” she said.
“Yes.”
“At twenty-five you come back.”
“Yes.”
“If the telemetry shows anything strange—”
“There isn’t any live telemetry.”
“You know what I mean. Anything strange on your instruments.”
“I come back.”
“If you feel sick, dizzy, anything at all, you come back.”
“Yes.”
She finished checking the neck seal. There were fourteen people in the control room. They had rehearsed the procedure so many times that there was very little left to say.
Charles climbed into the pressure vessel and strapped himself down. The destination display showed a number that still didn’t seem real: 4.08 billion years.
The hatch closed and Karen appeared on the monitor.
“Ready?”
“Ready.”
“See you in a minute.”
“Thirty minutes.”
“For you.”
Charles nodded. “Right.”
The field came up. For an instant the screen turned white, and then the laboratory was gone.
Charles remained strapped in for the first thirty seconds and checked the instruments. Pressure was within the predicted range. Outside temperature was thirty-two degrees. The atmosphere was mostly nitrogen and carbon dioxide, with traces of other gases and virtually no free oxygen. The return system reported normal.
He opened the hatch.
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