Time travel is a joke. Time is now and has always been a one-way street, a mighty torrent of eons and milliseconds barreling forward in one direction. To even think you can reverse time is horse feathers.

On the other hand light travel is a whole different bailiwick. Light bounces. It reflects and refracts and gets downright wibbly wobbly. And at some point, a really bright pointdexter figured out how to skip along light beams, allowing light rocket ships to go back and forth in time.

The hows and whys of light skipping are above my pay grade. The bright boys and girls know the mechanics of the miracles. They do the research. Hynde and I just pilot the light rocket ship. Or at least we did until we died.

As you can imagine it takes a helleva lot of energy for the eggheads to light skip back and forth to not step on butterflies and watch those goofy aliens build Stonehenge. I don’t watch the news but Hynde told me the big wigs and the mucky-mucks were always jabbering about the ROI of light travel scientific research.

Hynde said that one of the nerds had come up with the bright idea of stealing unused energy from the past to fuel the future. Yeah, apparently the geniuses of the 20th century were always losing nuclear warheads.

Hynde explained it like nine-eleven time to me but her explanations of lost payloads and downed airplanes just gave me a tension headache. How could you lose a nuclear weapon once let alone ten times? The twentieth century must have been bananas. Long story short, instead of just transporting squints on our good ship Jemison we were picking up fallen arrows.

We plucked a Fat Man, 30 kiloton nuke out of the Pacific. Next we snagged two 4 megaton thermonuclear cores, easy peasy. But three wasn’t the charm. We messed up off the Georgie coast. Well I messed up. Hynde and I always stay with the Jemison, while the smart guys explore. They get all the fun. I wanted to explore an itty bitty bit. You see I’ve always had this thing about pirates. I know get your yucks out now. But I just like the idea of treasure and adventure on the high seas. I just wanted to see a real life lighthouse.

I swear it was just a peek. The lighthouse was rad. Black and white checked, the restored structure was picture postcard perfect. I skipped down took a couple of selfies and skipped back. Or at least I tried. A little boy saw just me. I saw him too just as the paradox ice started to form. Half in phase, half out, I was frozen on the refractor. Hynde was pixelated. Her angry face faceted thousands of times. Doctors Biddle and Obanyo were shadows and my beautiful ship Jemison was Fibonacciing into oblivion.

So this is how we die? I thought. Would the light poison pollute time travel to the point we never exist. What if I was supposed to see that boy and he was supposed to see me and his descendents discover the very technology we need to visit the past.

This was my last thought when something kicked me in the groin and I shattered in a jumble of shards.

“Quit it or so help me Ant next time I will leave you dead for good,” Hynde growled and headed for the bridge.

Obanyo shook her head at me and Biddle gave me the finger. Leaving the refraction deck, I apologized to the geeks with a shrug. What can I say? Sorry not sorry. Light bounces, time is one way street, and lighthouses are way cool.