OK, you are walking down a street in your hometown, a place you know well.
You feel faint, like a heart attack. When your vision clears streets and people seem different. A glance at a newspaper shows you have somehow been spat like a cosmic watermelon seed to (just pick a day) the day of your birth.
You have all your usual stuff on you that you usually have while walking around town. (Money, watch, maybe a PDA).
I for one would try to alert The Proper Authorities. If you choose to do so, who would you approach and how would your convince them of your story?
Do you mean what would I do after I tracked down my dad and convinced him to take some stock tips and superbowl results? (Just think what kinda money you could make if you bet the whole season on the '72 Dolphins)
Well, I would figure that I would never get back, and seeing as it would only be 1982, I’d try to trade my PDA for a DeLorean. After I did that, I would just drive my DeLorean around everywhere. Them, when it came to the point a few days before I went back in time, I would find myself and tell them that they will most likely go back in time. I’m sure I could convince myself that I am him…I mean me…I mean…damn, time travel is confusing.
Well, realisticly, if I were caught in that situation*, I’d probably try and contact my family for help. (By family, I mean my soon-to-be parents, and maybe my other relatives) Hopefully, I’d be able to convince them that I wasn’t some raving psycho off the street…I imagine that if the family resemblance and knowledge didn’t convince them, the PDA would. Even if there’s no way to return to my own time, I imagine I could help out my folks with a little advance knowledge from the future. (“In 1996, buy stock in a company called Amazon.com, and sell it before 1999. In '86, stay away from the Ukraine. And Florida wins the world series in 1997.” Other than that, I’d try not to do anything that could screw up the timeline too badly. (My view: stopping serial killers would be an acceptible risk, encouraging the U.S. government to take a more hard-line stance with the Soviets because the U.S.S.R. is going to collapse in 10 years anyway would be a little too risky)
Sell the PDA to… I dunno, maybe IBM or something, but definitely for a LOT of money; (somehow) set up a new identity for myself (the duplicate birth certificate thing would still work back then) invest three-quarters of my money in a trust, payable to myself (that is the ‘real’ me that has just been born), with the explicit instruction that the beneficiary(me in the future) is to make sure that he carries several items of the very latest technology on his person at all times (plus maybe employs a bodyguard), then when that me goes back, he will have had more than just a PDA (plus, since IBM got a huge head start, it will be way advanced anyway)… and so on; an upward-spiralling loop.
Well I would try to remember the day of the tornado (F4) and also try to remeber where it happened so I could get away from there. I’d buy some Microsoft stock with money I make from writing screenplays that are just copies of movies I’ve seen (Matrix etc). I may also write some songs and then sue the artists when they come out with almost identical ones years later.
I’ll write a book of predictions and be hailed as the worlds greatest psychic.
Of course most of this would seriously screw up the timeline, but thats a risk I’m willing to take…
What story? Yikes. If you didn’t know what happened. You just showed up on a street that was from x amount of years earlier, you would think you were dreaming. Then when you didn’t wake up, you would think you may have gone crazy. The proper authorities (?) would probably place you in a very nice little nut house.
If someone on the street walked up to you today and said, hey I think I’ve traveled back in time from 2030, can you help me? What would you think?
But to go along with your scenerio, and I if I wasn’t too freaked out about traveling back many, many years. And IF I had money, I’d just look for a place to live, and start a new life. We’re in heavy fantasy here, so all the particulars about time travel and messing up the past/present be damned.
Forget the authorities. What are they going to do? Probably imprison/interrogate/padded room me.
I’d probably try to positively influence national/local/world attitudes in order to avoid some of the disasters/big mistakes that I remembered (e.g.: “hey, aren’t we making ourselves too dependent on oil?”; “isn’t it crazy not to have a law that forbids former members of intelligence agencies from ever holding public office?”; "shouldn’t we really improve our national and world centers for disease control so they can detect emerging diseases in their infancy and stop them before they get a footing?; etc.)
And I’d probably try to take advantage of my prescience to make some easy money gambling, too.
But mainly, I’d try to stay alive for a few more years, until 1969, then I’d be sure to get tickets to a fantastic concert that I have on tape and always wished that I could have ‘been there’.
I’d have a few months to write Neil Armstong and tell him to think up something a little better than “One small step for [a] man…”
Assuming the money I have on me is useless in 1969 since it’s all dated from the nineties or later, I’d try to get hired in some fairly simple menial job until I had my bearings and a nest egg, then start a series of investments. It might be nice to meet my parents but I wouldn’t want to risk screwing them up even more than they already were, so I’d be a casual acquaintance at best.
If I really felt like meddling, I’d talk my mother out of sending her 3 year-old son to that damn art school, where he will languish and develop bad study habits that will trouble him well into his university years. And get the kid on an exercise program, willya?
If I felt like meddling in American History, my first instinct is to go back in time and inform Abraham Lincoln to never set foot in Ford’s Theatre.
What I would really like to do, although it may be an impossible mission, is to go back in time and tell the Founding Fathers that keeping slavery in the newborn country is going to lead to unimaginable pain and suffering.
