Aaron Flesher could remember the future

He knew that in 2044 they would start terra-forming Mars and that they had established the first colony there some 12 years before that. He knew that in 2054 the U.N. would recognize artificial intelligence as sentient and therefore deserving of human rights. He remembered when they discovered evidence of life on Europa in 2066 even though it clearly had died out millions of years before. He remembered the first contact with alien life carried on radio waves from deep space. He remembered a great many things from the later half of the 21st century and he knew, he absolutely knew that these were memories not premonitions. None of this would be of particular interest was it not the year 2029.

What Flesher didn’t know was why he knew so much of the future and so little of the present. This place, this time seemed so primitive to him and so alien. Not alien in an otherworldly sense of the word, as, this was his Earth. The world was as he knew it, as he remembered it, but of an earlier time. How then, he wondered, had he come to be here, some 30 years before his birth. There was no such thing as time travel either in this time or in his. Had he somehow come detached from the time continuum or perhaps his consciousness found a way, intentionally or otherwise, to travel back in time? If so, why, and how and how would he return?

What Flesher didn’t know, and never would, was that in fact time travel did exist, or more accurately, once existed. It was a reality of his time, the latter part of the 21st century before he was sent back to the year 2029 to prevent one Dr. Albert Kemmelman from laying the groundwork for such an abomination against reality. In 2032 Kemmelman was to, or would have, or did in one reality, publish his research titled “A Dissertation on Time Slippage” that in turn sparked the first practical research into time travel. Once such travel was made possible by the most brilliant and well meaning of scientific minds the world was thrown into chaos. The paradox of changing the past was inevitable and seemingly irreversible. Until that is, agent Aaron Flesher was sent back to see that this atrocity was never started in the first place. Mr. Flesher succeeded in his mission of “negotiating timeline paradigm” and, for the time anyhow, the development of time travel was never begun.

He sat and remembered a future reality, a time familiar yet distant from which he was stranded with no possible explanation.