Copyright � 2026 by Shane
Tourtellotte
I have listed a lot of adverse events, from inconvenient to catastrophic, that could happen in your travels across time. There’s one I haven’t yet covered, a nightmare scenario to send chills down your back just thinking about it1. It’s what happens should your time machine stop working.
This is far worse than your automobile breaking down on some unfamiliar road. You can’t call Triple A for repairs or towing. You can’t walk or hitchhike back home. You can’t call anybody to come pick you up2. You can depend only on yourself to get out of this fix, which means it’s time to start planning ahead again.
Finding the fault is obviously crucial, so hopefully you’ve built enough diagnostic systems into your machine to be able to track it down. Bringing along your own diagnostic tools can help, but those are more things you need to keep concealed from the locals, so self-diagnostics make better practical sense. If the diagnostics aren’t working, either, that itself indicates a general fault, which narrows things down.
Unless you’re visiting sometime in the fairly recent past (or the future, which I’ll get to later), you’ll find nothing locally that you can use for repairs. Copper wiring is probably the material available the furthest back, several centuries depending on how fine you need it. If you need it insulated -- and you probably do -- that narrows your window markedly for indigenous material. Hopefully you brought some electrical tape.
This example shows that you should bring not only a wide assortment of spare components, but of tools and gear for repairs. These tools should either closely resemble those of the era you’re visiting, or be well concealed. In most past eras, nothing as sophisticated as what you’ll need will exist, so look to your concealment. If you’re visiting the recent past, you may be able to acquire some tools locally, but anything not common to the time may cost more than you expect. The cutting edge is always pricier.
Your time machine failure may happen due to running out of energy to power it. A few past eras will have electric infrastructure that will let you recharge a depleted battery. Most will not, but the situation there is not necessarily hopeless. If you can acquire strong enough magnets, if you can cobble together enough wiring, if you can find a power source in wind or water or muscle, you can build your own electrical generator. There are other resources that can guide you better in this process than anything I can set down in a few paragraphs.
What I can do in one paragraph is tell you what an excessive chore it would be. Sometimes the direct approach is best. Bring along one spare battery instead. Save yourself the indignity of having to produce some Gilligan’s Island-style science project out of bamboo and coconuts.
If your destination is the future rather than the past, your troubles are partly alleviated, but not entirely. An era of equal or better technology makes the materials you can use much more common. You won’t be finding wormhole expanders off the shelf, but you can find the components to make the components, or find things like 3-D printers to make you the components. You can even eschew bringing your toolkit, if you have (or can trade for) the funds to buy tools locally.
One stumbling block may be controls on purchases. Certain items and substances may be restricted; purchases may require modes of ID that you won’t possess. Be prepared to seek out gray or black market sources for the materials you need3.
With some decent luck, and some electronic and mechanical skills on your part, you’ll be able to fix your time machine, at least enough to get back home and do the full repair job. Sometimes, though, problems prove beyond your skills, or the dice come up snake-eyes. If you’re stuck in the past with a time machine beyond salvaging, what can you do?
The straightforward answer -- accept your stranding and quietly live out the rest of your life -- is feasible but not satisfactory. A related answer -- leverage your superior knowledge from the future and set yourself up as something between a mogul and a demigod -- falls afoul of the pesky timeline. You won’t enjoy your lofty position long before triggering a paradox loop, unless resentful locals decide to kill you instead and history never notices that you existed back then.
The reset from a paradox loop sounds like just what you need: a do-over, hopefully one where the crucial component doesn’t go kaput. It isn’t that forgiving. The same demands and stresses will be put on your time machine in the new iteration, bringing the same faults. You can’t take any precautions against this, because you won’t remember anything from the altered timeline that the paradox loop wiped out.
Granted, there is some chance the fault will hold off. There is also some chance that other loop interruptions will intervene. You could have a stroke, or get killed in your destination era -- or the fault could occur while you’re in transit instead. What happens in this case is not thoroughly understood, mostly because it’s too ghastly even for experienced time-travelers to think about for very long.
I will skip quickly to my next point for that very reason.
There is a chance, albeit a thin and dicey one, of being able to call for help. You can compose a mayday message, in a medium that will last the years until the age when time travel is known, begging for rescue. Getting it to survive should be easy enough; the other conditions surrounding the attempt are not.
You need something that will be uncovered, but not too soon. If it’s found and understood before your departure time, it risks paradox. If it becomes public knowledge, even after your departure time, it leaves time travel exposed as a known fact, which may not be paradoxical but will be worse than inconvenient for time-travelers. Ideally, you want a message that will survive, be found soon after your departure time, and be comprehensible only to a select few in on the secret of time travel.
The last does not mean leaving a standard cipher: too many people could crack that. It could instead employ a one-time pad, a specific cipher meant for a single use, solvable only by someone who has the key4. It could instead be a prearranged signal, using pictograms, nonsense phrases, or combinations of those and other methods to catch your audience’s attention while leaving others baffled5. Be sure to include place and time in the message. It’s only polite to meet your rescuers halfway.
Choosing a place to leave your message is a balancing act. It’s best if it’s someplace archeologists or other scholars are studying -- Roman sites work nicely for this -- but not a place they would have combed over already by your present day. Do enough research on your destination, and you may find just such a place: a dig site expanding its work, an old library soon to be catalogued, or others along those lines. If you’ve taken your trip to study megafauna in Ice-Age North America or to go on dinosaur safari, of course, this won’t work remotely as well.
If a rescuer does come, expect to shell out heavily for the pickup service. Some time-travelers may be altruistic, but it’s better not to assume that in your specific case. Small, value-dense merchandise is probably preferable, but don’t go out of your way to arrange this ahead of time. Your rescue may not be perfectly prompt, and you could be stuck with non-negotiable items for a while.
Speaking of non-negotiable, payment should be on delivery, not before. Your presumed benefactor might take your fare and then ditch you. What are you going to do about it, come after him?
Another non-negotiable matter is not leaving traces of your conked-out time machine behind. The opportunity for paradox is too clear and too great. If it’s a portable model, just bring it with you. If it isn’t, salvage the most vital and valuable components you can carry away, then destroy what remains. Dismantling it and scattering the pieces is acceptable; it’s better if you can hide those pieces. A nearby swamp would be convenient. Heaving them into the ocean might be better, as corrosion would eventually destroy them, so they aren’t discovered and recognized in later times. Rolling a self-mobile machine into the sea might be an ideal course; using a freshwater lake or river much less so6.
And if nothing else works, who knows? An older version of yourself might come along and save you. Do not risk the Bilking Paradox and fail to make the reciprocal trip when the time comes. The timeline hates ingratitude.
Footnotes:
If it doesn’t, you probably aren’t thinking about it hard enough.
Well, almost certainly not. We will get to that.
Again, I am not making a definitive statement about conditions at any specific place and time in the future. I am telling you what you may need to be prepared to do in someplace where you cannot make an advance study of conditions. In short, I’m not saying anything: I’m just saying.
The key is then never used again, to prevent other solvers from finding shared patterns in multiple messages and using those to crack the cipher.
There are a few such signals already known by a segment of time-travelers. You may get to learn them if you become known and trusted by that group. Don’t just sneakily learn one and use that. The signals are periodically changed, to prevent repetitions that sharp-witted observers might realize are more than coincidental.
They have an inconvenient habit of drying up and exposing what’s on the bottom. The ocean does this far less frequently -- but while I’m thinking about it, do an ocean disposal at low tide.
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