by Nigel Ridehalgh

Created on: August 23, 2007

2052 AD (Perhaps).

Since they discovered time travel things have been different. Haveweregoingto be different. Sorry. Forgot my time grammar. Most people do. I washadgoing to be born about ten old years before they discovered time travel. I willwasbeing too young to really know the world before. Hell, you can understand me without time grammar better, huh? I don't know what time you'll be in when you read this. Just know that this is 2052AD unless someone has changed something pretty fundamental.

They didn't think they would discover time travel, so they were a bit careless. They didn't think too hard about the ramifications, and what they could do about any of them. They were so surprised when they managed to meet a bill for the rent of the laboratory by sending the payment back in time to when the bill was due that they got a bit carried away in the local pub for several weeks.

By the time they started thinking about what they should do, such a large number of spiders, rats, and cockroaches from the unsanitary laboratory, not to mention their rather surprised cat Tibby, had accidentally travelled through time that things in the present had started to mysteriously change. Nothing so big that you could put your finger on at first, but something wasn't right.

It all happened quickly after that. Things are different. People don't have money anymore. It took the banks a couple of weeks to figure out that expiry dates no longer meant anything, and only a few days more before millions of people started investing in only those stocks which they knew would go up, after traveling forward to sometime next week. Banks exploded within about four hours. Quite literally in the case of one in Belgium where a team of gas-fitters was installing a new gas heating system, then the gas was turned on 3 days laterbefore without anyone knowing and the roof of the bank was last seen as the only financial asset to be going up.

Here in the United Kingdom things were even stranger. So many people went forward in time until they had paid off their mortgages or until they could retire that almost all work ceased within less time than the government could send out "I'm Sorry" letters to everyone it couldn't pay a pension to. That is until the government figured out how to send all the letters last spring.

Not long after, nearly all the government officials in the country went back in time to rent themselves out as sages, prophets and the like. Only the fact that nobody believed them back then

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