one day all this will be yours by adrian tchaikovsky

Worse, these travelers claim to be the narrator’s descendants. Who knows how long things might have continued this way if two travelers hadn’t shown up from the narrator’s own future? This isn’t supposed to be possible. So, there he is, at the end of time, with his pet allosaur and a bunch of farming robots, waiting for time travelers to show up so that he can kill them and wipe out their timeline so that it can never happen again. It’s hard to stay loyal when the faces keep changing and the reasons keep shifting. The other side-and the side the narrator is presumably on-sometimes disappear from one moment to the next. As soon as people start messing around with the time stream, history gets overwritten. He tells us his story, his deep dissatisfaction at seeing history come apart around him. In the last war, humans not only invented time travel (used to try and thwart the other side before they could make a move) but also bombs that are capable of shattering causality itself. Our narrator is a veteran of the last war humanity will ever fight. The narrator has chosen to use his time-traveling equipment to set up shop at the end of time and destroy any other time travelers he can find. At the risk of being hyperbolic, I would never in a million years think up what the narrator of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s lightning-fast novella, One Day All This Will Be Yours. My answer always changes, partly based on how recently I’ve read something about witchcraft trials (which rule out a lot of history for me) or medical history (which rules out a lot the rest). One of my favorite mental posers to think about is where and when I might go if I had a time machine.

One day all this will be yours by adrian tchaikovsky