No one knows why but time travel burns off all your hair. The stench makes me nauseous. I fight the urge to upchuck the contents of my swirling stomach. Vomiting while time travelling seems so disgusting – soiling several centuries at once.

I grab one sock and hop to the bathroom. I stare at my reflection in the mirror, where my clean-shaven skull glows red from the friction of hopping across timelines. I flush the toilet to figure out where I am. The water swirls counterclockwise. I must be in South America. The hotel décor gives me a rough idea of when I am located, which century the time travel portal has deposited me in. I wonder who is winning the war?

I turn on the television. The screen flickers to life and the actors speak English. The commercials are in English. My South American television is speaking English.

This means the Confederacy has won the Civil War.

Again.

After you invent time travel, history becomes rather fluid. I am a Union Blue, travelling timelines to ensure the North continues to win America’s Civil War. I wander to the balcony, looking over the city plaza of Caracas, Venezuela. A lot of people bustle back and forth across the cobblestones, the commotion of commerce. A slave auction is proceeding. Horrified I watch husbands and wives separated and sold to different plantations. I watch children ripped from their mother’s arms. The children cry. The mothers cry. I cry.

I have been a time warrior for centuries. I have been battered and beaten repeatedly. I travelled back in time, disguised myself as a Confederate soldier, and shot Stonewall Jackson from his horse. Had I not shot him, Stonewall Jackson was destined to be President of the Confederacy after victory had been declared in The War Between the States.

My fingers trace a musket ball scar on my right shoulder. It was a musket ball which I received atop Round Mountain. Myself and my brother Tom were the only Time Travel Warrior’s among the handful of Union soldiers who held a small insignificant hill and forced Pickett’s ill-fated charge at the Battle of Gettysburg the next day. Brother Tom had only joined the Time Travel Warriors because I had asked him too, convincing him our cause was just, fighting to end slavery. When I was shot in the shoulder Tom rushed over to apply first aid. That is when Tom was shot in the head. I held him and wept as he died.

It has all been for naught. Johnny Reb has managed to twist the timelines and win. Every time they are victorious, the Confederation of States quickly invade Mexico. Next, they conquer the countries of Central and South America until it is all one big slave empire. That is why my television in my South American hotel room is speaking English. I have landed in a timeline where the Confederacy has won the Civil War.

From the center of the city plaza, from the top of a statue celebrating Stonewall Jackson, from the crown of his hat, a pigeon lifts off and flaps his chubby little wings, flying straight for my balcony. The pigeon lands on the railing. The bird has something tied to his leg. Our civilization has mastered time travel but when our government wants to send me a secret message, they send it by carrier pigeon to make certain it avoids detection. I untwist the scrap of paper and discover my next mission.

I step into the shower, entering the watery time travel portal. The oceans of this planet were formed during a period known as The Great Bombardment when comet after comet struck the planet over and over. All the water we have is all the water our planet has ever had. When a scientist realized that water remembers time, time travel was invented.

I step into the time travel portal and step out on April 13th, 1865. A play has just finished, the actors performing to a raucous standing ovation. The thespians have gathered at a local saloon for some celebratory recreational drinking. One actor in particular, a small handsome man, is talking a lot of loud trash about the government.

“Abraham Lincoln needs to be shot,” the actor declared with an emphatic wave of his arm, hand held out like a revolver.

I marched across the room and punched him in the jaw. My hand hurt like hell, so I hit him with the other hand. Before I could punch him a third time, someone from behind, broke a chair over my head. I crumpled to the floor. I looked up and saw a barroom brawl had broken out. Almost everyone in the saloon was an undercover Time Travel Warrior. Tom, my sweet little brother who had died in my arms, leapt out from behind the bar, alive and well, and began pummeling John Wilkes Booth repeatedly. Then a large boot stomped on my head, and I remembered nothing else.

I woke up on a jail cell cot with a headache and a loose tooth.

I heard a groan from the cot beside mine. I looked over and there was Tom. It hadn’t been a dream.

“You’re alive!” I blurted out.

“Once a society invents time travel, history becomes a fluid thing.” Tom shrugged. “Turns out life and death become a little more flexible too.”

A good friend bails you of jail but a great friend is in the cell with you. Tom was a good brother and a great friend. He pointed across the cell to where a battered and bloody John Wilkes Booth was sleeping it off. Mr. Booth would not be performing at Ford’s theater this night. There would be no assassination this evening. Tom and I had just saved the President of the United States. Abraham Lincoln would not die tonight.

At least not in this timeline.