Time-hacks from the 31st century (1st draft)

Gregori prayed as he shot at the guards. He prayed that for the first time in history, the government had done its job competently.

The men screamed as their bodies dissolved and their stored energies dispersed out into the right places in the timeline, as a time bullet nicked them. It has been one of the greater horrors of this life for Gregori to find out that the universe did not owe humans a peaceful time restructuring. Bits of biological matter rendering loose into their base components as they tore apart and shot out across the universe to fit into the correct time displaced mold.

The Government of Urth had taken precautions, employing only lab grown clones to work the security, to ensure timeline stability as the original self was killed from the beginning, but even so, one could never know how much random influence these clones might have had on lives around them even as just suits standing outside the doors.

It was one of Urth's greatest secrets that Urth wasn't the original timeline. They had known this since they found clone vats suddenly empty at random, and new clone vats appearing at random. As it had turned out the universe didn't care for how time flowed or to where, for it would always reconstitute into the same amount of energy at the end of the day and every moment of its existence. The universe did not care what shape the energy within it took, and time displacing only ever just moved the universe's total energy in one point in time to another point in time while still leaving the total energy across the timeline the same. Matter across time was fluid, and it only mattered to living things that it were so.

For the universe, the rules of causality still worked correctly, even as things came into existence or dropped out of existence in linear time.

It was when the 15th guard had dropped dead that Gregori felt something had gone wrong. He could see the buildings around him shifting, and he could feel his body filled with pain, as the very organs and blood and bones in his body began to disintegrate. People were screaming as everyone within the city block began to melt away just like him. He screamed too.

Gregori took a sigh of relief 500 km away. Walking by the pond. It was a pleasant day. He never got that job at Site Delta. He had felt terrible about it at that time, but now, he had gotten used to the life he was living. It didn't feel so bad at all.

30 years earlier, Dr. Sternum wiped sweat off his brow. He had again stabilized the timeline, or at least his version of it. The clones had stopped disappearing, torn to shreds of non existence as soon as they were birthed. He did not understand why, but not hiring Gregori Sclongzung had done the trick. A man with a strong enough influence to alter the next 30 years of human history, possibly leading to the terrible deaths of billions, now just another footnote in the future, with nothing truly important to his name.

It was a very important job, time security. Nobody knew how many times the future or the past had been changed. Only that their version of the present was the one alive right now, and it was their duty to keep it stable.

" It has been theorized in elite circles without names that the reason we never found aliens so far is that the discovery of time travel is the great filter for all species. Who most often end up eradicating their own timeline in the process of altering the past or attempts at trying to alter the future, resulting in retribution and mutual self destruction."

"Once time travel is invented. Every moment in the future of the species till the end of the species is an opportunity for someone to travel through time and eradicate the universe itself."

"Given infinite time and infinite time travel capable branches, a point will occur where a time branch comes into existence where either time travel is never discovered thus maintaining stability of the timeline, or time travel is discovered but whoever discovers it manages to survive the risks until the end."