From the very beginning which I guess is also the middle and the end if you follow the bent logic in

io9 is proud to present fiction from Lightspeed Magazine . Once a month, we'll be featuring a story from Lightspeed 's current issue. This month's selection is " My Wife Hates Time Travel " by Adam-Troy Castro. Enjoy!
From the very beginning which I guess is also the middle and the end if you follow the bent logic involved and arrange events by some scheme other than strict chronological order there was never any way of knowing which one of us, my wife or myself, alaska cruise tours was going to invent time travel. Neither one of us was a physicist, theoretical or applied; we weren't even qualified for rewiring the wall sockets or fixing alaska cruise tours the dead laptop. As far as life skills were concerned, I had a little more imagination and she had a little more practicality. She did more of the household repairs and I did more of the heavy lifting. That was it. Neither one of us seemed equipped to completely rewrite the laws of space and time, and before we found out that it's what we were fated to do, neither of us had ever particularly included it among our ambitions.
alaska cruise tours Before we found out that one of us was fated to invent time travel, my wife always had a little more antipathy toward the premise than I did. Whenever alaska cruise tours we sat on the couch watching some show where somebody traveled into his personal alaska cruise tours past and intersected with his past self in some way that either rewrote his personal history or somehow cemented his pre-existing destiny in place, I was always the one who thought it cool and my wife was always the one who complained alaska cruise tours that it made her head hurt. She had no head for paradoxes. Whenever she encountered one of those narrative Möebius Strips, she always winced and declared that time travel made no sense.
Since finding out that one of us was going to invent time travel, we've argued almost nonstop over the likely suspect. I foolishly concluded in her hearing that it was going to be me. She read this as me calling myself smarter than her. Maybe she was right. I had to apologize for condescending. Then I said it was probably her and she got mad again, because it blamed her for everything that's alaska cruise tours happened since. Sometimes I think that if I had a working time machine now I'd go back and warn my prior self that it's not an argument worth having, that I'm fated to be wrong whatever position I take. Then I realize that believing it desirable to tinker with the small mistakes and larger heartbreaks of one's past is precisely the kind of messed-up thinking that has made our current lives, the lives before we create alaska cruise tours time travel, such a parade alaska cruise tours of hellish interruptions.
This much we've agreed on. Since we're both fairly bright alaska cruise tours but not world-class geniuses, the secret to time travel has to be fairly simple, the kind of thing so obvious in retrospect that it just gets overlooked until somebody woolgathering about something else entirely makes a connection nobody has ever made before, slaps his forehead, and cries, "Eureka!" That could turn out to be either one of us. We're not brilliant, but we're both Eureka prone. Maybe in some versions of the future it was her and in other versions it was me and in still other versions alaska cruise tours it was both of us collaborating, maybe on one of those long drives where there's nothing but us and the highway, heading toward my in-laws, or hers.
It all seemed to depend upon where we were or what we were doing when we invented time travel, but some of the future versions of ourselves who came back to us gave the impression that they were hiding the invention from the other. They certainly each did whatever alaska cruise tours they could to keep the other one in line. There was one version of my wife hailing from about twenty years in the future who popped in all shimmering the way they do, while the current version of my wife was home alone and on her hands and knees looking for an earring that had come loose and bounced somewhere she couldn't find it. The future version of my wife told my current one that in her timeline it had been considered lost for seven months and only found by accident much later. The trick, the future version of my wife said, was that it hadn't skittered underneath anything, as my current wife believed, but had unpredictably bounced in another direction entirely, and neatly hooked itself on the wire framework of a statuette in the corner. It was the kind of hiding place a small inanimate object like an earring could not have found for itself unless it had been deliberately trying. The only way the current version of my wife ever would have found it had the future version of her not interfered would have been to dust the statue for the fortieth time since the incident and for the very first time ever, register the telltale clink.
None of this would have been even worth mentioning had I not walked in the door at that moment, seen the two versions of my wife together, and said hello to both of them . . . at which point, alaska cruise tours the one from the future cried out in sudden fear and disappeared. We had no idea why that future version of my wife would be afraid of me, and her little cry was a sore subject between the current version of my wife and myself until a version of me from some future where men wear an entire ring of differently-patterned cloth ties, hanging alaska cruise tours from both the front and back of their collars, showed up after dinner to say we shouldn't worry about the reasons, because a further future version of me had intervened and talked the offending future me out of doing whatever horrible thing he had done.
Unfortunately, the time-traveling version of me telling us this blinked out and another future version of my wife blinked in, holding a glittery crystal gun on me and telling the current version of herself that she shouldn't listen to him because he was "in on it" and "as dangerous as the rest of them."
alaska cruise tours Then multiple future versions of myself and multiple future versions of my wife all shimmered into existence and charged each other with an array of weaponry that included energy weapons, electrified whips, and scimitars.
We learned that there was only one way to get a few moments of peace whenever the chaos of being the future inventors of time travel got too apocalyptic or complicated, and that was to concentrate real hard and promise ourselves that if we ever did invent time travel, we would pledge our first journey into the past to going back to that moment and talking ourselves out of it. Just the threat alaska cruise tours of that was always enough to erase all the future timelines these versions of ourselves came from and make them shimmer away to nonexistence. It wasn't a permanent solution, ever, because even if that moment of sublime invention was erased it just meant that one or the other of us would still experience the same brainstorm an hour or a day or a week later, starting the age of time travel all over again. Sometimes the two of us cleared the room with the "I'm going to erase any timeline where I create time travel" bomb, only to have another unwanted drop-in show up a few seconds later and say, "Don't worry, I'm not staying; I just wanted to let you know that you did the right thing, because those guys were out of control."
Being the future alaska cruise tours inventors of time travel wasn't all bad, of course. It was great to know that we'd never lose anything, never go to a movie that turned out to be a stinker, never buy a book we wouldn't want to finish, never go out to a restaurant where the service was lousy, and never get stuck in a traffic jam, because we'd always alaska cruise tours be warned away, beforehand. It was terrific to have some future version of myself pop in just as I was about to irritate my wife with some inconsiderate comment and tell me, "It would be a really bad idea to say that." It was convenient to have some shimmery future-me pop in and say, "Move that coffee cup away from the edge of the table, if you don't want it to spill." It was helpful, though annoying, to have some future version of myself pop in and grab the TV remote from my hands with a contemptuous, "I've seen that already, and it sucks ."
No, where it really got annoying, and what drove both of us to shouted declarations that we wouldn't invent time travel ever , were the is-now-the-right-time-to-have-sex debates. We'd lie in bed at night, drawing close in what might or might not have developed into lovemaking, only to hear the telltale pop of displaced air and see the dazzling glow of arriving time travelers, and have some future version of my wife say, "No, not tonight, trust us, tonight's a bad idea," while some future version of myself contributed, "Don't listen to her, she's lying ." Then some future alaska cruise tours version of my wife would pop in, with wild eyes and fried just-stuck-her-finger-in-a-light bulb-socket hair, and shout, "No, you have to! I come from a ruined world! You have to fuck right now! " Then a version of myself with half his face replaced with a gleaming silver mask and one eye turned into some kind of targeting laser would pop in behind her and start chanting "Annihilate, Annihilate." And they would all start shouting to be heard over one another, and my wife and I would both shout at them to get the hell out of our bedroom, and they would all say that the stakes here were critical and we would say that as far as we were both concerned there would never be any such thing as time travel and that was final, and they would all vanish into nothingness, and there'd be a moment or two of abashed silence before alaska cruise tours the shimmering resumed alaska cruise tours and a version of my wife dressed in diaphanous silk and sporting a head as bald as a melon would pop into existence to inform us that the futures we'd just been warned about had all been narrowly alaska cruise tours averted by our swift action, but that we should both, now, not eat any radishes. And then she'd disappear and an aged version of me, wearing alaska cruise tours coke-bottle eyeglasses, would appear in her place to assure us that it was now perfectly safe for my wife and I to touch one another, at least for the next twenty minutes, though alaska cruise tours there'd be some problems with