the tourist

Hey man, slow down.

Where I'm from, in the future, we finally invented time travel. At first everyone talked about it as being a great thing. We could go back and stop all of these terrible disasters from happening. Humanity would be a better place. Scientists argued that wouldn't work, it would be dangerous, it would change history, and every time they said that I thought to myself, isn't that kind of the point?

I'm not a scientist or a moralist though. What I am is someone with time and money on my hands. Eventually one of the inventors settled on a use for it: tourism. We could go back in time to anywhere we wanted. It was a world of adventure. Most people went back to famous eras, important events--some era they fancied.

I just went back to all the disasters of the world. There's so many of them to choose from, and I've got all the time in the world. And there's nowhere people are more human than when the world's being destroyed, when they're faced with the unknown, or something they don't understand--that's humanity.

After the last trip, I just decided to stay here for a while, because what is life but a disaster? I know everything that happens, now there's watching it unfold--not so I can be there at the events, but so I can hear people talking about it on the bus or at coffee shops--giving opinions about events they'll forget about soon, that pretty much always turn out to be wrong.

What is history but the story of people getting it wrong?