Author's note --
This is a work of pure fiction. There is no connection to any real people or places. Any resemblance to real life people, events, or someone else's writings is coincidental. It is for entertainment only and is not to be reproduced without written consent.
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My name is Egan (25), and my great, great, great grandmother helped save the future of planet Earth. I have been tasked to write this story to document the events that would lead up to preventing a world war. Part of this story is documented facts, part of it is family oral history, and part of it is first hand knowledge..
It is the year 2169. It was just 45 years ago that my father discovered how to make it possible to have a cold fusion reactor small enough to power everything from small cars to large ships. It even replaced the polluting oil fired power stations and radioactive risky nuclear power plants of the day. Doing so averted a global war over the last remaining oil reserves.
I've gone back in time 160 years to document a pivotal time in my family's history.
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Now that I have fixed my great, great, great grandmother's marriage and my great, great, great aunt's marriage. I decided to jump ahead about 20 years to check on how things were going.
Dialing in a date 20 years from when I first arrived, 160 years into the past, I pushed the button on my time transporter and was instantly whisked to the front yard of my great, great, great grandmother's house. Something didn't quite seem right though. The name on the mailbox was not my great, great, great grandmother's married name. It was conceivable that they'd moved since 20 years ago so I used my PDA to tap into a wireless internet connection to do a name search.
I first started with searching phone records for Julie and John's names locally. I found a John with the same last name but the wife's name was not Julie. I expanded the search, first to the state, then to the national level. Nothing. There just wasn't a married couple John and Julie with that same last name. Next I tried an expanded records search for their names and got some matches. There was a home sale transaction under their names just 6 months after their wedding date. I checked for Rick and Riana, they had bought a home in town was well, at about the same time as John and Julie.
There was a birth announcement for both within the first year they were married, but no others. That couldn't be. The family records said Rick and Riana had 6 kids and my great, great, great grandmother had 3 kids, the third and last was my direct descendent. The next entry was the most telling of all; divorces for both couples just 2 years after their marriage. It was a major blow to me.
Without John and Julie having 2 more kids, I would never exist. My timeline was gone. Even more frightening was the thought that without my dad ever being born, there would most likely have been a world war. I had to find out what had gone wrong. Sometime between the marriage and 2 years later, a major event happened that tore both couples apart.
Dialing the time for just after Julie's marriage, I pushed the button on my time device and shot back in time. I needed to observe the couple without being seen. Luckily, I had some tiny camera drones I'd brought with me on the trip back in time. If you've ever heard the phrase about someone wishing they could be a fly on the wall to see and over hear an event; well, this was the realization of it. It was the size of a fly and could be move through the air like a fly, recording sight and sound, all under the control of a surveillance app on my PDA. I programmed each of the 4 drones to automatically follow John, Julie, Rick, and Riana through their daily life. Then I time jumped a month ahead and downloaded the drone recordings and reviewed the output. For the first year it seemed like John and Julie were doing really well. Rick and Riana on the other hand were having some issues.