Step Back in Time (short story)

Step Back in Time was the sixth story in the Bernice Summerfield anthology The Dead Men Diaries. It was written by Matt Jones.

Summary
Benny's friend Anderson is late for lunch, and when she looks for him, she finds him at the library, admiring a Jeillo researcher. Anderson sends Benny over to the man, whose name is Porl, and eventually Benny and Porl begin a relationship.

Porl is a temporal anthropologist, and he enthusiastically tells Benny about a civilisation whose members had the ability to time travel within their own timelines. They apparently used this ability to learn more and more about their loved ones, in order to have a "long perfect memory" of their loved ones.

One day, Benny wakes up, hungover, in the bar, along with several other people. She has no memory of what she has done, but staggers off to find Porl. He sees that she has a love bite on her neck and leaves the room angrily.

Benny tries without success to get Porl to listen to her apologies, then she remembers the time travellers he had spoken of. She sneaks into the Great Library, and takes a stone ring that allows time travel. She hopes to change her timeline so that whatever happened to her in the bar will change.

Porl relents when she says she can change everything. However, he sneaks out in the middle of the night, and when she wakes up, Braxiatel and Anderson are there with security guards. Brax is looking for the artefact she stole, which is missing from her room. He tells Benny that Porl polluted the air conditioning in the bar.

Benny still doesn't understand what Porl is trying to do, but when she finally finds him, he tells her he is using the ring to go back in his timeline and make things right with someone called Rebecca. When Benny realises he used her to get the artefact, she kicks it out of his hand and drops it on the floor, where it smashes into pieces.

Characters

 * Bernice Summerfield
 * Irving Braxiatel
 * Anderson
 * Porl Tomas

Continuity
to be added