Sometimes I dream up ideas for stories, books or movies.  Generally they would get told to the unlucky grand-kids who happened to be riding in the back seat on a long drive.  No one ever writes them down, of course, and they get forgotten.  I don’t have the stamina to actually write a full blown story.  In this case, I wrote this much down a few years back.  Maybe someone else can “make me a movie”.

What if, in the future, when time travel is first being developed, we have a descendant of mine who works in the university environment, either as a professor or researcher.  His hobby is genealogy, and he has developed quite a complete and deep family tree.  Of course, there are gaps in his tree, which he continues to work on.

He is buddies with the scientists who invent time travel, is single, and offers to take a trip back in time to help resolve the question in his family tree.  He would, of course, be visiting his ancestors.  His objective is not to change the future or kill a bad guy or any other dramatic adventure like that — which is why the scientist decides that he would be a good non-scientific person to send back to test effects on the human body of prolonged “out-of-time” activity.  The scientists do not want to send a scientist, as they are needed to run the equipment.  And they don’t want to send an unknown person, for fear of attempts to change the future.

Andy (as I will call him now) wants to travel to the place (in time and location) where his last known ancestors were supposed to have lived.  The scientist want to plan a multi-time trip in which he will visit 4 to 5 locations.  They developed a trip plan together.  Given that Andy was able to utilize the family tree found in the cloud, originally developed by me, and build upon it (based on enhanced findings in DNA matching in the future), he went first  to Doggerland (a large area of dry land that stretched from Britain’s east coast across to the present coast of the Netherlands and the western coasts of Germany and Denmark)  during the Mesolithic period (20K BC to 10K BC).

This time period was prior to farming, people were all hunter gather types, and life in this area of the world would have been difficult, to say the least.

After visiting Doggerland, he was supposed to then travel forward in time in 5,000 year increments, with a final location around 1,000 AD.

The only equipment he could take with him would have to be carried on his body. No addition machines, tools, etc. could be carried.

They had invented a device similar to a GPS unit that could locate a position in time and space, as long as it was able to home in on a transmitter.  Andy had a transmitter embedded under his skin, so the scientist could locate him whenever they wished.  The plan was to “pull” Andy into a new time and place every six months, until he finally returned home.

Fearful that Andy would run into virus’s which his body was not equipped to handle, he was given a vial of super-serum to use in emergency.

He also carried a message transmitter which he could use to send emergency “pull requests” if such a situation would arise.

He was given much training in strength building and karate fighting training so he could protect himself in event of aggressiveness by “natives”.

The adventure part of the movie would be staying alive in Doggerland, and in the other early hunter-gatherer sites he visited.  He would have fights with local animals and get nursed back to health by local women, some of whom were his ancestors.  (Not sure how he knew them, solve this later.)

The “trick” part of the movie occurs (near the end, of course) when he finds himself falling in love with a young “babe” in his family tree, and decides to stay behind. In order to not be pulled forward without his control, he has to  remove the transmitter from his body before the six months is up.  He doesn’t want to fail the scientists by them thinking the experiment failed, so he can’t destroy the transmitter.  He decides to embed it into a body similar in size to his own.  He decides a large goat would do.  He has been able to solve the anomaly in his family tree, and chooses to send a note inside the body of the goat which explains to the scientists what he is doing, and why.  He also includes a note to for the genealogists of his future time so they can fix the gaps in his family tree that he has resolved  He calls his notes his  “suicide notes”.

Given the paradox in time travel that can’t be broken, there can never be two of the same object in any space/time position.  The twist in our movie is that Andy is actually his own ancestor, and was “destined” to go back, fall in love, and have children!  This was another case, therefore, of, heretofore unknown, “genealogical marital issue”.

Andy stays behind, and lives happily ever after.