Jason rubbed his face as he finished repairing and slotting back into the main computer a small circuit board and a data crystal before he looked at the simple, ring-shaped object in the middle of the laboratory. It had taken him nearly 5 years following a number of warp drive experiments which led to the development of wormholes, and there were so many failures and just as many successes, but at long last he had succeeded.

He had built a time machine.

Okay, granted he had not originally set out to build a time machine, but ever since the building of the Dyson swarm after humanity got back on its feet following the near destruction of the planet in the final days of the Earth-Minbari war when power was soon such a massive problem and resources were so scarce they couldn't re-enter hyperspace again, they had finally done something never discovered so far by any of the other Younger Races in the Milky Way, broke the speed of light barrier with the warp drive, and because wormholes worked to a similar theory, it was not long before wormhole technology was discovered and even now was being researched.

Armies of scientists were continually trying to expand on wormholes in the hopes of getting further out into space. Right now there was a massive influx of explorers, and during the last 7 years, vast swathes of the outer rim had been discovered and settled. But the real greatest expansionist projects were not on the rim, but in the parts of the galaxy where nobody had yet visited

Warp drive ships, each one vastly more advanced, more sophisticated were going out into the galaxy while avoiding the known races. Jason sometimes wished he was out there like he had in the past, but he had only been serving as a civilian scientist to a bunch of jarheads who were continually looking for new worlds and resources to help them shorten the gap between them and the Minbari, and he had not even visited beyond the great, unexplored mass of the galaxy before he was put off to a degree, and he had returned to Earth.

Jason had watched as the first wormhole was created, more by accident than by any kind of deliberate design from a warp drive that malfunctioned although whether it was a malfunction, or if a scientist had wanted to try something he had never gotten the story, and he had instantly signed up to a wormhole research team.

It wasn't as if his time back on Earth was bad. He still had his research and his work, and thanks to the recent discovery in wormholes, a group of explorers had discovered a golden discovery; a Dilgar shipyard, complete with the next generation of Dilgar fighters and warships. But the shipyard contained a further surprise; there were ships captured by the xenophobic feline aliens, superior alien technology and scientific knowledge had only helped Jason and the other researchers in little areas while they continued to work on the wormhole projects. The long-term hope was to build a wormhole that did away with starships in general and allowed instantaneous faster-than-light travel linking solar systems together.

And they had succeeded. The first wormhole had linked Earth to the moon, and then to Mars, and then to Io, and then to Proxima 3, and on and on until the Earth Empire (the Alliance still existed, but they had renamed it the Empire officially as the number of worlds they colonised grew and grew; some were perturbed by the changes, but Jason was not one of them).

But there were still vast improvements to be made, and one day during an experiment, Jason discovered it was possible for a wormhole to travel in time; all he had to do was simply add in the date he wanted the mouth of the wormhole to open to. It was just that simple.

Once his pre-start checks were finished, Jason activated the wormhole portal. He decided to set it to the past, directing it to 2248, the Battle of the Line.

Biting his lip as the image on the screen showed the sight of Minbari warships cutting into the Alliance warships desperately trying to keep the Minbari back and trying to give the refugee ships a chance to flee, but the Minbari cut off all routes of escape before they forced the ships back, destroying all human weapons and stopping them from mounting even a token defence before the Minbari just…changed their minds, and they demanded humanity's surrender.

For the next half an hour, Jason watched in horror as the Minbari bombarded Earth with mass drivers, beams and all other kinds of weapons, forcing the ships to crash land on the planet which was becoming increasingly more and more ruined with each strike. Much against his better judgement, Jason actually forced himself to move the wormhole forward a few years, watching as the Minbari transformed the planet into a colony of their own, freely killing humans for sport while they forced them to struggle to survive.

While he watched in horror as the Minbari murdered whomever they liked, he was delighted when his own people fought hard against them and eventually succeeded in driving the alien trash away.

Jason was about to shut down the wormhole when he saw something that surprised him and made him question his senses.

The Minbari returned.

They returned and they bombarded the planet, already shattered by the earlier bombardment, but they didn't stop there. They used biological weapons which wiped out all life on the planet.

Jason stood up quickly, shutting the wormhole down. The computer had recorded the whole thing automatically, and he would probably check it again later, when he could stomach it. But right now he was pacing the laboratory slowly, his mind racing as he tried to make sense over what he had just watched.

The Minbari had just left Earth and they had never come back, not once in the time humans had been free. Their departure had allowed Earth to rebuild slowly, and to venture out again into the stars, discovering wormholes and warp drive, and they had thrown hundreds of thousands of mirrors reflecting the light of the sun back for energy. So what had he just seen?

Inspiration came to him, and he rushed over to a bookshelf and he fingered the books until he came across the one he wanted. It took him a few minutes to find what he was looking for, a chapter describing alternative timelines. Suddenly it all made sense to Jason about what was happening. The wormhole had opened into a different timeline because there was no other way of breaking the chronology protection rules.

For a moment, Jason wondered what he could and should do now, but then he realised he had still discovered time travel, and even if some would be dismayed they could not change their past, they could still visit different times and places, and maybe they would discover technologies not available in this world.

End.