Thomas wondered when time travel was first discovered, he thought it was 2028. The year he turned seventy nine. However once the ability to travel backwards in time was discovered, being old wasn’t a problem. For you dialled up any of the years after your sixteenth birthday, then back you went to your chosen year.

The downside was that you had no control over which country you arrived in or even who you were. You could find yourself in a jail, down a mine. Or you might be on the high sea in the middle of a hurricane. You took pot luck. It was better than being dead in 2032. For that was the year that the world leaders turned on each other. The resulting chemical warfare had delivered something much worse than wherever one might arrive. Or so he thought. Until he found himself in a submarine that had just hit the sea bed after an internal explosion… How he wanted to return to his job monitoring post war camera images. Even if everyone had died.

Footnote: Word count 175.