Time Travel: The Only Way to Fix MS Windows

I stood in front of the time machine. Books never get time machines right. It isn't some simple mechanical machine. Time is less tangible. Time is potentials. Dozens of monitors were in front of me. Each showed a different window into the past. I was focused on the Seattle windows, as what I had to do would take place there.

Theoretically, one could pipe in as many views of as many past times as one wanted. As many Windows as you wanted, as it were. The empirical limitation was electrical power. Time machines required massive electricity. A typical nuclear power plant put out about 1.2 gigiwatts. That's 1.2 billion watts of power, very roughly, the power used by 500,000 Americans. All being piped into a single time machine.

The creation of a nuclear power plant so large, and the cover story fed to the public to get them to stop asking where all that power went, is a story I don't have time for. They'll arrest me for what I'm about to do, but my wife and child died last year, and I'm going to kill myself anyway, so I'm working my way through my bucket list. When you work on a top secret time travel project, your bucket list is atypical, to say the least.

My bucket list is a bit naïve and littered with altruism, but then my great failing has always been the fact that I believe in idealism.

Anyway, the further back in time a window looks, the more power it takes. Altering what it is seeing—its location—takes more power. Opening multiple windows at once takes more power, and as looking back in time is subject to bandwidth constraints—to use an imprecise word that is the best available analogue—each new window opened requires exponentially more power.

As I moved my Seattle window and searched, I finally caught sight of the nerd I was looking for. He looked like girl scout could beat him up, and was taking antiquated computer punch cards to a store whose name I couldn't see. I was about to enter the Seattle window, but then Windows crashed, as it regularly does. I wished Bill Gates were standing in front of me so I could knock his fucking teeth in. I'd lost hundreds if not thousands of hours to Microsoft's garbage ass products. I didn't have a problem with Bill Gates getting rich, but for Pete's sake, if you're going to make $30 billion, at least have the decency to offer a product that works.

I rebooted, found the skinny young nerd, travelled back in time through the Seattle Window. Now young Bill Gates was standing before me. And I shot him in the side of the head.

Bill Gates dropped dead. Windows would never exist. I closed the Seattle windows, shut down the time machine, and opened my laptop. I fired up my workspaces operating system. It ran ten times as fast as windows, and didn't crash once. Finally, my computer would increase my efficiency, rather than pilfering it as Windows had done. I loaded my bucket list, and looked for the next item on it. Ah, yes, I'm going to bomb the Goldman Sachs headquarters. Better book my plane tickets.