Difference
The worst thing about time travel is that moment when you get back and realize that absolutely nothing's changed.
All those books about how the smallest thing shapes the universe -- stomping on the butterfly means that the US was invaded by Russia -- it's wrong. You can go back and do all sorts of things, and everything will stay exactly the same.
Kill a dinosaur, step on a butterfly, and you come back to exactly the same thing. Wipe out an entire medieval village, and it's still the same thing.
Hell, I once went back and killed Lee Harvey Oswald at birth. Still didn't stop Kennedy from being shot. All we ended up doing was proving Oliver Stone right about that entire conspiracy thing.
Drop A-bombs in San Francisco. Steer ships away from icebergs. Push an archduke out of the way. Prove that a illegitimate heir cannot take the throne.
You can do a million things and it still won't make a difference. Sure, the history books have the names changed, the pictures have different people in them, but you can still come home after a day of work, turn on a re-run of Star Trek, and have a beer and some pizza for dinner.
When you've learned how little you can make a difference, you have two choices.
A lot of people go crazy and shoot their way through history, Machine-gunning agoras, dynamiting wedding chapels, that sort of thing. You've never seen anything quite so destructive and glorious as a teenage girl with a shotgun in ancient Assyria. Or a middle-age man surrounding Gettysburg with land mines.
But others (only a few, because it's always easier to destroy others than to destroy yourself), like me, well...
I'm not going back far, only a couple of decades.
And I'm going to try something.
If you kill your mother while you're still in her womb, will you exist?
Only one way to find out.
Written for Soul Kitchen.