“You see,” went on Me₃, “originally—well, originally to me, at least—I kept on trying to deïce the road. You,” he declared, pointing to me, “were unsuccessful, much as you would have been had I not intervened in the present. Now, I tried over nine thousand times to stop this accident, but somehow, some way, Latrodecta managed to keep it occurring.”

“No wonder you look like hell,” Me₂ responded, doling us out each a Coke.

“She…” Me₃ swallowed. “She also made good on her word to keep making it worse. Not every time did the number of deaths increase, of course, but they did so in general as my attempts piled up. She even managed to cause an accident several days earlier, forcing a detour.” I—er, he—clicked the slide forward again. “Then I just gave up, but before I did, I found something out. You know how we couldn’t travel into the future?” It was a rhetorical question; Me₃ took a sip of his Coke and kept on blathering on. “Turns out that that isn’t quite true.”