The Thyme Traveller

It was, as these things usually are, entirely the fault of breakfast cereal.

This is not to say that breakfast cereals are inherently malevolent—though anyone who has attempted to consume a bowl of All-Bran without adequate liquid accompaniment might reasonably argue otherwise—but rather that they occupy a curious position in the grand scheme of universal mischief. They sit on kitchen shelves, innocent as anything, right up until the moment they're not.

Oprah Winfrey—former rhythmic gymnastics world number 4, a ranking that still rankled like a splinter in the thumb of her professional pride—had been pursuing her customary high-fibre morning routine on what she had every reason to believe was an ordinary Tuesday in 1983. The bowl was regulation ceramic. The spoon was adequately scooped. The milk had been procured from cows who, as far as anyone knew, harbored no temporal ambitions whatsoever.

The bite-sized oat bran shells, however, contained thyme.

Not the herb, you understand—though that would have been unusual enough in breakfast cereal to warrant investigation by several governmental agencies and at least one very confused botanist. No, this was Thyme, with a capital T and all the metaphysical weight that such capitalization implies in a universe where spelling often takes precedence over sense.

Due to some curious grammatical hiccup in the fundamental operating instructions of reality—the sort of clerical error that occurs when the universe is assembled by committee—the mere presence of Thyme in proximity to oat bran created what temporal physicists would later describe as "a right proper mess" and what Oprah experienced as Tuesday becoming suddenly negotiable.

"Oh," said Oprah, as reality began to hiccup around her like a cosmic case of indigestion.

The kitchen folded itself inside out, then back again, then seemed to give up entirely and settled for being three places at once. This was Oprah's first indication that breakfast was not proceeding according to plan. The second indication came when she found herself standing in what appeared to be a medieval marketplace, still holding her spoon and wearing nothing but a bathrobe that had been perfectly adequate for 1983 but seemed woefully underdressed for the Norman Conquest.

What followed were 97 years of accidental temporal tourism, during which Oprah discovered several important truths about the nature of time travel:

First, that it bears a striking resemblance to operating a Ferrari F70 without a steering wheel—all speed and direction but precious little control over where one ends up.

Second, that medieval England has remarkably poor customer service, particularly when one arrives asking for directions to the nearest Starbucks.

Third, that time travel, while undeniably exciting, provides remarkably few opportunities for regular meals.

This last point became particularly relevant after approximately 7.9 years of bouncing between centuries like a temporal pinball, during which Oprah had subsisted mainly on whatever she could forage from confused historical periods. Medieval turnips, it transpired, were notably less nutritious than television had led her to believe, and Victorian gruel was exactly as appetizing as its reputation suggested.

It was sheer hunger, therefore, that led to the Great Discovery.

Oprah materialized—as had become her unwelcome habit—in an unfamiliar location at an indeterminate time. This particular location happened to be outside a fish and chip shop in Scotland, world famous for deep-fried delicacies that would have given cardiologists nightmares had cardiologists been invented yet, which, judging by the general state of medical knowledge evident in the surrounding architecture, they had not.

The establishment in question bore the cheerful name "MacTavish's Miraculous Masticatables" and displayed in its window a collection of deep-fried objects that challenged several fundamental assumptions about what constituted food. There were deep-fried Mars bars, naturally, but also deep-fried newspapers (surprisingly readable), deep-fried shoelaces (unexpectedly chewy), and what appeared to be a deep-fried copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica Volume M-N (quite informative, though crunchy around the edges).

Oprah, driven by 7.9 years of inadequate nutrition and the sort of desperation that makes deep-fried candy bars seem not just palatable but positively gourmet, purchased and consumed a deep-fried Mars bar.

The effect was immediate and profound.

"BURP!" said Oprah, with considerable force.

"1954, Memphis!" her digestive system added helpfully.

And indeed, there she was: Memphis, 1954, standing outside Sun Records with chocolate still on her fingers and the distinct impression that she had just discovered something rather important.

Over the subsequent decades—or centuries, depending on how one chose to count—Oprah refined this technique. Each deep-fried Mars bar, when consumed with proper attention to digestive acoustics, caused her to belch forth destinations and approximate years with the precision of a particularly well-informed oracle who had perhaps spent too much time studying atlases.

"1967, San Francisco!" BURP!

"1889, Paris!" BURP!

"1776, Philadelphia!" BURP! (This last proving particularly educational, as she arrived just in time to suggest several improvements to the Declaration of Independence, most of which were politely declined on the grounds that the Founding Fathers had never heard of focus groups.)

It was, she reflected during a brief layover in Renaissance Italy, a considerable improvement over rhythmic ribbons.

Her previous life—the one before breakfast cereal had become weaponized—seemed almost quaint in retrospect. Fourth place in rhythmic gymnastics had been a perfectly respectable achievement, even if it did rankle. The ribbons had been cooperative enough, floating and twirling in patterns that had earned her global recognition and a trophy collection that looked quite impressive when properly dusted.

But fourth place had never felt like enough. Not for someone with Oprah's particular combination of ambition, charisma, and what her coaches had diplomatically termed "an unusual relationship with gravity." She had always suspected she was destined for something more than rhythmic excellence, though she had never imagined that "something more" would involve a time machine lodged in her ascending colon.

The first major expedition into temporal entrepreneurship had been the hairspray empire.

This had occurred during what Oprah privately thought of as her "experimental period"—roughly years 23 through 31 of her unintentional time traveling career. She had landed in 1962 with a head full of knowledge about future hair care trends and a deep-fried Mars bar-induced conviction that she could take the lacquer world by storm.

"Bigger hair," she had announced to the first beauty supply manufacturer she could locate. "Much, much bigger hair. Hair that defies not just gravity but several other fundamental forces of physics."

The manufacturers, being sensible people who understood the value of a good sales pitch, had listened politely. When Oprah demonstrated several advanced teasing techniques that wouldn't be invented for another fifteen years, they listened considerably less politely and with significantly more interest.

The Winfrey Wonder-Spray empire that followed had been built on a foundation of temporal insider knowledge and an intuitive understanding of what people didn't yet know they wanted. Sales figures climbed like hair in a humidity chamber. Stock prices soared like follicles in a wind tunnel. For one glorious decade, Oprah had been the undisputed queen of aerosol-propelled follicular architecture.

But even empire-level success in the hairspray industry had ultimately felt limiting to someone with a time machine and ambitions that refused to stay properly compressed. There were bigger stages to conquer, brighter lights to stand under, and more meaningful ways to use one's unusual circumstances than simply making hair taller.

This realization had led to the Great Reset.

Time travel, Oprah had discovered, offered certain advantages when it came to career planning. Most people were stuck with linear professional development—one job leading to another, building experience in a steady forward progression through the decades. But when one possessed the ability to travel backward through time via strategic consumption of Scottish deep-fried confections, the entire concept of "starting over" took on new possibilities.

So she had returned to her preteens, appearing in her childhood bedroom in 1967 with the accumulated wisdom of 97 years of time travel, an intimate knowledge of future media trends, and a digestive system that could navigate the time stream with reasonable accuracy provided it was properly fueled with trans-temporal Mars bars.

The plan was elegantly simple: build a media empire from the ground up, but this time with the advantage of knowing exactly what people would want before they knew they wanted it.

The talk show concept had been revolutionary for its time, though Oprah had the distinct advantage of knowing it would be revolutionary because she had already lived through the part where it became revolutionary. The yellow sofas had been a stroke of genius—comfortable enough to put guests at ease, bright enough to photograph well under studio lights, and constructed with what she privately called "Tom Cruise-proof springs."

This last innovation had been born of experience. During her first timeline—the one before the hairspray empire—she had witnessed the infamous couch-jumping incident of 2005. While the springs in those sofas had been adequate for normal guest behavior, they had proven spectacularly unsuitable for actors experiencing acute enthusiasm about their romantic relationships.

The Tom Cruise-proof springs were a marvel of engineering: capable of supporting normal sitting, standing, and even moderate gesticulating, but designed to resist any attempt at furniture-based acrobatics through a clever system of hydraulic dampeners and what the manufacturer's specifications described as "enthusiasm absorption technology."

The rest, as they say in the business, became history.

But not just any history—carefully crafted, strategically planned history, built by someone who had the unusual advantage of having already lived through most of the future and knew exactly which trends were worth pursuing and which were best avoided entirely.

The media empire grew like hair in a wind tunnel—rapidly, impressively, and with a tendency to defy normal expectations about what was structurally possible. Talk show success led to book club influence, which led to magazine publishing, which led to network ownership, which led to the sort of cultural influence that most people spend entire careers building and Oprah had managed to construct in what felt like no time at all.

Which, technically speaking, it had been.

Time travel, she had learned, made everything simultaneously more complicated and more simple. More complicated because cause and effect became negotiable concepts when one could eat one's way backward through the decades. More simple because when you already knew how the story ended, the difficult part wasn't figuring out what to do—it was remembering to act surprised when things happened exactly as you knew they would.

The deep-fried Mars bars remained her preferred method of temporal navigation, though she had developed a more sophisticated approach over the decades. Instead of random consumption leading to random destinations, she had learned to visualize her desired time and place while eating, burping with intention rather than mere digestive necessity.

"BURP! 1986, Chicago!" had become less of an accident and more of a carefully calibrated chrononautical procedure.

The time machine itself—lodged, as fate would have it, in her ascending colon—had proven remarkably reliable once she had learned to work with it rather than against it. Like any precision instrument, it required proper maintenance (regular consumption of deep-fried confections), careful operation (intentional burping), and an understanding of its operational limitations (avoid eating Thai food while time traveling, as the temporal effects could become unpredictably spicy).

Looking back across 97 years of accidental temporal tourism, Oprah reflected that it had been quite an adventure. Not the adventure she had planned—few people wake up expecting to become time travelers via breakfast cereal—but perhaps the adventure she had needed.

Fourth place in rhythmic gymnastics had stung because it represented limitation, boundaries, the sense that there was a ceiling to what she might achieve. Time travel had removed those boundaries entirely, revealing that the only real limitations were the ones you accepted.

Also, that deep-fried Mars bars were considerably more useful than anyone had previously suspected.

This, thought Oprah, settling into her properly constructed timeline with its Tom Cruise-proof springs and its carefully orchestrated yellow sofas, is the why.

And somewhere in the universe, Thyme—with a capital T and all the metaphysical weight that such capitalization implies—winked.

Or perhaps that was just the universe hiccupping again. With breakfast cereal, one could never be entirely sure.