Time Travel Archival

I keep having this dream that I am a member of this special organization. My goal is simple: To use a machine and learn history and information from my assigned time period. This machine was a time machine of the sorts, but you couldn't change anything, only view it. Punch in a date, time, and your location, get yourself a nice view of what happened.

Everybody had their own assigned time period, usually lasting from a few decades to a few centuries. We'd write down what all happened in detail, or as we called it, "make the history books". While most people got ancient civilizations to study, I got the more modern stick.

As fascinating as we find out own history and past now, we still don't do enough to preserve our present, and we haven't for the past few decades. One important landmark in our modern society is the internet, and the technologies that make it. Many obscure things that brought us what we know today don't have a lot of information on them anymore.

That was my job in this dream. I would suit up and enter this spherical room, where I would await the commands I punched in to process. After the machine would finish warming up, its walls would seem to blast into the location and time I gave.

You'd be surprised how much you could learn about the history of a digital invention without touching a computer it's timeframe. We are physical beings after all, and it all started somehow.

I don't ever remember what time or place I would punch in, but it would always be different and about things I couldn't understand or knew nothing about. Possibly just gibberish my mind is making up to fill in the gaps. As I am about to write my first line in my historybook, the machine explodes, and I wake up.

The possibilities that it would bring if such an invention and it's task were to become true. I love preserving the history of the internet, but somethings just feel lost forever, and others might not ever be known. Perhaps this dream is the byproduct of my frustrations with stalled progress. Even so, it's an interesting concept to think about.