The perils of temporal fame. or How I ruined my life by pretending to be famous.
It seemed like a great idea when I thought of it, I just wish I'd thought it through a bit more before I went ahead and did it. Time travel was all the rage now that the cat was out of the the bag because the technology had proliferated uncontrollably once somebody posted the schematics to build a time machine on Reddit. The Bureau of Time Travel Oversight & Management, or BOTTOM, as it was laughingly called, had their hands so full trying to prevent catastrophic pollution of the timeline of early history with modern technology, that they simply gave up trying to police sight seeing, so I thought to myself "If the kardashians can be rich and famous JUST for being rich and famous, this could be my ticket to the life of luxury I always dreamt of."
The plan was simple in it's elegance, I built myself a time machine, then advertised sightseeing tours to see the most famous people in history before they were famous. Nobody would know I wasn't already one of the most famous people in history because it hadn't happened yet, so I could just stick myself on the tour along with the other glitterati that everybody was keen to go spy on, and once they were returned to their own time word of mouth would spread the news of my fame all by itself and people would now want to go and have a look at me.
To make myself appear famous enough to be worth visiting in the first place, I spent 5 years taking everybody to pretty much the same point in time to look at me, rather than spacing them out a bit like I did with all the other people in order to avoid creating a disturbance that would alert the people we were going to look at that something was going on, that way when people got back they had a tale to tell about the massive crowds of people who all wanted to look at me, far larger than the number of people who were interested in looking at any film star, rock star, historic general, writer, scientist, or anybody. Thousands of people thronging the streets outside my house just waiting for a glimpse of the person they were all sure must be somebody very special indeed if this many people wanted to catch a glimpse of them.
Where it went wrong is that I hadn't counted of other people deciding to cash in on this, after a while I began to notice that the crowds seemed larger than I thought they should have been given the number of people I had been taking back to look at me. I began taking people to a slightly earlier time to avoid the overcrowding, only to find that there were already people there. I tried later times and if anything the crowds were even larger than the ones I had created in the first place. Then, one day, when I returned to my own time I found myself in a different reality.
Rather than returning to the tour office as I had expected, I experienced a moment of intense, nauseating, pain, and found myself inside my house, looking out the window at a huge crowd of people in the street outside. Many of them were wearing T-shirts with me on them, pretty much all of them had imaging devices of some kind. There were banners and placards calling for me to come out and see them, declarations of undying love for me, death threats, marriage proposals, several groups of strangely dressed people I'm fairly sure must be some kind of cult swinging incense burners and chanting unintelligible chants, and endless other varieties of freaks and weirdos.
It's been about 6 months now, I'm stuck in my house. I can't go out. There's a cordon of armed guards that form a ring around my garden an allow deliveries through, but keep the crowd from getting in. I can order food and other things off the internet, but I'm not sure who's paying for it, perhaps it's the drivers, who seem to see me as the goose that's laying their golden egg and don't want anything to happen to me. I've asked, but nobody will tell me.
Being this famous really isn't anything like I thought it would be.