In the early 2000s, a man named John Titor appeared on internet forums, claiming to be a time traveler from 2036. Throughout several posts in 2000 and 2001, Titor shared the elaborate story of how he was sent back in time on a mission to retrieve an old IBM computer that contained special debugging software needed to avert a technological crisis in the future.
Titor said he was born in an alternate reality in the late 20th century. Still, he grew up in a United States that had descended into civil war after the Y2K computer bug caused widespread technological failures in 2000. As a child, his family fled to join a farming community in Florida to escape the fighting. In the 2010s, Russia took advantage of America’s weakness by launching nuclear strikes against several significant cities, prompting the U.S. to retaliate and triggering an all-out nuclear war that killed 300 million people.
In the aftermath of this catastrophe, remnants of the U.S. government continued operating and eventually developed time travel technology in conjunction with General Electric. Titor enlisted in the military’s time travel division and was trained for missions involving meeting alternate versions of oneself in different timelines. For his first assignment, he returned to 1975 to retrieve an old IBM 5100 personal computer from his grandfather, which contained debugging software needed in 2036 to address the impending “Unix Year 2038” computer bug.
After retrieving the computer, Titor made a detour to the year 2000 to meet his father and childhood self. His grandfather had urged him to try changing the timeline to avert the coming wars and chaos. Although conflicted, after meeting his family, Titor decided to take action. He began posting details online about the future calamities to alter the course of history.
Titor made several accurate predictions, including the coming of mad cow disease in the early 2000s and the rise of user-generated content platforms like YouTube in the late 2000s. However, in 2018, a man named Joseph Matheny revealed that he and some friends fabricated the entire John Titor persona as an alternate reality game. The story is loosely based on the character of John Connor from Terminator, and different friends take turns writing the posts in Titor’s voice. Nonetheless, many people continue to believe that Titor was real. His warnings about worldwide destruction and nuclear war resonated with the apocalyptic fears of the early internet era. While unprovable, some maintain that Titor did come from an alternate timeline where he prevented the catastrophes he described. His legend is one of the internet’s most captivating tales of time travel and attempts to alter the future.
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