Ryan was in time enforcement, which is a fancy way of saying he makes sure people don't go back in time and change the past. The time machine's creator, Dr. Reginald Sloan, had stated that while changes to the past would not damage the fabric of space time in any meaningful way, the universe's structure could be irrevocably altered. Dr. Sloan himself made such a change himself on his trial run. He claims went back to 1960 and accidentally caused the election of JFK. In the original timeline, Nixon was elected President in 1960, not JFK. He went on to serve a record breaking 5 terms as president, maintaining a patchwork support by winning the Vietnam war by dropping an atomic bomb and re invading North Korea with ground forces. A war ravaged USSR soon caved in, threatened and unnerved by the American willingness to use nukes.
Horrified by the enormity of what he had done (or, rather, undone), he vowed never to travel again and, armed with a time travel detection method known only to himself formed a timeline enforcement agency. They had been operating for about 5 years. There were 5 agents including Ryan and Dr. Sloan. Somehow or another the technology to time travel got onto the black market and various terrorist groups and hostile governments tried to use it to turn history to their own advantage.
They always failed, or at least they seemed to, Ryan would think to himself. After all, how would anyone know for sure that they didn't succeed? If you weren't there when a change occurred you wouldn't be aware of any change. You would also have changed. It was this thought, pestering him for months and then years on the job, that finally made him do what he did.
Ryan decided he had had enough of the thankless work of time enforcement. He wanted to rich and powerful and for it to have always been so. So he broke the law and tried to go back and make himself rich and famous with his future knowledge. No one really knew what would happen if you encountered or interacted with a previous version of yourself, but everyone agreed it wouldn't be pretty. So he played it safe. He left info for himself in the past about valuable stocks that were about to pay off big. His younger self didn't take the bait, he suddenly remembered, as he always kicked himself for not following through on the cryptic message an anonymous stranger sent him. He realized immediately he doomed the message to failure by making it too subtle. So he tried again, sending a message to himself at 20 to get a bookie and place a big bet on the Superbowl that year.
No dice again, as a new memory slammed into his head, another 'prank' note he received in college by 'one of his stupid roommates trying to trick him into gambling his money away with 'a sure thing.'
Again and again he tried to give a past version of himself a heads up of what was to come, only to find he couldn't, he wouldn't believe it. Finally, frustrated and past the point of caring, he decided on a more direct approach. He went back to meet his Dad, before he was born. He talked to his old man, younger then than he was himself and convinced him that he was his son from the future and to invest in all the right places to make himself filthy rich. He listened. He became the richest man in the world in a fortnight and went on to found charities, build hospitals and fund disease research around the world.
Ryan did not fare so well. He miscalculated. Badly. After striking it rich, his father abandoned his mother to focus on his fledgling empire. She never got pregnant and he was never born. But he was already in the past. In his head, there was a loud BANG that reverberated through him like a sonic boom. He lost consciousness from the pain.
When he awoke, he didn't exist. He wasn't Ryan anymore. He was nobody, with no memories, no past, no future. Space time had corrected itself by removing him from the equation. He got up and shuffled off, with no idea where to go, what to do or who he was. He thought he had been looking for someone, but then the thought faded. Oh well, he thought. It would come to him in time.
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