Hello! I'm trying to find the name of a science fiction short story.
Media: I saw this in a paperback anthology of short stories.
Year of Publication: Not sure, but I'd guess the 1980s.
Major themes: time travel and its effect on the present
Plot: The scene is of a lecture; there is a speaker and an audience. Presumably, to begin with, everyone is standard-issue human. There is a team of scientist whose job it is to send a probe back in time; the probe gathers data of some kind. They send this probe back multiple times while the lecture is going on, and the lecturer is explaining what the probe does, and the audience is asking questions about causality and time hygiene and the like. As this progresses, the speaker and audience are morphing; each time the probe gets sent back, the "humans" are rather different than they were the time before, until, at the end, they're unrecognizably different. They are, of course wholly unaware of this. At the end, the lecturer finishes his talk with a wave of his pseudopods.
Setting: A lecture hall somewhere.
Characters: Not sure any are ever named.
Language: English
Cover details: no idea
Target age group: adult
Ideas I've ruled out: I tried to search for the word "pseudopods" in conjunction with SF/science fiction short story, but there's a podcast by that name, so even if that word does literally appear in my story, it's buried under a thousand other hits.
Thank you so much!
Media: I saw this in a paperback anthology of short stories.
Year of Publication: Not sure, but I'd guess the 1980s.
Major themes: time travel and its effect on the present
Plot: The scene is of a lecture; there is a speaker and an audience. Presumably, to begin with, everyone is standard-issue human. There is a team of scientist whose job it is to send a probe back in time; the probe gathers data of some kind. They send this probe back multiple times while the lecture is going on, and the lecturer is explaining what the probe does, and the audience is asking questions about causality and time hygiene and the like. As this progresses, the speaker and audience are morphing; each time the probe gets sent back, the "humans" are rather different than they were the time before, until, at the end, they're unrecognizably different. They are, of course wholly unaware of this. At the end, the lecturer finishes his talk with a wave of his pseudopods.
Setting: A lecture hall somewhere.
Characters: Not sure any are ever named.
Language: English
Cover details: no idea
Target age group: adult
Ideas I've ruled out: I tried to search for the word "pseudopods" in conjunction with SF/science fiction short story, but there's a podcast by that name, so even if that word does literally appear in my story, it's buried under a thousand other hits.
Thank you so much!
