[ WP ] As soon as you put the finishing touches on your time machine/teleporter , hundreds of portals open up around you , with endless copies of you telling you not to start it up , to start it immediately , to make a few tweaks , etc .

`` It says here I need a pood of intertwined fullerenes. What the hell is a pood?'' 
 
 `` Uh oh. Do the instructions mention an arshin?'' 
 
 `` Ahhhhhhhh... yeah... here's something about the minimum spatial buffer must be 5 arshins.'' 
 
 `` What you got there is a Tsarist Russian time machine. Good luck. You pretty much have to travel back in time to get the tools to fix the thing just so you can travel back in time. It would probably be easier to do a Zhivago and walk all the way back in time. You're never gon na find a set of wrenches to fit that thing.'' 
 
 `` You sound like an expert at this time traveling thing. You been at this for a while?'' 
 
 `` Well,'while' does n't make much sense when time travel is involved. But I've made more trips than most people have.'' 
 
 `` You look kinda familiar.'' 
 
 `` Look around. See that guy? The Neanderthal stacking his boulders?'' 
 
 `` Yeah?'' 
 
 `` He look familiar too?'' 
 
 `` Yeah. We all look a lot alike. That's weird.'' 
 
 `` All I have to say is do n't lend him any tools. IF you get'em back, they'll be bent and scratched to hell, covered in mud and dung. But everyone around here, we're all pretty much the same. See, whoever was the first one of us apparently was a fan of self-replicating technologies. It's fine to build a machine that builds copies of itself. But he must have fell asleep at the controls.'' 
 
 `` Dammit, my first time travel and I ca n't go anywhere.'' 
 
 `` Look, when I was starting out, some other me showed me the ropes. You're welcome to ride in my machine. We can probably find one for you that does n't involve Tsarist units or granite boulders.'' 
 
 `` You sure? That would be great. Awful nice of you.'' 
 
 `` We better hurry. Right about now most of us like to have a coffee. Machines are gon na start popping in all over. Then all of us will start arguing about how to tweak another millisecond of resolution into targeting. The resonance of a few million clones arguing at the same vocal frequency tends to throw off a machine's calibration. Do me a favor and hand me that 16 kilograms of fullerenes.'' 
 

