I know.
FF = dropped for me.
Anyway, I had an idea when I was driving around today:
In the future, society has managed to master time travel technology but also embrace beaurocracy and capitalism to the nth degree. The government, fearing all the paradoxes we've seen a million times in sci fi shows and comics and books, has taken this amazing time travel technology and decided to use it primarily for "time audits": they go back in time, chronicling all the things history missed or lost, and recording their findings for a variety of uses in the present, but never interfering with anything. Someone on trial for murder? The trial consists of a presentation of the time audit--now the only permissable form of evidence--to the judge/jury, followed by a ruling and sentencing. So justice is absolute but fair, science has advanced way faster because scientists can now see exactly what their predecessors did, etc. Virtual utopia, naturally.
The most profound of these changes, though, turns out to be the application of time audits to property rights. Now that people can see exactly who did what, genealogical lines become super-important. Virtually no one works anymore because everyone is entitled to some slice of the residuals from their ancestors. Maybe the caveman who plucked the first G-chord on a string is your ancestor--you get like a quarter or a nickle every time that note is played now.
Of course, since there's no financial impetus to do anything, humanity has fallen into total stagnation. No one bothers to create or do much of anything anymore. Enter: our hero. The protagonist comes from the lowest rung of the societal ladder, with ancestors who created virtually nothing, but he rises up to inspire his fellow people to find their creative spark again. How? I don't know. Maybe he becomes a terr--er, "freedom fighter" and smashes up the time travel tech so that humanity has to live in the now again or something. I just thought the idea of "time audits" was kind of cool and the rest of this stuff started popping into my head. I never really got around to coming up with a narrative, though.