All You Zombies

Pop’s Place is a small bar somewhere in New York City; the bartender-narrator works there while he waits for the Unmarried Mother to arrive for a drink in November 1970. During the story, the bar has only a few patrons served by a second barkeep; the narrator focuses his attention on the Unmarried Mother. The bartender is a time-traveling agent who’s real purpose is to meet and talk with the Unmarried Mother. The storeroom in back houses a small inner room that contains the narrator’s time machine. 

Hidden in a bunker deep inside the Rocky Mountains, the Temporal Bureau—a military organization dedicated to protecting humanity from problems in the timeline of history—sends time agents to different years to correct temporal problems. The story’s hero must correct imbalances in his own timeline so that he, and the time-altering work he already has performed, can still exist. 

The bartender controls “a U.S.F.F. Co-ordinates Transformer Field Kit, series 1992, mod. II” (10), a time machine that permits him to travel to different years. He uses the machine to maneuver events across time so that his own infant female self is properly ensconced in an orphanage and that his older, post-sex-change male self encounters his betraying lover—who turns out to be himself as a time traveler—and understand the complex process so that he will join the Temporal Bureau and perform the above actions and complete the time loop.