[cicero]

Originally Posted by PastPrime

No. Volume 7 when Mikuru from a week in the future comes back and Mikuru Big leaves them tasks to accomplish. One of those tasks is to recover the damaged memory module with Time Travel formulas on it and send it to an address. SB got it first, but he gives it to them saying that it is necessary for his future too. At the end Mikuru Big meets with Kyon and tells him what she can of why he and Mikuru from a week in the future did what they did. And she mentions that he will have to make a big decision and she hopes that it is in her favor.

The text of that would be:

Spoiler for for length:

The stranger’s smile vanished off his face, and was replaced by a look of extreme boredom. With a flick of his finger, he flicked the transmitter towards me, as the small, black, board-like item traveled through the air in a trajectory course. Before it landed on the ground, I quickly shot forward to catch it.

“Take it then. It’s something I have to do after all. Do as you wish with it, and you can follow those silly orders for all I care. Continue to do as the time travelers tell you to, if you really want to.”

I looked at the object in my arms, which resembled a digital camera’s memory card, albeit one which I had never seen before. I couldn’t tell if it was dirty after being placed in the flowerbed, or if that was its original color.

Ah, whatever. Most importantly, it was safely in my hands right now. The thing which I had to worry about was this guy before us now.

“Who the heck are you, and how did you know we would be here?”

“Hmph.”

The guy’s sneer became more apparent.

“Aren’t you the same? What are you doing here? Why have you come all the way here? Why? Aren’t I supposed to ask you that first?”

Seeing someone who was roughly of the same age as I behave so arrogantly made my anger boil. However, I knew that I couldn’t let my anger get the best of me. Now was not the time to do things according to my own feelings.

Plus, Asahina-san was tightly hugging me, apparently very much intimidated by the stranger.

“The person you should be questioning isn’t me.”

The stranger said, as his gaze fell onto the figure by my side.

“Isn’t that so? Asahina Mikuru?”

I tightly held Asahina-san’s hand, as she continued to clutch onto my jacket.

“W-What do you mean? I d-don’t know you… Where have you…”

The stranger’s smile turned into a frown.

“I see… It’s your first time meeting me eh. Treat this as ‘Nice to meet you’ then. But to me, I’ve already met you several times now. You get what I mean Asahina Mikuru?”

I never loathed someone so much in my life before, as I found myself being pushed to the limits. From the malice in this guy’s eyes, it was obvious that he viewed Asahina-san as his enemy.

I may be mistaken, but I definitely felt that he was human. I’ve never met someone who so openly showed his animosity before. I never liked him from the first time I saw him, and it seemed that he had no intentions of hiding his hatred either, as he openly made snide remarks. I hate these type of characters, and I was sure Haruhi did too.

“If you have anything you want to say, just spit it out.”

Whenever someone suspicious appeared before me, I would find myself toughening up. The only person I would allow to babble such crap would be Koizumi. I continued, as my voice became firm, “If there’s anything you need from me, just say it out loud. Do you need me to relay a message to Haruhi? Or how about I introduce you to her, huh?”

“There’s no need for me to meet with Suzumiya Haruhi.”

Upon hearing his reply, I was initially shocked, but quickly got over it. I thought that this guy had some business with Haruhi. Apparently I was wrong.

“I am different from Asahina Mikuru,”

The stranger said as he shifted his eyes, gazing at the time traveler of the SOS Brigade, then shifting them towards me.

“You should think twice before following her orders so blindly. Reality is not just bound to you only. The same rules used to apply to me. That memory chip is an important artifact to the future. As long as you picked it up with your own hands, the future will not change no matter who obtains it. Isn’t that so?”

No, I’m afraid I don’t agree. I’ve been following my schedule pretty tightly until now, and that schedule clearly doesn’t state the appearance of a stranger like you.

“You’re pretty dim, aren’t you? Don’t you get it? What you’re doing won’t make much difference. Why am I here, you ask? Well, what do you think I’m here for?”

Actually, reading it again now, it seems pretty ambiguous. He seems to be saying that he's handing the chip over because he has to for timeline consistency.

Originally Posted by Kaisos Erranon

Time travel does not work that way.

The Haruhi series seems to follow the Novikov Principle (for the most part).

Essentially, the future cannot be changed, because it has already happened. There is only one timeline, and it cannot be changed. It can only be fixed, restored, or otherwise affirmed.

The only exception appears to be the "Harupowers", and it is this last that I believe Fujiwara and his people want control over. With Haruhi (or Sasaki) under their command, they could rewrite history and thus create the ideal world they want.

If the time travelers and data entities, due to their foreknowledge of events, have no free will, then Haruhi's powers, to them, must represent the freedom they have been looking for.

While I agree that there is initally one timeline, I would point out another possibility. Fujiwara could be from a different timeline if this different timeline came into possibility with a flexing of Haruhi's powers. Since Haruhi's powers can rewrite the timeline, then many things are possible around her. That is, if her power's existence created the possibility of an alternate timeline with time travelers and Fujiwara, then the probability of the originally privileged Mikuru's future automatically drops from its original 100% and existence becomes something meaningful to fight for, centered around Haruhi. To be clear, the new timeline would could into existence because their suddenly exists the possibility of fujiwara and co. intervening to cause Haruhi to change the future. And they only exist because the timeline now does. So yes, a closed causal loop. No one really understands how those work...
All this assumes that:
Time travelers can arrive from any timeline that has a possibility of existing, not just the most likely one. And that multiple possibilities are even tolerated by the universe.
In some sense, Haruhi's existence nullifies Novikov's principle.
There are self-consistent theories of time travel, etc. which don't invoke the principle, and I think that once you bring Haruhi's powers into play, one of these(ie multiple timelines) takes precedence.

....that was really difficult to type. I still don't think I got it out clearly enough. Oh well.