All You Zombies

Timeline of "'—All You Zombies—'" in diagrammatic form

The story involves an intricate series of time-travel journeys (see diagram). It begins with a young man speaking to the narrator, the Bartender, in 1970. The two of them relate in that both of them are from unmarried parents. The Bartender remarks that no one in his family ever gets married, including him. He wears an Ourobouros ring. The young man is called the Unmarried Mother, because he writes stories for confession magazines, many of them presumably from the point of view of an unmarried mother.

Cajoled by the Bartender, the Unmarried Mother explains why he understands the female viewpoint so well: he was born a girl, in 1945, and raised in an orphanage. While a fairly ugly teenager in 1963, she was seduced, impregnated, and abandoned by an older man. During the delivery of her child, doctors discovered she was intersex, with internalized male sex organs as well as female sex organs. Complications during delivery rendered the female organs unviable and forced them to give her a gender reassignment. The baby was kidnapped by a mysterious older gentleman, and not seen again. The Unmarried Mother then had to adjust to life as a man, despite an upbringing which left him unqualified for "men's" jobs; he had planned to get into space as a sex worker for male workers and colonists. Instead he used his secretarial skills to type manuscripts, and eventually began writing.

Professing sympathy, the Bartender offers to take him to the abandoning seducer, whom the Unmarried Mother wishes revenge on. The Bartender guides him into a back room, where he (Bartender) uses a time machine to take them to 1963, and sets the young man loose. The bartender goes forward eleven months, kidnaps a newborn baby and takes it to 1945, leaving it in an orphanage. He returns to 1963 and picks up the Unmarried Mother, who was instinctively attracted to his younger female self and has seduced and impregnated her. The Bartender nudges him to connect the dots, and realize that the seducer, the young woman, the baby, and the time traveler are all him.

The Bartender then drops the Unmarried Mother at an outpost of the Temporal Bureau, a time-traveling secret police force that manipulates events in history, to protect the human race. He has just created and recruited himself.

Finally the Bartender returns to 1970, arriving a short time after he left the bar. He allows a customer to play "I'm My Own Grandpa" on the jukebox, having yelled at the customer for playing the song before he left. Closing the bar, he time travels again to his home base. As he beds down for a much deserved rest, he contemplates the scar left over from the Caesarean section performed when he gave birth to his daughter, father, mother, and entire history. He thinks, "I know where I came from—but where did all you zombies come from?"

As the story is told as a disjointed point of view reference by several other points thereafter, this is the actual chronological history of "Jane" according to the story, although the story itself is still a classic example of a time paradox.

• On September 20, 1945, the Bartender drops off baby Jane at an orphanage. She grows up there. She dreams of joining one of the "comfort organizations" dedicated to providing R&R for spacemen.
• Nearly 18 years later, the man who refers to himself as "an unmarried mother" is dropped off at April 3, 1963, by the Bartender. He meets and, after some weeks of dating, seduces and impregnates the 17-year-old Jane, who has an intersex condition. From Jane's point of view, he then disappears. Actually, he has been retrieved by the Bartender, and taken to 1985 (see sixth bullet point).
• Jane learns that she is pregnant by the now-missing unknown man. After giving birth by C-section, she is found to be a "true hermaphrodite" who has been severely damaged by the pregnancy and birth; on waking she learns that she has been subjected (without her consent) to a "sex change" which reassigns her sex to male.
• On March 10, 1964, the Bartender kidnaps the baby and takes them back in time to the orphanage (see first bullet point). Jane, now male, becomes a stenographer, and then a writer. Whenever he is asked his occupation, he replies, somewhat truculently, "I'm an unmarried mother—at four cents a word. I write confession stories." He becomes a regular at the bar where the narrator, the Bartender, works, but does not interact with him significantly for six years.
• On November 7, 1970, the Bartender meets the Unmarried Mother, yells at the customer playing "I'm My Own Grandpa", conducts the Unmarried Mother into the back office, and takes him back to 1963 to "find" (and, ostensibly, get revenge upon) the man who got him pregnant (see second bullet point). He returns to the bar, seconds after going into the back room, and allows the customer to play the song. From his own point of view, he has carried out his mission of ensuring his own existence.
• On August 12, 1985, the Bartender travels to 1963 and retrieves the Unmarried Mother -- whom he had left there (then?) during the events of the fifth (and second) bullet point(s) -- to the Rockies base and enlists him (actually a younger version of himself) in the Temporal Bureau.
• On January 12, 1993, the Bartender, who is also Jane/mother/father/Unmarried Mother, arrives back at his base from 1970 to think about his life.