Agent of Time

by Nathan Van Coops

  She ran her finger down the column of names. “Cabrera… Calhoun…Camello.” She flipped the page. “Cameron. Robert.” Her fingertip swept sideways to the address. It was the same one she recognized from the vehicle registration. She found a pencil and jotted the address on a scrap of paper, then noted the phone number as well. She checked the listings for an Elton Stenger but came up with nothing.

  Next she located the Ls and searched the list until she came up with the name she was looking for. Longines, Malcolm. She got back up and reached for the phone, taking a moment to untangle the spiral cord that had formed a twisted knot beneath it. She dialed the seven numbers on the keypad, then stretched the phone cord so she could take a seat at the dining room table again.

  The phone rang a dozen times. She was about to give up when someone picked up the receiver.

  “Hello?” a male voice said.

  “Yes, hello. Is this Malcolm Longines?”

  “Speaking.”

  Stella leaned onto the table, her eyes focusing on the pavement out the window. “This is Special Agent Stella York from the FBI. We met yesterday at the scene of the fire downtown. Do you remember me?” There was a long pause on the other end of the line. “Hello? Are you there?” she asked.

  “I’m afraid you must have the wrong number,” he said.

  “I also saw you at the impound lot,” Stella added quickly, before he could hang up. “I didn’t recognize you when I saw you yesterday, but you were the one on the scooter. Do you ride a pink scooter?”

  “It’s red,” the man replied. “Not pink.”

  “Red,” Stella replied. “Of course.” She scrunched the phone cord in her hand. “But you were at the impound. You visited the van that crashed, didn’t you? What were you doing there?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Malcolm replied. “I have to go.”

  “I’m not going to report you,” Stella blurted out. “I’m just looking for some answers. I’m investigating a prison escapee who came from the van whom I believe to be responsible for multiple deaths and fires in the city since. But there has been so much going on that makes no sense and I’m practically losing my mind over it. I know that you’re connected somehow. I need your help to understand it. Can you please help me?”

  The phone remained silent for several long seconds, but finally Malcolm responded. “You’re only with the FBI? No one else?”

  “Who else would I be with?” Stella asked.

  “How old are you?” Malcolm asked.

  “What has that got to do with anything?” Stella asked.

  “How old?”

  “Twenty-five.”

  “Right… you haven’t met him yet,” he replied. “I’ve seen your name in the files, but you’re still too young.”

  “Haven’t met who?” Stella was getting frustrated. The last thing she needed was more unanswered questions.

  “I can help you, but we should talk in person.”

  “Where can I find you?” Stella asked.

  “Do you know the softball fields off Sixteenth Street and Thirteenth Avenue? Woodlawn area?”

  “No. But it’s not far. I can find it.”

  “Meet me in half an hour. Field 5. Home dugout.”

  “Can you tell me why—”

  But he hung up before she could finish.

  Stella lowered the phone receiver and stared at it momentarily, then stood up to place it back on the wall.

  She walked to the living room, picking up her holstered pistol from the coffee table. She took one last look around Danny’s house, noting that she had left her mug of tea untouched on the kitchen table.

  It would have to wait. She could rest later. It was time to get some answers.

  9 Malcolm

  The dugouts at the Woodlawn softball fields were simple slabs of concrete with metal benches. Being Florida, having actual subterranean seating for the ballfields would have been both impractical and an unnecessary expense. As far as locations for a meeting went, the benches were uncomfortable, the neighborhood questionable, and the scenery mundane. Stella found little to appreciate about the place and wondered why her rendezvous was taking place there.

  She arrived several minutes early and scouted the area, but other than a few vagrants smoking in the picnic area, she found nothing of concern. She located the home dugout of field five and waited.

  Malcolm Longines did nothing to conceal his arrival. The noise of his sun-faded scooter was audible several blocks away. He parked it on its kickstand near the curb and walked up the slight grade to the field. He was wearing acid-washed jeans and a black Robotech T-shirt. A messenger bag was slung over one shoulder. When he was a few yards away from the dugout, he stopped in the grass and assessed her. He took off his helmet.

  “You don’t look like an FBI agent,” he said.

  Stella crossed her arms. “Neither do you.”

  “I meant it as a compliment,” the man said. “You look like . . . a nice person.” The man was close to her age, with sharp eyes and a slight accent she hadn’t noticed the night before. He walked a little closer. “I didn’t have a chance to look at your identification the other day. Did you bring it?”

  Stella reached into the pocket of her jacket and extracted her badge, holding it out so he could read it. “How about you? Who are you with?”

  “I’m on my own at the moment,” Malcolm replied. “But I work for a man who has . . . an interest in your case.”

  “So, you do know something about the prisoner van.”

  “I know it’s not from around here,” Malcolm replied. “And I know when it’s from.”

  “When,” she said. “Not where?” Stella studied his posture. He didn’t stand like a crazy person. No fidgeting or nervous tics. There was a self-assurance to him that spoke of cold-reality. He looked a bit . . . geeky, for lack of a better word. She imagined him as someone who enjoyed hard data and not flights of fancy. “I’ve had a very strange few days. Things that are too odd to be coincidences. Then someone this morning started talking to me about time travel. I’m hoping I can count on you for more solid logic, because I didn’t come all the way out here to indulge in a group fantasy or some kind of complex practical joke.”

  “I thought you came because you want to know the truth,” Malcolm replied.

  Stella put her badge away and recrossed her arms. “I’m here. I’m listening.”

  “I’m guessing you know the truth already,” Malcolm said. “You must have seen the registration sticker on the license plate.”

  “The year twenty-ten?” Stella said. “Sure. But that didn’t make me believe the van was really from the future.”

  Malcolm walked forward a few more steps and reached a hand into his bag.

  Stella let her own palm rest on the pistol grip at her waist. She waited until Malcolm had removed a 4x6 photograph from the satchel and held it out to her before removing her hand from her gun. She took the photo.

  “That’s one of the men that was in the van the police impounded. “George Wallace. I expect you’ll recognize him.”

  Stella studied the photograph. It showed the man she had last seen at the morgue, but he was alive in the photograph. It appeared to be a shot from work. Wallace was dressed in his guard uniform from the penitentiary.

  “That’s a photograph from roughly a week before the incident that sent Wallace back in time. June, 2009,” Malcolm said.

  “Two-thousand and nine?” Stella asked. “What’s supposed to happen then?”

  “It’s a long story.” Malcolm sighed. “But part of it happened right here.” He pointed up.

  Stella followed his gesture skyward, but saw nothing out of the ordinary overhead, just a bright Florida sky.

  “The power line,” Malcolm said, referencing the benign-looking cable she had failed to notice. “In two-thousand nine an experiment at a nearby lab facility goes badly and introduces a temporally unstable particle into the environment. It displaces over a dozen people thr
ough time. Many of them end up here.”

  “I don’t understand. What’s a temporally unstable particle?” Stella asked.

  “It’s a very special sort of particle,” Malcolm added. “Once enough of them permeate an object or person, it can allow them to be displaced from the flow of time.”

  Stella studied the man’s face. He was perfectly serious. “So time travel,” she said. “Science fiction stuff.”

  “It won’t become commonly used until the middle of the twenty-second century,” Malcolm said, “but there are early pioneers that make use of it in the coming decades. This is an important era of history, temporally speaking. That’s why I wanted to be involved.”

  “Even if I were to believe you, what you’re talking about would have world-changing implications,” Stella said. “Who else knows about it? Is it some kind of government project?”

  Malcolm shook his head. “It’s a private enterprise in this century. The regulatory body that oversees time travel has jurisdictional limits that don’t precede the millennium. And they stick to prescribed timestreams. We’re too remote.”

  “What’s a timestream?” Stella asked.

  “That’s a longer explanation than I have time for,” Malcom said. “But it means we aren’t the only one.”

  “Only one of what?”

  “Universes. Timelines. There are others. Parallel in some cases, other times completely unique.”

  “And you’ve seen this?” Stella asked. “Are you telling me you’ve been to other universes?”

  “Not me,” Malcolm said. “It’s not my role. I’m a constant.”

  Stella eyed him skeptically. “So you’re asking me to believe all of this time travel stuff even though you admit you’ve never done it? I imagine you don’t have any proof either.”

  Malcolm shifted his bag on his shoulder and shrugged. “If you didn’t already believe me, we wouldn’t still be talking. I think you’ve seen enough to know that I’m telling the truth.”

  “This week has been weird. I’ll give you that,” Stella said. “But it’s still a stretch.”

  “Why did you come then?” Malcolm asked. “On the phone you said you had questions.” He took a few steps past her and sat down on the dugout bench. Stella followed him and sat as well, turning to face him.

  “I saw something. Something that I know happened but that no one else can verify. It’s like it got . . . erased.”

  She went on to describe the scene on the freeway and her return visit to find no evidence of the accident.

  “You saw this accident happen before you ran into me at the lab?” Malcolm asked.

  “Yes. Immediately before.”

  Malcolm looked pensive. “It’s rare for someone to be consciously aware of a paradox, but it’s possible that because you were so close to the epicenter of the change that your consciousness was able to perceive both of the diverging realities simultaneously.”

  “What are you talking about?” Stella asked.

  “Yesterday, the building that was on fire was the epicenter of a temporal change. Someone came back in time and altered events on a scale that was initially merely paradoxical but then couldn’t be contained. The timeline fractured, creating two separate realities. You and I are now sitting here talking in one reality, but in another, events have gone differently. It happens more often than we realize, but most people only feel the effects minimally—a brief feeling of deja vu is typically the worst of it. You had a more violent experience as your mind tried to reconcile the existence of two separate realities.”

  The weight of what she was involved in was settling into Stella’s mind. As bizarre as his words sounded, she had to admit to herself that she believed him. Nothing else was coming close to explaining what she saw.

  “Someone altered reality? Who?” she asked.

  “I’m not at liberty to say,” Malcom replied. “But events you witnessed were part of it. Elton Stenger was one of the time travelers involved. He was being transferred between prisons the night of the lab accident. The van hit a power pole and then jumped through time after being struck by the downed lines. He was the one who murdered the two victims in the van, and he was also responsible for several other murders. A law student and a prosecutor.”

  “The law office fire?” Stella recalled the night she had pursued Malcolm on the scooter and how she had encountered Danny outside the burning building. “Why? What was he after?” she asked.

  “I don’t have confirmation yet, but it seems the victims were both involved in his prosecution in 2009. The lawyer, Alan Waters, went on to be the judge that tried his case, and the law student was the future prosecutor for the state. The killings here in 1986 were revenge for the way he was convicted at trial. Perhaps he thought that if he killed them, then it would change his future.”

  “Will it?” Stella asked. “What happens now? If he killed the judge that sends him to prison in the future, how does he end up back here to kill them in the first place?”

  “That’s not how it works. It won’t change anything in his original timeline,” Malcolm said. “We are living in a new timeline now that has fractured away from the original version of events. Nothing he does will alter the future he came from, it will only create a new version of the events.”

  “I saw him die,” Stella said. “He was killed on the freeway. Did his body disappear because he was from the future?”

  Malcolm shook his head. “No. The accident you saw is part of another timestream now. Because it happened before the major break in the timestream at the lab, there was a brief window where both realities were overlapping. You were able to perceive the events of what would become an alternate reality for us now. But once you passed the point of the new fracture, the past no longer reflects what you saw. That’s the paradox.”

  “I think I’m starting to understand why the whole thing made me dizzy,” Stella muttered. “It’s enough to make my head spin now.”

  “There is a lot we don’t understand about paradoxical bubbles of time and how they behave prior to fractures in the timestream.” Malcolm looked up at the power line again, as if he was reminiscing over a fond memory. “It’s an ongoing area of research.”

  “You said you work for someone who knows about this? Is it someone I can talk to?”

  Malcolm brushed a knuckle under his nose to scratch an itch, then looked across the street. “He’s gone now. I had a message this morning. They got out of this timestream before the fracture. I’m supposed to shut everything down here and wait for further instructions as necessary.”

  “What do you mean? Where did they go?”

  Malcolm shrugged. “They chose to follow the other branch of the timestream. I’m guessing they got out before the fracture so they wouldn’t inadvertently duplicate themselves. They don’t plan to stay active along this timestream anymore and don’t want any extra versions of themselves created.”

  “You mean there are two different versions of us? Are you saying there’s another me living a different life?”

  “I wouldn’t get too worked up about it,” Malcolm said. “With as many time travelers as there are jumping around, and the fractal nature of the multiverse, there are probably a thousand other possible versions of you out there. Not that we’ll ever meet them. For us, time will always feel like a boring straight line.” He leaned over and snatched up a few blades of grass and started shredding them into smaller pieces.

  “You don’t sound like you’re happy about it,” Stella said. “Are you upset?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Malcolm said. “It’s in my job description to stay put. Just thought maybe I’d get to at least stay in the active timeline. Bad luck, I guess.”

  “So some other version of you is going to keep working with the time travelers? The one in the original timeline?” Stella asked.

  “That’s how it goes,” Malcolm replied.

  Stella tried to wrap her head around everything he was telling her—this universe of time travelers
hidden from the rest of reality. At the very least it was a wildly imaginative fantasy he had constructed. If what he was saying was true, the repercussions for the world could be Earth-shattering.

  “If you expect me to buy into this, I need to see something else as proof,” Stella said. “Do you have any way to verify what you’re saying?”

  Malcom tossed away the bits of grass and let them flutter to the ground. “Doesn’t matter now anyway. But what the hell.” He reached into his bag and pulled out a small boxy object with a handle on it. It had a meter and a dial on its face. He twisted a power knob, then aimed the device at the bench they were sitting on. The meter jumped and began to oscillate. A second, digital indicator displayed a graph of some sort of wave. “There. That’s a temporal frequency and it's got multiple layers now. See that?” He pointed to the graph.

  “Is that supposed to mean something to me?” Stella asked.

  “It’s a temporal spectrometer,” Malcom said. “It can tell when an object has been involved in a temporal event. This bench was where all the trouble started. If it weren’t for this bench getting hit by that power line,” he pointed skyward to the cable. “none of this would have turned out this way.” He opened a compartment on the side of the box and popped out another smaller object that resembled a flashlight. He aimed that at the bench as well and pressed a button. Instead of illuminating the bench, a red light flashed on the device in his hand. “See? There’s your proof for you. This bench has enough gravitized particles in it to infuse a Mack Truck. That’s how big this temporal event was.”

  Stella picked her hand up from the bench, examining her palm and wondering if the particles he was talking about were somehow contagious. She wiped her hands on her pants and stood up. She studied her companion. “Look, I know this is all well and good for you, but it sounds like a bunch of gobbledygook to me. Is there any way you could show some of this to the Bureau? If I’m going to try to explain that my murder suspect is a time traveler, I’m going to need to be able to back it up with some scientific evidence. It sounds like you’re the one who knows all about it. You could tell them what you told me and maybe we could close the case on this thing.”