times this precious timeline of yours has been changed before you set up this flawed system to regulate it.” The time cops just listened to Norman rant, silently, as his mocking laughter faded into more heated anger. “You think you’re protecting the space-time continuum? You don’t even know what ‘it’ is! You’re defending an idea, someone else’s idea! Not a thing that exists and breathes and evolves, man! You just know what you’ve been told! You have no clue what your risking your life to defend!”
Walking out of the interrogation area, knowing that every word Norman spoke was the pure, unadulterated truth, Aileen did not see Norman getting vaporized. But she did see the blue flash of the ray gun as she closed the door behind her. She hurried into a nearby office, stole a piece of official TTPD stationery out of a printer, and started writing her letter of resignation.
Meanwhile, Norman flew out of his chair and disintegrated in mid-air. He forcefully collided with the wall behind him, cracking his spine, after being shot in the chest with a single ray gun blast. His charred skeleton slumped to the ground in a trail of black smoke, only to be dragged away and tossed into a dumpster by a robot janitor minutes later.
As expected, Norman Bardsley soon woke up in his own room and in a different timeline, in a much larger bed than the one he had before. Norman was much richer than he was before, the result of a successful business meeting on that fateful, time-altered day three years prior. He could tell that he was richer, simply by looking around at how much more lavishly his bedroom was decorated. He saw priceless pieces of Renaissance art that he had purchased from Rupert Blix all around him. More importantly, Norman was alive.
As Norman walked into his kitchen, greeting his seven-year-old daughter who was helping her daddy’s cook make breakfast, he remembered the other timeline. He remembered all that he had been through being poor, drunk and hopeless for three years. He remembered that…for about 48 hours. That was all the time that it took for the timeline to readjust to the changes that Norman had courageously defied the Time Travel Police to make. Those memories from the other timeline faded, being dismissed as dreams that he had after sleeping off a drunken stupor. Soon, they disappeared from Norman’s mind altogether, because they never happened and he never dreamed them either.
And because nothing from that other timeline technically happened, Norman would not remember how he outsmarted a corrupt, laughably-flawed time travel police system and how badly they treated him. Because of this, Norman was an avid supporter of the TTPD, donating trillions of dollars (for the tax write-off) every time they had a fund-raiser.
If only he knew.
TO BE CONTINUED in
‘THE TATTLER: LOSING TIME’
…the sequel to ‘THE TATTLER’,
which is now available for the Amazon Kindle and
www.turtlerocketbooks.com
(THE TATTLER: LOSING TIME
COMING SOON)
Time Travel Police Corruption Page 3
