The Rewind Files

by Claire Willett

  There was an entire department on the third floor dedicated to regulating and policing the antique liquor trade; you had to maintain proper permits and licensing and the bureau would tell you how many bottles per year you were allowed to bring through. It was rife with corruption, of course, with agents permitting scandalous license violations in exchange for cuts of the profits; the black market for Chrono-Imported spirits was epic, and one bottle could fetch millions of dollars.

  Leo had given me some once, a glass of ninety-two-year-old Irish whiskey a customer had (legally — Leo was still his mother’s son) brought him as a gift. We had it for Christmas.

  Leo opened the bottle and poured the amber liquid into three heavy crystal tumblers, each with one perfect square cube of flawless ice sitting in the middle like a sculpture. The whiskey shimmered down the sides of the ice and settled in the bottom like ripples of golden silk.

  He handed a glass to Mom, and then to me, with the reverent air of an acolyte performing a religious ceremony. He drank, eyes closed in orgiastic bliss. Mom drank, and I could see her hold the liquid in her mouth, savoring it before she swallowed.

  I drank.

  “This shit tastes like charcoal.”

  Mom gave the tight, pointed sigh she saved for my most violently inappropriate social faux pas. Leo looked hurt, like a sad puppy I had just kicked in the face.

  “It does!” I said defensively. “It tastes like peat moss smells when it’s burning.”

  “That is the idea,” said Leo tightly.

  “It’s nasty.”

  “I’ll drink hers,” Mom volunteered, and I willingly passed it over.

  “This is the last time I waste Chrono-Imported liquor on you, heathen,” said Leo. “This bottle would cost six hundred thousand dollars in the open market.”

  “Just give me a beer or something.”

  “You eat like a raccoon,” he sighed, pointing me towards the kitchen. And true to his word, that was the last time he had wasted any of “the good stuff” on me.

  * * *

  I scraped the last of the stew out of the bowl and sighed contentedly as the hot spiced broth slid down my throat. I felt like a functional, living human being again.

  Unfortunately, I still had twelve pages of data to process before Director Gray came by at noon to collect all the apprentice reports, so this good feeling wasn’t destined to last.

  When I got back to my desk, Calliope was standing there, her face worried.

  “What is it now?”

  “He hasn’t called in,” she said, brow furrowed.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean he hasn’t called in. He was supposed to buzz me at 6 pm local. That was half an hour ago. I tried his Comm and couldn’t reach him.” I could see panic beginning to dawn in her eyes, and I patted her hand reassuringly.

  “I’ll check it out,” I said. “I’m sure it’s just a glitch. Give me a second to log in and we’ll get this all sorted out.”

  I was trying to sound confident, but it actually was really disconcerting to have Grove — nitpicky to a fault, neurotically obsessed with punctuality — miss a scheduled check-in. Especially knowing his perpetually-worried tech’s personality as he did.

  Grove and Calliope had been working together for ten years; she had been placed with him as an apprentice and never left. She was his right hand. If he had said he’d call her, he’d call her.

  It’s nothing, I told myself firmly, sitting down to the computer. This is Grove we’re talking about. He’s done this a thousand times. He’s patched this exact date at least twice a year since he started. He has it together. It’s just a glitch, Reggie. Just a glitch. You can fix it.

  Calliope went to grab us both more coffee. I entered my security code and endured the annoying retinal scan.

  This thing was installed on all of our computers last year, thanks to a boondoggle government contract with United Enterprises, who received a giant government handout to provide us a ton of security systems we didn’t need.

  Then, I logged into what we affectionately refer to as the Hive — a massive, ever-fluctuating data-tracking system which logs every agent currently in the field based on their GC coordinates against the General Timeline.

  The readout defaults to the current year, so I had to scroll back to 1968 to find Grove. As I scrolled, I watched the familiar undulating peaks and valleys of the moving graphs — a brief pop in France in 2145, another in New Mexico in 2014, a third in Dubai in 2009, indicating agents from around the world transporting in. All steady. Nothing to see here, folks.

  That was until I hit the screen for 1960-1970 and saw what Calliope was talking about. The readouts were going crazy, with the GC coordinates for Grove’s location spiking off the charts.

  What was happening? What had he done? Had he been spotted transporting in? Was he injured? Was the patch decaying? What was causing this level of instability? I had never seen anything like it.

  Not really expecting a response, I paged his Comm — mostly just so I could tell Calliope I had — and was surprised to see his face pop up on the screen, though the image kept freezing up and blacking out.

  “Grove! What the hell is going on?” I snapped, sharp-tongued and insubordinate out of sheer relief. Logically, I knew that if something really terrible had happened, we would have been paged for a Rewind, but I still hadn’t admitted to myself until I saw him alive how afraid I was.

  “Bellows, thank God. I’ve been trying to reach Calliope —”

  “She said she tried you after you missed the check-in and she couldn’t get through.”

  “The interference is playing hell with my Comm connection,” he said. “I saw her incoming message but I couldn’t connect. And when I tried to get her back, it almost died altogether.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “The patch isn’t working, Bellows,” he said grimly. “We’ve tried everything in the playbook and Johnson’s still alive and well and running for President.”

  “Oh my God, Grove, when are you? Is it —”

  “Yes,” he said. “It’s Election Day.” A klaxon shriek from my computer diverted my attention away from the Comm. The General Timeline was a mess.

  “Grove, you have to get out of there,” I said. “I’m getting some seriously demented readings. There are reverberations from your GC location filtering up as far forward as mid-21st.”

  “Something could still happen,” he said stubbornly. “Johnson could lose. We can’t manipulate millions of voters. We have no way of knowing what the results will be —”

  “IMPENDING TRANSPORT SHUTDOWN,” said the angry red letters flashing on my computer screen. “MANUAL OVERRIDE RECOMMENDED.”

  “Sir, get out now or you’ll be trapped there!”

  “That’s not your call, Bellows,” he snapped back as the computer continued to go crazy.

  “But sir, you have no idea what’s causing the Incongruity. If you don’t get out now, you could get stuck mid-transport —”

  “I know what I’m doing, Bellows. I need to stay until they call the election. If Johnson wins I’m going to have to —”

  “If Johnson wins the whole General Timeline will be in shambles,” I told him. “This has never happened before. Just get back to the lab and we can deal with it from here.”

  “IMPENDING TRANSPORT SHUTDOWN. MANUAL OVERRIDE RECOMMENDED.”

  “Bellows, my portable transport is malfunctioning. I need you to short-hop me back to last week. I need to talk to the President.”

  “Sir, I can’t do that. Any further transports inside this timeline will just make the Incongruity worse.”

  “Stop giving me excuses, Bellows, and do it.”

  I hung up on him. I had never done that before, and however much it startled him on his end, it couldn’t be half as much as I startled myself.

  But I knew there was only one thing to do. There would be time later to address the consequences, but right now my boss was trapped in an Incongruity wit
h a patch that was breaking down, and he was refusing to leave.

  “IMPENDING TRANSPORT SHUTDOWN. MANUAL OVERRIDE RECOMMENDED.”

  “I’m on it,” I muttered grimly to the computer as I shoved back my chair and bolted from the desk, nearly knocking Calliope over.

  “Where the hell are you going?”

  “Transport lab! Now!” She turned on a dime and sprinted down the long hall after me.

  The lab was on the same floor as the 20th Century department, down a long, long hallway full of offices and conference rooms, all spookily empty at this time of night. We sailed past them, running like our lives depended on it.

  Once standing behind the console, I felt a little calmer. Resigned. I would probably get fired for this — unauthorized transport was a big no-no and I hadn’t filled out any of the paperwork required for a jump this big. Without Grove present I’d need a ranking officer or department director to sign off on it.

  Not to mention the fact that Grove’s concerns were not invalid — if he left before his mission was completed, it could wreck the General Timeline. If Johnson was re-elected, the entire second half of the century would be reshaped, and the bureaucratic nightmare of cleaning it all back up again would cost the Bureau millions of dollars.

  But if I didn’t bring Grove back, he could die.

  Transport of solid bodies is nowhere near as risky now as it was in the early days, but the first Garcia-Chidong reports warned of terrifying dangers. A traveler caught inside an Incongruity could be killed — essentially, two versions of yourself meet in the Slipstream coming and going, forcing both your bodies to begin deteriorating.

  Grove was running a terrible risk. Without knowing what had caused that major spike — what unplanned event was taking place within the range of his GC coordinates and throwing the system into shambles — he was in increasing danger of getting stuck with every passing minute he stayed there.

  “Run a trace on all agents currently in the field within a hundred-year radius,” I told Calliope as she took her station. “See if there are any other aberrations.”

  My fingers flew over the keyboards, trying to get a lock on Grove’s maddeningly elusive signal. Vital signs were still stable, that was good news. He was still whole and healthy, just stubborn as hell.

  “Twenty-six agents within those coordinates,” she said after a few moments. “No Chronomalies. Whatever it is, it’s only affecting Grove.”

  “Or it’s only affecting 1968,” I pointed out. “It could be local interference. Check the registry. Any other agents in a concurrent timeline?” She clicked a few times.

  “Closest is ’66, Argentina. Too far to have any impact.”

  “I can’t get a lock on him,” I complained. “It’s like his signal is ping-ponging back and forth because of the interference. Whatever’s happening where he is, the instability is growing.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I could see my Comm buzzing on the counter. Grove was ringing in, no doubt to yell at me. Calliope moved towards it but I shook my head. “He’s gonna be pissed,” I told her, “but we have to do this. Are you with me?”

  “Can you get him out?”

  “I think so.”

  “Then I’m with you,” she said. “Just tell me what to do.”

  “Can you get a lock on any of the other agents in the field?”

  “All of them. Everyone else’s signals are clear. It’s just on his end.”

  “Then this might work,” I said, pulling off my ratty sweater and stripping down to the plain white undershirt beneath as Calliope looked on in puzzlement. “If you can lock on to them, hopefully you can lock onto me. Give me your coat.”

  “What?”

  “Your coat, your white coat. Give it to me.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Trying to shave a few points off my HIO reading. Take the controls,” I said, pulling my messy hair back into a hasty knot, grabbing one of the micro-cams from the bin and clipping it in over my temple. “I’ve set a lock on Grove’s exact location, just before the interference started.”

  “Wait, what? Reggie, no. You’re not going in after him.”

  “Of course I am. What did you think I was doing?”

  “I don’t know, I thought you were going to work some computer genius magic or something.”

  “Unfortunately not.”

  “You have no experience! You’re not cleared for field work outside the classroom! And that’s two unauthorized transports without proper documentation —”

  “This is literally the only idea I have left, Calliope,” I said. “It’s 3 am. There are no agents from our floor in the building. Either waking one up to drag them down here, or pulling somebody from another era and mission-briefing them, would take time we don’t have. We’re just going to have to do this ourselves. Keep a lock on me, and as soon as I make contact, bring us both back. I want to see if I can figure out what’s causing the Chronomaly, but if I can’t, at least I’m going to get my boss out of there before he gets stuck.”

  I knew she wasn’t happy. But I also knew she would do it. Hopefully in my now-nondescript outfit with a generic white lab coat over it and my hair pulled back, I could reduce my HIO level enough to get in and out with as little mess as possible.

  I stepped onto the transport platform and felt the familiar buzzing vibrations as the Hive locked onto my signal.

  “We who are about to die salute you,” I said dryly.

  “Not funny,” she snapped, punching in the coordinates. “Get back here as soon as you can. Both of you.”

  And with that I was gone.

  Four

  Election Day

  I felt solid ground beneath my feet and opened my eyes, to find myself in a toilet stall. “Very funny,” I hissed. I pushed open the door to the toilet stall, heart pounding. My Comm showed no human activity nearby, but I didn’t want to take any chances. All clear.

  “You try coming up with a low HIO transport site with fifteen seconds’ notice, smartass,” she snapped back. “It was the only empty room in the building. And no one will look funny at someone walking out of a bathroom.”

  “Well, they might,” I said, turning my head so my micro-cam could give her a full view of the row of urinals behind me, “since, you know, this is the men’s room.”

  “Oh.”

  “How far am I from Grove?”

  “He’s right across the street,” she said. “Go out the bathroom door, turn left and then left again, and you’ll be on the front steps.”

  “Can I do it without being noticed?”

  “God, I hope so.”

  “Calliope!”

  “It’s a public building. People go in and out constantly. Just merge with the crowd.”

  I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror — nondescript gray pants, dingy white shirt looking almost yellow in contrast with Calliope’s spotless white lab coat, messy knot of curls in the back of my head. Please don’t force me to go inside the White House dressed like this, I prayed.

  Grove’s vitals showed that he was outside, which was safer. On streets, people keep moving. They don’t look around as much. Indoors, people move less, and more slowly. It’s harder to go unnoticed.

  “Time check?”

  “You’re twenty-two minutes ahead of the Chronomaly. Plenty of time.”

  “Okay. Here goes.” I took a deep breath, opened the door, and stepped out into the tiled hallway of a big stone building, mercifully unnoticed.

  By the light coming in from the big arched windows, it was about midday. A steady stream of men in suits, and a handful of women, ebbed and flowed from the offices around me.

  I was struck immediately, as I always had been doing field study for my classes at the Academy, by how different the people smelled.

  We talk all the time about evolutions in ideology, fashion, hairstyles, architecture, slang terms and colloquialisms, cuisine, and all the other features that determine the personality of a society, but the one thing sch
ool can’t prepare you for is the tactile. How things smell and taste.

  Inside this building, 1968 smelled like old brick dust and coffee and strongly-spiced perfumes, with a fresh airy breeze the closer I got to the front door. But the heavy D.C. car exhaust stench I was expecting was curiously absent.

  I merged with a small cluster of gray suits and followed them out the door, like a salmon swimming upstream. As we stepped out into the chilly sunlight, I stopped short at the top of a flight of big stone steps and looked around.

  I had expected to land somewhere within walking distance of the White House. Instead, I was staring at the bustling Main Street of a bucolic Midwestern town, all brick storefronts and cheery red street clocks and open blue skies.

  “Calliope, where the hell am I?”

  “What do you mean, where are you?”

  “This isn’t Washington, D.C.”

  “Your dazzling powers of observation are —”

  “Calliope.”

  “This is Ohio,” she said. “You didn’t check the coordinates before you jumped?”

  “What the hell am I doing in Ohio?” I snapped.

  “I ask myself that question every day,” sighed a bored-looking woman as she passed me going down the steps, and I winced a little. Apparently I was not exactly as stealthy as I thought.

  “For God’s sake, Reggie, walk around the block or something. You can’t just stand there staring into space and talking to yourself.”

  I sighed. I hated it when she was right. I walked down the grand stone steps and turned around to look behind me.

  “It’s the Belmont County Courthouse,” said Calliope’s voice in my earpiece. “You’re in St. Clairsville, Ohio. Election Day, 1968. Turn left and keep walking.”

  St. Clairsville, Ohio. What was he doing here? More to the point, why was there a Chronomaly here? What was so important about this sleepy little town? The outside world faded away, my feet moving mechanically beneath me of their own volition, as I opened the mental compartment entitled “1968 Election” and rifled through it.