The Trouble With Time

by Lexi Revellian

  The other objection was that, having met Floss, he was unwilling to write her out of his life. She was the most interesting woman he’d met since Kayla five or six years ago; she was his treat, his reward, though for what he did not specify. Quinn was used to getting what he wanted; he was not good at forgoing possible pleasure. He decided to let things be.

  As soon as she was alone, Floss allowed her face to fall. Fear and dismay flooded back, and she fought them off, staring out of the fake window. There was the Shard glowing blue in the dark, now accompanied by even taller skyscrapers new since her day. She turned away. The bedroom and bathroom were pristine and equipped with everything she might need. Floss sat at the flash computer screen mounted in silver metal and looked for the On switch. There wasn’t one. She’d poked fruitlessly about for a couple of minutes before it occurred to her to say, “Computer.”

  Instantly the black screen blossomed into cantering horses, which morphed into birds, flew into the sky and fell as snow covering the hills. Winter turned to spring, and the horses reappeared. It was beautiful. Floss watched the sequence three times, before saying, “Google. Records of deaths. Emma Elspeth Dryden.”

  After ten minutes spent getting used to an unfamiliar interface and hunting about, the page came up that Floss had hoped not to find. Her mother had died on August 3rd, 2029, aged sixty-three. Tears filled her eyes and ran down her face. She walked to the window and stared into the dark city alive with lights. I’m going to get back. She’ll live longer when she’s not grieving for me.

  Floss returned to the computer and looked up her old boss at Zadotech. Bill Caldecot had retired the year before aged seventy, but was still doing some consultancy work. He still lived in the same cottage outside Oxford, where she had once visited when he threw a party for the department. It was strange to see him so old in the photos.

  Floss suddenly realized she felt exhausted, wiped out, ready for the temporary oblivion of sleep. Quickly, before going to bed, she looked up her own name. Google offered her various other Florence Drydens, mostly from the nineteenth century; Florence was an old-fashioned name. But though she searched for quite a while, she found nothing about her disappearance.

  In a way it was a relief; but odd. Very odd.

  CHAPTER 25

  Mutual charm offensive

  In spite of his avowed inexperience, Quinn proved fun to go shopping with. He took Floss to exclusive boutiques in Bond Street and picked out garments for her with a flourish, some of which she liked and some she laughed at and replaced with her own finds. He sat on small buttoned sofas outside fitting rooms, looking both out of place and completely at ease, insisting she emerge to model everything for him, and egging her on to be extravagant.

  “Take both,” he said, when Floss was undecided between two silk tops. “After all, how often does a government department buy you clothes? Make the most of it. Try this next.”

  He handed her a dress on a hanger; blue/grey, floor length, cobwebby. Floss took it into the changing room. There was no doubt Quinn had a good eye; the dress might have been made for her. Fitted to the waist, floating as she moved, drifting round her shoulders, it made her look like a ragged angel. She gazed at her reflection, then went to show him.

  “That one you must have.”

  “It’s awesome, but the price . . . and when would I wear it?”

  “Dinner at the Ritz with me. We’ll take it. I think after this we should get you a hat. Either something huge and shady, or tiny and ridiculous worn above one ear.”

  “I think not.” Floss gave him a quelling glance. “I am not minor royalty.”

  “As you wish. We’ll do boots and shoes instead.”

  They spent all morning shopping, then Quinn took her to a restaurant. Floss wore one of her new outfits; beautifully tailored trousers, wide in the leg and fitted to hip and waist, neat ankle boots, a plain top and a cashmere coat. Quinn arranged for her old clothes and their new purchases to be sent back to her flat. Over their second meal together, Floss tried to analyse Quinn’s charm; perhaps it was the way he focused his entire attention on you, listened to what you said, and always had an interesting response. He did not seem to regard this as an investment on which he would expect a speedy dividend.

  After lunch he took her to be registered and have a chip implanted in her arm. He bought a dataphone, used it to open Floss a bank account and transferred £500,000 into it.

  He handed her the phone. “You are good to go. Welcome to 2050. Now for your new job.”

  Back at IEMA’s headquarters, Jess was waiting in the lobby looking restive, as if she had been there some time. At their approach she rose and smiled with annoying solicitude at Floss, as if she was recovering from an illness, and pretty much ignored Quinn. He left for his office, after telling Floss he had not realized shopping could be such fun, and they must do it again in the near future.

  Once they were alone, Jess said, “Florence! You look very well. 2050 seems to suit you. I hope you are nicely settled in in your new flat?”

  Floss’s suppressed resentment at her abduction bubbled up. Bloody counsellors, paid to pretend to be your friend, thinking they know best the whole time, treating you like a child . . . Unable to make herself be pleasant to this woman, she decided not to care. Let her earn her money. “Not really. A, I don’t want to be here, and B, if I am stuck here, I’d prefer a flat with real windows. Can you get me one?”

  “Now that might be a little difficult. We did use the whole of the housing budget allocated –”

  Floss looked her straight in the eye and lied. “I suffer from claustrophobia.”

  “Oh. Well, in that case I’ll see what I can do. We might have to move you a little further out . . . Leave it with me. Now, I’ve found you a job with a pharmaceuticals company. Let me just order a pod, and I’ll take you there and introduce you to everyone.”

  The company occupied a modern building in Leytonstone, with BIOPHARM in big steel letters above the entrance. Floss’s spirits lifted; this looked promising. She had enjoyed her work, and looked forward to finding out about all the fascinating discoveries that must have been made in the past thirty-five years. Inside the spacious lobby, Jess spoke to the man behind the desk and he logged their chips. Then they went up in the lift to the first floor, a vast white space with windows all round and a vista of grass and roads. Jess led her past glass-walled offices with elegant desks, all appropriately futuristic, to an area at the far side with ranks of work stations in white and raspberry. Jess stopped at an unoccupied desk.

  “This is yours. And you’re next to a lovely view!”

  Floss, who had been expecting to be taken to a laboratory, became suspicious. “What is my actual job?”

  “You’ll be Junior Operations Manager, working with the C.O.O. – the Chief Operating Officer – for the senior management team.”

  There was an ominous pause while Floss deciphered this information. “So you have found me a job working as a P.A. to a P.A.?”

  “I wouldn’t exactly describe it that way . . .”

  Floss scowled. “I am a fully qualified research scientist, and this was the best you could find for me?”

  Jess’s lips pursed. “It is a pharmaceuticals firm.” The Teflon smile reappeared. Unlike most people, Jess was able to smile and talk simultaneously. “I’m afraid you’re forgetting your qualifications are thirty-five years out of date, Florence. You wouldn’t be able to cope with the equivalent of your 2015 job.”

  “I’m fast. I’d catch up. I’m prepared to work as many hours as that would take.”

  Jess was already shaking her head. “I think we have to face facts, here, Florence. No one’s going to employ you without an up-to-date degree or recent experience. Why don’t you just give this a go for a week or two and see how you get on? You might find it more rewarding than you think.”

  Floss took a deep breath and made up her mind not to bother. Did it matter, really? She was not intending to stay in 2050, after all. Though
she would have loved to find out about the advances in her field, she could always look them up on the internet.

  “I’ll give it a trial for a few days,” she said, grudgingly.

  A few days was all it took for Floss to decide she had had enough. That Thursday, her tasks for the day completed early, she waited for five thirty and brooded. Not only was she over-qualified and underused, but here there were zero opportunities to get her hands on a TiTrav. She was marking time. Now if she worked at IEMA . . . Suddenly she thought, why not? Why not try to manoeuvre Quinn into giving her a job? Subtly, so he’d think it was his own idea . . .

  She called into the C.O.O.’s office, then left the building, ringing Quinn’s number as she walked along the road in the early spring light. His pleasant low voice answered immediately.

  “Floss. How nice to hear from you. How can I help?”

  “I’ve done something dreadful. I hardly like to tell you.”

  “And I can hardly bear the suspense. What have you done?”

  “I’ve given in my notice. This job is ridiculous. I’ve decided to go back to university and take another degree so I can work in my own field.”

  “But that’s an excellent idea. Is there anything I can do to help?”

  “Your advice would be appreciated, of course. But it’s too late now to apply to start this September – assuming the process hasn’t changed?”

  “No, you have to apply by mid-January, mid-October for Oxbridge.”

  “I went to Cambridge – Corpus Christi – before.”

  “It’s just possible I might be able to get your application considered for this year. I have contacts at Cambridge. I’ll see what I can do.”

  “That would be awesome!” Floss attempted flattery. “You are so kind, I feel like you’re my only friend here.”

  “Just the first of many, I’m sure.”

  “There’s one problem – what do I do while I’m waiting? I can’t sit staring out of my virtual window all day. I’d be happy to do a boring job knowing it was a temporary measure . . .”

  “Hmm . . . I have an idea.”

  It was as easy as that.

  The following day, Floss started work at IEMA in the timecrime department as a dogsbody. She cheerfully accepted being the lowliest member of the team, doing nothing for the first few days except make herself useful and friendly, leaping up whenever anyone wanted coffee, running errands, printing things out, updating records. Making it clear to Quinn that his idea had been a brilliant one. Everyone was pleasant; but a few times she looked up and caught Kayla, the head of the department, eyeing her. Maybe she resented Quinn giving Floss the job without consulting her.

  Kayla was not happy about having this girl dumped on her. True, Floss was a willing and efficient worker, good at noticing things that needed doing, and doing them before she was asked. She was very little trouble to supervise. But Kayla’s suspicions were aroused. She couldn’t help suspecting that Quinn would not have taken Floss on had she not had those looks. Whenever he dropped into the department and paused by Floss’s desk, Kayla would watch and listen as much as she could without appearing to. They always seemed to be laughing together at some private joke. Kayla resolved to ignore it and say nothing. This resolution lasted a fortnight.

  They were in Quinn’s office after working hours to discuss the pay rise Farouk had put in for; after that, Kayla expected they would probably eat out together or go to Quinn’s apartment. His decision made – Farouk got his rise, a little less than he’d wanted – Quinn said in passing how Floss’s presence seemed to have speeded up routine matters in the department. “The weekly digest never arrived on time while it was Farouk’s responsibility. Now it’s in my inbox by nine o’clock every Wednesday morning.”

  Kayla tried to sound nonchalant. “How long is she going to be here?”

  “Not very long.” Quinn looked up from his screen. “She’ll be going to university in September, most likely. Why?”

  “I wondered, that’s all.” Kayla paused, then was unable to resist saying, “I’ve never quite understood what she was doing here in the first place. Why didn’t you leave her in the job that counsellor, what was her name, Jess, found for her?”

  He responded to her words, not her underlying emotion. He said calmly, “Floss didn’t like it. She’s too intelligent, she got bored.”

  Kayla’s voice sharpened. “If she finds filing and fetching cups of coffee at IEMA rewarding, I can’t imagine what they had her doing. Scrubbing the floor, perhaps?”

  Quinn gave her an assessing glance, his eyes cold. “If you’re curious, why not ask her?” he said, getting to his feet and putting on his jacket. He smiled in a perfunctory way and left the building alone. Kayla cursed herself, deeply regretting her failure to play it cool, knowing Quinn disliked any sign of proprietary behaviour on her part.

  After a week, discreetly, in the intervals of gofering, Floss started investigating leads. She had already attempted to find Ben Culcavy’s address. But he was clearly a dedicated and successful recluse; there weren’t even many photos of him on the internet, and they were shot from a distance and blurry. Only the student ones looked as if he was aware a photo was being taken and didn’t mind. Out of curiosity, she looked up the Daily Mail article, which made her feel quite sorry for Culcavy. After that her quest had led her into the strange online world of celebrity address websites. She’d typed his name into half a dozen search boxes, and got half a dozen variants on No Results. For the moment, she had given up this line of enquiry.

  She was excited to learn that the department had its own TiTravs used for collecting data from the future, plus a small black museum of illegal devices confiscated from time criminals. Farouk told her these used to be on display behind half-inch thick glass, until a couple of attempts to break in and steal them. They now resided in the vaults, locked behind foot-thick steel walls, and she could see that realistically there was no way of getting her hands on one. Tantalizing. Nor was anyone likely to leave a TiTrav on her desk while stopping for a chat. But you never knew . . .

  And there were other possibilities. Just occasionally, an illicit TiTrav surfaced. There were, in IEMA’s estimation, between six and twelve of them on the loose. The last one to show up had been five years before. Floss raised her eyes from studying the department’s records on her computer. Everyone was out of the office except for Farouk, who occupied the desk next to hers. He was scrolling through a property website in his coffee break, hoping to find a bigger flat before his first child was born; a hopeless enterprise that always left him glum and uncommunicative. She’d be doing him a favour distracting him.

  “Hey, Farouk, the illegal TiTrav that was found five years ago – were you here then?”

  Farouk raised sober brown eyes. “Yes indeed.” He shook his head. “It was a very big scandal. And we never actually found it, either.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  Farouk told her, in detail. Floss listened carefully, memorizing names and places. He finished by saying, “I liked Jace. He was the last person you’d expect to go off the rails like that. It goes to show you never really know someone. Even Kayla had no idea.”

  “Why, was Kayla . . . ?”

  “His girlfriend, yes. She and Quinn only got together much later.”

  Quinn and Kayla an item . . . This was news to Floss. Though the possibility had crossed her mind once or twice, there was little in their behaviour in the office to give them away. It explained why she noticed Kayla looking at her from time to time. “What happened to Scott?”

  “He left soon after. I think he felt bad about killing Peter McGuire, his heart went out of the job after that. He never got the chance to settle in here.”

  “And did you ever pin anything on Ryker?”

  “No. As far as I know, he’s still in his workshop under the arches. We haven’t had reason to investigate him since.”

  Farouk smiled politely and returned to Yourplace.com, his brow furrowing over video
s of apartments in undesirable parts of London, all of them undersized and expensive, and most requiring considerable work.

  Floss went back to the records of the raid that Farouk had told her about. If anyone asked what she was doing, she could tell them Farouk’s story had made her curious. The people involved, apart from those she saw every day in the office, were Scott Winchester, Jace Carnady, Saffron McGuire, and Ryker, who didn’t seem to have another name. Helpfully, their 2045 contact details were there.

  Floss wondered if there was more to Scott’s leaving IEMA than Farouk supposed. She looked him up in the department’s records and found his date of birth, his photograph, and his employment dates. He was young, clean shaven with an open face and dark crinkly hair. He had worked at IEMA for only three months. Aha – here was the copy of a request for a reference for Scott from the Metropolitan Police. All at once Floss saw the flaw in her plan. If she looked up Scott and tried to pump him for details of the raid five years ago, he’d naturally want to know why. And she could hardly explain to a policeman that she was hoping to get her hands on an illegal TiTrav in order to get back to her own time.

  Okay. So she needed to find someone involved on the other side of the law. Ideally, she wanted to find Jace Carnady, the likeable (according to Farouk) guy who had stolen the TiTrav and presumably still had it, and ask him to take her back to 2015. She Googled his name. To the right of the page were half a dozen photos of him. She moved closer, then clicked on Images. Carnady had dark eyes, a straight nose and a firm mouth in the few photos where he wasn’t smiling and showing good teeth; his hair had a Byronic curl, his jaw varied between stubbled and lightly bearded, his shoulders were broad in the high collared jackets of the time. Farouk hadn’t mentioned that Jace Carnady was hot.