A robotic female voice sounds from the device. “Hello, Beatrix. Your assignment is set in the year 2017.”
Ugh. What a boring time. I push clothes aside, running my hands back and forth through the ensemble. There’s nothing in my closet that fits in that era, I think. I’ll have to get something time-appropriate printed.
Peeking at the items on my closet shelf, I see the many tools I’m not authorized to bring because of the low-level mission. I pick the strength enhancers out of my vest pocket and take off my holo-ring disguiser, placing them both on the shelf. My sonic pistol is magnetized to the belt on my wrist.
It should be fine, right? It just disables people, I think, knowing full well it is not on the authorized list. I just can’t bring myself to take it off.
“Janice,” I groan, “what’s the mission about?”
“Because you previously requested for executive summaries to be as short as possible, this mission is about Xenobots.”
I wince, remembering one of the travelers correcting me a few months ago. “We’ve been over this; they’re called Xeno-People now,” I say, packing my bag. “Why is your algorithm not learning this?”
“I apologize, but this is in reference to the first experiments, where I believe the term Xenobots is still appropriate.” The wristband begins to flash and projects news reports from that time.
A reporter is saying, “... programmable life forms. These tiny pink blobs are made from stem cells, amassed into Artificial Intelligence-inspired forms. The microscopic ‘living robots’ grow like embryos, allowing them to move and act on their own—achieving things typical steel and plastic robots cannot.”
Janice continues where the reporter leaves off, filling in the details of the years following. “Eventually, Xenobots were programmed to terminate themselves after carrying out perilous tasks, like delivering medicine inside human bodies, cleaning up radioactive wastes, and rid—”
“Ridding the ocean of microplastics. I know,” I interrupt, smirking. I loved explaining discoveries during traveler academy oral exams. It’s the one thing I excelled at. It even helped me get my Guardian mentor. However, it doesn’t help me understand what it has to do with this mission. “Let’s just cut to the chase here, Janice. The first experiments were published in 2020, so why am I going to 2017?”
“To stop the experiments,” Janice says as robotically as she does everything else.
My head jerks back. “Wait. What?” I turn, staring at the metal band.
The projections, flashing 2D vids of the first Xenobot news reports, fade into holo recordings of the first Xeno-People on the force peacefully “expiring” after finishing their assignments.
“Why would the League of Guardians assign this?” I ask, almost breathless.
My head runs through the almost infinite list of possible unintended consequences. I can’t even keep track. This would be a huge change. My last few missions were easy, and I still managed to mess those up somehow. For something like this, I have no clue how many other time travelers would be needed. In my mind, the stacks of timeline dominoes fall. Stop the experiments from being successful. So, no Xenobots. Then ...
“If I do this, even our Xeno-People travelers will ...” I pause, choking a bit on the heavy thought.
“Will no longer exist,” Janice interrupts like she is helping me figure out the answer to a question.
“B-but, we need them,” I stutter.
They get the most difficult missions. They’re the only ones who are allowed to kill. They’re programmed with an aggressive biological drive to accomplish their missions and “end function” when completed—their “termination tasks.” Why would any of the Guardians want to get rid of that? They almost never assign corrections for something that exists in the present. Has the infighting really gotten this bad? Who is trying to one-up who?
I look back at the holos of Marxus Tran. I grew up admiring his corrections. Correcting this injustice would take me a step closer. It’s my chance.
I pack the rest of my belongings, then head to the printer to get my 2017 era clothing. Rushing outside to the main hall’s time warp, I shake my head as I jump in.
AFTER LIVING HERE FOR several weeks, there’s an order to my new life in 2017. Waking comes at midnight. I toss the shower curtain off me and peek outside of my tent into the abandoned parking lot I share with several other homeless people.
To avoid any unintended consequences, I have to be careful. I can’t rent a room, because someone from this time could have had it, and who knows what changes that might cause in the timestream. I must avoid any non-mission related consequences and live with a light “imprint.”
Several other tents fill the parking lot grounds. I notice two people in ragged clothing who have been up all evening, screaming obscenities. Others calmly shuffle items around in shopping carts and make clinking noises, moving garbage bags with empty cans. A man with a baseball cap sits down in the far corner, occasionally glancing my way, but no one is truly focused on me.
I pull my head back into the tent and release some sanitizing spray. It’s probably about as good as an actual shower in this time, but with its attention-grabbing spiral container, I need to be sure no one sees me using a product they can’t get until 2042.
Other than the hiding, the bugs, and the heat, this shantytown is a convenient place to stay. I can get food at a mini-mart nearby. I am even able to visit what they call the “public library” and use the computer there to find work.
Every weeknight, I walk almost three miles around midnight to get to my new job as a janitor at Tufts University, which will help me serve the Guardians and complete this mission. It’s where part of the team that published the first Xenobot experiments work and exactly where I need to be. Here, they test the grouped stem cells to make sure the Xenobots can grow and carry out tasks.
On most evenings, it’s a leisurely, yet slightly creepy, stroll before I reach the university, but tonight, it’s worse. He’s been following me for blocks. My pulse beats like a drum. It’s dark, and it’s late. No one should be out here, especially since this is a suburban neighborhood. Is there anyone else around? My eyes dart to the sides, trying not to turn around.
If I called for help, there’d be way too many disturbances. People would see me. They would remember the frantic, disheveled woman with the black plastic bag who woke them up. There’d be way too many changes in the timestream, and I might even get demoted to Level 2 assignments.
Biting my lip, I continue forward and quicken my pace. I hear him getting closer. The thought of him creeping on me makes my heart race. I don’t want to die in this time, I think, breathing heavily.
It’s only been a few minutes, but it feels like hours. I can’t take it anymore. I take a quick glance back, passing underneath a streetlight. He notices me and pulls the cap over his face.
Real smooth, I think. I cross the street, still several blocks from the university. Of course, he crosses the street too. The plastic bag in my hand sounds so loud. It swishes and crinkles at my race-walking pace. I think he’s only half a block away now—close enough to find me even if I wasn’t making noise.
I scan my mind, thinking about options. There won’t even be a ripple in the time stream if there’s no altercation. With the training and better health in our time, I can outrun this civilian in-timer.
I burst forward. All pretense of this being a normal walk is gone. I race with the bag jiggling in my vice grip. I don’t need to turn back. The sound of the footsteps keeping pace behind me echoes through the streets. He must be some kind of athlete. The quick clop of his footsteps gets louder. Is he actually gaining on me?
“Stop,” he says softly, but the night is so quiet it almost sounds like yelling.
There’s no other option left. I hope it won’t disrupt too much in this time. “Requesting immediate authorization to use non-lethal force,” I awkwardly huff to my wrist band, racing forward.
“Hello, Beatrix,” Janice says.
“This is a Level 3 priority mission; you were not authorized to—”
I know what I wasn’t authorized to do. “Emergency ... track,” I pant. It’s fine if I lose points for this. I’d rather finish the mission and live, then die following the rules when they don’t make sense.
He’s full-on racing after me, and only a few steps away.
“Authorizing ...”
His footsteps sound like they’re right behind my ear. Hurry, please.
“Authorization granted.”
The sound pistol in my bag starts whirring. I stop and whip around. He leaps toward me, reaching out his hand. I rummage past the time-approved items in my bag, gripping the silver gun-like device.
Unlike guns in this time, the sound blast should not kill him. It’ll make a loud, piercing dog-whistle sound only he can hear, giving me more than enough time to get away. I put a six-foot man on the ground for twenty minutes using it in traveler’s academy. It should be more than enough for this creeper.
I wrench the sound pistol out and shoot. The tall man expertly grabs my wrist, moving the blast out of his way. The ring on his right hand bores into my skin as he holds my arm above my head.
“Let. Go,” I mutter through gritted teeth, struggling to free my wrist from his grip. I glance at his hand.
The gleam of the moonlight distorts my view, and for a second, it looks like a ghost image of a lighter-colored wrist with blockish scrawls on it.
“Stop,” he says. Up close, his voice sounds too deep, like someone doing a bad impersonation.
I will not die here.
“You need to stop, Be—”
I knee him in the gut. His lighter-than-expected stomach gives way. Bending over, he grips his abdomen. Strands of purple hair slip out from underneath the cap.
With my hand free, I put my finger back on the pressurized patch, aim the pistol, and shoot. It emits a concentrated screech. He squirms and drops to the ground but doesn’t scream. He waves his hand as if he wants me to stop, but doesn’t yell. The cap drops off as he rolls, and I see his face.
It can’t be ... The name falls out of my mouth. “Ambrose?” I say, panting and releasing the trigger. “What are you doing here?”
“Stop what you’re doing,” he says, a little louder than he expects. He is holding his ears now, but overall, he barely seems phased.
There’s no way. Two travelers on the same Level 3 mission? The Guardians would never let that happen. Would they? Has the League’s in-fighting really gotten this bad? They’re just ditching protocols now. There’s so much room for error and consequences—all the things they continually warned us about in traveler’s training.
Standing, he pulls his hat down over his face again.
Why is he here? I think frantically. How did he get up so fast? It’s almost inhuman. None of this is making sense anymore.
“Just stop.” His odd, gravelly voice is almost hard to hear. “Take a loss on this mission. Do not continue.” We both turn, noticing lights turn on in the window of a nearby house.
“Wait. Why?”
He starts walking away, back in the other direction. “You were warned, Beatrix.”
AFTER SEVERAL WEEKS of training and protocols, I finally get to access the university labs alone, but I wait until my second night to strike. I spend most of the time mopping, almost in a daze.
The smell of the bleach on the floor triggers other memories. I managed to save one colonist from the Roanoke Colony, but none of the rest managed to get my message. The errors are costing me. I’ve given up everything for this career, and I still can’t move forward. Maybe being the next Marxus Tran is as out of my reach as Ellie thinks it is.
I reach the key card reader, located next to the two large lab doors. After I swipe my ID, the reader beeps as the light turns green, and the door unlocks.
I just need to be more careful this time, I think, entering the empty long, dark L-shaped room. The motion-sensitive lights switch on as I crane my neck, looking past identical rows of long, black-topped tables packed with laboratory equipment.
“Hello?” I shout. I pull my wheeled bucket with the mop behind me. “Hello? I don’t want to scare anyone. It’s just the janitor,” I say to the empty lab bays.
I have to make sure no one is around. Far too often, even at two in the morning, there’s some remaining graduate student or post-doc researcher, still performing experiments, unaware time is vanishing like smoke.
Good. No one’s here, I think, wheeling my bucket down the long room. “Janice?”
The band on my wrist glows green and responds, “How may I assist you, Beatrix?”
“Can you jam the signal of the overhead cameras?” I whisper without raising my arm. “Replace the recording with a loop of me cleaning on my first night alone.”
After a few seconds, Janice says, “Task completed. Is there anything else you require?”
“Tell me where to find the pre-Xenobot experiments.” Right now, they’re just a clumped group of stem cells, struggling to hold their shape. Soon, they’ll be my prey.
A holographic map of the L-shaped room renders above my wrist. “The pre-Xenobot cells are located here,” Janice drones. A blue dot flashes near the pit of the L. “The cells are being held in a temperature-controlled incubator in this room.”
Pulling the wheeled bucket past several more rows of black-topped tables, I walk into the room. There are several fume hoods, and a few sticky notes on them with the words “cell cultures” written on some of them. I move past the large, open boxes filled with red bags with the biohazard symbol, reaching the four personal-fridge-sized boxes.
The incubators! I look behind me, making sure no one is at the door. I’ve been extra paranoid because of the last few missions. I pull open the beige door on one of the fridge-like boxes, and a warm draft of air wafts from the inside.
“I think I found them,” I say to my wrist.
There are several Petri dishes with pink liquid inside of them. It has to be subtle; if they all get destroyed on one day, they’d know something happened. If only the pre-Xenobot dishes keep failing, for no understandable reason, every time they try, they’ll stop trying. No major incident, no investigations—just a bunch of researchers who think their experiments didn’t work.
I grab a bottle of bleach from the wheeled cart. All I have to do is keep diluting bleach and add it to the cells every day. I put some in a nearby beaker and mix it with water. The light mixture of bleach should be plenty to let the cells die slowly.
Directed by Janice, I add it to the pre-Xenobot cells. Is this the only way I can do this? I think. It’s not very flashy, but it gets the job done. I can’t afford to be detected.
On my way home, I look around again, still on edge about the incident a few weeks ago. I glance behind me every few seconds to make sure I’m not being followed. I reach the block where I barely managed to get away. The incident is stained in my brain, but most of all, I can’t stop thinking about the weirdness with his wrist—the ghost image. There’s only one thing I know of that could do something like that, and it doesn’t exist yet.
A holo ring? I wonder, with my eyes widening. Even if this is Ambrose’s Level 6 mission, he shouldn’t have been able to bring it. I was able to bring my sound pistol to this time because of the connections with my Guardian mentor. How did he get a holo ring here?
Crossing under another set of streetlights, I wonder about the blockish designs I saw under the wrist’s ghost image. At first, I thought they were numbers, but the image starts to come together in my head, “ELLIE.” It was Ellie.
Ambrose didn’t bring anything here, because he’s not here. It was Ellie using the holo ring, probably because she’s on a much higher-ranked assignment. Has she been trying to sink this mission the whole time?
I try to sort through the whys and hows of it all, and another heavy thought strikes me. I call out to my wristband. “Janice, how long does it take humans to recover after a sound pistol blast?”
“Approximately thirty minutes to an hour for most people,” she says as I mouth the answer along with her.
I knew it. I think about how fast Ellie got up from the sound pistol blast. It was almost inhuman. An uncomfortable, dry sensation takes over my throat. I look down at my wristband once more. “And for most Xeno-People?” I ask.
“It varies depending on their cellular composition, but due to their healing and recovery abilities, anywhere from a few seconds to three minutes at most.”
No weapon or item could have made a normal person recover so fast. At this point, it is clear. Her expert ability. Her high-level missions. Her being assigned to clean up my messes. Ellie is a Xeno-Person. As expected from the last few months I’ve known her, she has a laser focus. She has prepared for this and will probably use anything, even my fondness for Ambrose, to stop me.
As if to confirm my suspicions, I find a handwritten note when I reach my tent.
I don’t want to do this, Bea. Please stop. If you do anything else, I will get serious. –Amby
Oh, she’s really done her homework, using our old pet names for each other. Now, I realize she only pretended not to listen when Ambrose and I spoke more often. Unfortunately for her, she didn’t have access to any of our private messages.
It’s a cute feint, but whenever Ambrose sent holos with text, he would always spell his name as Ambi, not Amby, because he was ambidextrous. His writing was equally bad using either hand. It was our private thing, and his little jab at it being a useless skill. I stare at the crinkled note. The handwriting here is crisp, almost perfect. Like it was written by some kind of machine mimicking a human.
I step inside my tent, checking it for bugs. For the first time, I’m not looking for the ones with tiny legs. I can’t seem to find anything, but I still think something’s in here.
I peek outside. There are two disheveled men with a mangy pitbull in the corner. Another woman is stuffing a sleeping bag with plastic bags for some reason. A host of other people tend to their daily lives, trying to make ends meet. Now, I’m suspicious of them all. Any of them could be her.
Guardians of Time Page 21
