The youthful man set down the remote for the video monitor, indicating to his audience that his presentation was complete. Most of them rose and, murmuring amongst themselves, filed out of the theater. One equally youthful looking woman stayed behind to talk with the presenter. He gave her a little cock sure smile.
She sighed, “Yes, it was a good result. This time. I still believe your playing with fire.” She spoke with a non-specific Central Asian accent. “If you keep changing the past you will eventually end up with a result you can neither tolerate nor repair.”
“I don’t believe so.” He said, still cocky. “If we get a result we don’t like we can simply send them back for another repeat. We can do it as many times as we like until we get the result we desire. The process is essentially instantaneous for us. Only the documentation is time consuming. Even under the worst of circumstances we will eventually get what we want. It’s like the lottery, if you play enough you will eventually win.”
She frowned at him. “Sure, the process is quick and painless for us. But what about those poor people? We have no idea what they go through. We know the re-runs are for 18 years, but, we have no way of knowing how many they go through before they figure out what to do to set things in motion again. Or how many more it would take each time you start the process, even if they have it figured out.”
“Yeah, but, they always end up right where they left off, no worse for the wear.”
“No worse physically. You can’t make the same claim about their mental state.”
“No. But it’s all for the greater good. The suffering of a few is always outweighed by the needs of the many.”
“Maybe so, but it is still rather harsh.” The man simply shrugged. “But,” She continued, “The repeaters are not my real concern. What I am afraid is that you will someday make a change that cannot be undone, because the change will destroy your ability initiate a repeat. Someone indispensable to the process might never be born as an unintended part of the altered chain of events. What would be the consequence if somehow your meddling caused Artis Lansing to be wiped from existence? If he were aborted by the very process he discovered, would the paradox go beyond anything we are capable of imagining?”
The man looked exasperated, as if they’d had this discussion many times in the past. “Hedra. You’re worrying about nothing. We put far too much time into our preparations for anything like that to happen. The scope is always very limited, and the research is meticulous, both before and after. My work in comparing the research stored in the time vault with our new reality has shown a remarkable lack of unintended consequences.”
“Yes, I’ve seen that. But, what about the consequences of things which were not recorded and protected in the vault? How many things were changed that we have neither a record nor a memory of? I could be wiped away with your next reset and you would never know it because you did not write it down.”
“Sure, in theory.” He acquiesced. “But if things like that were happening, then we’d see evidence of it in the comparison to what we have recorded.”
“Sure, in theory.” She smiled impishly. “But maybe that’s the ulterior motive. Maybe you’re trying to get rid of me. Go ahead. Keep meddling in the past until your girlfriend disappears and you don’t even remember what a good kisser she was.” With that she stretched up on her toes and gave him a good long kiss. She turned on her heels and departed without another word.
Epilogue
Afghanistan, 2006
It’s the night of a new moon in the mountains of Afghanistan. The near pitch darkness is the perfect time for a raid. It maximizes the technological advantage of the British Army over their Taliban enemies. And a detachment of that army has been lying in wait, preparing to make use of their low-light fighting capabilities.
In the valley below, is a Taliban camp. One that military intelligence believes to be the base of a particularly ruthless warlord. The intelligence is correct and the warlord is about to get a rude awakening, in the most literal sense. The soldiers file out of their cover at a signal from Sergeant Mulvaney, who’s leading the raid. The soldiers enter the camp armed to the teeth, but, hoping to avoid a firefight. They have a very specific objective, and it does not include revealing their presence, if they can avoid it. Quietly two Taliban posted as guards are dispatched by way of slashed throats. The risk of an early alarm neutralized, the team moves deliberately on to their objective.
The warlord is no fool, and, knowing himself to be a potential target, he tries not advertising his position. Neither his clothes nor his quarters are any grander than those of his men. And his men are not allowed to do anything to overtly signal his status among them. But he does have a tell, as they say in poker. He has a penchant for young women. He has three wives, all teenagers, living in his tent. He believes if he never appears with them outside, it will go unnoticed. But while he is away, the wives make no effort to conceal their living arrangement. They flit in and out of the tent all day, walking around together like teenaged school chums, which they might have been under different circumstances.
So, Mulvaney knows precisely where his target is. He and half a dozen men enter the tent and set to work. They find two of the wives sharing a bed, while tonight’s “lucky” one sleeps beside their husband. Noiselessly the warlord’s throat is slashed just as his guards’ have been. The three teens are simultaneously subdued, then bound and gagged for transport. Mulvaney doubts any of the three will provide any useful intelligence. But hauling them off under that pretense gives him a measure of cover for when his superiors will undoubtedly question his judgment. But, he doesn’t find his other options very acceptable. He will not murder three teenage girls who are likely more victim than jihadi. And he won’t leave them in this camp, probably to be victimized further, quite possibly worse than ever.
***
Mulvaney’s suspicions had been right. The wives had proven useless as sources of intelligence. All three would be moved to Kabul, where they could assimilate with the non-radical population. One of the three had been pregnant with the warlord’s child at the time. She and her son would live a mostly quiet life in Kabul. She would never share with the boy the true story of his own origin. He would forever believe that his father had been a farmer who had been killed by the Taliban. And she would be forever grateful for that night when a handful of foreign soldiers had spared her and taken her away from the old man who had demanded her hand in marriage from her parents when she was only 14 years old.
***
The outcome for that young mother and her child had been much different before the time skips had altered her fate. In the original timeline, Elton Hardy had led that raid. He had been much less concerned than his successor about maintaining a stealthy operation. Not really a bad man, nor a bad soldier, he was nevertheless a bit cavalier about the lives of the men under his command. It was the same attitude that allowed him to sacrifice all the Skippers for what he considered the greater good. So he wasn’t all that concerned about the possibility that the raid would turn into a fire fight. And, he had little of the compassion of Mulvaney either. Up to the point of subduing the wives and killing the warlord, the mission had been nearly identical. But once their target had been eliminated, Hardy had no intention of taking the wives with them. He also had no plan to let them live either. He ordered his men to slash their throats as well.
One of the men questioned him. “Is that really necessary?”
“They’re just a bunch of bloody jihadi factories. If we leave them here they’ll just make more Taliban to kill us later.” He had no idea how right he was.
The first two wives were dispatched without hesitation, but, the pregnant one was in the hands of the man who had questioned the order. She took that opportunity to break for the exit.
“Bloody Hell!” Hardy exclaimed. He took out his sidearm and fired a round through the girl’s back. She fell to the ground, and immediately the soldiers could hear the stirrings of Taliban fighters alerted
by the gunfire. “All right, let’s get out of here.”
No time was taken to verify the status of the third wife. Hardy led his team out, leaving a path of destruction in their wake, as well as a bitter, wounded young woman. Instead of raising her son as a peaceful member of society, in the original timeline she filled him with tales of his father’s fight against the infidels, and of the British soldiers who killed him, and nearly her. The boy would become one of the world’s most accomplished terrorists. Someone who the interventionists of the distant future would decide could and should be either removed or changed.
They had determined that altering Hardy’s life trajectory would be all that was required. And they had been right about that. But what consequence came of altering the life trajectory of 167 individuals from the past? They would never really know. Hedra was right about that.
The End.
From the Author
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Craig Seymour
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Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Time Skip (Book 2): The Time Skippers Page 25
