Time Agency

by Aaron Frale

  “So why isn’t everybody out killing Hitler or something?”

  “I’m sure they are but if a dictator died in the crib before they became a dictator, would you know about it? History will just figure out a different person for the task. Think about it this way. If I killed Einstein, somebody else would have discovered relativity. All the knowledge for relativity is out there. Somebody just needed to connect the dots. You can't prevent the growth of science, just like you can't prevent a dictator taking advantage of a vulnerable country like post-World War I Germany.”

  “There goes my Sunday plans. So why are you here?” It was a weird question to ask my younger self, but in light of recent events, any information will be helpful.

  “I don't know if meddling in my own timeline...” he trailed off.

  “If you are worried about becoming a lost, I won't tell you a thing. But how can it hurt to tell your future self information? My future hasn't happened yet. And I promise. I'm not here to kill our grandparents.”

  “I…we are historians,” he began. At least I know now why I have no ninja moves. “Historians from our time watch history to get an unbiased view. The difference between what people write about their enemies and themselves is quite different than what happened. So I watch and record. I’m currently working on my dissertation.”

  My doppelganger was still a graduate student. I didn’t know how much help he would be. At least he could answer what is so important about now. “Why am I working on my schooling in this time period?”

  “This is where it all starts.”

  “Could you be a little vaguer?”

  My doppelganger proceeded to tell me about the inventor of nanomachines and how he grew up in this city. My double was writing his dissertation about the nanomachine inventor’s childhood environment and how it influenced the invention. The nanomachines were a part of every human's body in the future. They kept people alive and healthy. They acted as interfaces to electronic devices, so people needed to think to control computers of the future. He even showed me a cheap trick with his nanomachines where his finger glowed with artificial light. The reason I didn't tire or starve was because my nanomachines kept me alive. However, people still had the urge to eat and sleep. They just didn't have too, but they could if they wanted too. People simply enjoyed the old biological processes that made them human. Millions of years of evolution couldn't be discarded overnight. Only the hardcore spent their entire life not sleeping, eating, or using the bathroom. The rest used their biological processes because it felt right.

  I asked him about the memory mints, and he cut me off. The memory machine from my pocket either hadn't been invented yet, or he never encountered it. He refused to engage me on any information that he did not know yet. He was very stubborn, and kind of an asshole. I was frustrated by his dedication to keeping his future timeline free from my influence. Of course knowing that he would one day lose his memory was probably terrifying. It frightened me, and I was the one experiencing it. He did let one thing slip, though. The man who invented the nanomachines loved ancient books. I'm sure the ancient bookseller was not a coincidence. I knew where I had to go next.

  Event 1 - N

  Nanette sat back in her chair at her desk in the large monotone room. Her well-dressed protégé sat in a chair across from her. He wore a smile on his face. She stared at him blankly. He spun the chair to the side and looked at the wall. A meadow appeared. The sun was bright, and the clouds were fluffy and wispy. A patch of sunflowers grew off into the distance creating a sea of yellow. There was a fresh smell in the room and a cool breeze on her face. Jerry was quite amused with himself.

  “You aren’t going to detect any emotion on me,” she said flatly. The wall changed back to a wall. The smell dwindled, and the breeze died.

  His grin dropped to a flat expression. “You can’t blame a guy for trying.”

  “To do our job, we must be objective,” she said.

  “Is that why you aren’t decorative?”

  “The more pertinent question is why do you decorate your office?”

  “It helps me get in their heads.”

  “You don’t need to understand why. Only the what. We don’t feel emotions so everyone else can. I refuse to engage in this topic anymore. Subject 07760.” A three-dimensional image of the man neatly titled as 07760 appeared on the screen. She thought that he looked rather unassuming. His historical research was unremarkable. He observed and reported but didn’t discover anything that was new or couldn’t be postulated by any amount of attention to detail.

  Once history became observable through direct contact, historians were about as common as the old television reality shows. Scholars rushed to the past and wrote texts to “expose” the truth. Time travel inadvertently created a swarm of historians all seeking to stake their claim as the source of “real” history. The public loved the “true” life stories from their favorite historical figure. They devoured the secret lives of the great men and women throughout history. As far as Nanette was concerned, Shakespeare had figured out that people act in one way in public and another way in private thousands of years ago. Most of the hard “evidence” historians gathered simply proved that people were bastards and that she was probably better off burying her emotion.

  She became a member of the agency because she understood what was going on inside people’s heads. The agency didn’t protect the timeline as much as the people within it. With the advancement of technology, there was always potential for abuse of those without the technology. One man with a machine gun could rule in the Middle Ages. She was there to prevent such time travel abuses. She needed to bury any empathy to perform the duties of her job. Emotion often got in the way of making purely logical decisions.

  “What's his story?” Jerry asked about the 3-D rendering on the wall. The screen began to shift, and a hotel lobby came into view. The people of the hotel lobby began to materialize and appear on the screen.

  “Why don't we do this in the grayspace?” Jerry inquired.

  She didn't even give his question the decency of an answer. He was just trying to project boredom to get a rise out of her and show off his control of his emotion. He went beyond burying emotion. He was able to let an emotion surface when he needed it. But whether that would cloud his judgment and interfere with his logic, she did not know. Despite his recklessness, the agency needed him. He blazed through his training. He learned lessons in days when others, including Nanette, took months. He solved cases with rare insight and flawless planning. She knew he would one day surpass her, but he still had ways to go.

  When he was young, he was on a collision course to a reprogramming, but she saw potential. He had the abilities to be a good investigator, so she collected him and trained him. Her supervisors were very skeptical of his abilities and rather incredulous about whether he would ever be able to bury his emotions. After training, he was able to bury his emotions deeper than any investigator she'd ever known. He was the best and surpassed even her. However, due to his recklessness, Jerry would display his emotions to her when he was pretty sure no supervisor was paying attention. His behavior today would be disciplined and prove the theory of her supervisors that he was probably better off going to reprogramming. She didn't believe her supervisors and put up with his behavior. She knew that when the time came, she could depend on him. He was trustworthy.

  He was also rare in that he was the first protégé to make it past the three-year mark without a transfer or being sent to reprogramming. She had a reputation for reprogramming her protégés. No one knew or would ever know the work of her organization. They were ghosts to their society. The rest of the population used emotions to guide their lives, make decisions, and fill their existence with meaning, so they were always uncomfortable around agents. There was an old game called poker where people learned to control their emotions and read others to gain an advantage. A good poker player scrutinized every facial expression. An average person was uncomfortable with such
scrutiny. Nanette understood Jerry like fellow poker players understood each other.

  Nanette found a “poker face” comforting. It was the mark of a well-trained and balanced agent. When Jerry flippantly displayed his emotions, it threw her off balance. She tried hard not to display her discomfort, but he was as good at reading as he was at controlling and knew his disregard for the “stuffy” atmosphere of the agency irritated her. It irritated her second only to using her first name. Thankfully, he respected her enough not to cross that line too much. A young person with talent and a natural ability should make her jealous, but jealousy was counterproductive. Even though he was younger than her by a couple of hundred years, the nanomachines kept her young looking. Age was no longer noticeable except for those who decided to turn off their nanomachines and go back to the natural march toward death.

  “This hotel security feed from the historical archives was flagged as a point of interest.” Often, history crimes were discovered by looking through archives. Slews of people and computers would dig through archives of information looking for anomalies. Most turned out to be harmless, and some were sent up to the agents. The archival footage showed a hotel lobby where there were two of the same man talking with each other. One looked the age of a person who had not yet reached the age where the nanomachines halted the aging process. The other had reached his peak age. Nanomachines stopped aging at different times for everybody. Most people stopped the aging process somewhere in their twenties and thirties. She knew what was going on but wanted to check Jerry’s reaction. Of course, there was no reaction. He was good at hiding everything. He was deep in thought but looked like he was simply a blank slate.

  “He crossed his timeline and came back as a ‘lost.’ A simple undone timeline.” he postulated.

  “The problem with this particular footage is not that we’ve found the incident where a ‘lost’ undid his history or changed his timeline. It’s rare we capture the event but not uncommon. It’s that this meeting did not change his timeline.” She swiveled her chair to another blank wall. Stats of employee 07760 of the Historical Archive project came up on the wall. There was no indication in any of his files that he would be a person of interest. That was the part where her protégé would shine. Her superiors would be more focused on how it happened instead of asking the right question. She knew Jerry would ask the right question. He always did.

  Her protégé thought about his words carefully. The agents usually didn’t need to act on information quickly. They were the time travel police and had as much time as they needed to figure out a course of action. The past didn’t go anywhere. She could respond to the subject of interest a year later, and it would make no difference to the past. However, if the threat was a time agent, they usually did have to act quickly because time agents had a unique understanding of time and delay could be dangerous. The only person more dangerous than a time agent was a historian. Historians also had a unique understanding of time but little practical experience meddling with it, and sloppy meddling with time was disastrous. The historian numbered 07760 met with himself, and because he was a historian, it became a matter that needed an investigation.

  Historians meeting with themselves could be an attempt to take advantage of their historical knowledge. Historians knew better than the average person that trying to alter a personal timeline was a fairly fruitless endeavor. People who attempted to alter their past seemed only to reap the consequence of their actions. If a person told their younger self exactly how to capture the heart of another or the winning lottery numbers, the time traveler would come back to a future where another person who looked exactly like them had reaped the benefits and a time agent investigation. If they married the “one that got away” based on advice from their future self, they would come back to a timeline and be in a relationship where both partners remembered the past differently. The relationship would be awkward and nothing like the one where both partners shared all the same memories.

  Wealth was fairly meaningless to most people because nanomachines and grayspace left people wanting for nothing. Most time crimes were motivated by power, thrill, righteousness, and other emotional motivations. Even a person going back to win the lottery for themselves, and then staying in the past to reap the rewards could recreate the scenario in the grayspace. Time crimes were usually always something different. Since most time travelers attempted to avoid crossing personal timelines, a historian meeting himself meant trouble.

  Traveling back through history to correct possible problems means choosing time travel moments carefully. Time agents tried not to cross their personal timelines, so they would not inadvertently change their history. A person who claimed to be one of Nanette's protégés wiped himself on a case. He thought he’d go back and tell himself where to find his subject. The poor bastard thought he innovated the agency and ended up getting his past self killed. The ripples were more costly to him. According to Nanette, he’d died on his first mission. To him, he was just coming back from telling himself a clue. During the three years, he’d been dead, his wife moved on, son killed himself, and daughter got married. There was something to be said for not crossing personal timelines. When Nanette's business is traveling in the past to catch people, she had to travel carefully.

  But the careful nature of her work was a disadvantage in a situation like this. Unusual situations demanded unusual responses and unusual thinking. She was hoping her protégé would provide what she needed. If she waited for her supervisors to make a decision, there was a good chance the case would become generational. The generational cases were the equivalent of taking a problem too complicated for a simple solution and dumping it on the next generation. There were unsolved cases dating back hundreds of years. One researcher a few hundred years ago discovered that the original Black Plague strain that wiped out one-third of Europe had genetic markers of bacteria manufactured from the future. The person who created and unleashed the plague was never caught. Agents at the time figured that the case might eventually be solved in the future. Since a future generation could always travel back to Europe once they solved the case to apprehend the criminal, they left the case for future agents. The future agents also left the case, and so forth. Generational cases were unsolved. She didn’t want this one to be someone else’s mess.

  “His memory is wiped,” her protégé said.

  “Reasons for your conclusion?” She buried her surprise through rigid questioning. He may never detect the respect she had for him.

  “He crossed his own timeline yet still continues to exist without perceivable change to himself or the past. So the future self probably had a memory wipe,” he continued.

  “Wouldn’t it be more logical that the past self had the wipe? Thus unable to act on the advice from his future self?” she teased out his thought process.

  “If you are assuming he is there to pass information to himself. However, I find that information flawed. Notice how he probes his younger self for information.”

  “How could you know? There is no audio in the feed.”

  “Rewind the footage to right before the conversation.”

  Her protégé was observant or at least he had the ability to process everything he sees fairly quickly. She wondered what she missed that he noticed. She usually noticed everything. The human eye picks up everything it sees, and the brain filters most of it out. There was a bowl of mints on the coffee table that 07760 didn’t touch. They were after dinner mints with different soft colors like light green, light pink, and so forth. It was her job to notice the mints because any tiny behavior mattered. She could conclude he didn’t like mints, or specifically those types of mints. It also might be he already ate, or just wasn’t much of a snack person. Either way, if any detail could reap reward later, she noticed it. She caught a previous case by noticing what kind of beer he was drinking. Later on, when they narrowed his whereabouts to a bar, she scanned for his type of beer and found a half empty glass at a table. Her search was quicker and
just as well because he was about to climb out the bathroom window when she caught him.

  “The older 07760 attempted to use the computer occupied by that kid. Any self-respecting time traveler uses their nanomachines. According to his file, he was more interested in the people who made the future possible than the technology itself. In fact, there is nothing to suggest he had ever touched a computer. If he was trying to use a computer, then he was attempting to gain knowledge, and he was not using his nanomachines. Now fast forward to the end. His younger self shows him how to make his nanomachines glow. So, therefore, memory wipe,” he said.

  “You sound sure of yourself,” she said.

  “I bury all emotion.”

  “What if he aborted his attempt to change the past?”

  “A possibility but unlikely.”

  “Why?”

  “He is wearing clothes of the era.”

  “All time travelers use clothes of the era. They need to blend in.”

  “Issued clothes. Fabrics of our time are made of a different synthetic material designed to simulate period clothes. He is wearing real cotton. Zoom into the microscopic level if you’d like.”

  He was good. She hadn’t caught that detail. But what he said was true. The younger 07760’s clothes looked slightly too smooth. Real cotton was porous and made from a plant. Plants had not lived on Earth for many years. Time travel vacations were very popular at campgrounds. There was something intriguing about the wild and exoticness of nature. The books, programs, and grayspace simulations didn’t quite capture the realness of a plant. She read a statistic once that each campground in America had at least one time traveling group at any given moment in history. But the other campers did not know that. The beauty of time travel is that time travelers looked like everybody else. People were truly unaware how many times the person standing behind them in line was a time traveler.