Time Agency

by Aaron Frale

  “I believe the phrase from the era, ‘You owe me a drink,’ is appropriate,” he smiled. Sometimes, he was too reckless for his own good.

  “I believe you owe me a suspect. Find him and bring him to the interrogation chamber.”

  Event 7 – R

  I stood in front of the bookstore not quite sure if I should enter. It was different than the first one. The bookstore I encountered when I first arrived was new and giant. This was a tiny place that looked as if it was on the street when the buildings were new, and horse and carriage were the main forms of transportation. I knew that I must go in, but I felt nervous. It was like I was at the point of no return where some crusty old man should warn me to turn back. I had seemingly unlimited funds. What would stop me from just buying some house in an obscure town under an alias? The fact that I wasn't a secret agent caught up in something bigger than myself was intimidating. If a clothing store sales associate could take me out, a trained agent could certainly bring me down. I felt that if I met with the book dealer, I would have to accept my fate.

  There was also the possibility that I was just completely crazy. Maybe my mind was warped through delusion. My younger self may have been a phantom of a crazy person escaped from an institution for the criminally insane. Delusional people didn't know they are delusional. Another point towards crazy was that I forgot to ask myself my name. It should have been the first question out of my mouth. But I didn't ask it. I was so overwhelmed with the implications of meeting my younger self. I forgot the basics. Not that I needed a name until now. This ancient bookseller was the only person I could possibly know. And if the bookseller did know me, I could just ask him my name. The thought of asking about my name from an old contact, who may or may not know me, seemed lucid to me. If my brain were losing a sense of reality, I'd assume reality would just slip away, and I wouldn't know it.

  My nervousness must have sparked something in my brain. A memory came back. It slipped through the haze in the depths of my mind. I remembered a real delusional person I saw once. I walked out of a fast food place with a woman, a blond woman who seemed familiar. There was a piece of bread on the ground. It was covered in ants. A crazy man picked up the bread and insisted the bread was a test. The blond woman turned her nose up in disgust. The ants crawled on the crazy guy's skin, biting him. Red welts appeared as the ants attacked, and the man stood stoically. He calmly put the bread on the ground and brushed off the remaining ants. After he had been satisfied, he walked away without a word. I made a joke about passing the test. The blond woman punched my arm.

  As quickly as the memory came, it was over. I couldn't help but question if the memory was real. I remembered the man, the ants, and the bread...or had I dreamt it last night in the warmth of the hotel room? My throat tightened, and I felt a lump form. The woman was...my partner. We were...observing something...in the past... The fast food chain was the old style that served large portions of heart attacks in to-go containers. There were ground-based cars in the parking lot with real rubber tires. Or had I inserted the details into the daydream because my younger self told me that I observed the past for a living? Was my memory returning or just degrading?

  I entered the store. It was everything a bookstore should be. An overpowering “old book smell” assaulted my senses. There were books of all types on the wall except paperback. It was like each book had to be a certain age even to be on the shelf here. I vaguely wondered if I was rich. Even one book from this shop would probably sell for big money in the future. But if everybody was trying to sell artifacts from the past, would they be worth anything? Maybe there wasn't even money in the future, so the concept of getting rich wouldn't exist.

  “Hello,” I called out to a seemingly empty bookstore.

  I walked deeper into the store. There was a counter with an old-timey cash register with big circular buttons and a display with analog numbers. It was obviously a showpiece because a credit card machine sat next to it. I called out again and peered over the counter. There was no one there. I turned to browse the empty store, but it seemed as if even the owner had forgotten about books. Judging by the technology in the city, books were probably fading from existence. I had spotted many people with e-readers and electronic devices. The nanomachines were near to this time stream. Technology seemed only to come around when people were ready for it.

  Take teleportation for example. Humanity knew the theories to transport matter over a distance well before the technology became a reality. Scientists lacked the computing power and bandwidth to turn the technology into a reality. It wasn't until nanomachines could network massive amounts of quantum computing power with nearly unlimited bandwidth that Scotty could finally beam Kirk up long after James Doohan's ashes were blasted into space. Theories existed long before technology. Science fiction writers would dream of the possibilities before the actualization requirements were invented. For example, the theories of time travel existed, but the practice of time travel required so many other innovative ideas to exist.

  After the barrier of time had been cracked, the only barrier left was parallel universes. Humanity knew they existed because people had the option of rewriting their personal history, but according to my younger self, no one had ever found a way to travel between them without making some permanent change. If they bought their younger self a winning lottery ticket, the only way to get back was to intercept the lottery ticket. People rarely were able to change the big events of history, and if they did, all people in the future could do is take their word for it. My younger self said one of the “lost” claimed to kill a dictator in World War II Germany. The “lost” said that Hitler took the dictator's place, and history ended up being worse.

  Thus our only evidence of time travel paradoxes existing was the word of people who claimed to come from another timeline. They might be able to bring a history book back with them, but history books could be faked, especially if it's the only copy in existence. However, a person from the future wouldn't know their history had been altered. To people living in the future, the past was static. The only way to observe a change would be to go back, make the change, and then travel forward again. Schrodinger had explained the parallel universe and alternate reality question during other pursuits. He said that a cat in a box with a vial of poison that may open at any time could be both alive and dead. It wasn't until the box was opened that the state of the cat could be revealed. As soon as people observed the past or opened a history book, they would now define the state of the universe, but until then it was probabilities. So if I killed my grandparents before my parent's birth, rather than the probability of me never existing, there is definite proof that I didn't exist. In a sense, my trip to the past to kill my grandparents was opening the box.

  The only problem is that timelines are a one-way ticket. If my grandparents die because of my decision, I can never go back and bring them back to life. I theoretically could travel back to warn my grandparents about their impending doom. But the more times I cross my own timeline, the greater the chance that I will cause even more problems. So if I tackled myself and beat myself into submission, my grandparents may see the destiny of their grandchildren and never have kids. Or they may have kids but at the wrong time. There was no way to tell how the meddling will affect the timeline until they were observed. And the more times a person traveled back, the more tangled the timeline would become. Trying to fix time is like attempting to untie a knot where you only see part of the rope and have probable configurations for the rest of it. Generally speaking, the “lost” are restricted from time travel because they will drive themselves insane by tangling their timeline or get themselves killed while trying to fix their timeline. Fixing time is like swimming against the gravity of a black hole. Eventually, the person is crushed and wiped from existence.

  My younger self was wise to restrict our conversation. The more we conversed, the more we would change history. If I only had enough information to give to my younger self to warn him about the eve
nts leading to the memory loss, maybe I could prevent my situation from happening to him. Or maybe the conversation I had with my younger self led to the event of my memory loss, to begin with. It’s possible that I started sticking my nose in business that I shouldn’t have and ended up here. Either way, thinking about all the iterations of time is mind numbing.

  There was a rustle from a room in the back. An old door was at the rear of the store near a shelf of fantasy novels. I heard a loud thump. Most people would probably leave during a moment like this, but I had to investigate. This was my only lead and more than likely the owner was just moving boxes around.

  “Hello,” I called out as I approached the door. There was no answer. I knocked. The bookstore was silent. My knock dissipated the happenings in the back room. I was about to knock again when it opened a crack. I was greeted with a gun.

  “Go away,” a panicked voice commanded from the other side. It sounded familiar, but I couldn't quite place it.

  “I'm just here for information. I am unarmed.”

  “I really can't help you.” The voice was at the tip of my mind. I knew the person on the other side of the door, but I couldn't place them. Maybe they were in some memory bubbling up from the past.

  I really couldn't tell you how I knew what would happen next, but I sensed urgency in the voice. It was the crack in the voice of a person making an irrational decision, or maybe I experienced a similar event before. I couldn't have been sure how I knew the owner of the voice intended harm. I think I saw a tiny spot of blood on the sleeve. I kicked the door open and stepped to the side in the same motion. A gun went off. The door connected to the person behind it with a loud crack. A bullet burrowed a hole in a stack of books behind me.

  My body was fueled with terror. Rather than running down a narrow row of bookshelves where I would be an easy target, I charged through the door. I felt the door connect once again to the man recovering from the first blow. The back was an office and storage room. In a blur of adrenaline, I pushed him into a bookshelf. Books toppled off the bookshelf and rained down on us. The gun fired again. A large tome of collected fantasy novels landed on my opponent's head and stunned him. The backroom bookshelf was the metal warehouse type rather than the nice wooden bookshelves in the front of the store. I slammed his head into a jagged metal edge. It cut his brow and blood gushed out. The gun landed on the ground. I kicked him in the groin for good measure and brought the fantasy tome down on his head again. He lost consciousness.

  That's when I realized why I knew his voice. The person lying in the pile of books was the well-dressed man. He was covered in blood, but it didn't look like his own. That's when I realized there was another person in the room. A dead person. The body was sprawled out on the floor. There were several bullet wounds in the chest. I felt my face drain of all its color. The body looked exactly like the person I assaulted in the new bookstore. He must have been an identical twin. It couldn't have been a coincidence.

  I raced to the front of the store. A police car was parked out front. The officer must have heard the gunfire because he was ducked behind his door on the radio. I raced to the back of the store. The back office must have a way out. I considered getting the gun, but it was probably used to kill the bookseller. I considered the gun more of a liability than a tool. I heard more police arrive as I shut the door leading to the storeroom. Luckily, there was another door leading out to what I assumed would be a courtyard. I ran to the door and froze.

  Near the exit door was a beat-up wooden desk. It was old and ornate. There were lots of books littering the desk. Some were opened, and others were in various stages of restoration. There was a framed news article on the wall. There was something familiar about it. It was an article about the bookseller. He donated all sorts of money to restore a train station. The station was over two hundred years old and needed serious work. Many people were at the ceremony to commemorate the station. The murdered bookseller was shaking hands with some city official, and one of the people in the front of the gathered crowd in the background was me. I was at this event. I knew this bookseller. There were also lockers in the background. They were barely perceptible, but I could see them. I touched the key in my pocket. I memorized the name of the train station and went out the back.

  The smell of crisp water and old building hit my nose as I dashed out into the open air. There was a garden full of fruits and vegetables in what was a mostly deserted courtyard. Several buildings with various doors leading back inside were my only options. Some doors were chained shut. I didn't have time to try all of them. A sweet smell of roasting peppers hit my nose. The garden was probably a restaurant's, which meant that there was an unlocked door somewhere in this courtyard, and it had to be near the garden.

  I went to the door where the smell was the strongest. The door opened easily enough. I came right from the courtyard into the kitchen. The normal hustle of the kitchen halted as the employees looked at me. “I just had to see for myself. All the vegetables are fresh and organic! Fantastic!”

  One of the staff stepped forward. She looked like a manager, but I couldn’t tell. “Oh yes, we grow it all ourselves. There is another garden on the roof, but I'm going to have to take you back to the dining hall. Health code standards. You know.”

  I certainly knew. In fact, I was counting on it. She escorted me out of the kitchen area and luckily enough didn’t escort me to my seat. I made for the exit. I had evaded the police for the time being, but I was pretty sure my cover was blown. There had to be some camera footage somewhere of me. I couldn't disappear in the crowds like at the giant bookstore. It was only a matter of time before the police would go over the footage from security cameras in the store or on the street. They would figure out that there were three people who never left the bookstore. I had some time but not much. I had to visit the train station.

  Event 6 - J

  Jerry was covered in blood and running through a sewer system. He wasn't so well-dressed anymore unless disheveled bloody suits were the height of fashion. His body ached, and his head pounded. He had taken a serious beating. He was vaguely aware of how he got into the sewers, but most of his memory was blank. His first memory was when he woke in a storeroom of a bookstore with a dead body at his feet and a gun in his hand. He panicked and knocked over some boxes. Then there was a knock at the door. The only course of action that seemed logical was to make the person leave and sneak out the back. The person turned out to be some sort of ninja or secret agent because the unknown assailant took Jerry down. Luckily, there had been a sewer entrance in the courtyard because the police were hot on his heels. He heard footfalls and saw flashlights down the tunnel. He ran harder.

  He was faster than the flashlights and well ahead of them. For reasons he did not know, his eyes adapted to low light very quickly. As soon as he was far enough away from the flashlights to be in pitch black, he could see. It was like he had the infrared light spectrum built into his eyes. When the flashlights faded, everything seemed to have a green tinge. He couldn't quite explain it, but he was thankful because he didn't see how he would be able to elude his pursuers without the enhancement to his eyes.

  He also noticed his body had more endurance than the people holding the flashlights. He was able to outdistance them without exerting much of an effort. He didn't stop running until he was pretty sure no one could ever find him. Hours later, he was lost and unsure where he had been. He slowed down to figure out his position. He walked until he found a ladder. He climbed until he came to an access panel.

  Jerry climbed through the access panel into a subway tunnel. A train barreled down the track toward him. He ducked back down after being almost thwacked by the train. The rumble stopped, and he poked his head back up. It seemed clear, but he decided to wait. He wasn't sure about the length of the tunnel or the interval of the train. He heard another rumble about fifteen minutes later. After a few hours, he figured out the pattern. Fifteen minutes. Train. Fifteen minutes. Train. Thirty minutes. Train. Then
repeat the cycle.

  He decided the thirty-minute wait was probably his best option. He considered abandoning the subway tunnel idea but decided whoever chased him through the sewer would monitor the entrances and exits to the sewers. His better probability of escaping without notice would be to enter another system. He needed to leave the sewers entirely. A half hour between trains was probably better than he'd ever find in a big city unless he waited for the night train schedule. The men with flashlights would have dogs by now, and he wasn’t sure if he could outrun a tracking dog. He could not hide his smell. He needed to get back to the surface.

  The train rumbled by, and he got out of the hatch as fast as he could. The subway tunnel curved in either direction. He didn't detect anything more than the standard subway tunnel lighting. He decided to go the direction the train was heading. He felt that running away from the train was a better idea than running toward it. He may be adding to the precious seconds he needed to make it to the stop. He ran at a near sprint. His lungs and heart seemed to kick in naturally. He felt the strain on his body but not as much as he would expect. He could keep his pace indefinitely.

  He ran for what seemed like hours, but in reality, was only fifteen minutes. In the lowlight of the subway, his night vision didn't quite kick in. It was too bright for infrared and too dark to see very well. His foot kicked a piece of scrap metal, which was almost obscured by the darkness. He tumbled to the ground and cut himself in the rocks and filth. He scrambled to his feet. Precious time was lost, and he was nowhere near an exit. He slowed his pace anyway. Another fall on the train track was dangerous enough with the rocks, metal, and city filth, but the lost time in the thirty-minute window could be even more dangerous.