by K. D. Mack
“Not notes on what we’re doing, notes on how things are. Mathews has a time machine, he’s using it to steal things now – but like you said, sir, he can change anything at any time and it’s our new reality, right? We need some separate way to keep what’s happening now set. We don’t know when or how or what will change but if we don’t know how things were, will we know that they changed?”
Blaine nodded enthusiastically. “Excellent thinking, yes. Physics, is there a way for us to separate out some documentation? Save a history book or two – in some way that they won’t be altered if time is altered?”
“We’ll look into it immediately, sir,” one of Elliot’s colleagues replied.
“Good. Good. That’s a good start. We’re off to a good start, everyone. We can recover from this. One disgruntled ex-employee will not destroy Blaine Corp. – or time itself!”
3
As Elliot walked her through the laboratory, explaining the project and what they had accomplished so far, Amy couldn’t help but be impressed. The sheer achievement of figuring out time travel was amazing – well, that went without saying – but Elliot as well. He had handled himself at the bank, had spoken well at the meeting, and she couldn’t help but find the bubbly excitement in his voice endearing as he talked her through. It was interspersed with moments of stress as he was caught up in the sheer horror of what the device could be used for by someone with bad intentions, but then he’d get whisked away in his own excitement again.
“So obviously, we have to be able to track what’s going on when people use the machine. Figuring out how to get instruments to physically recognize the time stream was probably our biggest leap forward.” He pointed her towards an array of screens. “And if you see here, this is exciting because we had seen small evidence of it before, in tests sending, like, a pencil back a minute or so before. But here –”
“There’s a huge ripple,” Amy breathed out, looking at the 3D projection. A single, continuous tube was rendered across the screen in bright blue illuminated lines that suddenly, in the middle, warped and wavered as if someone had chucked a stone through it.
“Exactly! And we’re working on quantifying it, but my guess looking at this is he doesn’t travel for about half a week. Honestly, if we could talk to someone directly involved, that would be helpful. Since we don’t have data sets to compare this against, we’ll just be guessing when he travels. Then we’ll have to verify it either with someone telling us or us showing up then and hoping it’s right.”
“Do you think he uses this one?” Amy asked.
“No idea, honestly. Tracking down the point of origin will take a little longer, but we should be able to do it, especially with such a huge time signature. If he travelled so close to now, it was probably this one, because I don’t think he would have enough time to build another one. But who knows?”
“He worked here too, right?” Amy stared around the banks of computers, the huge screens dominating, the scattering of dry erase boards with a multitude of signs – and a few goofy stick figures – drawn on them.
“Yeah, in this lab. We worked together a bit. Seemed like an alright guy but was a bit strange. Really enthusiastic about the project – but we all were. I think he got into some sort of disagreement with Blaine, I’m not sure. Didn’t ask. Every once in a while, he’d get carried away talking about what he would do if he used the machine. I mean we all did, at breaks of course, but he would get really, really into it, like how he could create a better society”
“So, he knows we can track him, if he was working on it,” Amy pointed out.
Elliot paused. “He should, I suppose. Even if he used another machine, he would know we could pick up the distortions here.”
“Alright, good,” Amy replied. “That means we know he knows we’ll probably be coming for him, so he’ll be prepared, which means we should be prepared. I hope, for his own sake, he uses better fighters for his own protection than he used for that sorry excuse of a bank robbery and – wait, Elliot, who’s the Prime Minister?”
“What? Uh, Richfield? Wait, no.” His face crumpled in confusion.
Their eyes locked. “He just changed the PM,” Amy breathed. “Or changed something that changed it, I guess. We got to write this down. How do we keep it from possibly getting changed itself?”
Elliot paced. “They’re already working on making a large time-separate chamber, somewhere we can store as much as possible. But there is an immediate solution: the machine itself. It travels through time largely because it’s separate from time. Anything we put in there will exist on its own for as long as we leave it. Even if we somehow changed the fact that we wrote the notes, it should stay.”
“Excellent. Okay.”
They furiously scribbled notes about the state of the world as they remembered it. Amy muttered aloud to herself as she worked, “Ashfield is the PM. Margery Something-Or-Other won the Bakeoff. The Queen is still kicking and is probably immortal. Harry Potter is the bestselling series, though Agatha Christie is the bestselling author. Just trying to think of anything that could be butterfly effect-ed out of existence.” She sighed and looked at Elliot. “What do you have?”
“I had Bakeoff too, actually, and the fact that the pandas at the zoo just had cubs, that was huge news,” he replied. “It seems like that’s the sort of thing that would change.”
“But that did change,” Amy protested, “because they didn’t, not unless they had them this morning and I missed it.”
Elliot’s face paled. “That’s a new one, too? Crap. I could’ve sworn – but now that you say it – it’s hard to hold on to.”
“It’s like I’ve got two memories pressed on top of each other,” she replied, “smushing together into one thing the longer I think about it. But there being new pandas, even though my head’s trying to tell me it happened a year ago, the memory feels new – like something someone just told me.”
“Our brains are playing catch-up with a new reality,” Elliot said. “Fascinating. But that’s a good way to tell. Anything too shiny-new is straight out. Shouldn’t have happened. Got it.”
They gathered their notes shoved them into the large, cylindrical time machine. It looked like a giant pill standing upright.
Amy started working out a plan. “I say we start at the bank and work our way outwards. Interview everyone who was there. They said the robbers disappeared, so let’s find out how.”
After tracking down the security team and finagling a list of the names and addresses of everyone who had been at the bank that day – Amy couldn’t help but pause momentarily to admire Blaine Corp.’s surveillance capabilities – they hit the streets.
The first strange thing they encountered were differing accounts. Some believed the robbers had already been there when they arrived, others that the robbers had come bursting in. Some had seen them break their bonds and make a run for it while Amy and Elliot were in the back, while others insisted that the police had actually taken the captured men away.
“How do we know how much of this is the result of time travel, and people just having crappy memories?” Elliot asked, frustrated, as they stopped for a break on one of the benches outside the bank.
“This is always how these sorts of interviews go,” Amy replied. “One thing will happen, five people see it, and you get six stories. You just record everything and parse it later.”
“How long have you been doing this?” he replied, bemused.
“Since I was twenty, so almost ten years, now,” she said. “I started with MI6, worked there for about four years, the latter two in the field. Did very well, and I seriously liked it, but it was going to be ages before I was able to do anything really big. I ended up in one extremely tight situation; what was supposed to be a routine mission ended up compromised after – well, I can’t say who – but the enemy managed to turn one of our own agents. Ended up getting tangled up in some pretty big things for a few months. Blaine noticed and recruited me; it was a no-brainer. I got a taste for
real adventure and wasn’t going to go back. You?”
“Blaine recruited me right out of my PhD, been about five years, I guess. Way better funding than I had back at university, so that’s definitely something. I can’t even imagine what boring star-mapping project I’d be on if I were back there. Not that I don’t like stars and all, but the projects they were funding were nowhere near the insane, experimental stuff Blaine has us working on.”
“How do you know how to handle yourself like that, in the field?” Amy asked. Even if he was a gym rat –he didn’t look the type – he knew how to take someone down almost as well as her and her fellow agents.
“Ah, that.” He looked bashful. “I grew up as a military kid. My family was always big on self-defense, but I think I took it a bit further after a run-in with some thugs near the base.” (Amy could tell better than to press on that, at least for now.) “I learned too young how important it was to know how to protect yourself in a tight spot. But I felt like a lot of guys were relying too much on their weapons, you know? They were fit, sure, but they needed a handgun or the like. I never wanted to need that. I took off after high school, had finished early anyway. Traveled a bit, got really into martial arts – spent almost three years, I guess, training under this one fellow. Bit of a secretive guy. But he knew his stuff. After that, well, I went to school for real.”
Amy was about to ask more about this strange revelation, and even about some of Blaine Corp.’s other projects. She knew some of the equipment – and even artifacts – that she had tracked down for the Corp. were used for physics, but departments didn’t tend to talk to each other too much.
Movement across the street caught her eye: a figure hurrying past some shops, looking intently ahead of him – avoiding either side, certainly avoiding the bank.
“Elliot! That’s him!” she exclaimed, slapping her hand at his arm.
“What? Mathews?!” Elliot jerked upright.
“No, no! The first guy I took down at the bank! Look, over there.” She pointed to a small corner store across the street he seemed to be walking towards. “I recognize him!”
Elliot started stuffing their notes into their bags. “Okay, how are we going to do this, then?” he asked, the surprise dropping abruptly away from his voice.
Amy grinned. She was starting to like how quickly he acted, his shifts from planning and into attack mode. “I say we let him go in there, get whatever he’s getting. He came from around the corner so we can go there – I think there’s an alley on the building just past it. Then we grab him.”
“Good idea. Should we take one on either side, in case he exits the other way?”
“Yeah.” Amy nodded. “Give him a minute to get fully inside the shop, make sure he’s not glancing around or something. Then let’s roll.”
They took another minute putting their things away, tying up any final details they could think of in the plan, then split up, each taking an alley near opposite sides of the shop. Amy set about looking casual: checking her phone, occasionally glancing around as if she were lost and consulting a guide app, or something of the sort. People ignored her. They always do, she thought, nobody’s ever paying as much attention to you as you think.
That being said, looking casual and properly blending in was one of the first and hardest things they taught you. People are too good at being focused on what they’re doing. New recruits always look like they’re thinking about looking casual, not thinking about the sorts of things you do when you feel casual.
The wait felt long – almost twenty minutes, what could he possibly be buying in there? – before the failed thief finally walked past the mouth of the alley way.
“Oi!” Amy hollered. He turned, surprised. She waved at him, like he was a friend she had been waiting for, giving the sidewalk a minute to free up of anyone else besides him. A pause in the crowd was all she needed.
He hesitated. A strange expression – a sort of recognition, trying to remember where he’d seen her before, mixed with the immediate embarrassment of someone you don’t recognize recognizing you – was making its way across his face. Amy approached him, keeping her gait and her body language friendly, open. She tapped the speed dial button on her phone, alerting Elliot.
“I’m sorry, I don’t think I –” he tried to say as she reached out to shake his hand. His hand was in hers when he realized who she was. “Oh, God, no.”
Amy gripped his hand just tight enough to make him aware that she could probably snap his bones if needed. “Long time no see, huh?” She grinned, shaking his hand vigorously, like two business partners as far as any pedestrians were concerned. “It was Tony, right?”
Elliot turned the corner and came up behind him. “You need to come with us, sir,” he said, leaning in close to Tony’s ear.
4
“Look, we didn’t even get paid, I don’t know what you want from me here,” Tony protested. He had come with them easily. Amy had learned long ago that while a weapon was useful, a good bluff and a firm handshake could usually get you the same result. They loaded him into a company car and drove him to one of the safehouses Blaine Corp. kept in the city for occasions just like this.
“We need to know everything you can tell us about the heist. Who hired you, what were you supposed to do before we showed up – the whole deal,” Amy said, pacing back and forth. “We’re not interested in harming you, and we can avoid turning you in if you help us out.”
Tony looked around, wildly. “I don’t see why I should tell you crap!”
Elliot looked as he was going to say something, but Amy held up her hand. If you give people a silence to fill, they always fill it. Tony protested some more, kept complaining that he didn’t know anything, but their unrelenting stares finally broke him.
“His name was Mathews, I’m pretty sure, I wasn’t the main person he talked to.” Tony started slowly, picking up speed as he told them more. “He picked us up in some machine a few weeks from now. It was wild, man. I’m re-living the same month I already lived, having to avoid myself ‘cause he said it might cause some sort of time catastrophe.”
“Wait, you’re from the future?” Elliot interrupted.
“Yeah, I guess so. Didn’t think it was possible but there’s another of me here in town right now. You’re lucky as hell you caught this version of me, other guy would’ve had no idea what in hell you were talking about, ha. But it’s genius, right? ‘Cause they caught my face on the security cameras, thanks to you stealing my mask.” He glared at Amy. “But they also got me bang-to-rights at home with four witnesses during the robbery! And a me that when the police talked to him, gave the most convincing alibi! ’Cause he’s never been there, yet. Could’ve passed every lie-detection test in the book.”
“Time-traveling heists. Crime of the future,” Amy muttered to herself. “So you were just supposed to rob the bank and then clear out?”
“We robbed the bank while he zapped himself into the back, got some stuff. We were supposed to cause a lot of ruckus, what have you, and then we got to keep whatever we stole in the meantime. Pretty good deal. He zapped us out after you two went to the back. Only thing is we didn’t have our bags with us, so we didn’t get any of the cash. Thanks a lot for that,” he sneered at them.
“Do you know what point he was travelling to the bank from? Like what point in time,” Elliot asked tensely?
“He bragged about everything. Wouldn’t shut up. It was before he picked us up – I don’t get all the time travel stuff, honestly, how the order works. But he said April 12th was the first time a human being travelled in time in the universe. Said that a lot.”
“That’s in four days,” Amy said, looking over to Elliot with wide eyes. “We can still stop the first trip.”
They let Tony go after grilling him a bit longer, with Elliot reiterating to him that he really needed to avoid his current self. “None of us, not even Mathews, know how this stuff works yet when your own timestream overlaps. Our current guess is that it isn’t
pretty. If you don’t want to end up having never existed, or exploding the universe, please keep avoiding yourself.”
“Hey, I was just looking for some easy cash, not get taken on a crazy time trip. I’m more than happy to stay out of the way.”
They saw him on his way, dropping him off at a corner not too far from the convenience store where they had found him. He was trying to keep them from finding out where he lived, but Amy knew now that they’d made contact with him, Blaine Corp.’s surveillance would know in a few hours. Not that he had much to worry about. He hadn’t killed anyone, hadn’t managed to get away with any cash, so the company would likely leave him alone.
“Should we walk back to the base?” Amy asked, climbing out of the car. She wanted the fresh air. The car would drive itself back anyway.
“Let’s celebrate!” Elliot exclaimed, hopping out and walking next to her. “We know when it’s happening! We know when he steals the machine!”
Amy laughed. “What if he used his own or something?”
“Naw, he couldn’t have built it fast enough from when he stole the plans, definitely not with the timeline Tony set up for us. At least at first, he uses ours. We know where to get him. We know what to do.” He was almost giddy. “Let’s get food, somewhere nice. My treat. After all this insanity, it’s the least we deserve.”
Amy gave in. She wanted a break too, and she was enjoying this strange adventure they’d ended up on together. Of course, she knew it could spell the end of the world, but she couldn’t help feeling glad she had decided to stop by the bank a few days ago. Otherwise, would it have been just Elliot? There was some chance that she could have been assigned this case, but there were plenty of other capable agents who worked for Blaine. A part of her couldn’t help feeling she was supposed to end up here, doing this, with him.
Elliot steered their walk towards a nearby restaurant, a glitzy place Amy had always heard good things about but never actually got around to visiting; it was the sort of place you brought company to but never bothered to go yourself.
