Time Agency (20 page)

The world was inky black. She could feel the comfort of her lover’s body cradling her. Phantom images of machines tearing humans apart haunted her vision. Flashes of light bombarded the blackness. When her mind calmed, the blackness would return. There was something horrifying beyond her vision waiting for her in the dark. The visions of torture and the flashes of light berated her senses again.

There was a commotion. She couldn't quite tell what but she heard a whoosh of air being displaced. Jerry stood up, and there was a slight breeze as the air molecules filled the vacuum of space he once occupied. Before she was able to inquire, a hand touched her forehead. Another second later, the air had changed. Her lungs felt the emptiness of time travel. She gasped like a new agent. Another smell replaced the stench of burning flesh and smell of machinery. It was an old musty smell. She was in a different location and probably a different time. The smell of mold from an old building invaded her nostrils.

The blackness that engulfed her vision was replaced with a bright light. She felt her pain melt away and her arms tingled. Somebody was deadening her pain. Her nanomachines had been absorbed by 07760, so it couldn’t have been her. Her eyes began to heal. They registered strange patterns of light as the cells regenerated. She felt her arm tingle as the arm began to grow back. An uncanny burst of emotion welled up inside. A tear rolled down her cheek. She would be whole again.

A hand gripped her shoulder. It felt familiar. It was the hand of her lover. But it wasn't a tender touch. It was a forceful, angry touch. There was hate in the grip. Something was wrong. The healing process halted. The painkillers ceased to function. Every pain in her body flared with a vengeance. She barely squeaked out, “Why are you doing this?”

“I want you to know who is in control. I can make you whole. Or leave you as you are,” Jerry's voice replied, but it was different. There was an icy edge to the voice. He was cruel and not the lover she knew.

“What do you want?” she managed to get out.

“To understand,” the indifferent voice said. “You are in my past, but a past in which I don’t remember you.”

She felt the healing of his nanomachines return, and she breathed a sigh of relief. Her body began to restore itself. The flashes of light in her vision became more than phantoms created by a mind that once had sight. She began to see shapes. And then the healing stopped, and she cried out in pain.

“It hurts more when you have hope,” he said.

“You forgot about us?”

“It’s not that I forgot. It’s that you never existed in my timeline.”

“How is that possible?”

The healing started again, but this time, she was ready for it. When his nanomachines connected to her body, she targeted one single machine. Even though she lacked nanomachines of her own, she still had the hardware to control them. For his machines to heal her, they needed to connect partially with her body. By the time the machines connected to her a third time, she was able to short circuit one machine by overloading it with electrical impulses. As soon as his machines left, she set to work on repairing the machine. She shocked it to life with electrical impulses. Since his machines were no longer in her body, it connected to her. She began to replicate more nanomachines.

“Something has changed. The past is different. It’s not as it was. We need to correct the past. But it’s delicate because we don’t want to derail our past selves from realizing their true potential.”

“Is torture part of realizing potential?” She needed time to replicate a new network of machines.

“Torture is an archaic view. I prefer to think of it as science. You shouldn’t exist, so I need to see if you are a real human or a construct meant to derail us.”

“The pursuit of science doesn’t have to mean the loss of morality.”

“Morality is defined by the person. It is a human construction. And like all human constructions when they outlive their usefulness, we leave them behind.”

“What is the point of being human without morality? Isn't that what defines us? We may as well be machines without a sense of the way society should behave.”

“People suffer so that others may live. It’s the natural order. Rather than experiment with people from our time, we go to the past. Those people are already dead. They already lived in a time of suffering.”

Her body began to heal again. She hid her growing network of nanomachines from his. Soon she would have enough to fight back.

“All those people, you mangle them while they are aware.”

“The awareness in the experiment is essential. Sensory data is important. We need to know, so we merely turn off your ability to move your muscles. We are not inhuman by your concepts of morality. We wipe the memory, reprogram, and restore people back to their timeline. Sometimes, the restoration doesn’t work. Such is to be expected in the pursuit of science. Those people never come back or go insane. For the survival of the human species, some people must die. It's survival of the fittest. It's been a driving force in humanity. Society is merely a dressing.”

“Survival of the fittest is an excuse for people weak of moral character. Humans evolved brains to build a better society, and if civilization isn't about continually improving our communal existence, then we will be doomed to fail. Society is only as strong as the weakest part of it. Societies destabilize when the weak are denied basic human rights.”

“Your problem is your emotional decision-making. The agency of your time claims to have rid emotions, but they are still there. They infect you. We have turned off the emotional center of our brains. It helps us see the world for what it is rather than wail and cry for what it should be. The world is easier when we just accept.”

“Striving to make the world a better place is never the easy path.”

“Why do you care so much?”

“Because it gave me time to hatch an escape plan.” Jerry’s sense of humor was rubbing off on her. She sent a distress call from the room. A small cluster of nanomachines left her body with the mission to find the quantum signature of her true lover, not his future deluded self. She encoded a distress call to Jerry. She felt his nanomachines reach into her body again. This time, he was probing. She had enough machines to fight back now, and they were better than her old machines. One design feature of the new machines improved the electrical pathways in her body. Before he could learn that she sent a cluster of nanomachines out, she sent an electrostatic discharge. It fried all of his nanomachines and sent a shockwave through his body. The charge rebounded on her, and she went into shock. They both went into convulsions from the discharge. She stayed conscious long enough to know that she must have disabled all the nanomachines in both their bodies. She didn't detect any hint of machines. She was truly alone in the blackness. Her mind slipped out of consciousness as did her captor. The only question was who would wake up first and reboot their nanomachines. Hopefully, Jerry would find them before then.

I transported to a bookstore. The time frame was right.
Stranger in a Strange Land
was displayed as a new book. I realized why we were at a bookstore. Ever since I appeared on the street corner, bookstores always seemed to have one thing in common—murder. The well-dressed man committed murder at the ancient bookstore. I attacked the bookstore clerk. I shuttered to think what would have happened if I’d had a gun. I remembered attacking him like I was on autopilot like a hidden subroutine was embedded into the coding of my nanomachines. We both had been to reprogramming. They were controlling us, but I wasn’t sure how the bookstore element connected.

If I was in another bookstore and crimes were being committed at a bookstore, then chances were there would be another murder. I scanned the store. I saw the well-dressed man. He was repaired as if he had received a new set of nanomachines. I could sense his new tech. They were technology from the future. The well-dressed man reached into his pocket and pulled out a gun. I yelled, but he didn’t respond. His eyes were glazed over. He was definitely under some sort of control.

I looked at the person behind the counter, and my heart stopped. The clerk was the same man who approached me before I jumped back from the future. He was the same man who was murdered in the antique bookshop. He was the man I assaulted in the corporate bookstore. He was the same murder victim in every single era. This man was sprinkled throughout time, and the well-dressed man was facilitating the clone’s disappearance from it.

I had to stop the well-dressed man. I focused toward him. I sent my nanomachines out to control him, but the tech in his new nanomachines was well beyond my level. I even tried a less direct route and attempted to stop his motor functions, but that seemed only to trip him up for a second. I supercharged my nanomachines and increased my speed. I blurred across the store. The bookseller looked shocked and was unable to move fast enough when he saw the well-dressed man approaching him with a gun. I jumped toward the well-dressed man and tackled him just as he shot. We both crashed into the Heinlein display and sent the books sprawling. The well-dressed man looked stunned and turned to me. He looked at the gun in his hand in disbelief and dropped it.

Before we could speak, I felt the displacement of air right before the three goons in suits appeared. They wrapped their arms around my limbs before I could do anything. My nanomachines went to work hacking their tech when I felt a force cut me off. The homeless-looking version of myself appeared. He smiled and made my limbs go limp. The goons didn’t loosen their grip.

“Get up,” he snapped and dragged the well-dressed man to his feet with his mind.

The clerk popped his head up from behind the counter. A bullet had torn through a stack of books behind him. Most of the people ran from the store when they heard the gunshot. The clerk couldn’t easily get out from behind the counter.

“Thanks,” the clerk said, and my doppelganger forced him to go limp. He toppled head first into the counter.

“Kudos to my younger self for being so smart, but we already knew that. Isn’t that right buddy? And you mister have a job to do.” He forced the gun back into the well-dressed man’s hand.

Jerry looked down at the gun. Whatever haze had overtaken him was now gone. The last he could remember was blinking out in the torture factory from the future when some people had appeared and laid hands on him. The next thing he could remember was holding a warm gun while 07760 lay on top of him. He didn’t notice his lover. He reached out for her, but he could not find her.

“What are you waiting for? Do you not like shooting a man when he is down?” the future 07760 said. “I can animate him for you.”

The clerk popped up from the counter, but his muscles were relaxed like he was a puppet on strings. The clerk waved and diddled around like he was a clown performing an act. Jerry could see the fear in the man’s eyes. Jerry couldn’t take it anymore, “No, stop. I can’t.”

“Yes, you can. And you have. Many times,” the 07760 double said.

“With mind control.”

“Not this time. You keep forgetting that I’ve lived this moment too,” he said nodding to his younger self.

“Why would I kill him?” Jerry asked.

“Because you will decide to. The time loop started when my younger self prevented you from killing that man. It was the first point in the timeline of the loop we could pinpoint. The only one without future versions of us.”

“But how?”

“Multiple timeline theory. If you go back and change your personal timeline, you don’t cease to exist. You simply create a variant of your timeline with the change. There is the older me who provided guidance long ago and myself who was influenced by the guidance. Like a tree branch, it’s still part of the same tree. It just goes a different direction. The branch was quite an accident. And lucky for the both of you, I have some memories to share with you from that first timeline.”

Before Jerry could protest, the goons forced a mint down his throat. Jerry felt his muscles lose and tighten as he chewed the mint. The goons also forced 07760 to take one of the memory mints as well. They both slipped into unconsciousness and a deep distant memory.

My vision went dark when I was forced to take the memory mint. The memory was hazy like a recording with loss from re-recording over and over again. I was in the bookstore from the sixties. I could make out the 
Stranger in a Strange Land
 display, but the detail wasn't crisp. The title was hazed and looked like 
Stran  r  n   Strange l and.
The world and the detail around me seemed to pale in comparison to reality. I was in a memory that was retold over and over again. I was in a copy of a copy of a copy. Who knows how many timelines this memory crossed to get to me?

I passed a mirror and saw myself. I was in a body much younger than my current one. It was the young historian who I met in the hotel. He was the person I really would never know as I had forgone my memories. But I was a witness in this body even though it felt like mine. Memory replay was discordant and felt like a waking dream state.

There was a pad in my hand. I seemed to be taking notes about Heinlein. The title of my notes said, “Public reaction to Heinlein.” From the notes, it seemed I was doing a research project on him. I was compiling a historical perspective piece. The notes told me that I was probably here purely by chance.

The well-dressed man appeared inches away from me. He pulled a gun from his jacket. I saw the gun and reacted. Since I couldn't read the thoughts of the person whose memory I was experiencing, I had no idea what I was thinking or even if I was thinking. I was clumsy but lucky enough to disable the well-dressed man by tackling him into the Heinlein display. In this memory, the gun never fired, so the clerk and customers simply looked with curiosity and surprise.

The clerk was the same man. He was the same person in the different points of history, as well as different realities, and he always worked at a bookstore. There had to be a connection. I didn't think my younger self knew about the conspiracy as he did not give the clerk a second glance. He simply took the well-dressed man down. The gun skittered out of his grasp and slid across the ground. I realized the well-dressed man from my timeline was experiencing this replay as well. I wondered how much of the memory he experienced. Did he start in the bookstore? Or did he see what he was doing before he blinked into the past?

The person I tackled seemed to be in control of his actions. Unlike when I interrupted the assassination attempt from my timeline, this timeline's version of the well-dressed man seemed determined to kill the clerk. There was no haze in his eyes. He scrambled out of my grasp for the gun. My younger self wasn't much of a fighter, so the well-dressed man kicked me out of the way.

He picked up the gun, and the curious onlookers of the scuffle began to panic. A woman screamed and ran. Another man stumbled backward. I seemed to be committed to the struggle, and I crawled toward the well-dressed man and interrupted his shot. The bookseller had ducked behind the desk. The well-dressed man kicked me in the face and pain shot through my body and slowly faded away. This version of me must have had a really old form of nanotechnology. If this timeline had not discovered how to make the nanomachines instantly synthesize pain medication, then it was behind in the technology tree.

The well-dressed man jumped to his feet and went to the counter. I stumbled to my feet in pursuit. The clerk was hiding behind the counter whimpering. He cried out in fear while the well-dressed man rounded the corner. I rushed him again and hit him right as he shot. The bullet tore the flesh of the clerk's arm and sprayed blood onto some books. The well-dressed man anticipated my attack and kicked me in the kneecap. I felt my bone crunch and pain shoot throughout my body. My legs were useless, and I sprawled out onto the ground. I was persistent because I made a lunge for his legs, but he stepped on my hand and used his other leg to crush my elbow. The machines from this time once again did not knit the bones as quickly as my current machines.

He turned to the clerk and raised his gun. The clerk looked pitiful and cradled his wound. Tears flowed down his cheek, and he was shaking with fear. He barely managed to get out, “Why are you doing this?”

The well-dressed man hesitated. He leaned in closer with the gun, and the man screamed in fear. The well-dressed man could not pull the trigger. Instead, he redirected his rage on the books and the countertop. He slammed the books and kicked them repeatedly crying out in anguish. After he had unleashed his rage, he sat down next to the frightened clerk and simply said, “I have to.”

My nanomachines reduced some of the pain by now. I could feel the slow process of the bones reweaving themselves. The tech in this version of myself was behind. It seems the experimentation on the people from my future led to some advancement. I forced myself up and crawled toward them. The well-dressed man continued, “Somebody is manipulating us.”

“I don't know what you are talking about...” the clerk said.

“You're a history student,” the well-dressed man said to me.

“I...” I stuttered.

“I know you are a time traveler. Like me... I saw your pad. Standard University issue,” he said.

“Mister... I don't know…” the clerk began, and the well-dressed man pointed the gun to silence him.

“Get your pad. Your bones should be good enough to walk,” the well-dressed man demanded. “We don't have much time. The police of this time period will be here any minute.”

I limped over to the mess of Heinlein books and found my pad. In addition to a writing device, it was a mobile library. While network communications to the future were impossible, books, films, etc. could be stored on external devices. The pads were out of date in my time. The nanomachines in my body could store all the information and more without an external device. People from my timeline gave up the idea of clunky external devices a long time ago. This memory was another timeline of myself, but the tech was so different that there had been a clear manipulation of the technology. For some reason, I had much more advanced technology than this other version of myself. The human experimentation was probably the reason. The people from the future would test nanotech and send the discovery back. Each time a new branch in the timeline was created, the tech would be better and better. These versions of us must have preserved this memory to play it back to our younger selves to justify their actions.

”Search for this man's face in the historical archives,” the well-dressed man said. I called up the search results. I must have been shocked at the information in the past because I could feel my body tense. But reliving this memory didn’t shock me at the number of instances the clerk’s face appeared in history. Each time, it was at a different place and a different bookstore. The well-dressed man motioned for me to show the clerk the data.

“What is this? Some sort of joke?” the man said and fell silent again. There was fear in his voice.

The well-dressed man turned to me. “You are a history student. Tell me. Can you manipulate time?”

I gave him the textbook answer, “You can’t. You’ll just end up creating a new branch in the timeline. The one where you kill your grandparents so you’ll travel back to a future where you don’t exist.”

“Right, but that’s for personal timelines. But what about history as a whole?” the well-dressed man said.

“Let’s say you kill Einstein before he develops relativity. The information for relativity was already out in the world. Somebody else will develop the theory instead. You won’t change history as a whole. You’ll just change dates and names,” I said.

“But what if you could place multiple people throughout history in key positions?” He said.

I glanced over to the clerk. I am sure my alternate self and current self had the same thought. If he was part of the conspiracy, then why would he be in bookstores? The clerk was a pawn in some sort of game. A bookstore seemed like a poor place to have a person attempting to manipulate time. “I suppose if you have many agents working in tandem. But why a bookstore? If you wanted to manipulate history, why not put a person in the government?”

“Bookstores shape history more than you give them credit for,” the well-dressed man said. “The right book put in the hands of particular people can inspire them in ways you couldn’t dream.” 

“But who?”

“The question is where and when?”

“We are in Oxford, England, 1961.”

“Good, and there is a man going to school here in Oxford. He loves science fiction. He doesn’t know it yet, but he will be responsible for major scientific discoveries. This is the bookstore where Stephen Hawking buys his science fiction novels.”

“So this man is feeding him information.”

“More than that. He is manipulating the future. While you can’t uninvent science because there will always be someone else to make the discovery, you can manipulate its direction or even accelerate it. Imagine being able to plant ideas in the minds of the world’s geniuses. A bookstore is perfect. It’s one of the few places that mold people’s minds without blatant manipulation. You could supplant a professor, but then it’s obvious. A professor would be teaching theories that are way too advanced. A clerk is subtle and personal. You could truly target information to one person.”

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” the clerk said. “This is absurd. I’m just a clerk.”

“That’s the elegance of the plan. Implanting a suggestion to recommend a book to a particular individual is so small. The person doing the implanting may not be aware of it,” the well-dressed man said. I could hear distant sirens getting closer. The police of this period were on their way. The well-dressed man turned to the clerk. “You should have a book waiting behind the counter for your customer Stephen Hawking. Let me see it. Your life may well depend on it.”

The clerk dug through the books. He pulled a book marked reserved for Stephen Hawking. From the cover, I guessed the book was about black holes. The well-dressed man didn’t even look at it. He tossed it over to me and motioned for me to look through it. The sirens were louder now. It was hard to tell how far away because I wasn’t quite sure how loud a siren of this time could be. My past self’s hands were shaking. I knew how I must have felt. I should have left the moment I heard sirens. Time travelers causing an incident in the past were very serious offenses.

My past self didn’t blink away and alert the time agency. My past self was too curious like myself. Curiosity was the reason I obviously got trapped in this loop time after time. I browsed through the book. I scanned for the mention of black holes, and the science in the parts about black holes was way too advanced for this time period. Stephen Hawking was legendary for his discoveries regarding black holes, but the knowledge in this book was well beyond what Stephen Hawking did. But if Stephen Hawking was given knowledge beyond himself, even in a science fiction setting, imagine what he could do with it. He could innovate science in ways well beyond his time. I flipped the book over and scanned the author and the title.

“This book doesn’t exist,” I said. “Part of my dissertation covers science fiction’s impact on science reality. And this book is not any known title or author I’m familiar with. But the knowledge in this book is well beyond 1961.”

“This book was designed specifically to inspire Stephen Hawking.” The well-dressed man turned to the clerk. The sirens were really loud now.

“Amazing. Who are you?”

“Jerry.”

“Roman.” I turned to the clerk. “Where did you get this?”

“I ordered it for Stephen,” the clerk said.

“Do you remember when?” the well-dressed man interrogated.

“No... we were talking...about science...and I thought of this book he would like.”

“Did you order it?”

“Yeah... I think. I can't remember...”

“This is why I have to do this.” The well-dressed man cocked the gun back. The police sirens were outside the bookstore.

“Take the book to the future with you,” I said.

“No good. He'll just get another one.” The well-dressed man steeled his nerves.

“Please,” the clerk cried.

I could hear the commotion outside, and then my vision blurred. My mind sunk deep within itself. I could feel myself fall into my subconscious. Pressure held my arms down. A void of existence left my mind adrift. Light began to fill the darkness.