Authors: Aaron Frale
Nanette sat across the table from subject 07760. The interrogation room was doorless, windowless, and had nothing but a table and two chairs. He was not strapped to the chair. He was not what she expected. He was a historian, a loner, and incredibly smart. Her attempts to unnerve him didn’t go over very well. Normally, she would sit with an expressionless stare until the suspects talked just to fill the silence. Her recent case met her stare and did nothing. He was either completely comfortable with silence or crazy. She couldn’t figure out which.
Most agents didn’t use interrogation rooms anymore. There were brain-scanning technologies to extract information. The brain was like any other device. It was a storage unit that held data and information. She could dive in at any time, but the process was quite painful for the subject. It would often stir memories not meant for the surface and cause discomfort. She liked giving them a chance to avoid the scan.
She needed to ascertain whether or not he was a threat to society. Most people who crossed their own timelines just screwed it up for themselves, but when he went back, he didn’t screw up his timeline and didn’t cause any noticeable change, at least not yet. Her organization had a “pure” timeline ordinance. Killing Einstein would merely result in another person “discovering” relativity because relativity was a phenomenon that existed in the universe independent of the life and death of Einstein. Einstein was just the first person to connect the dots publically. It was her job to make sure the young Einstein didn't die because some nut job didn't get the memo about the inability to “uninvent” relativity. She protected people who weren't even aware they were in danger. The agency would try to leave the timeline as free of meddling from the future as possible.
Sometimes, she couldn't prevent the meddling. Her most famous case was the man who killed Marinus van der Lubbe. He claimed Marinus van der Lubbe was the communist dictator of Germany who started World War II. Van der Lubbe crushed the rise of this party called the Nazis and gained power for himself. The time traveler only wanted to kill him before he gained power, so he helped Hitler from the Nazis frame him for a parliament fire. Hitler had van der Lubbe executed. If van der Lubbe was dead, the communists could never rise to power. Hitler rose to power instead and started World War II with the addition of mass genocide. History ended up being worse. People from the future couldn’t change World War II. It was like the world was ready to go to war, and if one person didn’t do it than someone else would step in and start a war. To make matters worse, she was unable to prevent his change. She tried to undo his change and failed. However, most of her superiors considered it a triumph because she caught the man from the future who helped Hitler and just accepted the change as part of doing business. She couldn't accept it but had to swallow her emotions anyway. Empathy was considered a hindrance in her line of work.
The agency publicized the case as a triumph. Because most of the agency work was shrouded in secrecy, the agency gave out heroic stories to the public every so often to ease their fears. If the agency operated entirely in the shadows, the public would get nervous. However, if the agency picked a case here and there with a hero, the public would feel safe. What could be more heroic than bringing a “lost” who helped Hitler to justice? Nanette became a hero despite her disappointment in the inability to set the timeline straight. She had to bury the emotions and play the part. Without her and agents like her, people in the past would have no defense against a future conspiracy seeking to take advantage of them. Despite humans’ lack of ability to alter the timeline too much, people still attempted to try. She needed to determine if 07760 was one of those people. And even though it wasn’t apparent what 07760 intended to do, she needed to find out. That’s why hours earlier, she picked him up. It wasn't illegal to speak with a person’s self in the past. For the most part, people avoided it because attempts to alter personal timelines usually ended in disaster. But murdering, stealing, or taking advantage of the past was illegal. She needed to find out why this case came across her desk as a high priority.
When Jerry and Nanette went to take the suspect into custody, 07760 didn’t act surprised. He simply let her take him in. Most people ran or complained about their rights, but rights sometimes needed to be sacrificed for the greater good. When people ran, they jumped time or attempted to hop on a transport. There would be a chase, and she would catch them. That’s why she was the best agent. She didn’t let cases go generational. She never failed. But in the case of 07760, it was way too easy. It was like he volunteered to be captured.
Nanette buzzed 07760’s apartment notification system late last night. Doorbells were antiquated when people didn’t manufacture doors anymore. Apartment notification systems notified the owners that people wished to enter their space. When 07760 beckoned them to enter, they disappeared from Nanette’s office and reappeared in his apartment. 07760 sat in a minimal apartment on a transformable couch. The apartment was empty except a bookshelf and couch. 07760’s grayspace was completely wiped clean. It was almost as if he knew when they were coming to get him. The only words exchanged during the arrest were when he waived his right to representation.
She realized that she would never gain the upper hand through a staring contest. She decided to let him win this round. The table lit up with a scene of 07760 engaging his double at the hotel. She looked for any emotion, and there was nothing coming from him. She chose her words carefully. “I assume you know why you are here?”
“The real question is why are
you
here?” he retorted.
She ignored the bait, “Normally, an encounter with a past self wouldn’t be a crime.”
“So let me go.”
“But the period you studied for your dissertation makes us very suspect of your motives.”
“I’ve done nothing wrong.”
“I have the authority to detain anyone indefinitely for any period of time if I feel they are threatening the timeline. I don’t think I’m premature to surmise that this meeting with your younger self threatens the timeline.”
He shrugged.
She continued. “What I don’t understand is what you attempted to do. I clearly see this meeting didn’t make you a ‘lost’ or give you a noticeable personal gain, so I have to assume you had other motives for talking to your younger self.”
“Would you believe that I was looking for good conversation and what better conversation than myself?”
“No more games. Why did you meet with your younger self?”
“There you go. Using that younger self term again. How do you know I’m not the younger one, and the conversation hasn’t happened to me yet? What if it was that conversation that led me to this very moment?”
The conversation was going nowhere. He was playing games with her. She decided to try a different tactic. “What was on the bookshelf in your apartment?”
“Books,” he said.
“They were blank. Merely covers and empty pages.”
“I like to change the titles around for my guests. It’s decoration for those who like reading.”
“No one reads anymore. We absorb.”
“I was going to have a bunch of secret police histories when you got there.”
“Your attempts at humor will gain you no tactical advantage here. Agents do not guide decision from flawed thinking such as emotion.”
“So bribing you with beer won’t work?”
“What did you tell yourself?”
“The secrets to a really good home brew.”
“I can see that you aren’t willing to talk. I was only giving you the chance to talk as a courtesy. We have much more evasive methods of acquiring information.”
“You’re a puppet,” he said with conviction.
“I protect.”
“You’re a puppet to the government. You’ll just do what they say.”
“Life is perfect.” She accepted the bait. Normally, she would never act so rash. But there was something about this person she found exceptionally irritating. “Humans want for nothing. They can achieve any potential. I protect those privileges.”
“But they can’t travel to the future.”
“Plenty of people travel to the future.”
“Name one.”
The little shit was good with words and an asshole. She worked in a department specifically focused on the past. There was a department that worked on the future, but she never needed to exchange information with them. So while she could not name a person who traveled to the future off hand, the department existed, so there had to be people working there. The problem with secret government organizations was that they didn't have a directory, at least at her clearance level. The only way to contact a person from the future department would be a formal request to her supervisor. Her supervisor wouldn't think putting a smug asshole in his place was a good enough reason for the contact request.
“Our society needs to change,” he said on a more serious note. He was on the borderline of discourse and the talk of a madman.
“Society has changed. We used to classify second class citizens based on skin color. Then the second class citizens were based on sexual preference. Then the lack of intelligence. Then the lack of wealth. But with each adaptation, society grew and accepted. Eventually, there were no second class citizens. It got better. There is no reason to change the past.”
“So why can’t we go to the future?”
She didn’t have a response for him. She had never been to the future. The time travel laws strictly prohibited traveling to the future without the right approvals. In fact, travel to the future was locked so tightly that her department’s nanomachines didn’t even have the ability built into their program. But it never bothered her. Her focus was the past. She enjoyed the past more. Come to think of it. She was one of the few humans alive with the authority to time travel at will. Even 07760, who time traveled for a career, had to have every aspect of his time travel carefully logged and authorized.
Despite the tight controls, anyone could get authorization for the past. Authorization for travel to the early days of humanity wasn’t hard. Families vacationed in the past. Students would take classes in the past. There were slews of time travelers. If a person was a good standing citizen, they could travel. If a citizen had never compromised history, they always got approval. But every trip was approved and recorded. And if a trip was denied, a citizen could do nothing to reverse the denial. In a sense, the government controlled time travel. Even private companies offering vacation packages had to get approval. Approval seemed so easy to get that she never really thought of it.
In the ancient days, people used to have passports for international travel. They would get stamps to approve entering the country. For some countries, it was so easy to get approval that the travelers wondered why it was necessary to get a stamp at all. Time travel worked the same way. Because she was such a good citizen, she didn’t think about all the steps involved. And because she was never denied, she thought it was easy. She supposed a person being denied their approval would feel frustrated by the process, but she sensed 07760 was more than just frustrated by a denial.
“I haven’t been to the future,” she said after a while.
“You should try it sometimes,” he said.
She stared at him and then looked down at the table. While she may have never met anyone who traveled to the future, she knew people did. It was like international travel—just because she never met a person who traveled to a particular country didn't mean that no one had ever traveled to that country. 07760 was making some strong claims. Perhaps he was denied travel to the future, so he had made assumptions that his experience was the same as everybody else. People often made assumptions that their personal story or the personal story of someone they knew was the rule when it could be the exception. She doubted his belief was such simple flawed logic. He seemed too determined in his convictions to be fueled by mere irritation.
She had assumed the reason she didn't hear about the future was that it was like her era of time. Once humans achieved the perfect society, they would exist continually. Going to the future would be like going to the same vacation spot over and over. She assumed that all the excitement was in the past. Humans struggled to grow beyond their primitive society. The struggle was the exciting part of time travel. A society with no crime, hunger, or conflict is not exciting. She knew that all she needed to do was find a future traveler to prove 07760 wrong. But she felt her time would be wasted. He believed it with the fervor of religious zeal. People could never be reasoned out of religious convictions. She knew his. He was a zealot and barely worth her time. Zealots only gained power when people listened to them.
She decided he was no longer worth the effort. He was probably a little mentally damaged to begin with because he risked becoming a “lost” by talking with his past self. But to do it in such an important time period was lunacy. He had to have known that he would be caught. She mentally scheduled a scan for his brain. While he didn't commit a crime, she did have the authority to send people to a brain scan if she felt they were mentally unstable. Mentally unstable time travelers were too dangerous to be let free without a checkup. He would be scanned. If the scan revealed criminal intent, he would be reprogrammed. The case was solved.