Continuum: Time Rep

by Peter Ward

  “Where’s the present-day Geoff at the moment?” he could hear Tim saying as he approached the room. “We need to speak to him as quickly as possible.”

  “Sorry I’m late,” Geoff said, looking around at everyone as he entered. “What did I miss?”

  There were at least ten people in here, all crowded around a figure lying on a table. He couldn’t make out who it was, but he could see that they were draped with a surgical gown. He immediately recognized Tim—his friend and headhunter for the company, who had nominated him to be a Time Rep in the first place, and Eric—an elderly, double-Nobel-Prize-winning scientist who’d developed the supercomputer that scanned tourists before they traveled to the past. He had no idea who the other people were, but they all wore white coats and looked very concerned about something.

  Maybe they were just nervous about the fact that they had to wear white coats, in case they spilled something on them.

  “Where have you been?” Eric said, pressing his hands to the sides of his head as though he were trying to mime being stuck in a vise. “You were told to meet us here twenty minutes ago!”

  Geoff gulped. Given that he had used time travel to get here (and therefore could have arrived anytime he liked), there really was no excuse for arriving late, but he tried to think of one anyway.

  “I, uh…tripped on a thing.”

  Brilliant.

  Eric squeezed the sides of his head a little harder. Nobody else in the room said anything. They all just looked at him awkwardly, as though he’d just suggested they play an impromptu game of strip poker.

  “So…what’s happened?” Geoff asked, trying to change the subject from his lack of timekeeping skills. “I haven’t done something wrong again, have I? I mean, I swear I haven’t told a soul what I do for a living, or—”

  “Geoff…you might want to come over and have a look at this,” Tim interrupted, motioning him to walk toward the table in the middle of the room.

  Geoff did as he was told and walked forward. When he got close enough to see the face of the person lying on the table, he stopped still and looked around at everyone.

  “Is that who I think it is?” he asked. The man looked to be in his late twenties, with thick chestnut hair, pale skin, and a round face. He was an average height, with a skinny build and narrow shoulders, and the more Geoff looked at him, the more he couldn’t help but think he looked extraordinarily similar to the face he’d seen in the mirror two weeks ago, when he’d last brushed his hair.

  There was one major difference, though—this man was much better groomed.

  His hair had been cut, his face was clean shaven, and for a moment he almost looked…handsome. The man’s olive-green eyes were darting erratically around the room, drool was dribbling down the side of his face, and every so often he writhed around in his restraints, but other than that, he looked rather civilized.

  “I don’t know,” Tim said, walking across the room to stand next to Geoff. “Who do you think it is?”

  “Well, I’m guessing it isn’t a lookalike you’ve hired to go and open shopping centers on my behalf?”

  “No, it’s not a lookalike.”

  “And I don’t have a long-lost twin brother?”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “And there isn’t a Geoffrey Stamp costume on sale in stores?”

  “A Geoffrey Stamp costume?” Tim said. “Do you even need me to answer that?”

  “Well, then, that only leaves one other possibility,” Geoff said, looking closer at the man strapped to the table. “Is this person me?”

  “We think so,” Eric said, walking around to the other side of the table and scanning the man with some sort of portable device. “If our theory is correct, this person is a future version of you.”

  “What do you mean, a ‘future version’ of me?”

  “He’s you, only he’s somehow traveled back to this point in time from the future,” Eric said, examining the results of his scan.

  “He looks different from me in some ways,” Geoff said.

  “We were thinking that too,” Tim said. “This Geoffrey Stamp has had his hair cut. He’s shaved recently. Washed his face.”

  “Wow,” Geoff said. “So he must be from a few years in the future, then, right? Maybe when I’ve met the right girl and started taking better care of myself?”

  “No, Geoffrey,” Eric said. “He’s from tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?” Geoff said. In front of him, his future self turned his head and looked him in the eyes. He appeared to be docile and confused, like he’d just been forced to listen to a conversation about sport. “This is weird. You mean to tell me that at some point tomorrow, I’ll be lying on that table, looking at me saying the things I’m saying now?”

  “If our theory is correct, yes,” Eric replied. “Tomorrow you will travel back to today. Understand?”

  “What time did his watch say when you brought him in?” Tim asked.

  “Three thirty in the afternoon,” Eric replied.

  “Three thirty?” Geoff looked at his watch. “But that’s only twenty-two hours from now!”

  “We know,” Tim said. “That’s why we’re all here, trying to figure this thing out. That’s the ‘emergency’ part of our emergency meeting.”

  “So what’s wrong with me?” Geoff said, looking into his own eyes. “Why aren’t I saying anything?”

  “We’re not sure,” Eric said. “But according to these readings, you’ve suffered an enormous memory loss, and only your most basic brain functions are working.”

  “My most basic brain functions? You mean the part of my brain that knows never to eat quiche?”

  “No, your mind is barely active enough to keep you breathing. You’re in a massive state of confusion, and it’s quite likely the reason you’re not speaking is because you don’t remember how to.”

  Geoff swallowed hard. “So do you have any idea what might have caused this?”

  “We think it may have something to do with these guys,” Tim said. He reached into his pocket and handed Geoff a business card.

  It was from that new company Ruth had mentioned a few months ago—Continuum—and underneath the company logo, he saw his name. There was no job title, and when he turned it over in his hand, he noticed the back was blank.

  “Continuum?” Geoff said.

  “That’s right,” Tim replied.

  “Where did you find that?”

  Tim nodded toward a black suit hanging up in the corner of the room. “You were wearing that when you were brought in. We found the card in your jacket pocket.”

  “But I don’t own a suit.”

  “I know.”

  “So where did I get it?”

  Tim pursed his lips for a second. “It’s an old one of mine.”

  Geoff frowned. “An old one of yours?” he said. “Why would I be wearing that?”

  “We’re not sure,” Tim said. “Maybe Continuum invited you for a job interview, and I let you borrow my suit so you could look smart for it. That would also explain your appearance.”

  “But how could all that happen in a day? And even if it did, that doesn’t make sense. If I was looking to leave Time Tours, why would I tell you? And why would I have an interview with them in the first place?”

  “Again, we’re not sure. But we do know they are trying to recruit a lot of our Time Reps at the moment. Whatever the reason, it looks as though you choose to go and work for Continuum at some point in the next twenty-two hours. Have they tried to contact you over the last few weeks at all? Arrange a meeting? Anything like that?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You sure? What about your post? Have they sent you a letter or something?”

  “Maybe,” Geoff said. “There’s quite a lot of unopened post at home, so it’s possible they’ve been writing to me. I can check if you like?”

  “You do that.”

  “So you think what happened to me had something to do with Continuum?”

&n
bsp; “We don’t know,” Tim said, “but for now that’s our only lead.”

  Geoff inhaled some air into his cheeks, held it there for a few seconds, then breathed out again slowly. “Why do you think I traveled back in time?”

  “We have no idea,” Eric said, “but there are two possibilities to consider. Either you traveled back in time of your own accord, or someone sent you here against your will. And then of course there’s the bullet you had in your back when we found you…”

  “Right,” Geoff said, nodding absentmindedly for a moment. “Wait a minute—someone’s going to shoot me?!”

  • • •

  Geoff spent the next hour sitting in the far corner of the operating theater, staring at the Continuum business card. He had his back to the wall, and his legs were hunched up to his chest. Maybe he could just stay here for a day. If he stayed here, no one could shoot him in the back, right? Then again, what if staying here was what got him shot? Maybe a cleaner who really wanted to mop the corner of the room he was sitting in got so annoyed that he wouldn’t move that he ended up shooting him?

  This was Geoff’s train of thought as he turned the Continuum business card over and over in his hands, creating increasingly ridiculous scenarios that all ended with him being shot in the back. In the end, he reasoned that anything he did could result in someone trying to kill him, so he gave up torturing himself over what fate might befall him and tried to think about what to do.

  The others used their time a bit more productively. Eric said something about going off to analyze the bullet, and the other men and women in white coats continued to monitor Geoff’s future self for any changes in his condition. From what they could tell, there were signs that his memory loss was only temporary, and that some of his higher brain functions were returning. This didn’t really make Geoff feel much better, though. What on Earth was going to happen to him over the next twenty-one hours?

  “What are you going to do to him now?” Tim asked one of the people in white coats.

  “Once he’s in a more stable condition, we’ll get him into a ward,” they replied.

  Tim walked over to Geoff and offered him a hand. “Get up.”

  “No.”

  “Come on—sitting there isn’t going to solve anything. We need to work out what’s going on here.”

  “Fine,” Geoff said, grabbing Tim’s hand and pulling himself to his feet.

  “Okay—let’s go over what we know,” Tim said, pacing up and down in front of Geoff. He looked pale, and had to stop walking every now and then to dab his forehead with a handkerchief. “At some point over the next twenty-one hours, you are going to leave Time Tours to work for Continuum. Something is going to happen that results in you getting shot, and you will somehow end up being sent back in time. You will appear on Tower Bridge unconscious at three thirty tomorrow afternoon, and when you wake up, you will have no memory of what happened, nor will you be able to communicate with us.”

  “Great summary, Tim,” Geoff said, trying to reach around to feel his back. “I feel so much better.”

  “Now—let’s think about the unanswered questions,” Tim continued. “What would cause you to leave Time Tours and go and work for Continuum? Why would someone try and kill you? How did you lose your memory? Why were you sent back to this point in time exactly? And how were you able to get here?”

  “That’s a lot of questions.”

  “Did I miss anything?”

  “Yes,” Geoff said, handing the business card back to Tim. “Now that I know what’s going to happen to me, will this change the fact that I get shot? And what has all this got to do with Continuum?”

  “That’s what we need to find out,” Tim said.

  “Who are these people, anyway?” Geoff asked.

  Tim looked down at the floor.

  “There’s a lot about that company that still remains a mystery,” he said. “But maybe if we go back to your house, we can start to get to the bottom of this. Didn’t you say you might have some letters from them?”

  Two

  Geoffrey did indeed have some letters.

  In fact, he had about six months’ worth, so he was hoping the letter from Continuum would be in there somewhere.

  The mound of post lay unopened in a large round pile just inside the front door of 23 Woodview Gardens—the small, inconspicuous three-bedroom house in the suburbs of twenty-first-century London, owned by his employer, Time Tours. At first glance, the pile of letters looked like they might be a piece of modern art, an abstract representation of a bird’s nest, perhaps, created out of envelopes, fliers, and free newspapers. It looked especially nestlike since the middle of the pile had a large dimple in it, although this had actually been created when Geoff had fallen into it last week and it had taken him three minutes to climb back out again.

  Upon arriving at the house, Geoff and Tim did their best to scoop the mail up in their arms and carried it through into the lounge, dumping it on the coffee table in the middle of the room like two detectives about to rummage through somebody’s rubbish.

  “I see you’ve been keeping the place nice and clean since I moved out,” Tim joked, looking around at the piles of laundry tossed into various clumps throughout the room. The laundry was interspersed with several half-drunk cups of tea placed neatly on the floor in different places, and you’d have been forgiven for thinking for a moment that Geoff was trying to invent a life-sized board game similar to draughts, only using piles of laundry and cups of tea as the pieces.

  Tim and Geoff used to live together in this house for four years, before Tim moved out just over a year ago. Geoff had first moved in when he lost his job as a paper boy, and Tim had invited him to live in the house completely rent-free. At the time, Geoff thought this was too good to be true. He had no idea Tim actually worked as a headhunter for Time Tours, and that the invitation to live with him was actually a ploy to keep Geoff under close observation, deliberately reducing his level of contact with the outside world. The fewer friends you had and the less you went out, the more suitable you were for being a Time Rep, since it was less likely that you would cause any disruption to the space-time continuum by behaving differently. It wasn’t until two years ago that he had found out the truth. At first he was furious about how his life had been manipulated, and how Time Tours had spent all that time conditioning him to behave exactly as they wanted. But he soon accepted every explanation they gave him for the way he had been treated without question and just got on with what they told him to do: meet tourists from the future, and show them around.

  They began to go through the mail. The first thing Geoff pulled out was a leaflet from his local pizza restaurant advertising a brand-new limited-edition meal deal called the Goliath Box. In the box you got a large pizza, four pieces of garlic bread, eight chicken wings, some potato wedges, and a dip. He noticed another leaflet from the same pizza restaurant, only this one was dated a month later. This time, they were advertising a brand-new limited-edition meal deal called the Gladiator Box. In the box you got a large pizza, two pieces of garlic bread, ten chicken wings, potato wedges, and a dip. On top of that were four other leaflets, each one from the same pizza restaurant, each one dated a month apart, and each one advertising a brand-new limited-edition meal deal with a name that usually began with a G.

  Next, Geoff found a letter from his parents. He had last seen them just over six months ago, when they came to stay for a couple of weeks. They were wishing him well and hoped to see him again soon. His mum and dad had emigrated to America a few years ago because of his father’s job, leaving Geoff to fend for himself in England. This had seemed a little harsh at the time, but he felt better now that they were visiting him a little more regularly than they had done in the past. In fact, when they were last in the country, they’d had a really nice time—he’d taken them out for a few meals, been on some nice walks, and his mum even managed to refrain from telling him about any problems she was having with her computer/e-mail account/lawnmow
er/neighbors/roof/car/plumbing, which usually became the topic of discussion if they ever ran out of things to talk about.

  Best of all, when they’d asked him if he’d found a new job (he’d been unemployed for two years before becoming a Time Rep, which had often been a bone of contention during any long-distance phone calls), for once he could tell them that he had. Of course, he had to feed them the cover story that he told everyone: that he worked as a regular holiday rep, meeting regular tourists on their regular holidays to London. He was careful to leave out certain information, like the fact that the tourists had traveled back in time from more than a millennium in the future, and that there was always the chance in his line of work that he might do something that could destroy the universe. He daren’t have told his mum that last bit, even if he were allowed to—she got stressed enough when she once found out he was going to cycle to school instead of getting the bus.

  Geoff put the letter from his parents to one side and kept rummaging around for something from Continuum. Tim was searching much faster than Geoff, and for a moment he looked like a contestant racing against the clock on some sort of daytime TV game show. In fact, it wouldn’t have surprised Geoff if there really were a real game show where contestants had to rummage through letters, given the quality of shows he often watched in the afternoon. Programs were always about contestants going to an auction/boot sale/flea market/antiques fair/storage yard, buying something for a certain amount of money, and then trying to sell it for very slightly more money, so a show where people had to go through somebody’s letters would be completely revolutionary in the world of daytime TV.

  A large amount of the mail consisted of unopened bank statements. He hadn’t been bothered to look at these because he knew his balance off by heart: zero pounds and zero pence. This lack of funds wasn’t due to an extravagant lifestyle in which Geoff constantly spent everything he earned—quite the opposite, in fact. The reason he didn’t have any money was that he didn’t actually get paid by Time Tours for the work he did. Even when he had saved the entire human race two years ago on his first day (for which any normal person would probably have expected a pretty good bonus), the only thing Geoff got was a pat on the back and a small fruitcake. Someone had piped “Well Done for Saving the Planet” on the top in strawberry icing, but they hadn’t written the e in Planet very clearly, so it looked like it said “Well Done for Saving the Plant.” It was a nice gesture, but he would have preferred to have received lots of money. Then he could have bought his own cake, with better piping.