Continuum: Time Rep

by Peter Ward

  And a Playstation.

  But it wasn’t just Geoffrey who didn’t get paid—the same was true of all Time Reps. In fact, the wage bill for Time Tours was so small, it was even lower than the typical budget for a movie made by the Syfy channel. Obviously, many Time Reps complained about this, but there was supposedly a good reason for it: if Time Reps earned money, there was a danger that they would spend it on things they wouldn’t have been able to afford otherwise, which in turn could alter the trajectory of the space-time continuum. Of course, Time Tours understood that their employees couldn’t survive without some sort of income, so they developed a special system: instead of having wages, Time Reps could submit requests for anything they wanted. Food, drink, books, clothes, string, pot noodles, anything. The request would then get analyzed by the supercomputer in the future, and if it could be accommodated without disrupting the flow of history, the company would arrange for the item to be delivered within a few days. It was an annoying system, but at least it meant he didn’t have to go to ASDA.

  “This is the most ridiculous amount of mail I’ve ever seen,” Tim said, examining letter after letter in the hope that he might find one of interest. He paused for a moment and raised his eyebrows, as if he had just remembered something.

  “Do you see much of you-know-who these days?” he asked.

  Geoff stopped searching through the letters and looked up.

  Tim was referring to Zoë—the local postman who had delivered all this mail to 23 Woodview Gardens over the course of the last six months.

  “Now and again,” he replied, rubbing the back of his head. “We sometimes hang out by the lake, but, you know—as friends.”

  Zoë and Geoff had met many years ago, when Geoff was still doing his paper round and she was delivering mail along the same route. She was a good friend, someone who always made him laugh, and whom he’d had a crush on for as long as he could remember. Before Geoff was employed as a Time Rep, he’d never had the courage to formally ask her out—after all those years of nurturing a close friendship, he was terrified of ruining things if he expressed his true feelings. But it’s funny what a little thing like saving the entire human race from total annihilation does for one’s confidence, and after having thwarted an alien invasion, Geoff finally felt ready to tell Zoë how much he cared about her. He would ask her if she wanted to be more than friends. Compared to defeating the Varsarians, this would be a piece of cake, right?

  First of all, though, he wanted to be honest with her. He wanted to tell her what he really did for a living, that he wasn’t just a lazy slob who sat around the house occasionally meeting tourists from abroad in between his sessions of eating crisps and trying to beat his high score in Space Commando. He had an amazing tale of bravery to share with her, one that would make her see him for who he truly was.

  Only then would he tell her how he felt about her.

  Only then would he tell her that he loved her.

  Unfortunately, before he got the chance to reveal anything, he was taken to one side by the man with the thin moustache and told in no uncertain terms that being honest with Zoë was an extraordinarily bad idea.

  “But why?” Geoff had asked at the time. “What harm can it do?”

  “Mr. Stamp,” the man with the thin moustache had said, interlocking his hands over the small gray desk that sat between them. “I know this is a difficult situation for you to be in, but you have to understand—we can’t have you behaving differently now from how you would have behaved before. Time must stay as it is. You wouldn’t have asked her out if we hadn’t given you this job, so you can’t ask her out now that we have. And you can’t tell her what you really do for a living, or that you saved the planet from an alien invasion. Imparting this knowledge could drastically alter the space-time continuum. Do you understand? If she starts having an intimate relationship with you, she might not end up marrying her original partner.”

  “Her original partner?” Geoff had asked. “Who’s that, then?”

  The man had paused for a good thirty seconds before answering.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Stamp, but I can’t say. You know the rules.”

  Geoff couldn’t believe his luck—this was a real no-win situation. Before he was hired to be a Time Rep, he would never have had the confidence to ask Zoë out, despite being free to do so. Now that he was a Time Rep, it had given him the confidence to approach her, but he had lost his freedom; he could no longer behave the way he wanted to behave. Worst of all, he knew that one day, Zoë would meet someone else, and get married.

  Damn this job.

  He was so busy thinking about the situation with Zoë that he didn’t realize he had just uncovered a piece of mail that really stood out from the rest. The envelope was a shimmering silver color with a glossy feel to it, and looked a lot like something you would pull a nomination list out of at an awards ceremony. The top left corner had a strange logo shaped like a C, and on the back, just above the seal, were the words:

  C O N T I N U U M

  WHAT WILL YOU CHANGE?

  Geoff looked at Tim, running his fingers along the edges of the envelope.

  “I knew it,” Tim said, clenching his fists. “She really is going after every last Time Rep, isn’t she?”

  Geoff frowned. “She?” he said. “Who’s ‘she’?”

  “I meant ‘they,’” Tim said, correcting himself. “They really are going after every last Time Rep.”

  “Hmm…” Geoff tilted his head slightly. “Well, shall I open it?”

  “No, why don’t you just feel the edges of the envelope for the next ten minutes?” Tim said. “We’ve still got just over twenty hours before you get shot, so there’s plenty of time.”

  “No need to be like that,” Geoff said.

  He tore the top of the envelope open, pulled out a single, crisp sheet of paper, and laid it down on the coffee table.

  It said:

  23 Woodview Gardens

  Greyheath

  London

  GH14 3LQ

  21st January, 4678578 OSGMT

  Dear Mr. Stamp,

  Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Jennifer Adams, and I run a company called Continuum. You may have heard of us—we offer our customers the chance to travel back in time for their vacation, just like your current employer. At Continuum, however, we do things a little differently. Unlike Time Tours, we have the technology to allow our customers to go back in time and change whatever they like. People can alter history to explore the infinite possibilities of the universe, change things to see how their life might have turned out differently. Or if they like, they can just mess around for fun. Ever wanted to know what would really happen if you stepped on that butterfly in prehistoric times? With Continuum, you can find out. And best of all, it’s safe. Your current employer is desperate to learn the secret of our technology, but they never will. It’s what has allowed Continuum to change the way people travel back in time, and it’s why our motto is “What will you change?”

  And that brings me to the reason for getting in touch with you. We want to keep making changes. Our business is growing, and we need Time Reps such as you to come and work for us. We know how Time Tours are treating you. We know you are not paid, we know you have to keep secrets from those around you, and we can only imagine how hard that must be.

  But there is another way.

  If you choose to come and work for Continuum, all of that will change. We believe Time Reps should earn a decent salary, and we believe you should be able to tell those around you what you do. Thanks to our revolutionary technology, all of that is possible. That’s why so many of your colleagues have now left Time Tours to come and work for Continuum. Your employer will not have shared this with you, but they are in trouble. Over half of their Time Reps are now employed by us instead, and at the current rate of resignations and lost business, our analysts predict that they will go into bankruptcy in less than a year. But they deserve it. After the way they have treated y
ou, why should you show them any loyalty? Should a company like that really be allowed to remain in business?

  So in the spirit of writing a letter that concerns time travel, I will finish simply by asking you to think about the future. Do you want to spend it working for Time Tours, or do you think you deserve something better? We think you deserve something better—we think you deserve to work for Continuum. All you need to do is ask yourself one question: If you’re not happy working for Time Tours, what will you change?

  If you want to get in touch, our doors are open 24 hours a day.

  We look forward to hearing from you.

  With kindest regards,

  Jennifer Adams

  Managing Director

  Continuum

  Geoff stared at the note for a few moments before saying anything. “Wow,” he finally said, leaning back in the sofa and running his fingers through his hair.

  “Wow indeed,” Tim said, narrowing his eyes. He picked up the letter and read it again.

  “Is it true?” Geoff asked.

  “Is what true?”

  “You know. Is Time Tours in trouble?”

  Tim stood up and walked over to the other side of the lounge, stepping over a pile of pants and navigating his way past a number of stray socks that looked like they were trying to organize a prison break from the front room.

  “A bit,” Tim said. “Tell me—have you noticed anything different about the tourists you’ve been showing around these past few weeks?”

  Geoff thought about this. Now that Tim mentioned it, there had been a few differences. A lot more school trips, groups of students—people going back out of historical interest or educational purposes, rather than to have a holiday per se.

  “They do seem a bit less touristy.”

  “That’s the thing—all the proper tourists are going to Continuum,” Tim said. “When you’ve got the choice to use a company that allows you to go back and change whatever you like, why would you ever use us? Unless, of course, you want to see what things were like in an original, unaltered timeline. That’s why these days, the only people interested in using Time Tours are historians, or teachers organizing trips for their classes.”

  “And what’s this about the other Time Reps?” Geoff asked. “Is it true that they’re all leaving?”

  “We have had a lot of resignations over the past few months,” Tim admitted, leaning against the wall. “We can’t compete with what Continuum are offering. A full salary? The ability to go back and change whatever they want? It’s incredible.”

  “But if a Time Rep leaves, why is that a problem for you? Can’t you just hire another one?”

  “Are you kidding? You know how long it takes to find the right sort of person to be a Time Rep—it took seven years before you were ready for the job. It’s not like we can replace these guys overnight. And without a Time Rep to show people around, tourists just aren’t interested in visiting a particular destination. The more Reps we lose, the more customers we lose, too. It’s a vicious circle.”

  That was Geoff’s least favorite circle, the vicious ones.

  “So why can’t Time Tours change things and offer us a salary like Continuum does?” Geoff said. “Or at least let us change the past if we want to?”

  “Because that’s not how our technology works, Geoff. You know how we do things—if we allow any changes to happen to the space-time continuum, the consequences are disastrous. That’s why we’ve got that supercomputer, checking everyone before they go back to make sure they’re not going to alter anything.”

  Ah—the supercomputer. Geoff smiled. This was the machine that was supposedly capable of simulating the precise vibration of every molecule on the planet up to 100,000 years into the future, when humanity had finally left the planet to explore other galaxies, leaving the Earth as a pristine garden world. Whenever somebody traveled back in time, the computer would predict the impact their journey would have on the course of history, then compare it to the precise model of the space-time continuum stored in its databanks. If it detected even the slightest variation from the final second of its model, it would raise an alarm and prevent that person from going back.

  It was this computer that had first labeled Geoff as “one of the most insignificant people who had ever lived” when it first identified him as a potential Time Rep candidate. Someone apparently less important to the world than certain types of mushroom. In the end, though, the machine couldn’t have been more wrong—in fact, the only way it could have looked more stupid to all its computer friends would be if it had decided to change its operating system to Windows Vista, and then boot up an unpatched copy of Battlefield 4 for good measure.

  When it came to predicting Geoff’s insignificance as a human being, it turned out that the supercomputer had a major loophole in its programming, one that was deliberately exploited to make it overlook the fact that Geoff unwittingly prevented an alien invasion in the twenty-first century. Through a series of events that Geoff still wasn’t sure he understood, he was eventually able to expose the loophole, alert his friends, and go back in time to defeat the aliens before they invaded in a spectacular space battle. And at one point during this battle, when all hope was lost, it was he who had figured out the enemy’s critical weakness. He was the one who had taken command of the Earth’s entire defense fleet and destroyed a key enemy ship by ramming it into oblivion. His quick thinking had ended up turning the battle in humanity’s favor that day, and it was no exaggeration to say that if it weren’t for him, everyone would be dead. Except the aliens, of course, who would be alive and well, roaming the planet.

  So it was especially frustrating not to be able to tell anyone about all of this—particularly Zoë, given how impressed he thought she would be—and talking to her with such a huge secret hanging over his head made it impossible for him to act natural around her. When they met up, he found himself just regressing back to being the old Geoffrey Stamp—a nice guy, sure, but a man whose idea of responsibility was making sure he used all the milk before it went off. They talked about films and games and TV shows and the weather and other trivial things, but that was it. He would love to have known how Zoë would react if he ever told her what he really did for a living.

  “So…this part where they say I could go back in time and change whatever I like,” Geoff said. “Can they really let me do that?”

  “Apparently,” Tim said. “You thinking about Zoë? If you went and worked for these guys, you could tell her what you really do. You could tell her that you saved the world.”

  Geoff smiled. “I suppose, but I still don’t understand. If I told her the truth about me, wouldn’t that change the course of history? She’d start behaving differently, and that would have all kinds of nasty ramifications on future events, right?”

  “In theory, that’s correct,” Tim said. “But somehow, Continuum are able to send people back in time a special way, allowing them to change whatever they want and return to the future with no consequences whatsoever.”

  “But how is that possible?”

  “From what I understand, when a tourist goes back, they are given a device that allows them to jump back and forth through time and make whatever changes they like. However, once their holiday is over, Continuum doesn’t just bring them back the normal way; they reverse them back out again, undoing everything the tourist changed on the way back out again. Think of it as erasing a line you’ve drawn through a maze, back to the entrance. The clever part, though, is the fact that everyone retains the memory of what they changed, despite the fact that it technically never happened.”

  “Wow,” Geoff said. “That is pretty clever.”

  “Tell me about it. Our scientists have been trying to get to replicate the technology ever since Continuum first appeared on the scene, but so far they’ve had no luck.”

  Geoff nodded to himself.

  This was fascinating.

  “Why do you ask?” Tim said. “You tempted to go and work for them
?”

  “Tempted, yes,” Geoff said. “But I don’t think I ever would.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why not? Isn’t it obvious? ‘Dear Mr. Stamp,’” he said, picking up the letter from the table and pretending to read from it, “‘We’ve got this great job for you at Continuum. You get paid, you can ask out that girl you like, you are given free sweets every day, and in short, everything is amazing. Lots of Love, Jennifer thingy. P.S. We should probably mention that if you do come and work for us, someone will end up shooting you in the back, but hopefully this isn’t an issue. See you at the interview!’” He tossed the paper back down on the table. “No thanks. Before I do anything, I want to work out why someone tried to kill me.”

  “You mean why someone is going to try and kill you,” Tim corrected him.

  “Yes, why someone is going to have tried to…wait, I’m confused—what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying it hasn’t happened yet. No one has tried to kill you.”

  “Right—let’s start again. I want to know why someone is going to try and kill me. Better?”

  Tim nodded.

  “So let’s start thinking about suspects,” Geoff said, picking up the letter again. “First of all, who is this Jennifer Adams?”