by Peter Ward
Geoff was about halfway through his cup of frothy milk, thinking about what he could talk to the children about, when he noticed a man walking straight toward him through the crowd, looking at his watch.
Geoff placed his cup down on the table and stood up.
“William?” he said, looking the man up and down as he approached. Unless he was mistaken, it was William Boyle—one of the Time Reps from the Great Fire of London in 1666. Seeing him here wasn’t necessarily that unusual, since one of the perks of being a Time Rep was that you were allowed to go wherever you wanted as long as you didn’t change anything, but still—it was unexpected to see him here, of all places.
“That’s right, Mr. Stamp,” William said, smiling. “It’s me.” Compared to the William Boyle who had shown Geoff around the Great Fire of London when he’d first gotten the job as a Time Rep, this man looked completely different. Instead of his hair being all messy, it was gelled back. Instead of having dirt smeared on his face and blotchy sores on his skin, his complexion looked healthy, his face clean shaven. He wore a black suit with a white shirt undone at the collar, and his shoes were polished to a fine sheen. For a moment Geoff couldn’t believe his eyes—it was like looking at a contestant on Stars in Their Eyes after they’ve been through the makeup department.
“This is a surprise,” Geoff said, giving him a frown. “What brings you to the twenty-first century?”
“One moment,” William said, holding his finger up and checking his watch again. “Eight thirty-five a.m.,” he said, making a mental note. “Sorry, what were you saying?”
“What brings you to the twenty-first century?”
“I was looking for you, actually,” William replied. For some reason, William’s use of language sounded different from before. When Geoff had first met this man in 1666, he’d spoken in a very precise manner, with a slow, old-fashioned rhythm to his words. Now his voice sounded much more relaxed and modern.
“You were looking for me?” Geoff said. “Why?”
“Because I’ve got something incredible to show you.”
Geoff wasn’t getting his hopes up. William Boyle was from the seventeenth century—what could he possibly show him that he hadn’t seen before? A new breed of carrot, maybe?
“What’s that, then?” Geoff said, trying not to look too uninterested.
William smiled. “I’m going to show you what you’re missing, Mr. Stamp. I’m going to show you what you’re missing by not working for Continuum.”
“Continuum?” Geoff shifted his weight from one leg to the other. “You mean you left Time Tours? You’re working for them now?”
“I am indeed,” William said, “and let me tell you—it is amazing.”
“Is it now?” Geoff said, taking a moment to look around. He started to feel a little bit nervous, as if he were watching a horror movie and expecting a jump-scare at any moment. Could this be the beginning of the very chain of events that nearly got him killed?
“Do you remember when we last met?” William said. “When you were first made a Time Rep?”
“Yes. Yes I do.”
“You weren’t best pleased with the fact that we didn’t get paid, remember? That we weren’t allowed to buy our own place, or marry the girl of our dreams? All that stuff?”
“That was two years ago, William,” Geoff said. “I’m okay with that now. I understand why it has to be that way.”
“Well I don’t. I hadn’t thought about it until I met you, but ever since that conversation, I’ve always wondered what it would be like to travel through time without Time Tours watching over my shoulder. What it would be like to be able to go wherever I liked, whenever I liked, and change whatever I liked.”
“You’ve certainly changed your tune,” Geoff said. “The last time we spoke, you said you were grateful for everything Time Tours had done for you. Wasn’t it you who tried to tell me that despite the fact that you weren’t paid, your new life was better than the old one? Thanks to Time Tours, you said, you weren’t living in the street or dying from the plague, right?”
William nodded.
“But now you’ve gone off them?”
“Mr. Stamp. At Time Tours I was a prisoner. But now I am free.”
“I don’t understand, William—what’s brought this on?”
“I was approached by Continuum, Mr. Stamp. They showed me what I was missing out on by not working for them, and from that moment, there was no way I could go back to Time Tours.” He leaned closer to Geoff and lowered his voice to a whisper. “No way.”
“Okay, William,” Geoff said, taking a step back, “I’m going to be honest now—you’re really scaring me.”
William stood up straight again and smiled. “There’s no need to be scared, Mr. Stamp. I’m only here to offer you a demonstration, nothing more. I’m trying to see as many Time Reps as I can—I want to show you all the kinds of things you can do if you work for Continuum.”
“Oh, there’s no need to worry about a demonstration,” Geoff said. “I’ll just take your word for it: working for Continuum is really, really great.” He gave William a thumbs-up. “Got it.”
“No, Mr. Stamp,” he said, taking what looked like a set of car keys out of his pocket. “You don’t get it. I have to show you, otherwise you’ll never understand.”
Geoff glanced around at the hundreds of people walking past. “Whatever it is, why don’t we do this somewhere quieter? You don’t want to do anything in front of all these people, do you?”
“Yes, Mr. Stamp,” he said, pressing a small button on the car keys. “That’s precisely what I want to do.”
All of a sudden, a high-pitched engine noise filled the air, and the people who had been merrily walking into each other because they were too busy playing with their phones stopped what they were doing and looked up.
The noise was coming from a flying sports car, descending to where William was standing. The car was silver, with a sleek body, blacked-out windows, and a large spoiler sticking out of the back. The underside was made entirely of reinforced glass so the driver could see beneath them as well as in front and side to side. It was an impressive machine, and Geoff had seen hundreds of similar vehicles in the London of the future. There was just one problem, though—as far as Geoff could remember, antigravity cars weren’t going to be invented for another five hundred and fifty years.
As such, revealing a flying car to the people of the twenty-first century really wasn’t something you were supposed to do if you wanted the space-time continuum to behave itself.
“Oh my God!” a lady called out, pointing up at the sky. “It’s a UFO!”
“What do you think?” William called out over the sound of the engine as the car landed beside him. “This is the kind of thing Continuum lets you bring back with you from the future! Amazing, don’t you think?”
Geoff’s mouth hung open. He couldn’t begin to comprehend the damage William was probably doing to the course of history. Putting aside the fact that a piece of technology from the future was in full view of the public over five and a half centuries before it was invented, all these people had now stopped what they were doing instead of going about their normal routine; they weren’t nearly bumping into the people they were supposed to be nearly bumping into because they were all on their phones, or meeting the people they were supposed to be meeting, or having the conversations they were supposed to having. And later on, they weren’t just going to go home, eat their dinner, and carry on with their lives as normal, watching the latest episode of Downton Abbey—they were going to be on the phone, telling all their friends what they’d seen today. The shock waves from this were probably not just off the chart, but off the desk the chart was on, out of the room the desk was in, in a lift, out of the building, and in a taxi on the way to the airport with a one-way ticket to God-knows-where in its top pocket.
“What the hell are you doing? You can’t show that thing to these people!”
“Yes I can!” William said, �
��I told you—Continuum lets you hire one of these to bring back with you from the future! It’s got this autopilot feature that brings the car straight to your location with the tap of a button! Pretty neat, huh?”
“Okay!” Geoff said, walking toward William, “You’ve made your point—it’s pretty neat! Now stop this, okay?”
“Oh, this is nothing,” William said, opening the door to the car and climbing inside. He closed the door behind him and wound the window down. “I’ve had a few modifications installed as well. Watch this!”
Geoff watched as two panels slid back on either side of the car’s body, revealing metal cannons that extended out like robotic arms. Then suddenly, the car took off and accelerated through the air toward the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf at a blistering speed, weaving in between the buildings and swooping down at people like an eagle nose-diving toward its prey.
After a few minutes of performing an array of dangerous acrobatics in the air and ruining any chance Geoff thought he might have in explaining the whole incident away to everyone as a very elaborate magic trick, William brought the car around and hovered a reasonable distance from the main cluster of office blocks ahead. Geoff covered his face with his hands and looked up through his fingers. He was completely helpless to stop what William was doing, and he had a bad feeling about what was coming next.
That feeling turned out to be completely justified as a low hum filled Geoff’s ears, and he watched as a bright red laser beam fired out from the car, slicing through Canary Wharf’s skyline of tower blocks in a single diagonal streak. It was like seeing a samurai sword cutting through some flimsy tissue paper. Then the beam turned off, and for a moment nothing happened.
Everyone stood around in silence.
That was before the law of physics got its breath back and managed to catch up with what had just happened. All around, the buildings began to slide apart where they had been touched by the beam, falling to the ground in giant wedges of steel and glass with a deafening crash.
This was one of the most horrific things Geoff had ever seen, and as was customary with all horrific events, it was at this point that everyone decided it was probably a good idea to start running around screaming.
Four
Geoff’s body was completely paralyzed with shock. He didn’t move. He didn’t breathe. He didn’t even blink. In fact, he looked so completely lifeless that if he’d painted himself silver and laid a hat on the ground, he probably could have passed himself off as one of those street performers who pretended to be statues in Covent Garden. He wouldn’t have made much money, though, since every passerby wouldn’t have really been in the mood to stop running for their lives to see if they had some loose change on them.
He simply could not believe what he had just witnessed—a Time Rep from nearly four hundred years ago had been able to show up out of nowhere and lay waste to Canary Wharf in a matter of seconds. What was once quite a nice part of London boasting an impressive sixty-five Pret A Mangers had now been turned into a mountain of broken glass, twisted metal, and crumbling concrete—and what was worse, now there were only twenty-three Pret A Mangers left standing, and only ten of those were still able to serve hot soup. Fires were breaking out everywhere, thick clouds of black smoke were billowing into the sky, and dead bodies were scattered all over the place. He knew William had said that working for Continuum allowed him to travel through time and change whatever he liked, but he’d assumed there were at least a couple of rules to follow, like not going around massacring thousands of innocent people, for instance.
But apparently not—Continuum must have had even fewer regulations than if you worked as a city trader.
“William!” Geoff cried out at the top of his voice, looking up at the flying car. “Are you crazy!? What have you done?”
Through the glass underside of the vehicle he could see William looking back down at him, a broad grin spread across his face. How could he be enjoying this?
Suddenly, William sent the car into free fall toward Geoff, only pulling the nose up at the last minute to come to a stop safely beside him. Once the car had landed, he switched the engine off and opened the door, swiveling around in his seat to place one foot slowly on the pavement, followed by the other. As he stood up to get out of the vehicle, he looked toward the view of London’s decimated financial district and leaned over the top of the door, nodding to himself as if expressing some morbid satisfaction with his work. Any people that had been even remotely close to where he had landed were now running in the opposite direction, no doubt terrified as to what this insane person might do next.
Geoff paced over to William, grabbed him by the lapels of his suit jacket, and pushed him across the bonnet of the car.
“Mr. Stamp,” William said, lifting himself off the car and dusting himself down casually. “Please calm down.”
“Calm down? Look what you’ve done!” Geoff said, pointing toward a skyscraper behind him as one side of it broke away from the rest of the structure and collapsed across the street below.
Behind William in the distance, Geoff noticed three army trucks skidding to a stop. As the wheels screeched, swarms of soldiers began to pour out of the backs of the vehicles, each one running toward them with their gun at the ready.
“Oh dear,” William said, watching as the men and women got closer and closer. “Do you think I’m trouble?”
Geoff looked up as a roar of jet engines echoed all around. Up in the sky, a wave of fighter planes flew overhead, which had no doubt been scrambled in the hope they could provide some sort of defense against whatever had just attacked. “It doesn’t matter what century you’re in—when you destroy everything in sight, it doesn’t do much for your popularity!”
“Then I suppose it’s time for us to get out of here,” William said, walking back toward the car.
“You’re not going anywhere,” Geoff said, moving to intercept William. “And what do you mean by ‘it’s time for us to get out of here,’ exactly?”
William pulled a gun out from his pocket and pointed it toward Geoff. The gun didn’t look like a conventional pistol—it was quite bulky, it had some sort of LED display on the side, and the barrel was strangely wide, as though it fired particularly large bullets.
It took a moment for Geoff to comprehend that he was probably now in quite a bit of danger, but when he did, his mind leapt straight into action, trying to recall if he had anything useful in his own pockets he could point back with.
He had a pen with the cap missing.
Some chewing gum.
His train ticket.
A bit of his coat zip that had broken off a few months ago that he was meaning to get sewn back on at some point.
Well, it was a start. Maybe he could combine the items together somehow like Guybrush Threepwood would have done in the Monkey Island graphic adventure games, creating a makeshift device to counteract William’s gun?
“I mean you’re coming with me,” William said.
Geoff was still trying to think of some way to combine all the items in his pockets to create something that would help him get out of this situation. He’d gotten as far as using the gum to stick the zip to the pen before he realized this wasn’t going to get him anywhere, and slowly raised his hands in the air.
“But why?” Geoff said, taking a step back. “What do you need me for?”
“I told you—I want to show you something.” William motioned Geoff toward the passenger side of the car. “I want to give you a demonstration of what working for Continuum really means. What it really allows you to do…”
“So blowing up Canary Wharf wasn’t the demonstration?” Geoff said.
“No, no no no…” William smirked, waving his hand at the destruction he’d caused as though he were just dismissing a silly piece of gossip. “That was only the beginning. Now please, get in the car.”
Geoff shuddered. If this was only the beginning of what William wanted to show him, what the hell was next?
; He looked past William again at the approaching armed forces—there must have been at least fifty men and women dressed in camouflage uniforms, marching toward them steadily in some sort of cover formation. As they got closer, the soldiers split into four separate groups and created a wide circular perimeter around them.
“But—we can’t just leave!” Geoff said, trying to stall for time as he made his way around to the passenger door of the car. “Do you have any idea what sort of damage you’ve just done to the space-time continuum?”
“That’s exactly what we’re going to find out,” William replied. “Now will you get a move on?”
Geoff did as he was told, opening the passenger door to William’s car and sliding into the seat. As he sat down, three thick leather straps snapped across his legs and torso from behind, holding his body in place like a snake wrapping itself around something it didn’t want getting away. He struggled against the restraints, but it was no use—he couldn’t move.
“Okay, are we ready?” William said, sitting down next to Geoff and shutting his door. He wound up his window and pressed a flashing green button on the dashboard of the car, holding the steering wheel with the other hand.