by Peter Ward
“Yeah, I had a visit from William,” Geoff replied. “His demonstration of what you allow people to do when they go back in time was very memorable.”
Jennifer laughed. “William Boyle? The Time Rep from 1666? Yes, he’s done a great job for us in spreading the word.” As they approached the elevator, Jennifer stepped to one side and invited Geoff to go first. “Please, after you, Geoff,” she said. “May I call you Geoff?”
“You can call me what you like,” Geoff said, stepping inside the elevator. He was followed by Jennifer and the security guard.
“Basement,” Jennifer said.
“Actually, I would prefer it if you called me Geoff.”
“No, I was telling the lift where to go. Haven’t you ever been in a voice-activated lift before?”
“O-of course,” Geoff said. “I guess I’m just a little nervous.”
“Nervous? There’s no need to be nervous.”
“I suppose not,” Geoff said. Unless of course you took into account the fact that someone was going to shoot him in thirty-seven minutes, he thought.
The doors closed, and the lift began to move.
“So tell me,” Jennifer said, folding her arms across her chest. “After all this time, what made you decide to finally come and meet us? We’ve been trying to get in touch with you for months, sent you letter after letter, but up until now we’ve had no reply. Why the sudden change of heart?”
“I don’t know,” Geoff said, trying to quickly think of a reason other than the fact that he was there to spy on them.
But once he’d thought of spying, that was the only reason that went around his mind.
Spying.
I’m here to spy on you.
I thought I’d do a bit of the old spying.
Spy, spy, spy.
Spy.
“Come on, there must be something.”
“I guess I’m just fed up of not being able to do what I want,” Geoff said eventually. “I want to be honest with the people I care about and tell them what I really do for a living, but because I’m a Time Rep, I’m not allowed. I just have to do what I’m told all the time in case I change something. The truth is, I’m sick of lying to people every day. Pretending to be someone I’m not.”
That’s rich, he thought to himself, considering you’re actually here to spy. But at least there was some truth to what he was saying.
He was fed up with being told what he could and couldn’t do, and how he was supposed to live his life.
Jennifer nodded. “That’s what a lot of you say. What’s her name?”
Geoff smiled. “Zoë. How did you know it was about a girl?”
“With the men, it’s always about a girl,” she replied.
Eight
Jennifer’s office wasn’t what Geoff was expecting at all. Considering how successful Continuum was, he was expecting it to be a huge, palatial room, tastefully decorated with expensive art and large enough to accommodate its own swimming pool, private golf course, and nine-screen cinema. In reality, though, her office was very small. It had no windows, felt a little cramped, and was poorly illuminated by a single naked bulb hanging from the ceiling. Above all else, the room was a complete mess—books were scattered on the floor, various blueprints and paperwork were spilling out of rusty filing cabinets, and every surface was coated by a thin film of dust. It was as if the place had never really been cleaned, unless the cleaner didn’t know the difference between a vacuum cleaner and a leaf blower.
On the wall to Geoff’s left was a large blackboard, scrawled with notes and long, complex equations. On the right, a row of bookshelves was packed with tatty old engineering textbooks and, strangely, a book about baking.
Then a thought struck Geoff—beneath this professional exterior, was Jennifer Adams a bit of a slob? Was she actually a bit like him?
“Please forgive the mess,” Jennifer said, tossing her suit jacket over one of the hooks on the back of the door and shrugging on a white laboratory coat. She walked over to a desk on the far side of the room, brushed some screwed-up notepaper aside, and sat down.
“This is your office?” Geoff said, pulling a chair up.
Jennifer smiled. “A hangover from my days working as a researcher,” she said, attempting to tidy a few more papers into an already-crammed drawer. “Back at university, I had to spend most of my days in an underground lab. Writing out formulas on the walls, sitting cross-legged in a corner surrounded by textbooks. At first I couldn’t bear it—it was just so claustrophobic. But after a while, I started to like it. Made me feel all cozy being surrounded by clutter. At Time Tours it was the same—whilst I was building that supercomputer underground, I needed to have a small office nearby, so once again I found myself cooped away, out of the light.”
“And you liked that?”
“When I first set up this place, the board tried to make me take an office on the top floor. That was what they expected from the boss of the company. I did it for a few months to appease them, but after a while I realized that I missed the security of being in a small, enclosed space. The solitude of it all. I knew where I wanted my office. Not up on the top floor in full view of the world, but down here where it’s quiet. Private. Not too much room. This is how I like to work—out of the limelight.”
“Huh,” Geoff said. “Well, everyone’s different, I guess.”
There was a knock at the door.
“Come in,” Jennifer said.
The door opened, and a man came in holding two mugs of tea.
“Tea, Ms. Adams?” the man asked.
“Excellent,” Jennifer said, waving the man inside. “Just put them down on the desk, will you?”
The man did as he was told, then left.
“Milk and two sugars, right?” Jennifer smiled.
“How did you know that?” Geoff said, picking up his mug and taking a sip. The tea was exactly as he liked it—quite strong and sweet.
“Just a lucky guess.” Jennifer picked up her own mug and warmed her hands against the side of it. “Anyway—where were we?”
“We were talking about your office,” Geoff said, taking another sip of his tea. It really was a very good brew.
“Were we really? How frightfully dull. Why don’t we talk about you instead? That’s a much more interesting subject, wouldn’t you say?”
“Me? There’s nothing that interesting about me.”
“Come now, Geoff,” Jennifer said, giving him a crafty wink. “There’s no need to be modest. I’ve been wanting to meet you for quite a while.” She gulped down a mouthful of tea and placed the mug back on the desk. “Quite a while indeed.”
“Yes, your receptionist—Jeanette, was it?—said something about that. Why have you been wanting to meet me so much, exactly?”
She looked at him for a moment as if she were carefully considering her reply.
“I know what happened two years ago, Geoff,” Jennifer said, leaning back in her chair. “I know about the alien invasion, the changes in the timeline—everything.”
Geoff shifted his weight in his chair. “You do?”
“Oh, yes. You’re a hero, do you know that?”
“A hero?” Geoff could feel himself blushing. No one had ever called him a hero before. He’d been called many things, but never a hero. “You sure about that?”
“Well, how else would you describe someone who singlehandedly saved the entire human race from extinction? If it wasn’t for you, those Varsarians would have wiped us all out. Every single person on this planet owes you their life. Isn’t that right?”
“How do you know about that?” he said. “Time Tours told me that they’d managed to cover it all up. Keep it a secret.”
“They did keep it a secret.” Jennifer picked up her mug of tea again to take another sip. “But I still have a few friends there. They feed me all the juicy gossip.”
“Even so, I thought that unless you were someone who actually experienced all the changes we caused in space-time continuum
firsthand, you shouldn’t remember anything that happened.”
“Is that so?” Jennifer smiled.
Geoff looked down at his watch.
Three o’clock.
His stomach rumbled again—the tea was doing a good job of filling him up a little, but he was still pretty hungry.
“I can’t believe that buffoon Eric didn’t realize what was going on,” Jennifer said, looking down into her mug as she swirled the tea around inside. “Explain to me again how his algorithm was tricked?”
“You want me to explain it?” Geoff tugged at his shirt collar. He wasn’t sure how comfortable he felt sharing that kind of sensitive information, but if he wanted to maintain the illusion that he was fed up with Time Tours, he figured he had no choice.
He thought back to his first day on the job, when all of this had happened. It was quite a long time ago, but he was pretty sure he could remember everything. Then again, he’d felt equally confident about remembering the rules to Boggle after a two-year gap, and yet he’d still managed to wind up in A&E with his arm stuck inside a traffic cone the last time he’d tried to play it.
“Well, you know how his computer worked before he fixed the loophole in its algorithm?” Geoff asked.
“Correction,” Jennifer said, holding up an index finger. “It’s my computer. I designed it. Only the algorithm it ran was his, and we all know that code wasn’t exactly a flawless masterpiece of programming.”
Geoff looked down at his watch again. He knew he’d only just looked at the time a little while ago, but he couldn’t help it. It wasn’t long now before someone was going to put a bullet in his back, and things like that had a way of making you check your watch a little more often than you might have done otherwise.
It was one minute past three.
Twenty-nine minutes to go.
He looked again.
It was still one minute past three.
Still twenty-nine minutes to go, and a few fewer seconds.
“Okay, let me rephrase that,” Geoff said. “Do you know how his algorithm worked, before he fixed the loophole?”
“Yes, yes,” Jennifer replied. “It created a precise model of the space-time continuum, calculating the exact vibration of every molecule up to something like 100,000 years into the future, right? Then it took a snapshot of that moment in time, when Earth will have apparently been deserted by mankind to explore new worlds. Then, the computer compared that moment to a simulation of history which took into account the impact made by the tourist wishing to travel. If the computer detected any changes, it stopped them from going back. Correct?”
“That’s right,” Geoff said, looking down at his watch again.
Like before, it was still one minute past three.
He really needed to stop looking at his watch so much before Jennifer noticed.
“Something wrong with your watch?” Jennifer said.
“What? No, nothing. What were we talking about?”
“You were about to tell me how Eric’s algorithm was tricked.”
“Right. Basically, the Varsarians worked out that after going back and wiping out humanity, as long as they terraformed the planet 100,000 years in the future to make it look identical to final snapshot in the original timeline, right down to the last molecule, the computer would let them go back to change the outcome of their aborted invasion in the twenty-first century.”
Jennifer laughed. “It was such a stupid flaw. Even a child could have spotted that loophole. You know he actually won a Nobel Prize for that algorithm?”
“Yeah, I think he might have mentioned it once or twice,” Geoff said.
Jennifer placed her mug down on the desk and stood up.
“Anyway, that’s all in the past. Welcome to Continuum, Geoff.”
Geoff tilted his head slightly and frowned.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you’re hired.”
Geoff stared at Jennifer for a second in silence. This was just like his interview with Time Tours all over again. What was it with people just hiring him out of the blue for no reason whatsoever?
“You okay?” she said.
“Yes, but I mean, you’re hiring me just like that? No proper interview? No entrance exam? No ringing around my references to make sure I really am Geoffrey Stamp and not just some chump who’s just walked in off the street pretending to be Geoffrey Stamp?”
“No, no, no. There’s no need for any of that.” She reached into her desk drawer and pulled out a business card. “Trust me—I know it’s you all right.”
“You do?”
“Here,” she said, handing the card to him. “I’ve had this waiting in my desk for a long time. Waiting for the day you would join us.”
Geoff froze as she showed it to him. It looked just like the one his future self had had on him. No job title, just the word Continuum, and his name printed in block capital letters below the motto WHAT WILL YOU CHANGE? Hands shaking, he took the card, examined it closely, and then put it in his jacket pocket.
“You okay?” Jennifer said.
“Me?” Geoff’s voice had decided to go very high-pitched all of a sudden. He cleared his throat. “Yes. I’m fine.”
“Good.” She got to her feet. “Now, will you follow me, please?”
“Wait a minute,” Geoff said. “Before I start, I did have a question, actually. I mean, as long as that’s okay with you.”
“Of course it is!” Jennifer said, making her way toward the door. “Ask away.”
“What exactly is the job?”
Jennifer stopped and looked at him.
“I’m impressed,” she said, walking back across the room and sitting down at her desk again.
“About what?”
“You’re the first Time Rep to ask me that. So far, all the others have assumed I was hiring them to be a Time Rep.”
“But that wouldn’t make any sense. If the whole point of going on holiday with Continuum is to go back and alter the course of history, to see the effects of different changes, it wouldn’t make sense for there to be tour guides based in different time periods.”
“That’s right,” Jennifer said. “In fact, there’s no need for us to employ any of you at all.”
Geoff knew what he wanted to ask next, but it was now getting dangerously close to half past three, or as he was now calling the time in his head, bullet o’clock. What if this next question was the one that nearly got him killed?
But it was too late in the conversation now to just drop the topic. He couldn’t just say “Never mind—I’ve just realized that I’m not curious about that at all!” and skip merrily out of the room.
He had no choice but to ask.
“So, why are you employing Time Reps?” Geoff asked, his face contorting into a wince as though he’d just asked her to hand him a live grenade.
Jennifer let out a long, deep breath.
“I’m hiring as many Time Reps as I can for one reason, and one reason only. Without Time Reps, Time Tours will go out of business. And the day I left that company, I promised them I would do just that—put them out of business.”
“Why do you hate them so much?”
“Because they cheated me, Geoff. ” Jennifer looked down at her hands. “That algorithm was completely useless without my computer. The kind of processing power needed to run that thing was astronomical, and I mean that literally—I had to practically create a scaled-down universe of miniature black holes to process and store the amount of data required. Took me three whole years of my life, sourcing the right materials, working out the physics, solving the problem of reading information back through Hawking radiation, sacrificing my personal life to hit deadlines, and what thanks did I get? Nothing. Well, I say nothing—they got me a box of chocolates and a card that said ‘Thanks.’ And it was one of those annoying cards where no one knows what to write, so all the messages were variations on the same thing, like, ‘Thanks for doing such a good job,’ next to someone who’d written �
��Thanks for doing such a great job,’ next to someone who had just written ‘Great job!’”
“Were the chocolates nice at least?”
“Not really. They were Turkish Delights. And I hate Turkish Delights.”
“I like Turkish Delights.”
“I think we’re drifting away from the subject here.”
“Oh, yes. Sorry.”
“Anyway, the day we launched our first selection of holiday destinations, I found out Eric had been awarded another Nobel Prize for giving time tourism to the world. I get a crappy box of chocolates, and Eric gets worldwide recognition, and the highest honor that can be bestowed by the scientific community. So, as I’m sure you can imagine, I felt a little bit underappreciated, you know? That prize should have been shared between us, but instead he took all the credit.”
“So you were annoyed?”
“You could say that, yes,” Jennifer continued. “From that moment on, I vowed I would one day invent something that would render that computer obsolete. After all, since I was the one who built it in the first place, I should be the one that decided when it was no longer needed, right?”
“Right,” Geoff said. “Only…”
“Only what?” Jennifer said, narrowing her eyes.
Geoff was about to ask about the rumor Tim had told him, that Jennifer hadn’t actually invented the technology used by Continuum, but had convinced a key scientist who had been developing it to leave Time Tours and work for her instead. However, given that he was trying his best to avoid getting shot, he felt it probably wasn’t wise to antagonize her.
“Nothing,” Geoff said. “I just forgot what I was going to say. You ever get that?”
“No,” Jennifer said, standing up from her desk again. “I never forget anything. But never mind. Let me show you the reason why we invited you here.”
Jennifer led Geoff out of her office and down a series of narrow winding corridors that felt as though they had been designed just to annoy whoever was trying to navigate them. Many pathways double-backed on themselves, others just ended for no reason, and all in all, the layout of the place was nearly as bad as the level design in Duke Nukem Forever.
Eventually, they stopped outside a room with the words DEPARTURE ROOM A written on the door.