Time Agency

by Aaron Frale

  Then nanomachines were perfected. People died mostly from catastrophic accidents that mangled the body beyond the repair ability of the bots. So the population began to swell. Child limits were mandated and programmed into the bots. Those without a sex drive would focus their talents and became the ruling elite in art, business, and politics. Soon it became unpopular to have sex or to date. The state raised the children. Then the nanomachines were perfected to prevent aging or at least slow it down. The anti-aging properties in the bots put the final nail in the coffin for reproduction. The government had to control it, or the population would overrun the planet. People gladly gave up their sex drive in exchange for eternity.

  “You’re doing this, so we have a population explosion?” Jerry was well rehearsed in the rhetoric of the state. He knew the hindrance of love logically, so he used the rhetoric to attempt to convince himself that his decision to deny love was right. But love was more powerful than logic. He wanted to believe there was another way.

  “It’s not just sex drive. It’s much larger than sex drive,” the prisoner insisted.

  “Like what?” Jerry said.

  “Have you been to the future?”

  “People go all the time.”

  “Not other people. You.”

  “No,” Jerry began to explain. “But my department goes to the past…”

  “Do you know anyone who’s been?” 07760 insisted.

  “No, but I’m sure someone has. I just find the past more interesting.”

  “We all find the past more interesting. I did too until I learned the truth about the future,” 07760 said gravely. “You are so incredulous because we are conditioned to believe the future is more like today. That humans already made the perfect society continuing ad infinitum. If you are told a lie long enough, you’ll believe it as truth.”

  Jerry could was at a loss for words.

  “What happens during a reprogramming?” 07760 continued.

  “You go into a chamber. They target specific memories to remove and fix broken parts of the brain. You come out missing the bad memories. It’s much more humane. Murderers are wiped of their past and their defect, so they aren’t doomed to repeat it.”

  “You’ve been in the chamber. Did you see for yourself what goes on in the chamber?”

  “No…but…the memory is wiped so no one remembers.”

  “So how do you know what really goes on?”

  “Because my supervisors and the other agent...” Jerry trailed off as he mulled over 07760’s logic.

  “Can you edit the files that record this conversation?”

  “I can.”

  “Then you’ll want to edit out the next part. Maybe even the whole conversation. I’m not asking you to believe in a conspiracy. I’m asking you to verify what you can see with your eyes. There are nanomachines of yours in my body. I'm assuming they are controlling my withdrawal symptoms. Link them to my visual cortex. Watch what happens during my reprogramming. Your machines won't be reprogrammed. They won’t look for machines with your signature. Hide my pre-wipe memories like your mentor did for you. If you think I'm a raving lunatic mad from looping too much on my own timeline, then destroy my memories. I'll accept my reprogramming. If you choose to help me, have your bots wipe the reprogramming and restore my memory.”

  “What can you tell me about her? The version you met from the future.”

  “A person shouldn’t know too much about their personal timeline.”

  “From the person who believes in a future conspiracy.”

  “Fine. But I wipe my hands of it if you drive yourself insane. She didn’t show it, but I am pretty sure she was sad that she had lost you.”

  “What do you mean lost? Like, dead? Break up?”

  “It’s not like we had time for an extended chat. So are you going to record my visuals when I go into the chamber?”

  “You are willing to bet your existence on your theory?”

  “I'm willing to bet everything. I did turn myself in.”

  Jerry nodded and reached out to his machines in 07760’s body. He began to rewrite the code. Jerry also began to think of ways to hack the storage for internal surveillance. Jerry spent lots of time during the training testing the limits of the agency. If his superiors did look back at this conversation, they would see the record had been altered since there was no way to hide the missing time. 07760 was correct. This conversation needed to be wiped, but it wasn’t for their sake. The missing time would make any supervisor suspicious if they happen to look. Jerry needed to wipe it for Nanette. Jerry may have bought a reprogramming ticket for himself, but he didn’t need to take her with him. Jerry doubled down with his own existence too.

  Event 12 – R

  The limp bodies of the agents sprawled before me. “I don’t know if I should be more afraid of them or you.”

  “Come on,” she rushed me down the sewers.

  “Could I get one of those—”

  “My trips into the past are carefully logged and so is the equipment. It was only a matter of time before agents came back to assist, but if it looks like you got the drop on us...”

  “Why are you helping me?”

  “I’m going to restore your memories.”

  “You can get my memories back?”

  “My…partner. The man who has been helping you. He programmed them into a briefcase.”

  “I had the briefcase. But it…disappeared.”

  “Yes, my agents picked it up. And since it was official evidence, I had to pull a lot of strings to get it here.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “I need you to find somebody for me. After that, I’ll look the other way. You can disappear in time.”

  “Why would you help me?”

  “For the same reason, my partner helped you. I know you are not dangerous. You are not the person they think you are,” she said. “The time agents will be here any moment, so I suggest you pick up the pace.”

  We ran down the sewer farther away from the subway. I wasn’t quite sure if I could trust her, but she was a better choice than my other options. I was sure her control on my nanomachines had a limited range or else she would have stopped me long before today. I decided to try and get more information out of her.

  “He murdered the bookseller,” I told her. “Not that you would believe me, but I stumbled into the bookstore after the murder occurred.”

  “I don’t believe either of you did it,” she said.

  “I’m no expert, but he had a gun, and there was a body shot by a gun.”

  “Which is enough for a total personality wipe. Some offenses merit just a memory wipe of the incident and any event leading up to the incident. Helping you escape isn’t enough for a total personality wipe. Agents empathize from time to time. But murder, that’s enough. I think you are being set up.”

  “By who?”

  “That’s what I’m hoping your memory will tell us.”

  There was something unnerving about her. She didn't have any emotion or depth. I experienced uncanny valley syndrome. In the early days of robotics, people were unnerved by robots that were nearly human, but not human enough. They produced discomfort. Theologians claimed that uncanny valley syndrome resulted from the machines lacking souls. However, people with plastic looking faces from airbrushing technology produced the same effect. Either way, the agent looked human but didn't act human, so I felt the discomfort. She could sense it.

  “You probably think that I'm a robot,” she ventured.

  “You do have a certain deadpan delivery. You're either a robot or you've watched too much science fiction...”

  “Your sarcasm won't work on me,” she said. “We are trained to be logical. Emotional decision making will hinder our jobs.”

  “People with power will abuse without emotion.”

  “Our prime imperative is to preserve the timeline. Emotion may not be allowed to supersede that imperative. If I have a job that takes me back to World War II, I ma
y be tempted to save Holocaust victims. But I can't. The Holocaust was a terrible event, but humanity needed to learn from their mistakes. The suffering I can end for one person only means the suffering of somebody else down the line. Humanity needs to learn their lessons.”

  “Remind me not to bring you to my next party. So why not use a robot if you are going to deny your emotions?”

  “Robots have their uses, but we never could get them to think critically like a biological being. They can crunch large datasets and perform repetitive tasks, but once they encounter something outside their perimeters, they get confused. We can teach them strategy, trivia, and almost any task, but we can't teach them to draw conclusions without directly traceable links of logic. What makes humans invaluable is that they can create ideas without direct links. They can imagine.”

  “So by your logic, you'll never truly be able to control people through reprogramming.”

  “Elaborate.”

  “Ideas are generated by individuals, and people can create them without clear, logical ties. So that means people will think of ideas regardless if you cut the ties during reprogramming. People will still think. You can never control thinking.”

  “We can shape and guide them after reprogramming.”

  “Just like a dictator shapes ideas through propaganda?”

  I could tell that she didn't have an immediate response for me. We walked in silence through the sewer systems. I was always ahead of her. She must have wanted to keep an eye on me. Which meant whatever controlled my machines wasn't automatic. She needed to activate it. Otherwise, she'd turn her back to me. We climbed ladders, crawled through tunnels, and scrambled our way through what seemed like endless green, infrared light. I was reminded of a ghost hunting show I saw in the hotel room. The people would run around in the dark looking for ghosts. Their faces were green. Strange noises would catch the ghost hunter’s attention. The sewer was full of noises; drips, scuttles, and their shuffling broke the silence.

  “Has science proved or disproved the existence of ghosts?” I said. I wanted to stop listening to the noise of us walking. It made me uncomfortable, so I elected for the discomfort of my uncanny valley companion.

  “Science only proves. Disproof is merely a lack of evidence,” she said confused at the shift of conversation. I could feel her eyes on my back.

  “You'd figure that science would have made a determination on the afterlife once and for all by our time,” I mused.

  “I think we lost interest once people no longer died. People only cared about an afterlife when they didn't have a choice but to see if an afterlife was real. Now that people can choose death—except for the accidents of course—people aren't as curious. Those who choose to die are pretty sure in their belief, be it nothing or another stage of existence.”

  “No proof of ghosts in the future?” I said.

  “Not in the three-dimensional physical world that we can observe. That doesn't mean they don't exist. It just means no one has scientifically proved them to exist.”

  “What about encounters with them? Everyone has a ghost story growing up.”

  “We treat them as fiction.”

  “What about someone who thinks they are real?”

  “Mental deficiency. We can correct problems with any mental disorders with...”

  “Reprogramming.”

  “You’re catching on. Stop here.” She turned to the wall. There was an access panel. She opened it and produced the briefcase from the panel. It was a very clever hiding spot, but it was a little too convenient.

  “Seems like too much of a coincidence that you hid the case close to where you would catch me,” I remarked.

  “That’s because it’s not.”

  “But how?”

  “I knew you’d be here. We had police records. News stories. You are a murder suspect. It was easy to trace you back here.”

  “But how did you know I’d be on that train?”

  “Because that’s where police lost you.”

  She shoved the briefcase into my face. I opened it. “The same file with my face on it from when I opened it before was inside. Why can’t you just read it?”

  “The file is charged with nanomachines tuned to your quantum signature. Holding your hand on the file will send nanomachines through your body. They will restore everything.”

  I desperately wanted my memory back. I felt like half a person most of the time. At the hotel, a waiter asked me what I liked. I told him I didn’t know. Food was a foreign concept to me. There were lots of menu items, but taste is subjective. The only way to have appeal for a dish is to have experienced it before. Meat, vegetarian options, pasta, sandwiches…there were so many choices. Most people could eliminate menu items they knew they didn’t like. I had to guess. And I had to guess with everything. It went beyond a simple lunch decision. My entire life was a guessing game.

  A silence passed over us. It was almost as if the ghosts of the sewers lurked on the edge of my vision. They needed their existence to be validated. I wondered if the ghosts faded away in the future because people stopped believing. Maybe when no one remembered, they disappeared. Ghosts would be my only witnesses if she were using me. Maybe I was a killer. Her partner would be my accomplice. She could be waiting for me to restore my memory, so she would lock me down again, take me to the future, and return a murderer to justice. She would be a hero. If I were a murderer, I’d be better off without my memories.

  “How do I know I can trust you?” I said.

  “You don’t.” What pushed me over was a look in her eye. Deep down, past the creepy robot girl exterior, she cared about something. She had a code of honor. I reached down toward the briefcase to open it, but I could not open it, at least not yet.

  “Let’s not do it here. I’ll pass out.”

  “I’ll watch you while you are out.”

  “Forgive me, but I can’t trust you. Let’s get to the surface. I will find a safe place and do it alone. Then we’ll meet up.”

  I was having second thoughts. Even though I wanted to recover my memories, there was a part of me that was still holding out. People were always trying to get me to open the damn briefcase. The well-dressed man dropped it off and turned out to be a killer. I couldn’t be sure my real memories were inside or more of this reprogramming nonsense. Maybe the memories inside would rewrite my personality, but I had to be a willing participant in it.

  “I would say that you are wasting time, but as a time traveler, I have plenty of it. Let’s go,” she said.

  We were about to move when something happened. There was a change in the air. I could sense it. We were supposed to be alone in the tunnel, but I knew we were being watched. I tried to brush off the sensation, but it was something more than that. There was a scuff and a click.

  A shotgun pointed towards the time agent’s head.

  “Don’t move,” a voice belonging to the gun holder said. I turned to see the attacker, but I froze because I realized he had a partner when I felt the barrel of the gun on my back. The man with the gun didn’t look like a criminal, at least not what I expected. He was clean shaven, had hair cut tight, and wore casual clothes. The time agent looked like she was concentrating on something.

  “Your nanomachines won’t work on us,” the man said, and her expressionless face bore holes into him. She must have been shocked because that was the first emotion I saw from her. Her bots must be modified to incapacitate people. Why use guns when she had tiny invisible machines to do the job for her? It seemed perfect. But something was wrong.

  “We will need to continue walking, but you’ll need to be silent,” the gunman said. “The police are searching the tunnels. They are only looking for your friend at the moment and are still a little ways off. If you make too much noise, they’ll come. You would much rather be with us than them. Now walk.”

  I turned to face the person behind me. She was a tiny blond woman dressed in workout clothes. They didn’t strike me as thugs, but she did have a p
retty fierce look in her eyes. She motioned me forward, and I moved. I didn’t understand how they got the drop on us. We had night vision eyesight and could see in the dark fairly well. There weren’t any hiding spaces. There must have been a passage that I didn’t notice.

  We began to walk forward. There was a fork in the passage ahead of us. They motioned for us to walk down the left path. “Where are you taking us?” the time agent inquired.

  “You’ll find out,” the man said.

  I took the risk while he was distracted and tackled the man. The small blonde whipped her gun around, but it was too late. I had managed to use his surprise to get the gun free. I pointed the gun at his partner. His overshare of information was a tactical mistake. He said that if the cops heard a loud noise, they would narrow in on our location. A shotgun was a fairly loud noise, so I knew they would never use the gun.

  “Take her gun,” I told the time agent. She grabbed the gun from the blonde. Our would-be-kidnappers weren’t soldiers, thugs, or probably even comfortable around guns. They were regular people. I figure anyone trained wouldn’t probably give up too much information. At least I had an advantage.

  “He told us to remind you about Russia,” the man blurted out. He was obviously nervous at the change in power dynamics.

  “What about Russia?” the time agent said. Her eyes narrowed on him.

  “I don't know. Our boss said if anything goes wrong tell her about Russia, World War II. He said you'd know what that means. He said he could find the man from Russia for you,” the man was trembling.

  “Who’s your boss?” she said.

  “His brother...” He pointed toward me. I had a brother? That was news to me. But from what I heard about the way humans were raised in the future, the concept of brother was nothing more than sharing genetic code. My brother would be like everyone else, another person in a collective.