The Army had two old office buildings they were planning to sell instead of bringing up to code. They let Dilling pick one to be his global headquarters. He presented the president with several options for the official insignia of the U.S. Time Force. The president chose the one that looked like a DeLorean.
“And give the uniforms little gray caps. Like those guys Darth Vader keeps choking, you know, in the original movies, where he chokes those guys. I like their caps.”
Dilling took his sweet time with each bit of bureaucratic busywork involved in laying the foundation for a new federal agency. He got no complaints about the foot-dragging, for one very simple reason. On the other side of that busywork was a question that didn’t have an answer. What does the Time Force do? They can’t travel in time. And traveling in time is the only thing they do. And there’s no such thing as time travel. And Dilling had a time travel budget of $1.1 billion to account for.
Dilling tried using it up on huge research grants to scientists studying anything that could be even remotely connected to the concept of time travel. But reputable scientists wanted to remain reputable scientists, and being funded by the Time Force wasn’t a great way to do that. A majority of the grant applications involved psychedelic mushrooms.
In addition to money he didn’t know how to spend, Dilling had also been given people he didn’t know how to use. They’d signed up to be soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen, but by order of the president they had to be called time soldiers. Without exception, time soldiers fell into one of three groups. First, there were the ones who’d requested transfer because they weren’t embarrassed about taking a job where they’d never have to carry out their stated mission. They were the most numerous and made the least trouble — the unsung heroes of the Time Force.
Then there were the ones who’d been lent out involuntarily from the other service branches. They had mastered the art of going right up to the line of insubordination without crossing it (except for the ones from the Space Force, who accepted anything and everything with a thousand-yard stare that Dilling sometimes envied). The better they were at their jobs, the more resentful they were. Dilling had intelligence specialists reading history books from the public library because their workspaces had no equipment for gathering intelligence via the timestream, because there was no such equipment anywhere and no possibility of there ever being any.
Finally, there were the ones who’d requested transfer because they actually thought they’d be traveling in time to defend America. They were mostly good for janitorial work.
***
About 18 months in, Dilling said fuck it and took Gina to Rome anyway, and then the rest of Italy. Fortunately, he had made sure that all Time Force personnel accrued leave time at a generous rate. Having fewer time soldiers around helped with the problem of finding things for them to do, plus it boosted morale enough that he hadn’t been forced to court-martial anyone.
Now it boosted his morale, and Gina’s. They had ristretto in the morning and gelato in the evening. A vineyard owner let Gina taste a grape right off the vine, and as it moved around in her mouth he could see on her face some sweet memory from many years ago silently returning to her. He haltingly drove her down a narrow cobblestone street on a Vespa that barely held the two of them, while she clung to him for dear life. An old couple watched from the door of a little row house and clapped for them when they made it to the end of the block.
They planned for three weeks and stayed for four. He forgot to call in and notify Time Force HQ about the extra week. No one noticed.
It was while watching the sun go down over the Mediterranean from the patio of a seaside villa that Jim Dilling was assaulted without warning by the pointlessness of what he had been doing for the past year and a half. This was nothing he didn’t already know. He’d long since made his peace with it, or so he thought. Now, the lack of purpose pressed down on him like a physical force, pinning him in his deck chair. The air felt almost too thick to breath. He was drowning in comfort purchased with turning his life into nonsense.
Gina had gone to bed early. It was still mid-afternoon stateside, but he didn’t have any friends he’d risk reaching out to with something like this. He was on his own here. He told himself to suck it up, ordered himself to, imagined the measured but firm voice of his first CO ordering him to. He was too old for this, understood too much for this. He was a goddamn grown-up who’d made a deal with eyes open. He was a good man serving his country. He recalled the most cynical operators he’d known during his years in D.C., comparing himself favorably to each.
None of this worked. The emptiness was too intent on staring him down. Over the next few minutes, it roasted him on a spit, forcing him to fully absorb the reality that nothing he did meant anything.
The experience reminded him of jumping out of a plane for the first time. Once he got over the panic of feeling nothing underneath him, he began to appreciate all that he could see.
No one cared what happened with the Time Force, and they were right not to. But it was more than that. When was the last time he’d testified before a Congressional committee? When was the last time he’d spoken to the secretary? Anyone with any oversight over the Time Force wasn’t just neglecting it, they were actively avoiding it. They’d all gone along with its creation, so they all wanted it as far under the radar as they could shove it. Forgotten. Invisible.
If nothing I do matters, then what should I be doing? he asked the emptiness.
The emptiness thought for a moment.
Well…what do you want to do?
The answer should have been that he wanted to retire, buy this villa or one like it, and finally write his book about how stupid the whole thing had been. But in this moment of honesty, he saw the shame and anger that he felt at his own insignificance. Could he write a detailed public confession of that insignificance? He saw his regret for making Gina put off her happy ending. He saw his venality, and that of the powerful people who had opened the door to him for their own purposes. He saw that he had no respect for them whatsoever.
Dilling returned from his vacation tanned, rested, and ready. He started slow, felt out how careful he needed to be.
Not very careful, as it turned out.
***
First things first. There were a few customary perks of his position that he’d just never bothered with, like giving himself a car and driver. Now he bothered with them.
He started working from home half the week. Since he had access to the Time Force’s most highly classified secrets, this required security upgrades to his personal residence. The screen enclosing his back porch had to be replaced with the same bulletproof glass that went into the new remote-controlled skylight.
He flew to conferences on global security or cutting-edge physics in a jet decked out for a general and his entourage, who were all carefully chosen time soldiers of the first type. They attended in civilian clothes, both to avoid ridicule and to make it easier for Dilling to duck out early, since the conferences were always in places he and Gina wanted to visit. If she came on the same plane, and stayed in the same presidential suite, and ate the same foie gras from room service, then there was no additional cost to taxpayers, right?
That’s what he told her the first time he showed her their private room at the back of the plane. She gave him a dirty look, then winked and stuck out her tongue. Don’t lie to me, you old asshole.
And if her teasing wasn’t pitch-perfect, if it failed to fully mask any hint of concern, it was the kind of concern you feel for someone who’s already made his choice.
***
It was unseasonably warm for a December morning, so much so that Dilling could get away with opening the bay windows in his newly remodeled office. The good luck felt normal to him. His daily review and editing of expense reports practically flew by. He didn’t even register the faint buzzing-whining noise outside his office, nor the flash of light from under his door.
The phenomenon on the other side of the door unfolded in full view of a time soldier mopping the hallway. He watched in awe, then caught himself and put his eyes back on what he was doing. He figured this kind of thing happened all the time on the upper floors, and for once he was lucky enough to be around when it did. But he didn’t want to look like a rube, so he just kept on mopping.
Without a knock or greeting, a woman marched into Dilling’s office. She wore a uniform, but it wasn’t one Dilling recognized. Except for the little gray cap.
She plunked a small sheet of what looked like glass down on the desk in front of him. It had white, faintly glowing writing on it.
She saluted.
“Captain Terra Calderon, Historical Internal Affairs, United States Time Force. General, you are hereby informed that you are the subject of an investigation into misappropriation of Time Force funds.”
Art by Julian Shaw
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