The Oval Office was standing room only. The generals and admirals who had somewhere else to be when the Time Force was first announced had cleared their schedules. The president reached out to shake Captain Calderon’s hand just as she raised her hand to salute him. The president raised his hand to salute her back, and then they awkwardly switched to a handshake. Her grip was stronger than he thought it would be, and he tried to match it. She was confused as to why the handshake was going on so long, but he was the president.
Eventually they managed to break it off. They took their seats on either side of the president’s desk. That desk had seen plenty of history. Now, the future sat in front of it.
“Thank you for your time, Mr. President. As I told your aides, an analysis of the Time Force’s archival records shows a pattern of abuse by General Di—”
"I order you to use time travel to keep Mexico from getting nuclear weapons."
Calderon missed a beat, then stated firmly, "I'm sorry, sir, but I take orders from the president in my time."
"What, I'm not president still? Sounds fake."
"You've…been dead for about a century, sir." Her eyes glanced around the room in a futile plea for someone else to say something.
"How am I remembered?" said the president, leaning back and cocking his head like a cop probing an alibi.
"Well, you're…remembered well. You…" Calderon paused to clear her throat and seemed to be making a decision. "You're remembered as the man who made this country great again, sir."
"What would you say my biggest accomplishment was?" He leaned back further and folded his hands behind his head.
“The Time Force, sir.” It was the one thing she could say without having to stop and think. History had recorded little about this president’s achievements in office. “Thanks to your visionary leadership, for a hundred years the Time Force has—”
“What do you think was my second-biggest accomplishment?”
“Your economic policies,” she began, since she knew that economic policies were something that existed. Without knowing much more, she found several ways to say his were good.
This went on for a while. There were some truly talented sycophants in that room, and more than one was silently impressed by the amateur’s ability to think on her feet. As they were wrapping up, Calderon casually asked the president to extradite Dilling to the future.
“Sure, you can take him. He's just outside.” The attorney general started to pipe up that they should discuss this first. The vice president silently signaled him not to bother.
Just outside the Oval Office, Dilling sat quietly, elbows on knees and hands folded. He’d waited for hours to be called in to tell his side of the story. He stood up as Calderon exited, and took a deep breath while smoothing out his uniform. As he was about to step forward, Calderon took his arm and they vanished in a flash of light.
***
Jim Dilling went down in history as the twenty-first century’s D.B. Cooper: a daring thief who vanished, never to be found.
The scandal trumped the sense of national embarrassment that had kept public opinion from focusing on the Time Force. Once that psychological barrier was broken, it was all over. Congress voted to disband it before the week was out. There was talk in the administration about whether that was wise, and whether it might be prevented by showing Congress the evidence that they were abolishing in the present something known to exist in the future. But it wouldn't have made a difference. Call your members of Congress and ask them if their reelection is more important than preventing chronal paradoxes. They will say yes and put you on a list.
***
Shutting down the Time Force had essentially no effect on history for as long as the prospect of traveling through time was still bullshit, which was a very long time. The human story continued to turn its pages. The Great West Coast Earthquake. The Space Elevator. Rising oceans and wars over freshwater. The meltdowns of ancient nuclear plants that made cancer prevention the obsession of old and young alike. The Evermore probe's first video from Alpha Centauri's only planet, and the unknown cause of its shifting sands. The emergence of, negotiation with, and departure of the Singularity.
Then things began to not happen.
In the early years of the twenty-second century, a research AI chugging away in a state-of-the-art quantgrav mainframe at Caitlyn Jenner University began tweeting that time travel might actually be possible, and events started to go missing from history like Jenga blocks. The military did not begin to reconsider the usefulness of the Time Force, which had not been reduced by that point to just a website maintained by gig workers temporarily commissioned as generals in fifteen-minute intervals. Funding was not thrown at every avenue of research the AI could think of. One of those avenues did not produce a practical method of time travel.
The revamped Time Force did not come under pressure to reassure a public deeply nervous over the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision that it was constitutional for the government to travel in time. The gig generals, now hired on permanently, did not attempt to shore up the Time Force’s reputation by forming a Historical Internal Affairs unit to root out corruption in the service’s own past, starting with the biggest slam-dunk case they could find in a hundred years’ worth of financial records. The AI did not warn them that if they deliberately tried to change the history of their own organization, “it would be super easy to trigger a shitstorm literally beyond your comprehension.”
Terra Calderon did not join the Time Force in defiance of her parents’ wishes that she take over the family protein farm. Captain Calderon did not march into General Dilling’s office.
Dilling continued using the office-supplies budget to buy cases of those dark chocolate peanut butter cups they have at Trader Joe's. He and Gina traveled, on their own timetable, being themselves and answering to no one, for six years before he died of diabetes. A retiring major was persuaded to replace him by a promise of one star. The powers that be avoided the embarrassment of publicly shutting down the Time Force. Instead, it was neglected into obscurity.
In the early years of the twenty-second century, a research AI at Jenner U passed a psychiatric diagnostic after claiming that time travel was possible. The military dusted off the Time Force. A young, headstrong Terra Calderon left the protein farm behind. She traveled back in time and marched into Dilling’s office. The Time Force was shut down, and she didn't march into Dilling’s office.
And so back and forth it went. Humanity had locked itself into a perfect little time loop, with two seemingly separate versions of history that were really a single, continuous flow of events, in the same way a Möbius strip appears at first to have an inside and outside.
Except…
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