As the loop played over and over, variations arose like wobbles in a spinning top. That should not have happened. It cannot be emphasized enough how much that should not have happened. Maybe somewhere outside everywhere, a cosmic watchmaker noticed something off and gave the universe a tap and a shake. Maybe in the far future, one of the timelines produced an advanced civilization who subtly intervened after noticing that they were blinking in and out of existence every billionth of a nanosecond for some fucking reason. Maybe people are just so complex that there’s literally no accounting for them.
Whatever the reason, things wobbled. The fifth time around, Calderon swapped an “and” for a “but” when she was trying to explain to Dilling what the hell was happening. This nudged Dilling’s thoughts in a different direction. But not enough to make a difference.
The 94th time around, the first thing Dilling did when he looked up at Calderon was sneeze on her. It was a surprise sneeze and he didn’t have a chance to cover it. It felt disrespectful even though they both knew it wasn't. This nudged Calderon's thoughts in a different direction. But not enough to make a difference.
The 1,053,777th time around, a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil caused a gust of wind to catch Dilling’s combover on the walk from his front door to his waiting car. It fanned out like the gray, stringy tail of a peacock that’s had a hard life. His driver, who had trained for a career as a Marine sniper, said nothing.
Calderon walked in on Dilling still fixing his hair, causing him to quickly and clumsily shove his hand mirror into his desk drawer. He was more flustered and defensive than he’d ever been during this conversation. A bit of combover still stuck up like a cowlick. His thoroughly unprofessional appearance and demeanor nudged Calderon’s thoughts in a different direction. Enough to make a difference.
She decided to lean hard on the contemptible excuse for an officer. She threw down the glasslike tablet onto his desk and rattled off every misdeed laid bare by its illuminated text. He was as caught off guard as a person can be, but he still wasn’t about to lose a pissing contest in his own goddamn office. He offered her several options as to how the smug look might be wiped off her face. She helpfully pointed out that his uniform wouldn’t be so tight around the midsection after a few years in a military prison. It was as if longstanding frustrations were boiling over between these two people who had never met before.
She told him that where he was going, his family was long dead.
Dilling’s red-faced expression turned cold. Calderon took this to mean she was getting to him. She leaned over his desk till she was practically looming over him and told him what he had to plead to if he wanted to maybe see the outside of a prison before he died. As she delivered her best checkmate, asshole! speech, Dilling smoothed over his hair, and for good measure put on his little gray cap with the general’s gold braid across the brim. Then he reached under his desk and buzzed security. Two burly time guards (as the Time Force was required to call its MPs) roughly escorted Calderon to a time cell (an office that locked from the outside).
As soon as she was alone, Calderon activated her recall device, appearing in the twenty-second century version of Time Force HQ, which had been redecorated in a grim, industrial style that quite naturally made her feel like a badass, and that is why she immediately jumped back in the tachyon chamber and traveled back to Dilling’s office five minutes after he’d kicked her out.
Dilling, lost in thought over what he was going to do with her, was even more surprised when Calderon barged in the second time—and the first time he hadn’t known who she was or that time travel was real. He reached under his desk to buzz security again, but this time his hand was shaking from a second adrenaline rush piled on top of the first, which had been piled on top of two cups of the small-batch fair-trade coffee he’d had shipped in from Sumatra instead of staffing human resources.
Calderon admitted to herself that she hadn’t thought this one through. She lunged forward, belly-flopped onto the desk, and tried to grab Dilling’s fumbling hand as it hit to the left, then the right, of the little red button.
One of his fingers briefly made contact with the button, but neither of them even noticed. The two combat-trained officers flailed and grunted and slapped at each other’s hands like grade-schoolers grabbing for a kickball; one hindered by decades behind a desk, a failure to wrap his head around the concept of seeing one person twice, and the rich, bold flavor of Sumatran dark roast; the other by a position so awkward she almost couldn’t have planned it that way, the corner of the tablet she’d dramatically dropped onto the desk now poking her in the armpit, and the distraction of her recall device sticking halfway out of her pocket, about to clatter onto the floor.
Clatter it did, and landed button-side down. It vanished in a flash of light, on its way back to the twenty-second century, just as the same two time guards burst in and wondered if they forgot to push-and-twist the doorknob of the time cell to lock it. You had to push in the doorknob first, and then turn it a little, and that would lock it.
For a second everyone paused. Calderon and Dilling looked at each other. At some point in the tussle, he’d halfway fallen off his chair and was on one knee. She was still sprawled across his desk on her stomach. They were at eye level.
Did some mutual understanding pass between them? Might two people so rapidly humbled in front of each other by an absurd universe thereby see the humanity in each other? Was there any solace to be had in the shared pointlessness of all that had transpired?
No.
Calderon punched Dilling in the face. The time guards dragged her to her feet.
“Put her in the deepest, darkest hole you can find and lose her,” Dilling told them with a hardness in his voice they’d never heard before.
Slowly he got to his feet, gleaming with sweat and failing to recognize one of the pains in one of his arms as the beginning of a heart attack. By the time Calderon was in that hole, Dilling was in a deeper, darker one.
Calderon was quietly rescued, then loudly scapegoated for derailing a high-profile case by going after the target at a point in his timeline when he was just about to die anyway. Her report became a classic case study on predestination paradoxes while she cleaned hydroponic protein ducts back at the farm.
And that’s why we have a Time Force!
Comments (0)
See all