Chapter Text
It was a sweltering spring afternoon in mid-May. He had come back into the office, swiping in through the security kiosk and submitting to the customary full-body scan for unsanctioned weapons, but was held at the entrance while the guards called up for his specific authorization. The Division Administrator had telephoned a provisional approval, even though it was a Sunday, even though it was the eighth Sunday in a row that he’d shucked the disappointing husk of his spartan Berlin apartment and returned to work despite having no mission on the books for another week.
The security personnel buzzed him through, and he pushed open the immense glass doors to the Recovery & Rescue Division. He wound his way through the byzantine labyrinth of empty open-plan desks, down into the subterranean levels of Processing with racks and racks of sealed evidence and all the way through to the lowest sublevel, where his office butted up against the Sarcophagus.
Flat cabinets and cantilevered tables. The cement bunker that they called the Sarcophagus exuded an odd charm, like Frank Lloyd Wright had crash-landed on a Gilded Age bullpen. The Sarcophagus was a remnant of a different, forgotten building that the ultra-modern Service Headquarters had cannibalized. His office made them a matched set: two relics uneasily synced with the rest of time.
He flicked on the lights. The old fluorescent tubes pulsed as they warmed up, casting light across six months of work. What had started as a side project had grown to monstrous proportions: red yarn engulfed his small office, overwhelming all of the furniture. A CRT computer terminal had been pushed off to the side and then eventually abandoned to the string. At the end of each thread lay an index card (titled, dated and geo-located) that represented the sum of his personal knowledge of the chain of events that would precipitate World War III.
Except no one called it World War III. No one other than the Instructor. In Recovery & Rescue, they simply called it the Future Incident.
Hell, the name made a perverse kind of sense.
Recovery & Rescue worked solely in reverse time. No agent who joined the team would ever see the results of their work. To them, the future remained indefinite and theoretical. To join Recovery & Rescue, a prospective agent had to die--and while their actions might change the world, their death was a fixed point on their personal timeline that they could not erase. This fact was drilled into all new trainees; the Instructor, who knew more about time than anyone else at the Service, made them repeat it like a mantra. It was Inviolate Rule Number One.
Inviolate Rule Number One: Agents cannot move forward beyond their time of death.
He had died in a train yard, his head crushed against a rail.
He had come to in an ambulance. An oxygen mask had been fitted over his face. He had tried to breathe and couldn’t stop his lungs from burning as they expelled all of the oxygen in them. A Recruiter had steadied him and told him not to fight it, to wait for his lungs to catch up with what his brain already knew. He had laid on that gurney choking, drowning on dry land... until his body intuited the new rhythm. Exhale, inhale. Exhale, inhale.
When he had looked less peaked, the Recruiter had taken his pulse. “Welcome to the afterlife,” the Recruiter had joked.
The pitch was short: do you want to stop global annihilation?
“All I have for you is a word,” the Recruiter had said. “Tenet. It’ll open the right doors, and some of the wrong ones.”
He couldn’t even remember his name, but he felt the righteousness of purpose. He’d accepted on the spot.
In return, the Service had given him an office (cramped), an apartment (adequate), a call-sign (Protagonist), a goal (save the world)--and little else. His briefings were sparse, his Division was tight-lipped, and Recovery & Rescue never called him in to top-level meets. Hell, he’d never even met the Division Administrator, who wouldn’t know him from Adam.
During the first month, it had frustrated him to no end. But as mission after mission had been completed, he had learned that none of the other agents had the same freedom that he did. Stuck in the bowels of Headquarters, he was free to spend his off-hours however he pleased. In the open floor offices, the agents were regulated by time cards, meetings, and 14-point schedules.
So he’d chalked this one up as a draw. He sacrificed a place in the Division’s inner circle for the freedom to solve problems on his own terms.
In the absence of official meaning, he created his own.
Card-and-string brainstorming offered him a tangible method of interacting with a world that streamed by him in reverse. Six months’ worth of index cards filled his office thicker than a forest. The nest of string that connected Event B with Cause A increased in density and ferocity with each new mission he completed. Yet gaps in his knowledge stubbornly persisted. Who was trying to precipitate the Future Incident? And why had all his missions in the past six months put no visible dent into the shape of the future?
How would anyone know if the shape of the future changed?
--That question challenged him, and he shot off about it whenever he could find another willing ear to listen. It was above his pay grade, everyone told him. Perhaps the Division’s inner circle knew, but--he couldn’t count on that. The stakes were too high. Each agent had to act as though they were the only one standing between survival and catastrophe.
Nevertheless, red string and supposition could only take him so far. If he was going to prevent World War III, he needed actionable intelligence.
*
He stowed the last explosive charge in the Munitions locker, and stripped off his tactical gear. It wasn’t exactly breaking protocol to have them. He had lifted them from the Dresden Recovery op--another solo mission with a violent conclusion and an ambiguous beginning. He had taken the explosives rather than let them be collected by the saboteur (who would have retrieved them, driven them back to their origin, and then begun the laborious task of un-fabricating them). Now they were here, deactivated and dislocated from their original timeline. It was probably against Division policy to remove objects from their natural course. But he’d been given no explicit instruction about how items affected the timestream--and he was getting restless. If the Instructor had the actual thing to study instead of just a field report full of hasty guesses, she might be able to discern the explosives’ maker or their purpose.
Actionable intelligence.
He bent over to unfasten his empty ankle holster--
That was when he felt the lightest touch on his shoulder.
His heart leapt into his throat.
His knives were in his boots on the bench behind him, his gun in its holster on top of his tactical vest. He was completely unarmed.
“It’s customary not to sneak up on a man undressing,” he said lightly as he leaned towards his boots.
“Granted. But it’s also customary for you to shoot first and ask questions later, so I’ll take my chances with rudeness.”
The hand withdrew. He rethought his options. (Did he trust himself at this range with a knife? He’d barely had time to practice with them.) Diving for the tactical vest instead, he grabbed his sidearm and spun on his heels.
The room was empty.
A sinking feeling prickled at his throat. He opened the Munitions locker. The explosive charges had vanished.
He reviewed the security tapes. He had been alone when he entered Munitions. He queued the footage up to his entrance, and watched it forward and backward. He entered; he undressed; he spooked; he ran to the security vault; and then back again on a loop.
No one else had entered Munitions. No one touched his shoulder. There was no other man. There were no explosives.
Inwardly, he took measure of the situation. The voice had been male. British. He wracked his memory for the current deployments bulletin. The Service had an entire field office in Britain; any agent could be visiting the Berlin office, but there hadn’t been any postings about visiting agents in the last three months. And now that the explosives were gone, with no evidence that he had ever taken them from the Recovery op in the first place, he saw the events of the night in a more conspiratorial hue.
The only division that could have known what he was doing, and done something about it, was one that was moving in a direction different than his own.
Temporal Affairs.
He unwound the tape reel from the player, and slipped it out of the vault with him. Back in his office, he wedged the tape reel behind a row of unremarkable-looking books.
The card he wrote for the day was short and to the point.
2019-May-30. Anomaly encountered. Investigation ongoing.
*
Recovery & Rescue was the smallest division of the Service. Agents burned out and resumed forward time almost as quickly as they finished their field training. At six months, he was the third-longest-serving agent in the Berlin office. His status allowed him to enjoy a few luxuries at Headquarters between missions.
An extra account for mission expenses. Trips to the Sarcophagus to speak to the Instructor about non-critical mission objectives. Lingering coffee breaks in the aboveground offices.
It wasn’t curiosity that led him to take these breaks outside of Temporal Affairs.
No, they simply had the nicest view of Berlin’s green boulevards from the Atrium. So if he took his coffee in the Atrium once a week and just so happened to watch a situation board that echoed his own on Temporal Affairs’ level--
--that was nothing other than a happy coincidence.
Cards disappeared from Temporal Affairs’ board as Recovery & Rescue cleared objectives. Temporal Affairs existed in the forward flow of time, so his surveillance mainly constituted watching their intelligence decrease, as lines disappeared off of cards, nodes grew more sparse, and their knowledge grew thinner.
His presence in the Atrium toed the line, but that was as far as he was willing to go without concrete evidence of tampering. Nothing about the explosives turned up on their cards; and maybe it couldn’t. For all he knew, the thief could be safely confined to the future he could no longer access. It was all speculation at this point. He had no evidence but his memory to back him up.
And he refused to break the second inviolate rule of the Service.
Inviolate Rule Number Two: No communication between divisions.
He sipped his Blümchenkaffee and watched their operational board through the foot-thick two-way glass that separated Temporal Affairs from Recovery & Rescue, and wondered which department knew more about the future at this point in time.
*
The knock at his door surprised him. In six months, no one had visited his office.
To his further surprise, it was the Instructor. She had stepped out of the Sarcophagus for the first time in his memory. She peeked her head in, then did a double-take at the straight-out-of-the-50s glass panel door, complete with his code name in gold-leaf. PROTAGONIST.
It was a bit on the nose, but all of his requests to assign him a new callsign had disappeared, futilely, resigned to the future.
She took in the mid-century modern tanker desk and matching desk set. Everything about his office clashed with the ultra-modern design of the rest of Headquarters, but the Instructor visibly relaxed.
He patted the dust off of his chair and waved her into the office. The wooden roller chair squeaked as he eased himself into it gingerly. That freed up enough space for the Instructor to move around the cramped office. She touched the strings, read the cards.
“So this is what you do with your free time,” the Instructor said appraisingly.
Her tone sounded approving. The Instructor was never approving. Her gaze jumped around the room until it lit on a card nearly buried under red string.
2019-November-18. PROTAGONIST awakens. The first card he had tacked to his board.
“One month forward, an oil tanker off of Jakarta. Two months forward, four concrete factories in Georgia. Three months forward, the Metropolitan Opera.” She touched the cards as she named them. “These are only your recovery operations. Where is the rest of your division?”
“I couldn’t tell you. Stonewalling other agents is Unofficial Rule Number Four,” he joked. “I can’t get straight answers from the rest of my division.”
“They tell me nothing either,” she commiserated. “In the last six months, I have only had one update. The dance protocol for new agents.”
They shared a look; he’d attended the second session of the dance class. How to time yourself dancing with a partner traveling in a different temporal direction than you, in five different classic ballroom dances. What he’d learned was that Recovery was full of agents with two left feet.
She studied the web and its multiplying complications, and then put her finger on the thread that led towards the single blank card, tacked somewhere near the bookshelf, that symbolized the Future Incident.
“Ahhh, I see now. What you are charting is time. Causes have effects, and then effects have further causes. You can trace them forwards and backwards, and see each of them as they are. A type of thinking similar to the Sator Square that the Service is so fond of.”
“I hadn’t thought about it that way,” he said honestly.
“It is the type of thinking that makes great spies or mediocre historians,” she shot back.
Affection welled up in him; their working relationship was playful and he enjoyed the ease with which she joked with him or rebuked him. He hoped that this meant that they were friends.
“Let me guess--” He didn’t try to suppress his grin. “--you’re going to tell me the world works in a different way.”
She produced a sand timer from her pocket, and set it down on his desk. To his surprise, grains tumbled through the bottleneck. He knew his office interacted with time strangely but he’d never seen that principle demonstrated so directly. He watched the sand in the hourglass dwindle with great interest--but the point the Instructor was making eluded him.
“It is only a hypothesis.” She inverted the glass and watched the grains fall again. “But lately, I have been thinking time might be malleable, like sand. Remove a few grains and the shape of it is still the same. The results are still the same. The sand flows through the glass, minus a few details, and achieves whatever end it desires.”
“Just a hypothesis, huh.” He swiped the sand timer off of the desk, and studied it up close. “Sounds like you’ve been thinking about this for some time.”
“Off and on,” she said with a calculated diffidence. She nodded at the sand timer in his hands. “Keep it. My cabinets are full of these curiosities.”
He laid the sand timer back on the desk, and drummed his fingers against his watch out of habit. The Instructor had gifted it to him for completing the Recovery & Rescue’s basic training. It was a custom piece of equipment for Service members. The matte black hands ticked backwards on a black field of numbers no matter which direction he traveled in the timestream.
He was drilled to think in seconds. The second before, or the second after. The sequence of actions that make up a complex motion. Everything counting towards the objective, away from the zero-hour. It was a good mindset for a soldier. Simple. Direct. Understandable. It kept him alive and in the moment; and it made him indispensable during a fight... but...
“Nobody in Recovery seems to get the big picture. If they did, we’d be talking to Temporal, rather than pretending they didn’t exist. How can we be expected to save the entire world if we can’t even cut through the red tape of our own department? But I don’t think I can buy into your hypothesis, either. If we’re just bailing water out of the Titanic, then what we do in Recovery doesn’t matter.”
“Think on it during your next mission,” she replied. “And then tell me what you conclude? My viewpoint is perhaps too circular.” She lingered in the doorway. “And if you encounter any anomalies or...unintended consequences...”
He laughed. “You’ll be the second person to know.”
He couldn’t believe it; after all of that big-picture wind-up, the Instructor was angling for a favor. He sprawled back in his chair and considered his options. Yes, they were friends, he hoped, but did he trust her? Did he trust anyone in the division? Six months was an awfully long time to be carrying the burden of this life by himself.
He came to a decision; if he encountered any provable anomaly, he would trust her with it. He couldn’t save the world alone. And maybe he was a little tired of trying to.
*
The Service had remained characteristically silent on his mission in Oslo--the fewer details they gave him about any mission, the better the outcome would be. They simply reminded him of the third inviolate rule and sent him on his way.
Inviolate Rule Number Three: Make no alteration to the timeline in non-nexus locations.
2019-May-10, Oslo was not a nexus, and therefore no change was to be made to the timeline. He was simply to go to the designated location, participate in events as they unfolded, and then piece together an explanation after the action was complete.
The or else had been very strongly implied in his mission briefing. He hadn’t triggered any unintended consequences yet--and as far as anyone else knew, the Munitions Incident had never happened. Why the heavy-handed warning?
What would happen if timeline alterations propagated outside of a designated nexus event?
If events had causes whose downstream effects grew in scale the further forward from a single incident one travelled, quite a lot could happen if he interrupted even one non-nexus event. He briefly thought about the sand timer on his desk as he geared up in the Sarcophagus, with all of its as-good-as-identical grains of sand falling through the choke-point over and over again. The Munitions locker clicked shut. He fitted a blazer over his tactical load-out and checked his lines in a full-body mirror. The bullet-proof vest was barely visible under his suit jacket. Maybe he could pass for a bystander if he needed to abort the mission.
A solo mission meant he had no time to spare on hypotheses until he returned safely with his objective achieved.
A Service helicopter waited for him on the landing pad. He hustled into the co-pilot’s seat, and they rose into the night sky above Berlin, awash in red and blue lights from nightclubs, discos, and 24-hour financial pillars in the heart of the city. They quickly cut across Germany to the North Sea, and touched down on an unmarked yacht which skipped backwards across the waves. The pilot watched for signs of turmoil below. They were catching a free ride from someone who didn’t know the helicopter was there, and they needed to be ready to bolt if the crew sensed something was off. When they neared the Norwegian shore, they took flight again toward the capital.
The helicopter reached their destination, hovering over a squat Oslo office building with no distinguishing features. He attached a climbing harness and rappelled onto the roof. He drew his pistol and held it lightly at his side, ready to snap up in an instant. As he pried open the roof access panel, he realized that the pilot’s approach had disguised all of the building’s signage. If he was retrieved the same way he entered, he wouldn’t know where he had been or how to get back here.
A true blank slate situation.
He took a deep breath, threw off the climbing gear, and squeezed himself through the choke point.
Movement on the third floor spooked him before he could finish scouting the perimeter. A row of doors, all slightly ajar, offered him cover. He ducked into a records room. The room was trashed. Bullet holes riddled the glass partition. One side of the room was singed from a fire that had been hastily put out.
He tore his blazer off just as a smoldering patch of embers sprang to life. As he began to battle the flames, he at least had the comfort of knowing that he’d succeeded.