The Time Saving Agency

The Time Saving Agency

Imagine if you will:

At the highly secretive, largely independent, inter-dimensional and (inevitably) clandestine organization called the Time Saving Agency, there is a saying that goes: 'You can't break an omelet without first making eggs'. While this may appear to be a rather flippant little idiom, there is – as is usually the case, far more to it than meets the eye.

For starters, that's a rather simple principle of Time Travel right there – and according to the pioneers of time travel, it's one of the foundation stones of the Theory behind it. It's something of a paradox – a mind-boggling annotation in the ever-puzzling and ever growing Anals of History. (Some readers may still be thinking that should be 'Annals' – however, the author of this work cannot be blamed for what you may think.)

This point may be somewhat reminiscent of the age-old 'what came first, the chicken or the egg?' riddle – in fact, at first sight the two concepts might even seem to be the same, but no, not really. Once you start digging a little deeper, you would realize that in order for the hypothetical omelet to exist or be made (or indeed, be broken), there have to be some suitable eggs lying around first. Indubitably, this also suggests that something has to get laid fist – presumably the – um, egg.

While both these statements refer to eggs, the main difference between these two rather irking statements is this: omelets do not come from chickens – it is eggs which come from chickens. Omelets on the other hand, are an entirely Human invention. Humans being here, the 'middle man' as it were.

The explanation behind this rather perplexing conundrum is that while we may not know which came first, chicken or egg – we do know the omelet came after, and regardless of what eggs there are, unless you have an unusually accident prone chicken, they will not turn into omelets by themselves. In other words, there may be eggs and chickens to lay them – but without people to make omelets, there will be no omelets. Or in fact, any need for omelets.

Nobody seems to know which came first; egg or chicken – except of course for agents of the Time Saving Agency – who can find out anything about, well – anything. The only trouble is, they aren't talking – however, you can take it from me – they know. The answer to these and other puzzles are kept safe and secure behind fire-walls and thick security doors secured with, er – time-locks, where one could possibly find answers to many other troubling questions, and not all of them necessarily relating to chickens.

Agents of the TSA, who police time-travel and prevent outside forces from mucking up the works and changing History, have to be very careful. One dropped egg and whoops, no omelet. In essence, to stretch the metaphor, this point links to yet another which is best illustrated by yet another idiom in use at the TSA: 'A nine in time saves stitches'. This much understated principle is what generally underlies the entire purpose of the TSA: To save Time.

While all of this may seem overly philosophical, and even far more theoretical than practical, it all comes down to this: Each day shapes the days that follow.

Everything that makes up a day, every event that takes place everywhere – all adds up. Everything, no matter how seemingly insignificant, plays a part. Sometimes the meaning of every little thing – each individual component of a day – is made clear only by their absence. Like a man and an apple.

Imagine, for instance, a bright summer day somewhere in England. The grass was green, the sky blue. Birds chirped in the trees. It was a really nice day. A funny looking little man sat snoozing under a tree in an orchard. High up in the branches of the tree, a blurry shape seemed to shimmer slightly before solidifying into a male figure that silently mouthed the words: 'Oh, f**k!' before grabbing onto a branch and hanging on. The figure leaning against the trunk snored, blissfully unaware of the struggling figure above. His name was Newton, Isaac Newton. Not quite 'Sir' yet. The man in the tree? His name was Scrooby, Johnathan Scrooby.

You see, certain things happen at a certain time in a certain way, which in a sense, is what it's all about. If certain specific things didn't, then everything would be completely different – for instance, the Russians could've invented the A-bomb first – and blown up America and Germany (and probably everybody else too). Alexandre Dumas could have written 'The Three Picadors' and died a poor, unknown writer. As another example, one time, after leaving the Navy, JFK could've became a well-known used car salesman and Baptist faith-healer instead of entering politics, putting a serious wrinkle in the Kennedy dynastic plan, much to the annoyance of the family matriarch.

Although a little noisy at first, in a bizarre twist of fate, electronic music became popular in France in the 1890's before fizzling out in favor of Swing music – which somehow made an early appearance in the 1900's. In another alternative timeline, the Beatles never existed and England invented popcorn and hamburgers in the 1840's. Damn, that's what almost happened last time again, thought Scrooby tensely, while maneuvering himself onto a stronger looking branch. Details, everything was about the details. Sometimes there was almost too much detail to keep up with.

Beaming into the thick of a tree without becoming a lifelong tree hugger was a tricky business. A precision job. Scrooby's job at the Time Saving Agency was a tough one. Billions of lives depended on him not screwing up. Literally billions and billions. Once, he'd screwed up in only a very small way and people wore those little yellow smiley faces on t-shirts for decades afterwards – and that was just a small screw up. He sighed. Here he sat, in the branches of an apple tree in an apple tree orchard – and without a single apple in sight. Below him, Isaac was waiting to get bonked on the noggin with an apple so that he could fulfill history by toddling off to invent gravity and shape scientific and mathematical principles for generations to come. Only one problem – no apples.

Some wise-ass bastard (the Agency preferred to call them Time Terrorists) had slipped back in time and infected the local trees with a short-lived disease which wiped out the entire crop of apples for this year. Enter the Time Saving Agency – and him. He felt the lump in his pocket and removed it while clinging to the branch with his other hand and knees. It was a bright shiny yellow apple. Not exactly what grew around these parts (or in these times either) – but an apple nonetheless. At any rate, it was the best he could come up with at short notice. Aiming carefully, he let it go and waited. Bonk, went the apple. It only occurred to Newton much later to wonder where the hell that bloody apple had come from in the first place.

So it was that Agent Scrooby rematerialized on the time-jump platform at the TSA headquarters, satisfied with the thought of another job well done – and that he had just saved the continuum from more funny t-shirts.

"Did it work?" He asked expectantly.

"Gravity's still here." Said the voice of someone being a smart-ass from behind a console across the room. "And we're all still speaking English."

"Nice job, Jimmy." He complimented his operator at the controls of the Time Jump Motivator – or if you will, time machine. "You're still the ace!"

"Thanks, J." Jim Rusche smiled back. "At least you didn't fall out of the tree this time. Ha-ha."

"Ha-ha. It's lucky we were able to do it over again or the American War of Independence would've happened in Mexico." He said, un-strapping the tracking module from his belt.

"Yeah, and the time the USA became a province of Canada, eh?"

"Oh yes – I remember that one. A real tragedy that was." He sighed, remembering the time before that when Napoleon finally managed to dig his famed tunnel across the English Channel and invaded London. They all ended up speaking French for a while. Sorting that out had been... well, challenging. Mon dieu. Thank the gods for the Buffer. It protected them from unforeseen time events, or UTE's (in other words, screw-ups) and gave them the chance to go back and Try Again Later. In this line of work, people who made the same mistake twice were the lucky ones who didn't kill themselves doing it the first time. He'd had enough for one day.

The TSA liked having fresh agents on the job. Fresh agents with a clear mind and steady hand. Time travel wasn't for the faint of heart. The pay was good though, but as Scrooby had decided long ago, that even if he didn't get paid for it, the thrill alone was payment enough. Then again, the TSA realized they couldn't afford to have disgruntled employees with too much time on their hands and the power of the gods at their fingertips, so the pay was very, very good. Debriefing was routine. And how he hated routine! His supervisor was a senior agent called Guy Krummeck, a rather drab character who liked his shiny silver suits almost as much as he liked to go over every little detail at least three times. Minimum. This time everything went right, so it went quick. Twenty minutes later, tired, he clocked out and went home to his small apartment. Tomorrow, after all, was another day again.

* * *

It was neither dark nor light here, and yet somehow at the same time it was both. There was no air, but there was a very definite chill of terror and despair in whatever passed for it. The eerie absence of sound was deafening. It was said that idle hands were the Devil's instruments. The Limbo Practicale had many idle hands. Idle minds too. Bodies were adrift in the confines of the chrono-spacial anomaly that was the Limbo Practicale, bodies that were for all intents and purposes, not dead at all.

Frantic souls lingered in their own private little Hells, living and re-living the same horrible nightmares ad-infinitum. After only a short while, most people's sanity would start unraveling just to pass the time. If anything were able to observe, they could be seen to twitch occasionally.

The only hope for any variety would be when they experienced the same time-loop from another angle or dimension entirely or perhaps upside down and purple. Dense smothering silence cocooned the inmates, as though it were slowly draining the sound out of them. Yet on another level, detectable only by the psyche, there was the inaudibly feint sound of slow, backward screams. And mindless gibbering.

If they had been fully conscious, those imprisoned here would be wide-eyed and screaming. Seeing your own life from the inside repeatedly was supposed to be something like watching re-runs, again. Or re-runs of someone else's home movies. Most people, as has been noted before, would be certifiably mad after just a few days in the Limbo Practicale. It was a prison for the mind, body and soul, where perpetrators of Time Crime would, well, do time. Like, forever.

There is one man of particular interest to us in this little bubble of Hell. Like the others, he was drifting silent, still – unconscious in the depths of this plane. But against all known odds, Brad Xyl was smiling. He had just been through his life again, backwards, and was relishing the trail of destruction and chaos he had left ahead of him.

For this was a man who stood out from the crowd, a Time Terrorist extraordinaire. A man who took all the resources of the Time Saving Agency to capture, well who knows when – years ago, or in a time still to come? A man who wrought chaos and devastation across three millennia simply for the fun of it. Just because he could. Rumor had it he was one of the first to invent time travel – and the irony of the whole thing was that this man was one of the founders of the TSA itself. How he ended up here was, needless to say, ironic - and naturally, well-deserved.

These people all got here at the end of what everyone assumed was a one-way trip. But just because the TSA considered being sent to the Limbo Practicale to be a one-way trip, didn't mean that it really was. After all, a trip between two points, a point of origin and a destination may seem linear in a one-way sense – but time is rather pliable under certain circumstances, and especially if the flow of it is reversed.

Time did exist here, in small amounts (well some of the time) – and there were feint eddies and currents of time here, things that were barely tangible. Feint forces of the universe they were, nearly indiscernible from the nothingness like a warm breeze on a hot summer night. How long he had been here, he knew not – but he was slowly learning to master these barely tangible waves like a new surfer with one foot on the sandy beach and the other on a shiny new board of Hatred. Revenge splashed around his feet like the cold waves of the ocean of Time. Nearby, two other inmates collided with each other, bounced apart spread-eagled and spiraled off into the distance in infinite slowness. The Wetsuit of Insanity clung to his spiritual body, isolating him from the timelessness that seemed to exist here. A wind of Change blew at him from behind and he pushed off from the beach with iron determination and a mental clarity hereto before unknown to him. Something in the microcosm that didn't even have a name went 'bling' and against all the laws of probability, Brad Xyl opened his eyes.

* * *

In the grand scheme of things, Deanna was just a footnote in the Anals of History. (Some of you are thinking 'perhaps that was a typo? Surely it should be annals', but no.) Deanna was a small planet, almost the size of good old Earth, but unlike Earth, Deanna had much more land than ocean. The central ocean was a lot like the Pacific, only landlocked, shallow, and fresh. Braking dolphins swam in shoals of hundreds in the warm shallow oceans. The funny little dolphin-like creatures were air breathers – and marsupials. Their pouches tended to cause a little too much hydrodynamic drag and slowed them down, hence their name. They had no natural predators, but could sometimes almost starve to death trying to catch faster prey. Braking dolphins darted peacefully in and out of the serene and beautiful coral reefs in the shallower parts of the Greater Equatorial Fishbowl, the larger part of the Landlocked Ocean.

Deanna, the planet which is the setting for our story, orbits a medium sized star called Ramalama. Deanna has two small moons in close orbit. Only a few decades earlier the first settlers to reach Deanna named them Ding and Dong in some misguided attempt at humor when they arrived, and found to their dismay that there was very little at all to laugh at here. (Crabby-grass may seem funny, unless you're barefoot and standing on it.) Dong is just a lump of plain rock about a kilometer around. Ding on the other hand, is a sphere of solid titanium ore fifty feet in diameter.

Just two months prior, a Ruminarii warship (that just happened to be invading Deanna at the time) accidentally struck the small moon and knocked it out of the sky. This wasn't the first time, nor was it safe to bet that it would be the last. Never-the-less, it took the usual four big space tugs (and some fancy language) to get Ding back into orbit. The Tourism Office heaved a huge sigh of relief, as the little moon had become quite famous over the years, and now formed part of the main attraction of the colony. It would be a crippling blow to the tourism economy if Ding stayed in its newest crater. It just wouldn't do at all.

The plains were dry and dusty, and there were few forests to take advantage of the excellent groundwater. A few native forests grew wild near the tropics, vast and almost totally unknown, except to a handful of strange men in lab coats and steel-capped safety boots (this is Deanna after all) who insisted on looking for natural cures for strange and exotic diseases – and often discovering a few new ones in the process.

Crabby-grass grew wild on the plains, terrorizing the population of imported livestock. Crabby-grass looked like ordinary grass and smelled like ordinary grass – except that it was aware that it was being looked at and smelled. It would mostly stay still, feeding on spores and little bugs and mites in the soil. In the cities, crabby-grass subsisted on a steady diet of pigeons, the winged vermin of the galaxy. The creatures preferred to move only at night, looking for – er, greener pastures. It generally objected to being stepped on, nibbled at or even being addressed in a harsh tone of voice. Many a rancher has been surprised to find his missing red-horned wildebeest trying to hide under a cherebub bush half its size – or on top of his Jeepo, whimpering. Getting bitten back by its dinner was a novel idea to most herbivores, and a cow in a state of shock can do amazing things – especially to milk.

The capital city on Deanna was a medium sized city by current standards, consisting mainly of smaller colony towns that had sprawled into each other as the number of colonists increased over the years. Atro City had a character all its own. Lugaluru was one such town, right at the outskirts of Atro City, and still just as 'country' as ever. Anybody who was anybody drove shiny new hydrogen powered SUV's and wore fancy suits and cowboy hats. Which is why Gary Beck wore jeans, sneakers and a blue khaki shirt. (The hat unfortunately, was a necessity.) It was a typically bright sunny morning outside his two bedroom camper, which is why he was still indoors.

The blown hover-drive technically excluded it from being a mobile home, but anyway – that was probably the only reason he was able to afford it in the first place. As with most things these days it was cheaper to buy a new one than to fix it. The garage door whined open, letting the sunshine stream in through the gap. The municipal sand-droids had finally finished filling in the huge crater in his front yard yesterday morning (another story altogether), so he was able to park his electric Jeepo in the garage again. The vacant lots across the drive yawned openly at him.

Old mister Krugher had claimed his insurance money and moved to an old folk's home in Texasville, on the other side of town. Krugher's four-bedroom Supercruiser had vanished into the same crater, along with his wife and mother-in-law and several other surrounding campers only two short months ago. (Who'd have thought the Ruminarii were so adept at landscaping? All it took was a few well aimed anti-matter bombs and voila.)

Beck, aka Beck the Badfeller was actually a nice guy. He worked as a bounty hunter, collaring all kinds of criminal types and had developed an impressive reputation for always getting his man. Er – well, alright – except for that other case two months ago, where his man turned out to be a woman. Or was it the other way round? Anyway, Cindy-Mei Winter was something special, something that just made him feel good about getting out of bed in the mornings. He froze. No, that wasn't what he meant. He knew fellas who would say that about a gal, and then swiftly add "...and run like hell!" to it. This was different. Mei made him feel good about facing each new day. Yep. That was it.

Mei hadn't moved in with him yet, but he was working on that. She preferred having her own place and her own space, and just spending time with him. She was afraid to ruin a good thing, she said. Otherwise, he thought, she was probably just too classy to live with him in a mobile home with a blown hover-drive in a trailer park on the cheap side of town. Hell, even he was too classy to live with him, but it was the best he could do under his present circumstances. Besides, he spent more time at her place these days, when he wasn't working.

Beck reversed his Jeepo smoothly down the ramp, this time without disappearing into a crater, and drove off towards town. It seemed a pleasant enough morning. The sky was aquamarine, fluffy white clouds dotted the horizon, and Strato-Penguins were soaring high overhead in a 'c' formation, leaving a faint vapor trail as they migrated west. (It was quite a long migration because any geographer worth his dolomite knows there is no east or west as long as you don't cut the globe open and spread it on a flat surface and play Spin the Bottle.) People were walking the streets, going about their daily business as usual.

The buildings in Lugaluru were mostly low, not more than three or four stories high, and modern in design. The city fathers had tried to make it as pleasant as possible, planting grass on the verges and indigenous ploplar trees to cast shade from the bright sun. It seemed like a good idea at the time, until it became apparent that aside from eating small bugs and even pigeons, crabby-grass thrived on eating ordinary grass. Add to that, the local trees didn't grow well so far from the tropics and the grass just wandered off, leaving the streets and sidewalks as bare and dry and dusty as the plains. Well, at least there was plenty of parking space, without having people yell at him to 'keep off the grass!'

The Salubrious Café was a pleasant little street café with sidewalk tables and umbrellas. As street cafes went on Deanna, it was pretty good. Cindy-Mei was already waiting for him when he arrived.

"Morning, love." He greeted, giving her a good morning kiss.

She smiled at him as he sat down. She was a sight for sore eyes – which his were by the way. Too many cold ones at the 'Shock Diamond' again last night after work.

"Sleep well?" He asked.

"Peacefully." She replied softly. His eyes wandered over her body. She was wearing a little black number today, a short sleeveless dress and shiny black stiletto court shoes. Her make-up was perfect as usual, her blond hair tied back in a neat stylish fashion. Her beautiful hazel eyes radiated emotion at him. It was hard for even him to believe that she had ever been anything other than female.

"Miss me?" She asked.

"Nope." He grinned. "Ammo is expensive." It was one of his little jokes. She smiled at him. "I can tell you're glad to see me." He said.

"Two days was long enough." She replied. He'd been on a case and only closed it yesterday. "I missed you."

He reached across the table and took her hand in his, gazing into her eyes.

"Move in with me?" He asked, trying his luck again.

"I have a better idea – come with me?" She countered playfully. "Let's leave this crazy planet and find somewhere nice to live. Somewhere sane. Let's go to Mars. It's a nice place. You'll like it there – no crabby-grass, no obsidian crows."