Program Sixteen, Attempt Seven

The man grabbed my throat as he pinned my body against the pavement. His hand was warm and clammy: uncomfortable, but that was the least of my worries. 

To my surprise, I didn’t feel my throat constrict, and warily, I sucked in heavy breaths. 

“What do you want from me?” I rasped. 

He ignored me, and spoke into a small watch on his free hand. 

“Program Sixteen, attempt six,” he muttered. “Location: Penn Station. Mark start time as 23:34, 12 seconds. Third log for April 6, 2059.” 

“I think you got the date wrong,” I said before I could stop myself. “It’s New Year’s Day.”

It only struck me then how out of place he looked. It was a Friday night, and he was dressed in a pristine business suit with a top-of-the-line holoemitter peaking out of his pocket and an earpiece that matched mine. 

He was dressed like… like one of us. 

“Are you—”

His hand tightened around my throat.

As my vision faded, a spark of recognition hit me. That wristwatch, it was—

“Agent Calloway,” he said. “You need to wake up.”

A pair of eyes deep in my subconscious opened, but not soon enough.

My eyes popped open to the most boring sight ever: a cheap, tiled ceiling. 

I groaned and rolled over, head throbbing. What did I do yesterday?

My eyes landed on my nightstand, and as I looked at it, a teal hologram displaying the time popped up at me. 

10:52. 

I bolted upright. I was supposed to be in a meeting in eight minutes.

“Happy 2055, Erin,” a voice said from across the room. “Damn, I didn’t think you’d wake up ‘till tomorrow. You were out.”

Without acknowledging my roommate, I sprang out of bed and over to the cabinet I kept my clothes for work in. 

I grabbed the first set of civilian clothes I could find. 

January 1, 2055. 

“What, are you hungover?” 

I was, but that wasn’t it. I’d been looking forward to this day for months, and I was about to be late. 

The next minute was a blur as I scrambled to down a cup of coffee and make myself look presentable before half-walking, half-running out the door. 

“No work today?” my roommate called as I threw on my favorite leather jacket. 

I didn’t answer her. 

I walked into the briefing room exactly twelve minutes and 35 seconds later than I was supposed to. 

The typical table and chairs were gone, revealing the seal of the Bureau of Temporal Intelligence stenciled black on the charcoal floor. The lights were dim, and I could just make out the figure of a man, dressed the typical stiff suit, standing a few meters away. 

He chuckled when he saw me. 

“I think you’re the first to be late on a deployment day, Agent Calloway,” he said. 

“Happy New Year,” I grumbled in response, even though my mind was spinning with everything but the date. 

“You remember your designation?”

I nodded, running through the plan for today. “Drift to 23:00, January 1, 2055. Anomaly occurs at 23:04. Attempt intervention, report back if it doesn’t work. Program Four is plan B.” 

My heart started beating faster. I had never Drifted before, and after months of training, I was finally ready for my first assignment. 

The man read a few readouts to himself on a small projected holoscreen in front of him, then stepped forward, holding a small device. 

“Your earpiece appears to be working; it will pick up everything you hear.” 

He handed me the device, and I recognized it immediately. It was a Drifter, a small watch-like bracelet that would allow me to pass freely through space and time. 

Drifters were the world’s best kept secret: nobody, not even most world leaders, had any idea they existed, and those who did know were often handled swiftly and silently by the Bureau. 

That was my job today. Orion Carter, my target, had somehow gotten his hands on a Drifter, but he was ill-trained: at approximately 11:04 PM today, he was going to get himself stuck in temporal loop that would leave him experiencing the same day over again until I intervened. 

I was confident it would be easy. All I had to do was touch the Drifter on his wrist, and it would register my signature and slide off. 

“I’m ready,” I said as soon as the Drifter was touching my skin. 

The man glanced at his holoscreen again. “You’re go, Calloway. Godspeed.”

My heartbeat increased again. 

It’s finally time. 

I nodded, and willed time to pass. 

And it did. 

The man’s movements began to speed up until he looked like a time-lapse, zipping through the room until he left it entirely. The millisecond decimals and location coordinates I’d memorized seemed superfluous now: I knew my destination as the Drifter burned it into my head, I knew it better than I knew anything.

I felt a sense of peace as the world around me faded away. The peace that one feels when they transcend time and space and life and death, when simultaneously everything and nothing at all seems possible. I felt what God must have felt before He created the us, submerged and floating in a sea of nothing made of everything. For a split second, I could see the entire universe, from its birth to its death, the life of Earth captured in less than a blink of an eye, less than the continuous decimals of fractioned time I’d tried to remember. Microscopic galaxies lived and changed and died like distant fireworks, and I was everything, I was the universe and its creator, I was—

—in a subway station’s bathroom stall. 

Immediately, I stood up and checked the digital face of my Drifter just as the time shifted from 10:59 to 11:00. 

I’d done it. 

I flushed the toilet, which was in desperate need of cleaning, as to not seem suspicious. 

A gasp of betrayal sounded near the door. 

“You told me no one was in here!” an accusatory girl’s voice said. 

“I didn’t think anyone was!”

I took the arguing as my opportunity to slip out of the stall and splash some cold water on my hands before making a hasty exit. I paid no mind to the two girls, who were both dressed in sequined cocktail dresses. 

I shook the effects of the Drift out of my head as I walked purposefully through Penn Station, where my target was about to initiate his temporal loop. Everything seemed to matter less than it did before. Who cared if Orion Carter was stuck reliving January 1, 2055 for the rest of time? The universe would still evolve untouched by humanity, and galaxies would still die like fireworks. 

No, I told myself as I scanned the throngs of people for Orion. The Bureau cares. 

If Orion had gotten one thing right, it was timing. He’d chosen the chaos of the 11:00 train’s arrival to initiate his Drift, which made it much harder for me to find him in time. 

Suddenly, a loud voice rang through my ears, causing the people around me to turn their heads. 

“Somebody stop her!”

I felt eyes on my back. Even though I’d never been here before, my stomach dropped with sudden deja-vu, like I’d expected to be caught. 

My instincts told me to run. 

Before I knew it, my feet were pounding across the pavement, and I knew someone was after me when I heard heavier footfalls behind mine. 

The adrenaline coursing through my body reached an all-time high, and I sped straight through a large holoscreen ad, which shimmered and glitched as I made contact. 

The incoming 11:00 subway slowed as people jumped out of my way. The passing windows came slower and slower, like time itself was winding to a stop. I tried to match their speed, to push my body as far as it would go. I didn’t know why, but I knew I needed to escape whatever was after me. 

I screeched to a stop along with the subway as a shooting pain shot through my body, forcing me to freeze. My hand clapped instinctively to the source of it, but instead of impacting skin, I felt cool metal. 

The Drifter. The Drifter was burning, sending pain flowing through my veins like snake venom until I couldn’t bring myself to lift my foot to take the next step. 

My pursuer, a man, the man, took that as his opportunity to tackle me to the ground. 

He grabbed my throat as he pinned my body against the pavement. His hand was warm and clammy: uncomfortable, but the least of my worries compared to the slowly dulling throbs emanating from my Drifter and my instincts, which were still screaming at me to run. 

To my surprise, I didn’t feel my throat constrict in his grip, so I warily sucked in heavy breaths, labored from my sprint. 

I knew this man, even though I’d never seen him in my life. 

“What do you want from me?” I rasped. 

He ignored me, and spoke into a small watch on his free hand. 

“Program Sixteen, attempt seven. Location: Penn Station. Mark start time as 23:03, 4 seconds. Fourth log for April 6, 2059.”

January 1, 2055.

“I think you got the date wrong,” I said as I recovered. “It’s New Year’s Day.” 

It only struck me then how out of place he looked. It was a late Friday night, and he was dressed in a pristine business suit with a top-of-the-line holoemitter peaking out of his pocket and an earpiece that matched mine. 

He was dressed like… like one of us. 

“Are you—”

His hand tightened around my throat.

As my vision faded, a spark of recognition, a galactic firework, hit me. That wristwatch, it was—

“Agent Calloway,” he said. “You need to wake up.”

A pair of eyes deep in my subconscious opened, but not soon enough.