Confessions of a Time Traveler

      The alias I have used for the past 25 years is not my real name. When I was an active agent I was sworn to silence but now I am free to tell the story of my travel to the past, the advantages it gave me in work, money and relationships, and the nightmare when it was taken away. I was a low-level operative whose safehouse and reporting location was a foreclosed textile building in downtown Richmond, Virginia. I would always return from various cities to this building using my key; the lower floors were a warehouse with giant bolts of fabric hanging from the ceiling, the upper floors were condemned office space and I accessed the communications portal through a rooftop apartment. The portal was a small washroom in the back corner of the roof dating to the factory days. The time server and circuits that powered it were under the floor and could only be accessed by rappelling off of the roof and prying a boarded-up window on the side of the building. This location was chosen because it is a historically inert zone, a place that is not mentioned in any records for a period of 70 years. I was a time agent only in that I was the custodian of this portal which I continued to use after the original custodian retired, and I was chosen because I happened to be leasing the apartment when I was 23. I am fifty now.

           I moved to Richmond to get away from my biological family. The owner of the building took pity on me because my parents were textile employees back when they were teens. I loved the shabby little apartment and my rooftop garden because of the solitude it gave me, which is significant because I’d end up going into the portal in August and immediately step out again in Winter when the roof was overgrown and dead. The agency didn’t know I was there because my lease was never in writing.

           One day I was approached by an older woman who had acquired the foreclosure. She was there to evict me and our friendship began when she realized I wasn’t going to leave. She began talking about strange philosophical subjects. Our friendship eventually led to her choosing me as her replacement.

           My first day on the job I was taken to an office with workstations and a photo album of exotic destinations on the front desk like a travel agency, but they were photos of different time periods. I’ve only seen it once. I met a receptionist who was from the 2050’s; her earlobes weren’t pierced but transparent. The portal and time circuits were on the top floor of my same building, they’re just not visible in the present day.

           I was interviewed and told many things about the universe, one of which is that advanced civilizations are homogenous, communicating with themselves in every century so there are no longer leaders or achievements, they basically live like ants. The portals themselves come from the far future and I’ve been told there is a time where they are the only things left standing. I was also told the next-closest portal (as strange as this sounds) is in New York at the hill where Joseph Smith had his visions, a location that was chosen because it’s a park forbidden to visitors.

           I was taken on a “tour of history” that lasted half a day but mentally fills up a great deal of my memory. Rather than famous historic events they chose times and locations where we would go unnoticed. First I was briefly in England in the 1790’s which is the time and place all portals use for calibration because a building with a carved masonic eye faces that exact spot. (As a child I saw the building with that eye in a dream, and I have come to realize I’ve dreamt every location on the tour at some point except for the one that is still in the future). I saw the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg and the English Civil War, and then France where I saw the painter Monet and his daughter. Children were the only people who noticed us. I’ve spent much of my retirement trying to decipher these images including the girl staring at me in the reflected water. Our last stop was in the distant future, a desert wilderness with a floating city in the distance at a time when land is only used for conservation.

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           Being just an ordinary person from my time allowed me to learn from reading exactly where to be and what to do to acquire money for travel, vehicles and women. I usually explain how it works using a chess board: Imagine I’m drawing an arrow down the middle of the board that is the Arrow of Time. If I’m a pawn who wants to beat up the king and take his lunch money, in the space in front of the king everything about this crime is common knowledge even to this little pawn, so this is where he gets all the information he needs. Going back to the space before the crime he can do whatever he wants, he could be sitting next to the king without him knowing it, take his lunch money, and then go all the way back to his starting position where nobody knows. In the space in front of the king there is no culprit to be found. If the king pulls a knife on me, I just go back and arrange for him to lose it a week earlier.

           I’ve told several people in the 20^th Century about my time (which is now fast approaching), that overweight women are considered attractive and are on the cover of Sports Illustrated (which people usually don’t believe), that cars drive themselves, and that everyone in my time is ten years older than they look. I communicated with my future self by marking currency with little notations. I had to think in reverse; I needed a place to sleep which meant finding a girlfriend so I could crash at random locations, and to get a girl I needed a vehicle. (I dated several women in the past. The life of a time traveler is extremely lonely and conversation becomes a rare gift.) Most agents are emotionless jerks or outright fiends; the ones from the far future are invisible to cameras and are socially awkward (more on this later).

           In this way I successfully posed as my younger self in 1998. There is a business park on the southside of Richmond where I was hired by a temp agency and worked for several days. So basically they let a guy with no address and no vehicle enter the building without a badge and sit down at a work station that was connected to all the other stations with a daisy chain of dialup circuits, on which the user could install a private account just by using the features that come automatically with Windows. (And my knowledge of computers is just common knowledge in my time.) I saw a security guard come into the office demanding to know who was doing it, and when they started to suspect me I left.

           On that same jaunt I stole a motorcycle by coasting it into the woods where I switched the license plate, arranged for the original plate to be found in another state, and left it to be found again when I was finished with it. I had what people thought was a keyless entry device but was actually a universal ignition release. I don’t mean to say I was James Bond, I considered myself an anarchist which was my motivation at the time. The most beautiful obese women were available to me who had never been treated as desirable before and were amazed even though this is normal dating behavior in my time. I also have a preference for motorless vehicles; I was unprepared for manual driving at first.

            I went to Houston, Texas at a time when there were only eight casinos in the state, to see if I could win a chess tournament against a Russian grandmaster that I knew took place in a famous hotel. I arrived in a classic car dressed in a three-piece suit and spent the day winning the tables. I also knew I would meet a beautiful woman who would get me access to Houston Space Center, but I didn’t know how I would be meeting her.

           It was the most difficult game I have ever played because of the number of moves I was required to memorize. My opponent told the hotel staff he thought I was cheating but there was nothing they could do since the game wasn’t part of the casino. It took place in the hotel lobby with an audience, five of whom were bridesmaids attending a wedding. After winning I split the prize money between the house and the five girls and took them immediately to dinner.

           Dating for a time traveler is much like winning a chess game, you just learn in advance what your partner wants to hear. I told them about my life and times, then we retired to “my” suite and thus I was able to get a place to stay under their names. The girl I spent the night with thought she ended up with me by chance but in reality I knew it would be her from the start.

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           Brianne was the most beautiful woman I have ever been with, but more importantly she helped me to gain access to Houston Space Center. Now this was in the months following a space shuttle disaster and the center had two possible futures, one in which it is on the leading edge of classified research (which is the history I know) and one in which it was downgraded to a museum facility (which is the way it is now). Agents from competing timelines had already been seen on the campus. Let’s say there’s one from the 1960’s I will call “the Cosmonaut” because he believes he is fighting a cold war in space. Agents from the past aren’t very skilled, so let’s say he gets shot dead by a guard as soon as he appears. I might run into the same agent alive again because it hasn’t happened yet. Agents from the far future are nameless and much more dangerous.

           Brianne and I entered the complex posing as fire extinguisher inspectors, which in 2004 was extremely easy to do. The main entrance was called the Visitor Badging Center which literally had a sign out front that read “Security issues badges for employees, contractors and visitors”. Our very obvious relationship was part of my strategy; the guards were watching Brianne instead of what we were there to do.

           Now I’ve had to redact some aspects of my “mission” that are still sensitive, but there was a young technician working there who in my time is a renowned physicist similar to Albert Einstein, but as a result of the events of that day and my failure to stop it, he was reassigned to Iraq. I realized during our “tour” that I had stopped receiving messages from myself. (The vending machines at that time only gave out some kind of dollar coins, so I resorted to asking the guards if they had any $1 bills.) I began to realize my timeline and everything I know had been discontinued.

From that moment I no longer knew what events were ahead of me or what the best escape route was under these new circumstances, and the world outside was much more dangerous as events moved farther away from the ones I had memorized. Agents whose timelines are discontinued become helpless, since then I’ve had only my own wits to survive in the past. I sent Brianne to an emergency exit and never saw her again.

           My confrontation with the nameless agent from the far future wasn’t a pleasant experience. He had taken the place of a janitor and beat me with a handheld immobilization device they carry, breaking my nose and leaving me on the floor to die. He called me a “time meddler”, the only two words he spoke to me.

           I knew that if I was discovered it would all be over, so I pulled the fire alarm. The time agent had broken a gas pipe filling the room with chemical smoke, and it was then that I had my first hallucination where images from the past were coming after me.

The facility was evacuated and I made it to an ambulance where I first noticed the nurses seemed smarter and better at their jobs now; I couldn’t even charm them into giving me a smock or a ride back into town. I had to walk a creek for miles and then pose as a homeless person to avoid attracting attention. To my knowledge no time agent has ever had such a blunder.

Two weeks later I was back in Richmond with a beard and made my way on foot to the old textile building, to the rooftop apartment but the portal was gone. There was no trace of it. I tied a rope around myself and rappelled off the roof, prying up the wood on the side of the building but the time office was gone as well. I don’t know if the agents are dead or never existed.

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           Months later I started receiving messages on currency again, but not from myself. I was told to be in Lansing, Michigan on a particular day, so I had a woman I was dating drive me there. I watched an agent go into a building and followed him into an apartment sealed with police tape. His safe house was an absolute dump where I was physically assaulted for the second time with one of their devices, but I did learn a few things about them.

           The reason they can’t be captured on security cameras is they carry a radioactive device that overexposes them. They also wear generic-looking faces through a kind of facial projection technology. He was socially inept and didn’t like talking in complete sentences. He ridiculed me for my choices and forced me to clean myself up, calling me a “consort”.

           Now a consort is what I call the women I use to make the job easier, so basically that was my role now. I accompanied him for about three weeks in an abusive relationship doing menial tasks preparing safe houses in the most inhospitable locations. His “personality” was very much the opposite of mine; I’ve long wondered if my failure created whatever half-baked future he came from.

           Then one day I saw him die at the hands of another agent. It was completely unexpected and he pleaded with me for help, then he was pulled into a wall and out of sight in just seconds.

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           So the final chapter of my story describes the years since I stopped being a time agent. For a brief time I coexisted with my younger self in Richmond. I only encountered him twice, once where I told him a specific date that would be important in his life, and once on the street where he recognized me but I had no time for him I regret to say.

           Images of the things I saw in my training have haunted me to this day, the building with the carved eye and the girl looking at me from the water in Monet’s time, a location that was chosen because of his paintings, often combined with nightmares of the chemical smoke I inhaled the day I was stranded here.  In my own timeline we were just beginning to understand dreams are real, so I became obsessed with them hoping to somehow restore my access through introspection. I tried going back to the portal in my memory to see what would happen if I went through it, but unfortunately I was never gifted at introspection.

           Eleven years passed and I happened to be reunited by circumstance with my old predecessor. She is a widow now and was grateful to have some assistance. It was nice to be able to talk about the agency again, although she was never more than a caretaker. She had been invited to a “reunion” (not of time travelers but docents of the furniture district), possibility some old acquaintances that had first introduced her to the building.

So I landscaped her yard, listened to her talk about her cats, and attempted to bring out any information on the networks or the exact location of the portal in Giza, Egypt. But she’d heard nothing since retirement and would start to bristle at the mention of it. Eventually I began staying in her spare room, taking care of all maintenance in the house with the possibility that I might inherit the place someday and look through her files for any proof the time office existed. But then one day she caught me entertaining a girl and soon there was a police cruiser in the driveway.

I’m not going to repeat what she said to me or what she told the police I was, as if she had forgotten I was ever anything but a grifter. I don’t even belong in this decade, and it was the third time I’ve lost all my possessions.

That night on the street I finally dreamed of the last place we stopped on our tour of time, the desert that is still centuries ahead of us. My mentor was there, leading me out of the kaleidoscopic portal to our final destination. I’ve never had much control over dreams but fate is resourceful and I was under duress. I pushed her over the side of the canyon to her death, and only then did I return to the portal to take her place.