Time Flies When You're Having Fun

Henry finished the TSB’s six month training program in three - partly because they desperately needed more agents in the field and partly because he was just that good. His reflex times were off the charts, his aptitude tests were in the highest percentile, and he won every combat challenge they threw at him. More importantly, Henry was a company man through and through. He believed in the TSB’s mission. But all the skills and all the care in the world could not change the fact that Henry was a green recruit with zero field experience and an overly sanitized understanding of what the job actually entailed. He needed the guiding hand of a seasoned agent, and TSB command thought it best to partner him with their oldest veteran - a hard-nosed lone wolf and all around perpetual grump named Diego.

With a tenure of ten years, Diego was the longest serving field agent in the history of the TSB, which was simultaneously considered to be both a plus and a minus. The rest of the agents with his tenure had all left the field long ago for lucrative positions in TSB command. It’s not that he wasn’t qualified - he was the best agent they had, but year in and year out he turned down every single opportunity for advancement. Each year the powers that be would ask him what his career goals were and each year he’d say the same thing - “Ma’am, with all due respect you hired me to do a job and I’m doing it.” They couldn’t argue with that. Despite his steely demeanor and lack of ambition, he was well liked and the higher ups all agreed that the company owed him a great debt. He did his job and he did it well, even if there was no passion in it for him. It’s not that he didn’t care - he did - but he only cared just enough to prevent anyone from finding out how little concern he actually had for his job.

When he clocked out at the end of his shift he’d leave all thoughts of his work behind as soon as the door shut behind him. Each day, he took the train straight home, cracked open a cold one, and baked elaborate cakes and pastries until his back ached. He was a man with few needs and fewer words - he preferred baking alone, living alone, and if it were up to him, he’d continue working alone. The last thing he wanted was to be paired with an eager and bright-eyed new recruit with a hero complex, whose sole purpose in life seemed to be mainlining the company Kool-Aid.  

Temporal tourism, or time travel, had been introduced to the general public a little over a decade prior. While there had been strict regulations surrounding temporal tourism - stay invisible, observe only, for god’s sake don’t touch anything or anyone - there were of course, as with anything that involved human beings, those who felt that the rules did not apply to them. In the beginning, these temporal crimes were thought to have little bearing or consequence on the present day. After all, the past was the past for a reason - it had already happened and could not be changed.

However, temporal physicists began to notice a growing number of strange anomalies that defied all scientific explanation. Temporal crime was initially thought to be harmless because anytime someone changed something in the past, a new timeline branch was born, thus leaving the prime timeline unaffected. Mathematical models showed that the universe could survive the birth of a few hundred extra branches, and these branches were usually so unstable they almost always ended in a quick apocalypse anyway. But much to the horror of temporal physicists everywhere, it was quickly discovered that the birth of a new branch was never an isolated incident. Each new branch made its own branches, which in turn made its own branches, and so on and so forth, because each new timeline had at least one idiot who just couldn’t help but mess things up for everyone else. The strange anomalies led to the discovery that the universe was finite and dangerously running out of space. If too many timelines were created, the universe would collapse in on itself, and every single living being in every single timeline would cease to exist.

Upon this discovery, each national government banned temporal tourism immediately, but the damage was already done as hundreds of thousands of temporal chamber units flooded the black market. Thus, the need for the Tempus Security Bureau, or the TSB, was born. Its purpose: to track and prevent temporal crime, to slow the growth of branching timelines, and to stem the collapse of the multiverse. At first the caseload resembled an easy game of Whack-a-Mole, but recent years had seen a sharp and troubling spike in continuity offenses, or in layman’s terms - crimes that involved a purposeful attempt to change the past in order to “improve” the future. No matter how many times people were taught that changing the past was impossible, hundreds of time truthers, or so they called themselves, made the attempt to do just that each month.  

Time truthers believed that the laws of temporal physics were all part of a deeply rooted and far reaching conspiracy to stop the true heroes of the universe from fixing the present. They believed that they themselves were these heroes, and that it was their sacred duty to question and challenge long standing scientific beliefs. Most people saw the time truther movement for what it really was - a way to make people feel empowered in a rapidly multiplying universe in which they felt increasingly small. In the beginning, time truthers were dismissed as wackos and nut jobs, but officials were dismayed when the movement quickly gained traction. As the present day became more chaotic and more complex, the more people lamented about where it had all gone wrong and theorized the existence of a single pivotal point in history from which all the so-called present day immorality stemmed.

When Diego had first begun working at the TSB ten years ago, the continuity division had consisted of a team of twenty temporal agents who received orders from seven analysts. The analysts used sophisticated technology to detect temporal anomalies that were indicative of an attempted change. The approach proved to be flawed, however, as the rise in continuity crime and the increased complexity of continuity “heists” led to a failure rate that severely threatened the survival of the universe. The TSB had no choice but to change the way they did things, which meant implementing a new multi-pronged strategy that partly involved sending more agents into the field in teams of two. The new strategy was a smashing success, thanks in large part to the surprisingly fruitful partnership between Henry and Diego.

Diego sat on the bench in the employee locker room and looked up at the clock. Above the clock hung a bright neon sign:

IT HAS BEEN [ 93 ] DAYS SINCE OUR LAST TIMELINE INCIDENT

The back door slid open as Henry scanned his fingerprint and clocked into his shift.

“You’re late,” Diego said.

“Did you miss me? Afraid you wouldn’t be able to check your score?”

“Don’t flatter yourself. I couldn’t care less.”

Henry opened his locker and bent down to untie his shoes. Diego surreptitiously peeked at the makeshift tally Henry had taped to the inside of his locker door.  

HENRY: 107

DIEGO: 112

Diego suppressed a smile and quickly looked away before Henry could catch him.

The competition between the two men had started out as a completely one-sided venture, with Henry shouting a running count each time he bagged a time truther. Diego pretended he didn’t care but was quietly pleased to discover that Henry had been keeping a truthful account of Diego’s score as well. Diego never acknowledged it, but the competition fueled him to be better at his job than he had ever been before. Their partnership prevented more timeline incidents than any other team, resulting in the lowest failure rate the TSB had ever recorded.

The two men got dressed in their temporal suits and turned on their assignment review screens. Henry sighed. Three months ago, TSB command had implemented the next step in their new strategy: sending individual teams to the same so-called temporal hot spots each day. These were points in time where continuity crimes were more commonly attempted - typically historical events of great consequence, such as the assassination of Franz Ferdinand or the invention of the atomic bomb. Because of Henry and Diego’s remarkably efficient track record, they had been assigned to the most dangerous and most contested temporal hot spot in the entirety of human history. For the past three months, Henry and Diego had traveled back to the same point in time over and over and over again, and the thought of it made Henry sick to his stomach.

Henry and Diego strapped themselves into the temporal chamber.

“Do you ever stop and think about how messed up it is that we keep having to do this?” Henry asked.

“No,” Diego replied.

“I mean, we have to save baby Hitler every single day. We’ve probably saved him more times than every single Nazi officer did during all of World War II combined. Doesn’t that bother you?”

“No.”

“I get that we have to do it for the sake of the universe. And I get that he’s a baby and he’s still innocent and whatever, but I mean, come on. That baby grows up to be Adolf fucking Hitler!”  

Diego ignored him and leaned his head back in preparation for the jump.

“People ask me what I do for work and I tell them I work at the TSB. If they ask me what my day-to-day is like, I can’t even tell them. ‘Oh, what do you do at the TSB?’ ‘Uh, I save Adolf Hitler multiple times each day. Yeah, no, that Hitler. No, no, the one and the same.’ And then when they look at me shocked and disgusted, what am I supposed to say? ‘But it’s ok, because I’m a hero? I save Hitler in order to save you?’ I mean, do you have any idea how awkward that is to explain?”

Diego flipped each of the switches on the console and hovered his hand over a large red button. “On my count, commencing launch in 5…4…”

“I signed up for this job because I wanted to save the world, not be some Nazi sympathizer…”

“…3…

“…at this point I’m too ashamed to tell my own mother what I do…”

“…2…”

“…and really nothing kills the mood with a girl like talking about what baby Hitler looks like…”

“…1…”

Diego pressed the button and both men launched backwards in time. They materialized in a large bedchamber on the second floor of a boarding house in the small town of Braunau am Inn. A small screaming woman lay in a bed drenched in sweat and blood, her long brown hair matted around her face, completely oblivious to the invisible battle about to take place around her.  

Henry yawned as the midwife pulled the infant from the woman and the little newborn mass murdering tyrant made his first cries. At the same exact moment, a tall blonde woman materialized in the corner of his eye and wrapped her muscular arms around Diego’s neck. Diego repeatedly shoved his elbow into her stomach and attempted to shift his weight to pull her over his head, but her grip was incredibly strong and he remained in her headlock. A brown haired man materialized next to the midwife and held his hands out to strangle the baby. Henry quickly aimed his stun gun at the baby assailant and shot him before he could touch the infant, sending electric spasms through his body and knocking the brown haired man unconscious. Diego continued to grapple with the blonde woman, as Henry turned and shot her in the face. 

“I had that one,” Diego grumbled.

“Sure you did,” Henry said. “That’s two for me, none for Diego.”

The two men placed teleportation discs on the assailants, and the pair of criminals were sent back to the present day to be prosecuted.

“Goddamnit, that’s another save for baby Hitler,” Henry said as he looked down at the infant. He couldn’t help but coo and curl his finger. “You dumb, evil, future mustache-stained son of a bitch.”

At that moment, a portal opened and four more time truthers materialized.

“If it bothers you so much, call off the game,” Diego said as he dodged a punch from the first assailant and shot him in the foot. “Declare me the winner.”

Henry ran, slid, and took out the legs of the second assailant before the man could touch the baby. “I knew it! I freaking knew it! You do care about the game!”

Diego ducked as the third assailant attempted to roundhouse kick him. “I don’t. I just want to do my job,” he said as he launched a right upper cut, “and not have to hear you yammer on about it all day.” He dodged a hit and punched the third assailant squarely in the face, knocking him out cold. “But if I did care about it, which again, I don’t, just say, ‘Diego, you win, you’re better than me,’ and I’ll get Command to reassign us. They owe me a favor.”

“In your dreams, old man!” Henry said as he aimed his gun at the fourth assailant, narrowly missing.

“Do you want to keep saving baby Hitler?” Diego asked as the second assailant got up. Both of the remaining attackers attempted to surprise him from behind. “We can keep saving baby Hitler.” Diego threw the gun over his shoulder and shot both of them without looking. “We can keep saving baby Hitler all day.”

Three more time truthers materialized but were poorly trained and hesitated a half second too long before launching their attack. Diego shot all three in quick succession. In total, seven time truthers lay unconscious on the floor. Diego looked gloatingly at Henry.

“Yeah yeah, that’s seven for you,” Henry begrudgingly admitted.

The two men holstered their guns and put their hands on their knees as they caught their breath. The midwife handed the baby to his mother, and she looked down lovingly as he cooed.

Henry looked at her and feigned gagging. “I so wish we could tell her what a piece of shit that baby ends up being,” he said.

A group of twelve time truthers suddenly materialized and spread out into a circle, surrounding Henry and Diego at the center of the room. Henry and Diego stood back to back as they each hovered their hands over their holsters. In perfect unison, both men grabbed their guns and began rotating as they shot in a circular motion around the room.

“Fine, if I say you win, you have to do something for me,” Henry shouted over his shoulder as he continued rotating and shooting.

“No,” Diego replied as they continued their dance, sending four more time truthers to the floor.

“I’ll say you win, if you get a drink with me after work,” Henry said as two more assailants collapsed.

Diego contemplated this and narrowed his eyes. “Just one drink and I win?”

“Just one drink,” Henry nodded.

The remaining time truthers ran toward them and the two men shot them all in quick succession.

“You’re buying?” Diego asked.

One time truther raised his fist in protest but was quickly knocked out.

“I’m buying,” Henry replied.

Diego sighed as the last of the time truthers twitched on the floor. He wouldn’t admit it but he really couldn’t help it - he cared deeply about the game. He wanted to win. He glanced over at the tiny, now sleeping infant and sighed. He also really hated that baby. 

“Deal,” he said.  

They both lowered their guns. Neither man noticed as the future Führer stretched his arm and clutched his mother’s finger. 

“Diego, I concede defeat,” Henry said as he bowed. “You are a better agent than I am, and you win the game that for the record, I made up and you clearly care more about than you let on.”

Diego could not help but break out into a giant, immensely satisfied grin as the two men shook hands.

Henry laughed. “You son of a bitch, I knew you liked the game. Admit it, you like the game! Does this make us friends now? I think this makes us friends now.”

Diego rolled his eyes but smiled. “Don’t push it, junior.”

Diego continued to smile as the two men neutralized each subsequent group of time truthers in short order. He had to admit he had developed a certain fondness for the young rookie, and that his job had been more enjoyable since they began working together. He wondered if this was what caring or friendship felt like. He frowned. It was so much worse than he could have ever imagined.