Tampa Florida
March 8, 1963
I took all Sunday that week to rest, and no, I didn't go to church. Instead I sat around and leisurely fucked my two near-identical cousins until lunch time, then turned them loose with a pocket full of cash to go get themselves something pretty. Then I crashed out.
I'd been at it, fucking like a god, for a while now, and even my batteries need re-charging upon occasion. I mostly slept, took a little walk on the beach, swam, ate healthy, made a few phone calls, did a little research. I haunted the hotel bar for a few peaceful hours, and then returned to my room just in time to watch Lori try on a few things. A simple doggie fuck in the shower and I was ready to crash again.
The next morning found me up at dawn taking a run on the beach in the cool March air. You have to do a little maintenance on the instrument from time to time, after all. I'd been living a rich, full life, and a little clearing of toxins was only wise. I jogged back to the hotel about seven and met Cromwell in the restaurant for breakfast. No need waking Lori up and kicking her out so we could talk business. She was pretty tired, too.
"All right, vacation's over," he said with a sigh. "Hope you enjoyed it. I see you've added a few more to your tally," he said, glancing over the list of the women I'd fucked over the weekend. I had omitted Shelly from it, of course -- no need to discuss my private business. She was a bit of an experiment in temporal dynamics, after all, and something our boss would definitely frown upon. "You ready to finish up the list so we can go the hell back to base for a few days?"
"Too much sun, sand, and sin?" I teased, taking a whole wheat bagel from the bread plate. Tampa had great bagels.
"Just want a little civilization. These Dark Ages are fun for a few days while you get used to the 'quaint', but there's no substitute for real . . . sophistication."
"You're just spoiled," I chided. "Just because you only have three channels, and not a thousand . . ."
"Enough," he said, sounding just the tiniest bit crabby. "We've got to get on with it. There's . . . stuff happening back home. Word has come down that we are to complete all assignments and return to base at the earliest opportunity."
"What's up?" I asked, concerned.
"Not sure," he admitted. "But the priority code was pretty high. Something to do with the divergences."
"Ah," I said, nodding sagely, having only the tenderest of clues about what he meant.
I may have given the impression in this document that Cromwell was a mere flunky, an uneducated and unsophisticated gopher that fetched me what I needed. It may come across that way because that is, usually, how my interactions ran with him. But the truth is, Cromwell was a highly trained, very adept agent of the Project, and had a far, far better grasp of both the technical and the philosophical underpinnings of temporal displacement than I ever would. Consider him having a doctorate in the subject of temporal mechanics. Add that to his impressive Army record, his ability to blend in to virtually any era, his knowledge of history, and the balding, funereal sidekick you've seen is actually a highly competent professional. He was part actor, part secret agent, a professional liar in the service of humanity. My life was, literally, in his hands.
So when he started throwing around technical terms like divergences, I took note.
Let me back up and explain a little about the confusing and impossible-to-understand science of Time Travel. You pervs who are just reading for amusement can skip over this part and come back for the next sex scene -- the rest of you nerds pay attention.
When you go back in time, you change the future -- that's basic causality. Assassinate Hitler or Einstein as a boy or perform some equally world-changing event and you have forever locked the timeline into an alternate track from what you grew up with -- a "divergence". The only way to fix it is to travel back to the cusp point and un-do whatever it is that got done to screw things up. Usually that fixes it. Mostly.
We can't help making divergences -- it's actually the whole point of what we do. Just showing up and standing around someplace in the past can have an unanticipated effect. That's why we were almost always sent away from the epicenters of big, important events -- like the assassination of JFK in Dallas a few months from now. Sure, we could stop a tragedy from happening, but the fact is that the world would have diverged so much from what we had known as to be nearly unrecognizable to the time traveler in question.
The thing is, the only one who notices anything different is the time traveler. Every trip back is evaluated in detail to determine mission success, said success being measured in terms of the number of people saved in the point of departure, against the average temporal "drift" the divergence caused. But all of those people who suddenly flash into being when I fill some tight 20th century twat full of sperm don't know that they are divergent from the "control" time line, because from their perspective they've "always" been there. But to me, those are thousands of people who would not have lived, had I not gone backwards in time.
They call it Basic Temporal Relativity, and it will make your brain hurt just thinking about it. Basically, it states that if you go back in time and change something, you as a time traveler can only access the future in which those things happened.
The difference between the "control" time line and the "new" timeline is measured every mission by comparing about twenty thousand irrelevant facts -- little things, like the number of jumbo-sized diapers purchased at the Columbus, Ohio A&P in 1982, or the attendance numbers at the 2004 Rose bowl; or big things, like the list of the presidents, or when Puerto Rico joined the Union, or the exact number of Polish immigrants who came to America in 2012. The aggregate of differences between the control list and the post-mission assessment is called the "divergence".
Over time, these divergences were cumulative, quantified by a percentile. The theory was that if we kept the divergences under 10% or so, we'd be able to finish our business and return to a happier, healthier utopia in the future that we'd created in the past, one shag at a time.
Only things don't always work out so well in time travel. It's all very well and good to say, arbitrarily, that 10% of our reality is expendable . . . but which 10%? I mean, I don't much care whether or not I have to order my pizza by phone, fax, email, smoke signal or telepathy . . . but I do care if pizza is invented or not. Everyone (at least when I grew up) knows about "sensitive dependence on initial conditions" -- the cornerstone of Chaos Theory -- but until suddenly you've popped into a future where Rock and Roll never became popular and Daniel Boone is black, well, you haven't lived it, baby.
