The lights were low, the music soft, and Sondra and I were snuggled side by side on the couch, as close as we could get. She looked up, into my eyes, smiled, and brought my lips close to hers. Her eyes closed, as did mine. The loud buzzing of the phone stopped us dead. I looked at the phone and saw that the number on the screen indicated it was the commissioner.
"There’s another murder to deal with, Phillips, and it’s your turn, so get on it fast."
I was about to ask what was the big hurry, but he’d already hung up.
Same old, same old. Another TTM. Who did these people think they were fooling? Somebody figures out how to travel back in time, and the next thing you know, some wise guy is trying to test the Grandparent Paradox. You know: go back in time, kill one of your grandparents, so then you’re not born, so you can’t go back in time and on and on you go.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. These TTMs just don't understand that you can’t change the past. If you’re going to go back in time to kill somebody, it isn’t going to be a grandparent. If you knock somebody off, it’s got to be someone whose death won’t prevent you from being born. When you killed the person that would have been your grandparent, you’d automatically branch off to another universe, another world. Because your grandparent wasn’t murdered and you were born in your timeline, your past, right after the death, you’d shift over to another timeline.
That’s where I come in. The time travelling murderer goes back to the past, commits what seems like the perfect murder, and I go after them and make them pay for the crime. They have the idea that, since they’re going to the past, they know way more than the locals, and they can’t be caught. But they are. Every time. And I wasn’t going to let that change, not while I was on the job.
"So what have you got?" I asked the cop at the crime scene.
"Who are you? Get outa’ here, this is a restricted area."
I sighed and pulled out my ID.
He spat on the ground, just missing my left shoe. "Not you guys again. We can handle this. So—hey!"
I’d walked around him, past the yellow tape and up to the corpse. I pulled out my scanner and passed it over the dead man’s face, then his chest, and there it was: massive heart damage.
"What are you doing? You can’t—"
"Look," I said and showed him the screen. "No bullets, just the crumpled heart." There was also foreign matter, just trace amounts, but a clear indicator. The victim had been shot with ice bullets, long since melted, but they left their trace behind. Minute quantities of a rare pollutant were in the heart tissue. The murderer was from at least 30 years in the future. That was when this pollutant had first gotten into the water supply. No doubt the TTM had thought no one from this time would know about that.
But how could we not know? I shook my head.
"What is it? Whad’ya’ got?"
The scanner went back in my kit and I pulled out my QSR. I swept it around and found more evidence. There was a weak but clear quantum signature left, and the pattern was now recorded in the QSR.
Next, I fed the QS pattern into the computer and asked for the most probable current location of the TTM. Surprise, surprise: the closest exotic dancer bar. No longer legal 30 years from now, so after the murder, the TTM figures he’ll go grab a couple of beers and watch the dancers.
As soon as I stepped into the bar, I immediately located the TTM. He was sitting up close to the dance floor. I sat down on the opposite side of his table.
"Hey! Outta’ my way, man. I can’t see—"
Now he could see. My ID was flashy and had a nice hologram on the front. He couldn’t help but read it: I’d pushed it within a few inches of his nose.
"Yeah, right, man. That’s funny. Where’d ya’ get that thing made up? Looks phony."
"Oh, well, let me think."
I paused, and leaned into his face.
"I remember. My grandfather gave it to me."
The TTM paled.
"Yeah, that’s right," I said. "Maybe the locals don’t know what you did or why. But I do."
His eyes widened. Then his face dropped as he made a feeble attempt to give me a tough guy look.
"Listen, you don’t want to mess with me. I—"
I’d extended my arm over the table top and wrapped my fingers and thumb around his throat. Now I squeezed and watched as the colour of his face went from pale pink, to white, to a gentle tinge of blue.
He garbled and tried to pry my grip loose.
"Hey there, Mr. Blue. What’s that you said? Speak up now. Don’t be shy."
I cuffed him, and then I cuffed him.
As I dragged him out of the place, I took one last look back, just to see if anyone had noticed us.
Bringing TTMs to justice is rewarding, but not without cost. To go back in time means to leave your world for another one, similar to your previous world perhaps, but not identical.
Finished with my job, I went get back to my own time. Then I stepped in the teleportation booth and tapped in the coordinates to send me from the edge of the solar system to the switching station orbiting Earth, and one more step to Boston. A robo-taxi took me home.
I unlocked the door to my apartment and stepped inside. I noticed a slightly different carpet and a few other changes, but most of the details looked pretty much the same. It would do.
"Carter? Are you back so soon?"
"Sondra! You know I couldn’t stay away."
"‘Sondra?’" she repeated. "It’s Sonya."
I slid down onto the couch, wrapped an arm around her.
"That’s what I said: Sonya."
Later, the lights low and the music soft, Sonya smiled at me and her lips came close to mine. She looked up into my eyes, and started to close hers.
Then she suddenly stiffened and put her hand on my chest.
"Hey!" she said, and pushed me away. "When you left here your eyes were brown."
Then she was gone.
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