Kill her? Heck, he was the Time Travel Police Commissioner. He could travel back in time and kill someone hundreds of years before she was born that would result in her and numerous ancestors never existing. For the Time Travel Police Department, time travel is an exact science. All of these things could be figured out beforehand and executed with the precision of a surgeon and his blade.
Norman Bardsley now found himself in front of four screens. He was briefly introduced to high ranking officials in the Time Travel Police Department (two humans, two extraterrestrials from two different planets) before the charges were read to him. “Conspiracy to change time…” said one of the alien judges. “This is a serious charge, as the word ‘conspiracy’ implies premeditation.”
For numerous obvious reasons, time travel makes things (even court proceedings) move a lot faster than it would if one were forced to follow a fluid, forward-moving sequence of events. The verdict had been decided before Norman had even arrived here to be interrogated. Realizing how badly he had been railroaded and that this verdict was likely to be “vaporizing by ray gun”, Norman started to beg for his life.
“I just wanted to reset my alarm clock!” he shouted, tears streaming down his face as time cops charged their ray guns, setting them to the highest setting. “Please! I lost my job! My daughter! Everything I worked for! I lost everything! Because of one stupid alarm clock!”
This made Aileen extremely uncomfortable. Watching time criminals get executed always made her feel depressed for days afterward. She was always trying to shift the duty of actually executing the criminals to someone else whenever “zapping duty” landed on her. And the fact that this man was sobbing and pleading for his life after committing a relatively minor offense didn’t help her contain her emotions. But that was before she knew what Commissioner Bonin was up to.
It was three years prior (fluid time), about the same time that Norman was trying to sneak back into his own house to reset his alarm clock, that Past Aileen was on stakeout. She had set up magnetic thumbnail cameras all over a certain warehouse and was monitoring them from a safe distance. She was in a hover van in a trash-strewn alley a few miles away, gawking at hologram screens that fed her grainy 3-D image feeds. She was trying to collect evidence that Rupert Blix was smuggling art from the Renaissance period into the present, so that the price for this “long-lost” artwork would go up twentyfold. This was the warehouse that he was using to store the paintings and sculptures, at least according to her source.
It was gutsy for her to go on a stakeout by herself. Some would call it foolish, but her increasing suspicions about her colleagues made a solo stakeout the most viable option with the cards that she currently had in her hand. She kept a toolbox in her van and stayed dressed up in work clothes, including a dirty painters cap. If one of the cameras went on the fritz, this was her cover to go in there and pretend she was a fix-it person doing routine maintenance on the pipes or some other aspect of the warehouse.
One camera only malfunctioned once. And when Aileen was in the warehouse, trying to fix it, she was startled by someone coming out of the rear office. Not expecting anyone to be here, she quietly slipped into the shadows, so that she would not be seen. She held in her gasp when she realized that this short, well-dressed Puerto Rican man was underworld time travel kingpin Rupert Blix. She had seen his picture many times in private TTPD files and later deduced correctly that she was wise to stay hidden. A man who does as much time travelling as Rupert Blix may have met Aileen in the future without present day Aileen knowing anything about it. If she tried to pass herself off as a humble maintenance worker, Rupert may have seen right through her deception, based on something that hasn’t happened yet…and may never happen if he killed her right then and there, deleting that future self that he met in the first place.
Yes, that is technically a time paradox, but it was Rupert Blix’s brilliant mastery over such things that made him the most feared, most elusive criminal that the TTPD ever has to deal with, one with dangerous contacts in countless places and time lines.
Aileen stayed hidden as another well-dressed man walked into the warehouse a few seconds later. Her heart stopped when she recognized the voice. The arrogant, dogmatic voice that had become commonplace around the station, whether he was barking orders at his men or making inappropriately flirty remarks to some of the female cops.
I better get this on video, Aileen thought to herself, trying desperately to figure out how to get back to her hover van without either Rupert Blix or Commissioner Bonin seeing her. I have fifty GPS-linked cameras in this stupid...
Aileen had to wait until the brief meeting was over, until after Commissioner Bonin had left and after Blix retreated to his office, before she could leave the grounds of that warehouse. When she got back to the hover van, she had the most monumental bit of criminal evidence that a detective could possibly hope for, one that had the potential to bring down the entire department. She had a 3-D hologram of Rupert Blix conspiring with the Time Travel Police Commissioner.
She studied these images meticulously for ten minutes straight. All that was exchanged was a file folder, no briefcase full of money. There could have been a check inside the folder, though. And the only clue Aileen had as to what was inside the folder was a small portion of a photograph, poking out of a torn part of the folder. As Commissioner Bonin flipped the folder open, Aileen paused the video and zoomed in to see the image clearer. It was unmistakable. The photo showed the image of a politician who had run for President of the United States almost 600 years ago, in the year 2020. That was the first year that elections had been held in the United States after aliens from the planet Kardash had conquered the planet.
Lee Finn¸ Aileen thought. History was her favorite subject in school, a common story for most time travel cops, so she started running what she knew about Lee though her mind. What could Rupert Blix want with him? Wasn’t he assassinated? Did Rupert assassinate him?
Having a better understanding of how deep the corruption in the TTPD went, Aileen decided before she got home that night that she no longer wanted any part of it. She left for work that morning as a dedicated public servant, proud to put on her badge and protect the universe from the bad effects of time travel, and came home sullen, complacent, apathetic about her life’s most important choice.
Aileen knew that she would have to tough it out, just in case either Rupert or Bonin knew that she had seen their mysterious transaction. Quitting suddenly would have been suspicious, so she kept doing her duty for another three years. She even deleted the hologram video of Blix and Bonin’s meeting, knowing that no one on either side of the TTPD would have the courage to prosecute either of them. Just having that video was like painting a large target on her forehead.
But there was something about watching Norman Bardsley being sentenced to death for wanting to reset his alarm clock so he wouldn’t lose custody of his daughter that really boiled Aileen’s blood. As loyal time cops set their ray guns to ‘vaporize’ and prepared to execute the hard-working, tax-paying father, Aileen decided that enough time had passed. It was time to quit.
And she did.
Looking down at his wrist, Norman Bardsley watched with amazement as a gold watch, one of the most expensive and high-tech on the market, just appeared on his hand, out of nowhere. He was elated, holding up his hand to gawk at this watch with his mouth wide open. This meant that his mission had actually succeeded. And the timeline was conforming to the change, molding like clay around things that Norman had done before being arrested. And there wasn’t anything the Time Travel Police could do about it.
All of the noise that Future Norman and his dog had made in the kitchen had indeed woken up his past self. Well, technically, it woke up the twenty-year-old super model that Norman had met at a fund-raiser the night before and she woke Norman up. But after grabbing a baseball bat from under the bed and making sure that there were no murderers, ra
pists or paparazzi in the hallway, Norman noticed that his alarm clock had malfunctioned. He reset it before crawling back in bed next to a beautiful body that would grace the cover of Cyber Sports magazine two months later.
He would not sleep until ten o’clock that fateful summer’s morning in 2617. He would not miss his important government meeting and lose his lucrative job. He would not fall back into his old college drinking habit, losing his money and having to sell (among other things) this expensive watch to stay alive.
It was certainly an unusual sight for the time cops who were surrounding Norman, awaiting his execution by ray gun, to see the subject suddenly burst into laughter. But Norman knew that none of this mattered. Even if they vaporized him, the timeline would reconfigure into a world where Norman’s alarm clock did go off that morning and he didn’t get arrested. His watch reappearing was proof of that and it filled Norman with brimming confidence like he had not experienced for the past three years.
“You have no stinkin’ clue!” Norman told the cops, boldly looking up at them in between fits of laughter. “You’re all brainwashed idiots! You have no clue how many