《Time Investments LLC [on hold]》 01 - First Taste If a bird lands in the lap of a hungry man, does he not eat it? - Proverbs of the poor I woke with a start. Where am I? The room was unfamiliar, my mouth tasted like an old penny. There was a glass of water on a small table by the bed and I drink half. I began to remember as the fuzzy sensation cleared from between my ears. That''s right, this is 2013, 200 years before I was born. This is the opportunity of a lifetime, and I am supposed to act normal. Time Investments LLC has a good system. They have a very careful selection process, intense screening, a network of aliases, supervisors in the past, and kept 25% of your earnings. You would sign a hefty contact, be transported to a time and place of their choosing, assume one of their aliases (recently vacated by another client), take the job they give you, and collect the paycheck for however many months you agreed to. Since none of the other banks or investment houses of the future are available in your work time, you have to deposit your money in the brokerage house acquired by Time Investments LLC for this purpose. They invest it, as directed by their future self, to grow it all at a slow pace. They do not want analysts in the past to pay attention to their manipulations. Half of the economic issues of 2008 were because of Time Investments LLC clients removing money from circulation. That is when TI? added 4 pages to the contact and instituted Time Wardens. These are people who go into an extended term of the past and watch over the clients. They often fill the roles of boss or supervisor to the positions the clients are filling. Because of the psychological stresses involved in this position, TI? only keeps 10% of the wardens paychecks. Once a stable bank opens, some 70 years before his departure time, his money will be moved a little at a time to an account. There it will collect compound interest until he gets back and withdraws it, at which point he will be able to afford the future he wants instead of the future he had. Our that is the sales pitch they give you. Why they couldn''t just make Time Investments Bank instead, he did not know. I checked my watch, remembered it had been taken before transport, and looked for a clock in the dark, unfamiliar room. If I had cybernetics I would already know the time, but then I also would not be eligible for this opportunity. Some crudely formed red numbers on the small table next to the water caught my eye. I recognized the retro digital clock font available on some interfaces, and realized that was the time. And that wasn''t retro in this day and age. 6:42 Only for hours since my arrival; that is why I could still taste pennies. Transportation was rough. The rumors on the streets had vastly differed on the details, but they all had that one right. Some thought that time travel would always be impossible and the claims of TI? where just a cover for black market organ sales. There was plenty of that in the dark corners already, no need to start a large, shiny company to cover more. Another line of thought went If time travel was real, why hadn''t someone gone back and fixed this mess of a world so that every one had decent food and a dry cot. The answer to that one was obvious now; because the people who had time travel didn''t care about who''s backs they were standing on. And now I am one of them. This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience. Part of what they don''t tell you before you agree is how it works. They give you something that looks like a pear sculpted out of a heat sink, its grooves filled with glitter. That is for your mouth, and that glitter (synthetic cobalt hemoglobin) holds enough oxygen to keep you alive for 3 hours. You have to climb into a pod, morbidly shaped like a coffin, and calmly suck on your metal pear as the pod fills with electrolyk gel. Then you are electrocuted. To be fair, it is not electricity they pump you with but a different form of energy, the end result being an enormous jump in your potential energy measurement; but it feels the same. The pod holds some piece of you in your time, a bio signature, so that nature knows where to put you when it realizes that you are out of place. That usually happens in about a week, as your synthetic potential dissipates. So if you sign for a 3 month contract you just volunteered for 12 electrocutions give or take your personal resilience. The scientists discovered it when trying to simulate a black hole. Since gravitational pull provides massive potential energy, they looked for a way to do the same without destroying the lab and found this instead. Time travel is like throwing yourself up a cliff, it takes a lot of energy and is against the normal way of things. Also, the top of the cliff where you now find yourself is shrinking, eventually becoming too small for you to stay and you fall off again. An odd side thought; what does it mean that the past has more "potential energy" than the present? Entropy is king and we are all headed towards chaos. At least the big heads who think of all this promise us we are eons away from that. That doesn''t matter to me though. I am here to reject the rotten start I got in life, and take whatever I can to better my own life. Time travel means I can snub fate and destiny, and write my own rules! Well, as much as TI? will let me. I have to get up in an hour to get ready for my orientation .... Even with time travel, I still can''t sleep in. 02 - Rules Sleeping is hard, so I review what I know so far. Part of what they do tell you are the rules that they have found do not bend, found by unfortunate circumstance. 1. You cannot jump to the same time slice twice. Your second entry breaks the connection of your first, and both copies of you are immediately returned to the present, with a very messy conclusion. This was confirmed with fruit, since one test is never enough for the scientists but none of them volunteered for the second. Related, you cannot jump to your own time because it causes a confusion of the bio signatures. Also tested with fruit. They have, however, shaved the delay for reentry to 6 minutes from your disappearance. This makes it so that you can complete a month of work in the past with a half hour in the present, including recharges. 2. Only organic material goes through, hence the fruit tests. One titanium joint was left inside the pod with the bio signature after the disappearance of the traveler. That is a horror story the street rumors actually had right, of a man trapped in a remote test location for a week, missing a piece of his internal structure. I will let your nightmares fill that one in, like mine have. This also meant that the founder of TI? could not simply move gold back or bring vintage items forward. 3. An anchor point is needed, hence the use of the pods. If your bio signature is lost, so are you. This one still has some unanswered questions, because the return looks the same (pop-zip) but the traveler does not actually return. Do they reappear somewhere/sometime randomly? Are they swept out of existence? Do they find the "transcendence" that some fridge groups preach about, and it is so wonderful they dont want to come back? No one has answered any of these yet. 4. You can cause chains of bad things, but they are always bad and don''t. Just don''t. Part of the Time Warden''s job is to identify who does what bad thing, and then a message is forwarded and TI? unplugs your pod. It is in the contract; your bio signature gets purged if you step out of line. They left "bad things" rather vague, but the importance of the rule was still firmly impressed upon us. Perhaps that will be one of the things they explain in this orientation meeting. I am not getting any more rest here, odd tingly sensations and that bad penny flavor. I suppose I should get up; time isn''t going to wait for me. My name is John Gn¨¢th, I am a TI? client, and I am a nobody. That is part of the selection process that everyone goes through. TI? often accepts us street dwellers, because we are hungry for what they offer and don''t have a way to fight back if something goes wrong. Because of the travel limitations we are screened for inorganic implants, not that many of us could afford implants of any kind. They look for our background information, or any signs of us being connected to one of their opponents. They don''t want to send their opposition into the past, things can happen. They give us a physical, because they don''t want us to die in the first zap. Yes, they get a report instantly if the person lived or died, and can purge the pod and line up the next "client". But hiding a body in the past for a week until it disappears into nothing is an unpleasant job. Finally, they spend a little time teaching us these rules. They want to make sure we wont mess up their operations, because that would cost them money and money is the reason they are doing this whole thing. Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings. I was fortunate to be on a good street corner for the last two years. I received enough donations to get some balanced nutrition occasionally. That made the physical simple. The charity was not enough for me to get a cybernetic implant though, so I missed some job opportunities but also met that requirement here. They control who goes where, so I trust them to obey their own first rule. That leaves the fourth one, which is really the only one I have control over. I am so far out of knowing what is what, I don''t think I could do anything big enough for them to notice anyway. The room is dark, and the bed is small. I am not complaining. I have not had a real bed in years, and this is a comfort that I am going to take full advantage of during my tenure here. Since the clock is the only think I can see at the moment I reach for it, and find the base of a lamp right next to it. The lamp does not respond to my touch, so it is probably more "retro" technology. This is going to take awhile to get used to. There is a rocker switch on the base of the lamp, so I press it. The light reveals a small room, sparsely furnished. I have a tiny table with two chairs, though I do not know who the second one is for. There is a little kitchen area, a length of counter above a few short appliances, with a toaster oven and a small stack of paper on top. I get out of the bed and go over to the papers. There is a little welcome paper with a few stains on it, clearly reused for each person who stays in this room. It explains that the appliance under the toaster oven is a mini fridge that has eggs in it. There are also instructions for how to form an aluminum foil bowl to hold the egg in the toaster oven, and how the controls work. I refill my water cup from the sink and drink while my breakfast heats up. One egg and two small pieces of bread to make a toasty breakfast sandwich. The welcome paper tells me that the Warden of my job will come by and collect us all for orientation at 8:00am.