Nanowrimo 2015-11-18

We stayed with my parents for nearly a week during which they tried to convince me never to go back to the agency again.

"It's too dangerous, and you might get hurt!" my mother would say.

"As much as I want to understand things, you don't have to understand everything," my father would say.

"But if they've sent me back to kill someone innocent, what if they are sending others back," I would protest.  I'd look at Connor and say, "I have to stop them from hurting people who don't deserve to be hurt."

"I'll back whatever you want to do," Connor said, "but I feel ready to go."

I had anticipated this resistance from my parents.  I didn't expect them to be fully on board with my plan.  I just wanted them to accept that it was happening.  That was part of the reason why I had brought Connor and I back a full week before I left on the mission to go kill him.  It would be even less wise to go anywhere near the agency while my past self was still hanging out and training there.  If I ran into myself, things could get really messed up, or if someone caught me but then ended up going after my self from the past instead.  I didn't want to think about all that could go wrong with that.

I wanted to force myself to have to wait, and to have time to reassure my parents that this was the right thing to do.  At the end of the week, I wasn't sure they were as accepting as I would have liked, but they at least didn't stop me and Connor from going.  The part I wasn't sure about was whether Connor should go with me, but he insisted.  "I want to be a part of this, too," he said.  "These people wanted to murder me even though its clear now that killing was not necessary.  I have the same desire you do to stop them.  The only difference is that you know more about them than I do."

I reflected during the day before our mission that I wasn't entirely sure that was true.  I thought I knew things about the agency, but I had told Connor basically everything I thought I knew.  And I was no longer true which of those things even were true.  I considered that Connor, with his outside perspective, might actually see the agency more clearly than I did, even though he had never set foot there before.


Our plan was simple, but not easy.  We were going to sneak in during the night and poke around in all those places I was never allowed to go.  I briefly wished I had some cream to help us get in (as the time traveling hand cream let you travel through space as well as time), but then on the other hand, they could detect time travel activity and would probably put a stop to that right away.  "Breaking" in the old fashioned way would be much easier.  It really helped that the agency operated more based on secrecy than on real security.  Their building was an old warehouse in a completely abandoned town (abandoned around the time of the 2057 crisis because the illogical people there thought they would be more safe in a big city), and there was no visible security.  They did have some more security stuff once you got inside the building, but it was a good ways in, there wasn't a guard on duty, and I would have my badge with me in the absolute worse case.  I figured that if anyone did cause trouble for me, I would just tell them the partial truth:  That I hadn't found it in my heart to kill Connor and had brought him here instead and it seemed to work out find since Rome and Beijing were now still in existence.  I was concerned Connor would not be okay with this "Plan B", since it involved telling the people who had wanted to kill him, "Here he is!", but he told me, "Well, if it comes to that, at least it will make it really clear where they really stand."

So that night, Connor and I drove in near silence to this old abandoned town, parked a mile away from an old abandoned warehouse, and walked right in the front door of the time travel agency for which I worked.  No one was there.  No alarms went off.  I nearly breathed a sigh of relief.  And then I led Connor to the archives.

The archives were where Maria kept all the records of past missions.  It was the least secure of the three stops we planned to make to gather information, the other two stops being the scientists' main office and the historians' main office.  I had never been inside either of those offices and only vaguely knew where they were.  At least the archives I had been to when Maria had me file my reports on my first few missions.  After that, I had never been in that room again, but I certainly remembered where it was.  What surprised me slightly was that the door to the room was unlocked, but I chose not to question it and motioned Connor in.

We kept the lights off as we went through the files.  There weren't a lot of files, but that's because each of them contained a digital document that contained hundreds of reports.  The one little bit of clever work I had done before coming here was to purchase a program that could scan through the documents for certain keywords.  It wasn't perfect, and if I had been more proficient with programming, I probably would have written something more advanced, but I figured it would get the job done.  What shocked me to the core was what the program found.  Connor was actually the one who found it first.  I heard him say, "What the hell?" which really startled me because I'd never actually heard him swear before, even that drunken New Year's Even when he found me and asked who I really was.

"What is it?" I said walking over to him.

"See for yourself," he said, clearly not sure how to describe what he had found.  He flipped the document around for me to see and I audibly gasped when I saw what was displayed there.  It was a picture of Connor, but with the name "Jason Andrews" below it.

"Are you sure that's you?" I asked.

"Yes I'm sure!" Connor exclaimed, a bit louder than I would have liked.  "Scroll down."

I did, and I found a whole report about how Jason had been renamed Connor (the search looking for Connor's name was how he had found this document to begin with) and sent back in time due to his insubordination against the agency.

"What the hell," Connor said again.

I just had to restate what this document was saying because it sounded so bizarre.  "You used to work here?" I asked.

Connor shrugged.  "Apparently," he said.

"Well, did any of this feel... familiar as we walked in?"

"No," he said.  "Nothing.  Except..."  He turned and darted out the door, leaving me no choice by to follow him.  I was surprised at how he seemed to know where he was going.

"This is it," he said, stopping at the door to a sleeping quarters.  "This is where I used to sleep."

I was even more shocked now.  This wasn't just any sleeping quarters.  "That's my room," I said.

He turned at me, startled.  "What?"

"Yeah," I said.  I opened the door and let him in.  "See, this is my stuff.  And there's a picture of my family."  I pointed at the desk.

"What the?"

I shook my head.  "I have no idea, but I think we need to get out of here."

"What about the other two offices?" Connor asked.

"I don't think we can afford to worry about those right now," I said.  "We need to get somewhere safe and figure out what on earth is going on."

"Okay, agreed," Connor said.  "Lead the way."

I looked at him.  "Are you sure I have to?" I asked.

Connor frowned.  "No, apparently not," he said, and he led the way straight out of the warehouse.


When I told my parents what I had found, they were equally shocked, but this didn't last long on my mom as she then exclaimed, "I knew I knew you!"

"Yeah, apparently you did," Connor agreed.

She looked at him more carefully, trying to remember.  Then she shook her finger at him, seemingly in an effort to lock down the memories.  "You were dating my daughter."

Connor and I both laughed.  "What?" he said.

"You were," my mother insisted.  "I don't know how I could forget it, but you came over for dinner.  It was a big deal because you weren't supposed to, but you insisted on meeting the family.  You sat right there at the table, and you told my daughter that you loved her.  I couldn't have been happier."

I saw Connor frown as my heart felt like it dropped.  We exchanged a look.  "It wasn't a dream," I said to him.

"What wasn't a dream?" my mother asked.

"Connor, I mean Jason, and I both had a dream of what you just described," I said.  "I guess it wasn't a dream after all."

"It was a memory," Jason said.  Then he looked at me.  "But how can any of this be possible?  How can they just erase our memories like that?"

I sighed.  "Well, I told you they had some mind-altering tech we were supposed to use at times," I said.  "Like when I was supposed to calm your alleged grandson.  It can erase certain memories, too.  I just didn't know quite how advanced it apparently is."  I crossed my arms and shook my head as I looked at the ground.  Then I looked back up at Jason.  "I'm so sorry," I said.  "I'm so sorry, Jason."

He looked a little uncomfortable, but then reached out his hand to touch my shoulder.  "Don't be sorry," he said.  "If it weren't for you, I'd still be trapped in the past."

"Maybe," I admitted, "but I also can't help but feel that you wouldn't have been sent to the past to begin with if it wasn't for me."

"We can't worry about that now," Jason said.  Then he added with a sly grin, "It's all in the past."

I couldn't help but laugh at that as I wiped some tears from my eyes.  Then I turned to my parents.  "Do you two remember anything else?" I asked.

My mom shook her head, "No, I don't think so.  Just the dinner."  She looked at Jason, "And you name."

"I just remember this feeling," my dad said.  "Your mom describing the dinner brought it back.  It was like I was happy for the two of you, but really scared, too."

"Do you think you knew something bad was happening?" my mother asked, turning to address my father.

He shrugged.  "I don't know," he said.  "If I had, I'm sure you did, too.  You usually have a better sense for those things than me anyway."

There was silence for a minute and then Jason asked the billion dollar question:  "So what do we do now?"