When I stood there staring at a much younger version of my mother than I was used to, I was initially at a loss for words. This was compounded by the fact that she was holding a wided eyed baby girl in her hip whom I knew to be me. Once more than enough awkward silence had passed after my mother's greeting, I finally said what I knew I was going to say: "Mrs. Larue, I'm with the insurance agency. Can I come in and speak with you and your husband?" I showed her my business card and fake ID, and though she was a bit confused, she had no reason to refuse.
As I watched my mother put my younger self in her crib and then sit down with my parents at the dining room table, I still had a hard time getting past how surreal this all was. The agency had told me this was good. They wanted me to have this crucial meeting with my parents while such things still seemed surreal to me. It would help me relate to them better add they tried to process it all, I was told. That may have been, but it still did nothing to calm my crazy nerves.
Even though I was nervous, I managed to stick to the script. I launched into my phony insurance speil. I showed them some news article screens from the near future, particularly articles that described bad things happening, and warned them that such things could happen to anyone and they should be prepared. It came off as a cheesy sales pitch, as it was supposed to. My parents weren't sure if they needed more insurance. I knew that they felt these cute gimmicks weren't enough to convince then of what they thought I was trying to say.
I told them that it was okay. If give them some time to think about it and I'd come back in a month to chat again, if that was okay. My parents resultant reluctantly agreed. They tried to give me back my "fake future" articles as my dad called them, but I refused and said they should keep them as a reminder. They shrugged and my mom tossed them on the weekly mail pile. They didn't know yet what I knew: that those "fake future" articles that were actually extremely real were the whole point of that first of my two visits.
When I returned a month later, my father was the one who answered the door. He was holding the article screens in his hands, just like I knew he would be. "Who exactly are you?" He asked, looking a bit nervous. "I can tell you that you certainly aren't an insurance salesman."
I smiled. I loved my dad so much. I just wanted to give him a big hug. "I'm your daughter." I said.
His face flushed. For a moment I think he was scared that I really was the daughter of him and some random girl from back on his school days. I looked just young enough that maybe that would be possible, though it would be a stretch. "Come again?" He asked.
"I'm your daughter," I said again. And then I added. "I'm Anna."
His mouth hung open, trying to process just how crazy I might be. "Anna is only a few months old," he said.
"Now," I replied. "But I'll look just like this 27 years from now." I gestured to the articles still in his hands. "Just like this articles that I have you a month ago look just like articles that you've found in the past three weeks.". I paused to let him process the ridiculous claim I had just made. Then, with my pulse pounding, I asked the critical question that I already knew he would answer in the affirmative. He had to. "May I come in?"
He looked at me; he looked down at the papers; he looked back up at me. He let out a deep sigh, a sigh that said, "I'm going to regret this.". But outloud, all he said was, " okay."
When I say at my parents' take that second time, they were much more nervous and much more inquisitive than they had been before. They had all the usual questions, the questions I was ready for, and I answered them all.
Was I crazy? Well, sometimes I thought so, but no.
Where did I get all these papers? Where it looked like: from the future.
How was that possible? In the not so distant future, the science to support time travel works be possible. I have some boring but impressive sounding technical details about what was necessary and how it would become possible in the next 10 years.
Then was the big one: if time travel was possible ever at all, how come they hadn't seen time travelers before? Time travel was very tightly controlled, the technology remained top secret and only existed for a small number of years before the tech and all research leading up to it was destroyed. They wouldn't tell me exactly when our all the details of why. This all limited the number of time travelers running around to just a hand full. Even then, that could be enough for the secret to get out, so these few time travelers are carefully monitored and nearly everyone they encounter who learns who they really are has their memory wiped after the encounter.
Is this memory wipe going to happen to us? No.
Why not? Because you have a very important job. You must raise me up to believe time travel is possible while still keeping it secret. It is croak l critical that you but me on the necessary path that will lead me to become a time traveler so that I will come visit you today and convince you to lead me to become a time traveler.
What on earth...? I know it's confusing, but the basics are that you need to convince me to be receptive to the idea of being a time traveler. Preventing everyone else from thinking we're crazy is a nice bonus.
Why is this so important? I took a deep breath before this one. This is the question that each traveler needs to answer a little bit differently, each in whatever manner will most appeal to their particular parents. For mine, I said, "because with your help, I will have the power to change the past and the future for the better."
Now I feel compelled to tell you, time travel is not so much about change as it's about making sure the right thing happens when we already know the right thing has. Bit that concept is a bit hard to grasp, so talking about change is as good as it gets most times. And I knew this is what works appeal most to my parents and get me to tell this story for years to come. When I would grow up and learn from the academy that "change" wasn't exactly correct, I would be a little annoyed at first. But then I would realize that the only person I had to be annoyed at was myself. And if I couldn't really trust myself, then who could I trust?
After convincing my parents to convince me to pursue time travel so that I could come back and convince them to convince me to pursue time travel, I returned to headquarters for my next assignment. HQ is in the year 2125 on a small island off the coast of what used to be called Italy. My supervising officer, Maria Rodriguez, was there to greet me with a smile. You'd think that this time lord types would be rougher, but Maria is really quite kind.
"Right on time," she said with a smile as she looked up from her retro smart watch. "It must have gone okay or else you wouldn't have been here."
"And the universe would have exploded. I know the drill." I tried to give off an annoyed tone, yet smiled to let Maria know I was just joking around. To my surprise, her smile drooped in response.
"Anna, you know just as well as anyone that none of us really know what will happen if such a paradox is created."
I nodded, taking her lead in getting more serious. "Yes, Maria," I acknowledge.
She smiled again and gave a friendly nod. "Good then," she said brightly. "Ready for your next assignment?"
Considering Maria's bright smile, I would have guessed my assignment had something to do with puppies and kittens and rainbows and unicorns. I was pretty surprised when she told me what it actually was, especially since this would only be my fourth assignment and it seemed like something much too important to risk a noob screwing it up, especially considering the serious 10 second talk we had just had about the uncertainty of creating a paradox. Yet, I couldn't question Maria, both because it was against protocol and because I couldn't stand the thought of disappointing my friend, so I solemnly accepted her mission.
Now before I come right out and tell you what my mission is, I'll ask you: what's one of the first things you think of doing to make the world a better place when time travel becomes a possibility? If you said, "Kill Hitler," then you're right on the money. Though really, my mission wasn't so much to kill Hitler directly as it was to make sure he died on schedule. You see, the academy's research division had found evidence of a potential alternate timeline in which Hilter escaped and went into hiding instead of staying in Berlin where he committed suicide. The fear was that this alternate history could lead to a small, loyal uprising that grew after the war and continued to reek havoc in Europe for years afterwards. My job was to pop back to April of 1945 and make sure the proper suggestions were planted into Hilter's staff so that they would give him the news of imminent defeat that led him to realize that all was lost. I had to make sure there was no hint of hope that might cause Hitler to make his "final stand" in another way.
As exciting and important as all of that seemed, it was still frustrating. A part of me, well, really, all of me, wanted to go back to before 1945. I wanted to just take a gun with me, shoot Hilter in the head before he rose to power, and stop the atrocities of World War 2 from ever taking place. As much as I wanted to do that, I knew I couldn't, because I clearly hadn't. The best I could do was make sure that Hitler was defeated and died as he was supposed to.
In the end, my mission with my parents was much more emotionally intense than this one. I hate to say it, and you'll probably think me a monster for saying it, but World War 2 had happened so long ago that I had very little if any personal investment in it. I know in your time, that WWII is a huge deal. 100 years in your future, it's still big, but there are lots of other horrible things to worry about, too, like the time in 2057 when we almost destroyed the whole planet. Still, I knew enough to know Hitler was a terrible, terrible human being, and I wanted to kill him, or at least make sure he died, but it's truly surreal going back to 1945 after having just seen your parents in 2098.
Well anyway, the Hilter mission ended up being fairly anticlimactic. I bumped into some guys on the street, used one of our devices to mess with their memories, and away I went. It was scary because I wasn't sure what I had really done until I returned to HQ, but then there was Maria smiling at me and I knew that everything was still okay.
I tell you this story because its really a perfect example of what we do. You might think I did nothing, that what I did made no difference. But our historians believe that it made all the difference. For whatever reason, we couldn't stop Hitler sooner, but we could stop him from becoming even more of a monster than he was. It seemed like I didn't do anything, but that was the whole point. We were the unseen protectors of the universe, ensuring that slightly vague events in history went the way they really were supposed to. And when we did it right, no one knew we had done a thing. No one could know. The only people in the world who knew time travel was real were the members of their academy and in, the case of the time travelers ourselves, our immediate family members. And if any of those family members got out of line, they would, in theory, get more than a stern talking to.
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