For the next several days, the trainers worked with me. It had been a while since I shot that elephant, and Connor would be a much smaller target. I noticed right away that when they, the trainers, talked about him though, they didn't call him "Connor" or even "him." They just called him "the target."
"The target will be smaller and harder to hit. Just wait until he's still."
"The target has no reason to suspect anyone would want to do him harm. Use that."
"Keep your eyes open and don't take them off the target."
"After you drop the target, leave your weapon and head immediately back to the present."
They were all very business-like about everything, and not a one of them seemed willing to point out that they were asking me to murder another human being who had done absolutely nothing wrong. If anyone deserved to die for this whole mess, it was me, and even then I didn't think I should die either. In a perfect world, I would live, Connor would live, and all of these people trying to kill him physically and me morally would be locked away.
As I trained, I remained stoic. I did my best to remain calm. With each passing day, I became more and more aware of the truth that my life had been a horrible mistake. I should never have listened to myself when I told my parents that this was my destiny. These people were not good people. And on top of that, they had so many secrets. Who knows why I shot that elephant or rescued that cat. If they'd had it their way, they probably would have asked me to kill Connor for no reason at all. In fact, I was half surprised they hadn't asked some other traveler who knew nothing about the whole situation to go off and be the murderer.
It dawned on me more than once that I could simply refuse to go back and force them to kill someone else. But I didn't do that. I would never do that, because I wanted to be able to do the right thing myself. And the right thing, I knew, was obviously to not kill Connor. I couldn't say I didn't want to do this, because then they wouldn't send me, and they had to send me, so that he wouldn't die. I hadn't quite figured out what I was going to do with him instead of killing him, but I knew that he wasn't going to die, at least not by my hand, and not before his natural time.
Once I resolved that this was my plan, I came to a realization that I could never come back to my own time. I would have to stay in the past forever. I wasn't sure how all of this was going to work, really. Would they know I had failed my mission and come back in time looking for me? Or would they just keep on living, expecting the world to change around them when I succeeded, and being surprised and confused when it never did? It was all very strange, and I had no idea what to expect, but I knew that this was going to be my final mission. It would be the end of it all, but it would also be a new beginning. It would be the beginning of me finding myself in the past, instead of in the hope of the future, of being great, that I had grown up with. I only wished that I could tell my parents good-bye and thank them for all that they had done for me, but I feared it would look suspicious if I asked for a day off to go visit them now, so all I could do was hope that they knew just how much I loved them and that none of this mess had been their fault.
As more days passed, I started to grow a bit nervous. Didn't they feel like I was ready to go back and complete this "assassination?" Had I done something to make them suspicious so that they had decided to send someone else instead and not tell me? I couldn't let these fears show, or else I was lost and so was Connor.
Connor. I thought about him so much during this time, far more than I'm sure I ever would have if I had just been able to go on that stupid date with him and then leave him in the past. I wondered what he would say when I showed up again, told him I was a time traveler who was sent to murder him, and then asked him to trust me. I nearly laughed aloud when thinking about it that way. Now obviously, it wasn't going to go down like that. It couldn't. I had to earn his trust and then find a way to make sure he was safe while somehow still ensuring two major cities didn't blow each other up in 2057. I reflected one night as I was drifting off to sleep that it really would be so much easier just to kill the guy, but I couldn't. Not just because it was murder, but because it was Connor.
Needless to say, I dreamed about him even more now than I had before. I saw him on many of my past missions, in my dreams. Sometimes it was really weird, like I saw his face on the body of that cat I had rescued from the tree. Other times, it was just as a stranger passing by on the street. In one of my dreams, I opened the door to my parents' house, just like the time I went back to tell them to convince me to become a time traveler, but there was Connor instead, and my hear felt like it was fluttering. Then came the night where the dream did not take place in the setting of a past mission. It was just Connor and me, sitting on a blanket on a hillside, flowers all around us, my hair blowing in the breeze, as we looked out over a forest surrounding the hill and more mountains on further beyond that. It was beautiful and I was smiling and laughing and saying something and Connor was smiling back.
And then in my dream, I said, "Wait, is this our date?" But before dream Connor could answer me, a loud bang rang out across the hillside and I heard my scream follow it as the red dot of blood appeared in the middle of Connor's forehead and then expanded out until he dropped dead before me. As he fell, I saw Maria standing behind him holding a rifle that she was now pointing at me. She had this stern look on her face and looked like the kind of total badass you'd see in those old classic action flicks. She was truly terrifying. "Your turn," she said, in my dream. As she pulled the trigger and another shot rang out, I bolted upright in bed, sweating and breathing heavily. "What the..." I whispered to myself.
I took a long time getting ready that morning, longer than I should have in retrospect, but it gave me time to calm down so that when I got into the office and started walking towards the training field, I didn't jump completely out of my skin when Maria met me on the way and announced cheerfully, "Today is the day!"
I assumed she meant to go back and shoot Connor, but I wanted to hear her say it, just to make absolutely sure this was really happening. So I remained silent and just stared at her until her grin dropped a bit and placed her hand on my shoulder as she spoke in a more normal voice to say, "Today is the day you go back and make all of this right." Then she said something that really surprised me. She said, "I know this will be hard, but trust me. It's the right thing to do."
The way she said it, the way she looked at me, the sympathy in her voice, I almost believed her. Almost. There was no way that killing an innocent man could ever be the right thing to do, especially when he was haunting your subconscious and emerging into your dreams, practically begging you to spare him. I knew what I had to do. I remained stoic. I gave a nod. "I promise I will do the right thing," I said.
Maria smiled and gave an approving nod. "That's the spirit!" she said, giving me a reassuring set of two pats on the back. "Now let's go get you prepped!"
I guess I haven't really told you all that much about the time travel process yet. I suppose now is as good a time as any. When most people think of time travel, they think of a time machine or time portals or worm holes or something like that. It's really nothing like any of that. It's this weird cream stuff that you smear on your body that messes with your particles and lets you travel back. I'm not kidding. That is truly what it is. It doesn't smell the best, but the smell is gone by the time you've completed the trip, which happens nearly instantaneously, by the way. You smear on the cream, you feel this weird cooling sensation, and then you start to feel a little dizzy and suddenly you're where you need to be.
Getting back home is even more bizarre. You can take cream with you, and most travelers, including me, do, just in case, but in 99.99% of all situations, you can get home just by thinking about it very intentionally for a couple of minutes. Now for this mission, they made certain I have cream with me, since it will be a stressful situation and I might need to recall very suddenly. This is actually great news for me, because I know enough to be able to use the cream to go somewhere else in the past if I really need to. It's dawned on me that I'll have enough for two trips, so in theory, I could take Connor with me to another time if I really needed to and they'd have an even harder time finding us. I really hope it doesn't come to that.
So yeah, there you go, time cream. No joke. Just figured I'd lighten the mood a bit before we get into the really heavy stuff.
So they led me to the chamber, they gave me a backpack with some provisions, the spare cream, and the sniper rifle that I had to use all taken apart into pieces. They handed me a sheet of paper with an address and a key. This is where I could go to prep once I got back in time. Then they smeared the cream on and sent me on the way. The scientists looked somber. The trainers barely even looked at me. Only Maria was smiling and waving good-bye. It made me sick, not just the travel itself, but the cheerful look on my boss's face as she sent me off to become a criminal. I half wanted to take the rifle out of the bag, assemble it right in front of all of them, and shoot her before I went.
But obviously there was no time for that, and before you know it, there I was on a nature trail on the edge of the woods in the early evening, looking at a piece of paper that could easily have been a map and carrying a backpack back from my nice little hike, or so it would appear to anyone who happened by.
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