Thursday, March 24th

Whitfield is completely overrun. Barely escaped with my life. From the hill on the outskirts I saw Shamblers along the uptown area. None near the grocery store on the edge of town. I thought I could chance it if I was was quick and remained stealthy. Pried open the backdoor without being discovered. The storeroom beyond had largely been raided by previous parties. I decided to investigate the main store and looked out from the storeroom. The interior of the store was filled with highly decomposed Shamblers and at least two fresher Runners. I barely escaped. As I jumped the fence beyond my leg must have gotten tangled in the razor wire. I have bandaged it for now, but the wound still aches. I used the last of my alcohol in cleaning it. I hope I don't succumb to infection. It would be embarrassing to make it this far only to die from that.

​

Saturday, March 26th

My limp has been slowing me down. I have been forced to travel away from the cities and across open ground. This is slow going in the best of times but now it means I will be lucky to make it to Hargrove by the end of next week. If my supplies last that long. I think I may have a fever so it looks like I didn't clean that wound out well enough. It looks bad today, but the bleeding has stopped so that is encouraging. I also think being sick is making me feel less hunger as I really haven't had much of an appetite. Maybe that will extend my supplies. Regardless, Jean should be waiting for me in Hargrove. I have to keep reminding myself of that as that one thought is all that is allowing me to push on like I am.

Sunday, March ?

Walked all day. Very much walking. Hungry again. Food gone off. Spit it out. Find something later, maybe? Slept much yesterday. But tired today. Like cloud settling in. Hungry and hard to think. Must be fever. I think they have medicine in the place. Place with Jean.

Tuesday March 55

Hard to write. Hard to think. Walking and hungry. Didn't stop last night. Kept walking. Tired, but hurts to stop. Easier to keep going. Leg hurts less. Don't really feel anything anymore. Kind of numb. Still going place. See Jean soon.

Day

Writing. Jean.

Saw Jean. Ran to her. Not so hungry. Where Jean?

I guess it depends on what you are looking for.

Tolkien is best appreciated (in my opinion, at least) as art and not just as literature.

The prose may feel dry and it doesn't have a lot of action scenes. So if you are looking for edge of the seat, heart stopping adventure . . . It's probably not going to be there.

But, let's talk about the fact that to make these stories one man (not a team) came up with a language, genealogies, mythologies, and maps to explain how this all fits together.

If you can't look at it in terms of the artistic detail that went into it and appreciate the level of work involved then, no, you are not going to like it. That's like asking what's the big deal about a grandfather clock when it is just a big wooden box with a face when viewed from the outside.

Now, that's not to say you are a shallow or something is wrong with you because you don't like it. Not all media is meant for you and art is not appreciated the same across all groups. Liking paintings more than sculpture is fine. Liking sculptures and paintings and not being wowed by the intricacies of the Antikythera Mechanism is also fine. But if you see someone geeking out over this ancient computer and you say you don't get it, expect a lot of talk about the construction and implications. If that sort of thing bores you, then you aren't going to like digging into it.

Makes sense?

The Heiljimoor By The Axe 4000 was supposed to make record keeping easier, I mused as I pulled the advance lever. It only seemed to compound the issue. Scrolls rolled and unrolled. Furled and unfurled. All as a blur as tiny automaton arms pulled each from their tubes and loaded them into the feeder to place them in the reading pane in front of me. I pumped the foot pedal harder to keep the clockwork mechanism going as I went through the ledger files one by one. Each vellum scroll flipping past with the quick drying ink that the automaton's quills used when I tapped out the notation on the keyboard. Part organ, part grandfather clock, and all damned nuisance I had grown to loathe the beastly automaton that the dwarves had constructed. What was wrong with waxed cylinders and . . . oh, wait. There was the ledger form I was looking for. Hunter Moon of last year. I ran my eyes down the row until I found the relevant column. Billed amount: 6,000 crowns. Collected 4,000? I found a code for a different scroll. Tapping the code into the keyboard caused the hidden mechanisms to roll up that scroll and bring up the relevant one. Seeing the lopsided signature at the bottom of the damage report confirmed my worst fears.

I pulled the operator bell's trigger and dragged the speaking and hearing trumpet closer to my head.

"Operator," a distant and tinny voice echoed from the trumpet.

"This is Guild Master Crane," I said, "I wish to place a person to person call to Gregnok at Oak 7. Men's Dormitory 432."

"Yes, sir. Would you please stay by the tube while we place your call?"

Before I could say anything I heard the telltale sound of the operator unplugging my hose and plugging it into the standby box. Which meant I now had to listen to Bexder Noggin's One Man One Dog rendition of Venchnelli's "The Storming Of the Fortress of Yellow Cliff While the Screaming of the Mutilated and Dying Echoed Over a Blood Red Ocean Lit By the Fires Of the Villages Below." Venchnelli's operas were an acquired taste anyway and listening to a senile beggar try to sing in a language he had absolutely zero familiarity with as a cocker spaniel howled the brass section did nothing to improve my mood.

The strained notes of Bexder trying to pronounce the word "chstol" (Old Ikonian for "intestines") without sounding like he was drunk were suddenly cut off as the hose was reconnected.

"Sir I am piping him in now," the operator said just before the sound of the hose reconnecting was met with a familiar gruff voice saying, "Ahoy-hoy?"

"Gregnok," I said at last, "This is the Guildmaster."

"It's my day off, sir," he said.

"Indeed? And how do you figure that?"

"Boss Talon told me not to come in today," he said, "He was very clear on that. Do not come back tomorrow."

"Did he specify when you should come back?"

"Beg pardon, sir, but he did appear to be more interested in coordinating the fire brigade at the time. The bucket chain had to go all the way down to Suede Street due to the wharf at Newport also being on fire, sir."

I looked at the inbox on my desk with the still unread and unfiled scrolls. One of which I now saw had an ominous black seal on it.

"Are you telling me that both the guild house and the wharf at Newport were on fire last night at the same time?"

"Well, no, sir. It was all the same fire. Not two separate ones. In fact, it was the same fire that took out the Crooked Temple."

"The . . . stave church on Black Butcher? That's . . . nine blocks from the wharf. How did a single fire manage to consume half a mile of the city?"

"I do believe it had something to do with the walls of Gutted Pelican, sir. They were made of brick."

"How does a public house's use of brick walls cause a fire to engulf the city?"

"Well, sir, it's not like I could just cut through them. Could I? Had to think creatively. Old Creekway was on the other side of the wall from me. I couldn't just shove a knife through it. So I pilled up thirteen barrels of lamp oil, sixty pounds of nails, and dusted the area with nine barrels of flour to use as a fuse."

"Wait, you are telling me you were taking out a target for a client? Who was drinking in the establishment?"

"Yes, sir! And I collected the ninety crowns afterwards as I pulled his severed head from the rubble as proof of completion of the job. I got out just before the thatch came crashing down."

"You . . . created an explosive to take out the pub? To perform an assassination on one man? Old Creekway? Isn't he a riverboat captain? Why didn't you wait for him to leave? Or wait for him on his ship? Why did you blow up the city?"

"I thought he might be less prepared for this tactic."

I nearly pushed the stopper back in the tube. But instead I counted backwards from 6,000. Wait. That reminded me.

"The reason I piped you," I said at last, "Was because of the Grape Growers job from last Hunter's Moon. Remember they tried to form a guild and the winemakers hired you to remove the guild leader?"

"I remember the job," he said, sounding annoyed, "Refused to pay the full amount. Deducted from us for what they called 'damages.' Can you believe that?"

"What sort of damages?"

"Nothing serious, sir," he protested, "There was just some difficulties with making an escape on account of all the blood. They said we owed them for the carpeting. And the tapestries. Plus the chandelier."

"Blood on the chandelier?"

"Just a bit," he said, "And it would probably look good as new once you saw the head off of it."

"Saw the head off?" I asked.

"Yeah," he said, "Got stuck on the ironwork pretty tightly."

"The target's head is stuck on a chandelier?"

"No," he said, "The target's head was still attached to his shoulders. They're both in the privy. His daughter, now, her head is-"

"Wait! His daughter? Was the contract for his daughter as well?"

"No, sir. I did say there were complications."

"How many people were involved in this complication?"

"Difficult to say, sir. Are we talking about people who were trampled outside the grounds as well?"

"Trampled? By what?"

"The bulls, sir," he said, "I had to get past the gate somehow. So, I think to myself that they probably aren't prepared for a man riding on the back of a bull in the middle of a stampede swinging a scythe like a-"

"Gregnok?"

"Sir?"

"Don't come in tomorrow either."

I thought it was if the car breaks you aren't still paying for it 18 years later.

Sure! I could do that.

Just need to figure out where as I've tried 3 times to post the next segment as a reply to Part II and Reddit has refused 3 times. Maybe I'll expand upon it off site.

Part II

Because it's not his body. Things are a little off.

No problem!

After Hwang freed me, I tried standing up. My arms and legs felt weak and I nearly fell over. Hwang seemed prepared for this.

"Easy now, Captain," he said as he caught me, "This isn't your body. It's going to take a moment to feel out the controls."

I nodded my understanding and eased myself back into the chair. A sense of vertigo washed over me for a moment as I felt as if things didn't quite fit. Like the arms and legs were the wrong size and my head was in the wrong location. It seemed to pass and with each moment I felt more and more "at home" in this skin.

"187 Minute War," I prompted, "What is it?"

"Eh," Hwang said, "Kind of complicated. You'll remember more, but - in short - about sixty years from now a bunch of countries that have been stockpiling nukes, chemical weapons, and high speed kinetic weapons all grow really frustrated because they have all these expensive toys and aren't allowed to play with them. So, within about six months, they all go from arguing about trade policy with sternly worded speeches to just hurling the scary stuff at each other. Two different factions form amid all these chaos and they decide the best way to bring the madness to a stop is to send the other guys back to the stone age. Just over two hours later approximately half the planet is left uninhabitable."

I think I said something. A profanity perhaps? He didn't seem to notice, he just kept talking.

"I forget the official tally," he said, "But something like six billion people died in that first week or so. Another two in the next few months as food shortages and disease took them out. Within a year the human race had been reduced from a population over 12 billion to something like 900 million scattered over a few dozen countries where it was still safe to walk outside without a full hazmat suit. Or, at least, it was. Some climate shift took place. I don't understand it. Something about the carbon released or maybe the ash? I don't know. The rains started bringing stuff from the badlands into the good lands and something vital way down in the food chain went extinct. Things started collapsing pretty fast after that. It took about ten years for them to go past the tipping point, but after that the population was doomed."

"But . . . you said we were from 250 years in the future. That sounds like we go extinct in less than a century."

He shrugged.

"Not quite," he said, "Just because of random chance alone some parts of Africa and South America manage to escape the worst of this. Australia probably would have been okay too if they hadn't been right in the worst of the arguing from the start. Survivors flocked to those areas and things died slower. We think the first Null Spindle was created."

"The what?" I asked.

"Sir," he said, "I'm not a techie. They just told us something about a device inside the building is responsible for detangling us from the normal flow of time. Apparently this allows us to project ourselves into the past in the first place but also means that what we do here doesn't affect us personally. At least not usually. There is a theory that AlphaCat is working under they call The Causality Whip."

Either my memory was coming back or I was losing my mind because the more he talked, the more familiar this sounded. AlphaCat, for instance. That was a computer and it wasn't Alpha Cat as in "meow" it was Alpha, the Greek letter, and Quantum Amplitude Temporalizer. Alpha QAT. It was a machine that calculated which events would cause the greatest impact on the future while causing the least immediate disruption. There was a theory that the smart guys in the white coats had. Something they called temporal inertia where time keeps trying to stay on the same course it has been following. The closer to the event you are trying to avoid the more of a jolt you need to dislodge it. But, the more energy you put in the larger the ripples and-

"Felix Fisker," I muttered.

"Good, sir!" Hwang said, "Your memory is coming back."

"No it isn't," I said, "I don't know who that is. It just seems important."

"Well, it was important at one time," Hwang said, "Now he's a forgotten nobody. The entanglement projector only works so far back. After that the energy demands get to be astronomical. We're around the theoretical limit right now so while we can project ourselves to time lines closer to the war we can't go much further back than right now. Well, about 100 years ago we think a group discovered the method and created the spindle and they tried to stop a cataclysm that they said was the first step in the coming events. They thought the rise to power of a power hungry German solider was what caused events to play out the way they did. So, going at the theoretical limit of their technology, they went back and arranged for him to die in a traffic accident before he rose to power."

"And what happened?"

"And . . . a failed artist took his place and events mostly unfolded the way they did originally," Hwang said, "It was too close to the event and even doing something drastic like that wasn't enough to fully deflect the course of things to come."

"So, nothing changed?"

"Didn't say that," Hwang corrected me, "I said mostly the same. Turns out the artist guy wasn't as gifted with tactics and was also more obsessed with occult matters. So, unlike Fisker, he wasted time and resources doing stupid things and allowed racist policies to chase away brilliant scientists who took up in the west with their findings. As such, the Germans lost the race to develop the atom bomb in this time line and Great Britain still remained as a major player in the world of politics. So in the original timeline, the war that ends everything happened a few decades sooner and was called the Ten Day Armageddon. Which means, yeah, it worked. It delayed things and the fallout was less overall. But the downside is that they managed to also uninvent some of the technology they were dependent upon. They turned off the spindle and stuff started to unwind around them as the timeline tried to reassert itself upon them. They managed to cobbled together enough notes that our guys could reconstruct some of it, but now we're that much closer to the event we must change. We lost a lot of ground there."

The Whip. I remembered it now. Cause too big of a change all at once and the ripples just grew in magnitude and the shock at the end could annihilate all of us. AlphaCat gave us probabilities of how likely each little change we made had in resulting in catastrophe. Erasing ourselves from existence in exchange for avoiding the war was considered "acceptable fallout."

I worked for psychopaths. Worse I was one of them. No, worse yet, it actually was starting to make sense. Without thinking, I scratched at my elbow. The location where I had recently had an IV placed. Would have. Didn't have. Not this body. That was the body in the future locked in a medical bay with probes attached to its skull.

"What are we doing here?" I asked Hwang as I stood up. This time I kept my balance.

"There is a school about six blocks from here," he said, "I am going to go there and give the principal of the school a flat tire."

"That's it?" I asked, "We're just giving someone a flat tire?"

He shook his head.

"Deadline is too close," he explained, "That's what I am doing. I need to delay him so he doesn't get home too early. Before you have time to do your job."

Hwang looked away from me as he reached behind his back and pulled a pistol out of his belt. He flipped it around and held it out to me, butt first.

"Sir," he said, "I know how this looks. But, when your memory comes back to you, you'll remember that we did draw straws for this job."

I took the gun from him without further comment.

Yes, essentially. They have a way (as yet undescribed) where they can project minds into the past. But not physical objects. So, they just take control of people and use their bodies like remote control puppets and use them to influence events.

The way I was thinking about how this would work to avoid paradoxes they are picking people who are about to die so that anything they do will remain a mystery. Why did Jim suddenly jump in a car, drive half way across the country, and sucker punch a teenager sending the kid to the hospital? We'll never know because Jim died a few hours later in a house fire. That sort of thing. People who disappear or do weird stuff just before they die may have had a time traveler hijacking them.

Word limit. I could describe that they are hijacking people who are about to die to alter the future or I could go into how these agents are trying to influence the future events. I couldn't do both.

I thought the idea they are trying to prevent a war was more interesting than the how as, realistically, that might be something as basic as "make sure this girl decides to become a poet rather than teach physics"

I feel calm. Too calm. Was I drugged? I didn't feel drugged, but, then again, would I really know what that felt like? Maybe not. Was this what it felt like? To feel calm when I should be panicking?

I tugged on the ropes binding my arms behind the back of the chair. I didn't really expect them to loosen up, but I didn't have much else to do. They were still tight. Not constricting, just not something I could easily escape without tearing flesh from my hands. If they were my hands. Wait. What? Where did that thought come from?

The door slowly opened. Allowing in enough light to momentarily blind me. I turned my head away and grunted in pain. The gag prevented me from telling the person to close the door.

"I know the light hurts, Captain Franklin," a male voice said. It resonated with sympathy.

"But you need to try to focus your eyes," he went on, "We only have a limited amount of time."

I grunted my understanding and tried to let my eyes adjust. After a few seconds the blurry shape standing in the door started to resolve into a form that was recognizably human. Not recognizable in the sense I knew the man, I didn't, but it was definitely human. A youngish man with a complexion I thought of as Hispanic for some reason. Up until ten seconds ago I wouldn't have been able to tell you what the word "Hispanic" meant but, suddenly, the word just leaped into my head and attached itself to this man's features. He was wearing a long sleeved shirt with a picture of a bull on the front. I thought it might be some sort of sports jersey but I couldn't tell more than that. He wore a baseball cap on his head and had a small fringe of a goatee on his chin. In one hand he held a steaming cup of something.

"It's tea," he explained without me being able to ask, "It'll help more than anything else. Believe me, I've been where you are. If I turn on the light do you think you will be okay?"

The light in the room still came from behind him. It didn't hurt as much as it did a moment ago so I nodded. He smiled and flipped a switch beside the door. A naked bulb over my head flickered to life. The light it cast was a warm color that somehow gave the entire episode a cheery ambiance that seemed completely at odds with my situation.

"I'm going to remove the gag," he said slowly, "And let you take a drink. If you scream, it goes back in. Got it?"

I nodded again. He smiled kindly and pulled the gag free and brought the cup to my lips. I sipped and, no, it did not taste good at all. I wanted to choke on it. But as he promised, a buzzing headache I hadn't even realized was there started to settle. He lowered the cup.

"You called me Franklin," I said at last, "Why don't I know that name? Why don't I remember anything?"

"It's normal," he explained, "A side effect of the process."

"What process?" I asked, "What's going on? And . . . why am I taking this so well?"

"Because this ain't your first trip," he explained, "And, somewhere in that ball of gray mush, you recognize that. This is good, Captain, it means you'll have full coherence soon."

"Coherence?"

The Hispanic man nodded and held the cup to my lips again. I sipped once more. Something seemed to fall in place.

"Who are you?" I asked, "Why do I feel like I know you? Except, no, I'm sure I don't at the same time."

"My name is Hwang," he said," And, yes, you do know me. Just not like this. I went through the Entanglement Vortex 24 hours before you did, sir."

"The-?"

"Time travel as depicted in stories is impossible," he interrupted, clearly feeling easing me into the subject wasn't working, "At least as far as we can tell with current technology. Moving a physical object back in time is not possible. What is possible, however, is transferring information. The Entanglement Vortex sets up a sort of quantum resonance across time between your mind and an acceptable host in the target time period. Before you can fully synchronize the receptacle has to be in a non-observable state. That's why we tossed it in a locked room. sir."

"Wait, you lost me," I stammered, "You're saying what? This isn't my body?"

"No, sir," Hwang explained, "Our current technology only allows us to override the native intellect for a period of 36 hours. So we pick subjects who are scheduled to die or disappear in that time frame - generally due to violence so we aren't impaired by poor health - and your mind some 250 years in the future pilots it while your real body is maintained on life support. As the zero hour of the original death arrives we pilot it to the site of death and eject when it is too late to violate causality. This way we get to interact with the time line in a more controlled manner. Got it?"

"We hijack bodies of people who are about to die?"

Hwang nodded.

"This one is due to die in a gang shooting in the next 6 hours or so," he agreed, "Your host jumps off a building the day after tomorrow. Right after his wife files for divorce when she discovers his affair."

My stomach churned and I nodded for more tea. He lifted the cup once more and allowed me a long swallow.

"That's awful," I gasped, "Why would we do such a horrible thing?"

"Captain," Hwang said, "I know your memory is still not all the way back, but when you do recall the events of the 187 Minute War as well as the aftermath, you'll understand better. If we do not stop that war from occurring, the entire human race will go extinct in less than a generation."

I was certain that more tea would not help. Hwang grimaced and set the cup down. He started untying me.