Instants Instance Wattys2016

Chapter 8

Nestor waited until the guards and the three people on the raised dais had left, and then collapsed with laughter. He didn't stop laughing for a good minute, by which time his face was beetroot red and tears were streaming down his face. The other man, who had stayed behind, was also chuckling, though not quite so hard. At one point, Nestor's guffaws began to subside, but he caught the man's eye, and started them both off afresh.

Finally, the two of them composed themselves. "Right. Time for some introductions," began Nestor. "Max, my name is Nestor, Alex already knows me. And this," he indicated the man beside him, "is Argus, a colleague."

"How did you tell them what to do?" asked Alex.

"Well, I kind of run them," Nestor replied. This was met by a stunned silence.

"Why didn't I know this about you?"

"There are a lot of things you don't know about me," answered Nestor, with a wink.

"I don't mean to be rude," said Argus, "but we should get moving if you're going to show them around before the squad is ready."

Nestor cracked his knuckles. "Follow me, kids, and keep your wits about you!" He led the way out through a side door, and Alex and Max followed, leaving Argus behind.

They wandered through several corridors after Nestor, who seemed in no rush, whistling a little tune to himself as he walked. Nestor began to explain as they went.
"This place is my base of operations, or at least, it's one of them. Basically, I realised that even though I can go to any place and time to sort it out, I only have so much time to do it in. I'm not immortal. Anyway, I decided to set up an organisation to do some of the work for me. They call themselves the Achronals. They go around bringing in time travellers that are about to try to mess up the timeline. It's not about preventing damage; it's about apprehending them for the other crimes they've committed that conventional police aren't able to handle. And then we sentence them."

They had reached a corridor with transparent walls revealing the rooms behind. Each room was small, with wildly varying heights, though all were extremely tall. At the top and bottom of each was a hole. Looking down into one, Alex saw the room through the hole in the ceiling, through which he could see the hole in the bottom of the floor, through which he looked to see the hole in the bottom of the floor...

He staggered backwards, barely able to keep the contents of his stomach in their proper place. Glancing to the side, he saw Max looking pale as well.

"Yeah, those things do tend to do that," said Nestor, grinning in his strange way. "The holes are actually the entrance and exit of a wormhole. Falling through the bottom one sends you back a carefully calibrated time into the past. You'll see in just a second what it's used for."

A pair of Achronals appeared, dragging a young man of about twenty-five between them. He struggled against his restraints, but the grip of the Achronals was as iron. The man was strapped into a scanner, which brought up all his biometrics. Lines of code scrolled down a screen, and then a large letter C flashed up. One of the Achronals punched a few buttons, and then waited.

Suddenly, in the chamber marked C, a man in perhaps his forties fell through the ceiling, high above. Following after him was an identical man, then another, and another, a pile of men with long hair and beards. As more and more of the men fell through the hole, Alex realised that they were each subtly different. The ones now falling from the ceiling were slightly younger than the earlier ones. Hundreds, thousands of men had now fallen through the ceiling, and past the now-shorter beards, it was possible to see the face of the man currently strapped down in the scanner. The first man to fall was about to reach the bottom of the chamber and fall through the hole, when a robotic arm plucked him out of the way and into a side passage, miraculously without breaking any bones. The rest of the men fell through the hole. The man in the scanner was unstrapped and once again grabbed by the Achronals, who led him over to a door set into the wall. As the final version of the man passed by, the Achronals heaved the first man through it. He landed at the top of the pile, and then fell through the hole at the bottom of the chamber with the rest of them.