The Leaf

History

Raymond

"You mean those two people found on that island?"

Claire Wesley had exceeded Raymond's expectations, as far as her immediate surrender went. She was not going to be difficult.

"We'll get to them," he knew. "In time, there will be no victims. Just people who lived as best as they could while being offered the best conditions to do so."

In all the scenarios that Raymond got to run through the Timekeeping System, Tony Wesley's wife could not imagine life without him, such as he was. It was a surprise to Raymond how fast she stopped mentioning him. Laying in their bed with his killer.

"You... Fix history? What for? It's done, it happened," Claire had more pressing concerns than the murder of her husband and her general safety. She seemed unable to care about the harm that could come to her from a stranger. As long as he wasn't Tony, there was not much he could do to her, Raymond assessed her approach to danger.

"So that there'll be no more tragedy. The future of infinite timelines depends on us finding ways to avoid catastrophic events. Not for ourselves, but for the people we force to live the same fate by ignoring them. We look back to learn what went wrong, how to fix it, and never to repeat it. To see how we could have achieved the same evolution without the missteps."

He joked, "The most difficult part of a mission is planning how to stop mankind's evolution in times of peace and prosperity. We had to keep a lot of people busy with gossip and cooking shows, romance and traveling. It's been fun, we have an entire... I guess you would call it a reality TV show... about it. We all contribute, we all see, we all decide. The government keeps us informed."

He hoped he was convincing, "Where I'm from, there is no need to hide. Whatever it is that is needed to save one more person from one more evil, we all want to help. It's actually crazy on volunteer day. They have to create low stakes missions just to keep up with the applicants. They will not be disappointed: more tasks get added, even if they revolve around making sure someone doesn't forget to take their pills. We want to help. It's how I found out about you."

"What is your mission?" Claire asked, and Raymond could sense her head turning to see the back of his. He was afraid she might approach him, further deviating from the History Logs. Someone would notice, but he didn't say anything to stop her.

"I'm not an agent," he admitted. "They never get caught. They replace someone or come in as a new role, but they are very well trained, part of a well-oiled AI augmented machine. I'm a janitor."

"A janitor?"

"The last soldiers, we are called," Raymond said, proud. "Even with our technology, troubleshooting infrastructure problems -- especially equipment ones -- still require a human eye. A screw there, some glue here, wherever a machine wasn't designed with a perfect auto-sustaining mechanism that self-repairs. It's fewer and fewer, soon no man will have to walk again. Few of us do, actually."

Raymond forced himself not to turn to Claire, it would only encourage her to behave unscripted.

Claire

"The only reason I look like your husband is that I trained to be an agent. To look like a human from your times, a contemporary of mine would have a lot of work to do, even if with the same genes. It's not how our society looks like. We mostly never leave our solitary pods, all our needs are guaranteed to be satisfied for the rest of our lives. There's no need to physically look in any way, to have jobs, to do anything you don't want to do. Everything is lived virtually, and the possibilities are endless. We have reached a status where everyone can be taken care of, with little effort."

The man spoke like a robot, in equally weighted words. It was what told Claire he might not be lying. In all honesty, she was still hoping it was all a dream.

"Like in the Matrix?"

"That movie scared you all," his voice went warmer as if amused by her examples. "It's not so bad. Not to mention it's how we can contain the population, keeping everyone safe and sheltered. We made the Matrix work for us."

The heaven he proposed scared Claire despite him clearly remembering it fondly.

"I attended the meetings where new missions were planned. Claire Wesley, always second on the list of potential leaves. As they got fewer and fewer, your name got mentioned more and more. Still, there was always someone more hopeless, they feared you wouldn't cooperate. Didn't think you weren't in serious danger."

"And I was?"

"I think you were," Raymond said, as if concerned. "The way we record history is not like a video, although it can be shown that way. It's data -- all the information we have -- compiled into a very detailed report. It can be represented 3D, 2D, photos, text, anything you want. But it's based on all the information we have, data we kept, aggregated from actual recorded data, AI simulations, memories of events. We have radars that can detect where an object or person was at a certain time in the past. We can recreate any moment, check everything we want exactly as it was, but it takes a lot of computing power on top of the already enormous space we keep the necessary information on. It can't be used unless there is a very good reason. Sometimes it's easier to send someone back in time to witness a scene than it is to find the scene in the History Logs."

He continued, "Your life was recorded as relatively calm: you had a boring but comfortable marriage. No unfulfilled ambitions, nothing to make you sad. You enjoyed solitude and never imagined leaving Tony Wesley. Even though sometimes tense, your conversations, interactions or facial expressions never gave out any animosity towards each other. Every information we had about you said that your general happiness level should have been higher. You always measured lower, for no apparent reason."

"And you know why?" Claire hoped he did because she always felt she should have been happier with the considerable luck she had had.

"I suspected that your husband was cruel, but not by being physically abusive. I had an idea while watching a dinner conversation of yours, displayed for educational purposes. Because he was a clone of mine -- well, I am a clone of his -- I recognized immediately the way his anger made him still."

Claire knew exactly what he meant. She better wrapped herself in her sheets.

"It was only because of the Great Blackout that history erased his behavior," his voice was careful.

"The... Great Blackout?"

"The last world terrorist attack in history."