Raymond Reyes falls for the wife of the man he traveled back in time to replace. He's planned his mission to the minute, yet he finds himself unprepared to meet the woman all his files are wrong about. History wants to repeat itself -- Raymond is ju...
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Raymond
"I love having a break from my own life," Claire smiled, toes investigating the plushy carpet as if completely new to her, despite the furniture rarely changing in her home.
Raymond watched her in silence as she searched for something to do: eyes going over the walls, perusing the purely decorative bookshelves, stopping on the immaculate sofa.
"I want to celebrate, but you know..." she pointed to the drinks cabinet. "I can't," she shrugged, not really bothered.
"It's better, we can't play too much. Maybe we spill something. This couch stays white until you refurnish, five years from now. It can't come out of the glitch stained with wine," Raymond answered, knowing she wasn't listening to his words, just staring at him as if trying to understand him while muted.
A lot shorter without high heels -- one of the last women of her time to wear them so often -- she climbed an armchair to sit on its back, feet deep into its pillows, knees kept tight together despite the relaxed posture.
"So... what do we do now?" she asked the question Raymond was avoiding, even in his head.
An attack move, coming from a resilient woman, especially considering how much more often she relied on her defense mechanisms. They functioned so well that they'd fooled everyone she was living a good life, even fooling herself. It was a small price to pay, tolerating Wesley. Just like tolerating Raymond would be a small price to pay to get rid of Wesley. Despite being a mutually beneficial agreement -- the most ethical route -- it rattled Raymond.
He had a few preset plans ready to be laid out for her so that they'd decide on the best strategy together. There was no need for an AI evaluation to see how that conversation would go: he would get mocked. Claire was already having a field day just watching him search for his words, biting the inside of her cheek to keep a serious face, playful eyebrows taunting him.
"Generally your days are the same," he explained, deciding to let her think she'd intimidated him. It puzzled him how important it was to her that she kept the upper hand: making Raymond afraid of her made her less afraid of him.
"He goes to work, comes back, you have dinner, you go to bed, he leaves while you pretend to be asleep. To save space, the events are compressed when saved to the logs. Similar days archived as one day, the average. Weeks, months. It's why we can pull off just approximating. It can deviate a little. For bigger events, it's more detailed, better monitored. Luckily, there are very few during your marriage, compared to the average couple. His promotion, some parties, trips to Europe."
"Sex," Claire teased him. Too confident for a woman facing a man who had access to everything known to mankind about sex and about her. Separately, he could hear her laugh.
"Yes, although that too gets repetitive, merged into single episodes, based on their common denominator. It loses frequency and by the time you're both forty, it all but stops. A huge glitch covers the area a few months after that, and it leaves decades of no information. It's how we're gonna go undetected, later in life."
