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
Driving by himself -- his own hands controlling the wheel, having to make decisions to avoid obstacles -- was a new experience for Raymond.
He hadn't had time to panic-plan, after seeing Ti already nesting in the car's passenger seat, in the minus one parking floor of Spencer & Gill, 6:02 PM. Said passenger was currently in shock, glued to his seat, looking like he was about to vomit. Over three hours of highway, going nowhere. 9:19 PM, dashboard blue LEDs alerted.
Ti had been forced to use his actual body to travel back in time: wrapped in black cellophane for proper isolation from germs, disgusted face with no eyebrows, hands and feet smaller than they should've been -- unusable flippers. His mobility device in its sheath, folded like an umbrella. It was bad if he had to get out of his pod and get Raymond. The bureau didn't trust a simple message would make him go back. They had to be sure he would.
It's how Raymond knew there was no way he'd get to continue playing house with Claire.
Ti's first reaction when meeting Raymond's hopeful stare was to not show any other emotion than the discomfort of being forced to be in his body for so long.
"Raymond Reyes, is it?" were his first words. "Good move, choosing a name to relate better. It's been appreciated," he nodded. "I personally like how it fits your GUID."
"What triggered the alert?" {R3YD021F-4784-4CEA-B4Y1-3670CF917456} -- Raymond Reyes -- had to know.
"We are not very good with emotions, in our time," Ti had been too eager to answer, staring forward, and Raymond knew then he was going to get a prewritten speech. By Ti himself, he would not just autogenerate encouraging words: he and Raymond had spent multiple lifetimes being best friends to each other. Although multiple lives back they'd lost touch, his old friend's words would he honest -- albeit heavily edited, like a 2019 social media post.
Ti was probably the most constant person in Raymond's lives. It was why they'd chosen him to deliver the news.
"We can't determine for certain -- one hundred percent -- whether someone is happy or sad. We have indices, measurements of everything else. Diseases, body reactions, microexpressions," Ti's voice settled on a human tone Raymond also had in his options. "So we can't catalog emotions in a satisfactory way, check all boxes for all humans, all times, all cultures. We configure, get closer to producing that happiness syringe. Still... Not there yet."
Ti had paused only to watch a man trying to pay for parking after stopping his car too far away from the payment terminal. He kept stretching his arm out the window, hoping it would elongate or something.
"It changes how a body reads. People react differently to stress, for example, but they all do react. Their breathing changes, their blood pulses differently. They set alarms."
Claire.
"The glitch, your grand idea," Ti continued, "Actually worked against you. Because it gave Claire Wesley a chance to adapt to you, and she came out of that glitch a different woman. We won't know what happened until we'll finish reading your drive, but something did. The lack of information in-between proved to be better at showing us the contrast -- it went red on the Monitors. We finally made the connection to our very own Tony Wesley, now halfway through his empathy treatment."
Ti didn't forget to be encouraging, as trained, "He's doing remarkable progress, starting to comprehend his life choices, and in turn, we got more information. That and you constantly bringing Claire Wesley's name every time a new mission was proposed... Going on about how we're not seeing how hurt she was... You were right, we are sorry."
The dashboard clock showed 6:16 PM, so Ti had tried to reason with Raymond, "I think it's time we went back to our pods."
"Can I say goodbye?" was all Raymond wanted, already knowing he couldn't. They were going to replace him or something, an agent was probably already at Claire's door. He hoped erasing her mind wasn't an option, it hadn't been used in centuries, considered unethical and barbaric.
Maybe they'd just continue from the night he'd replaced Wesley, the instance of Claire that lived with Raymond being handled in a different way -- they wouldn't erase her existence, she was a person to them even if removed from the time tree. A leaf.
Or they'd bring her to his time, let them meet again: she was the only instance of Claire that he wanted. The one he'd met, touched, and kissed.
Of one thing he was certain: they would make sure she got the most probable chance at a happy life. Because they'd realized they'd been wrong about her and had to recalculate everything better. Raymond's rebellion had been a success.
It just wasn't certain her happiness would be with him.
So Raymond hit the acceleration pedal -- the car didn't start so he had to go into Tony Wesley's file to learn how to drive it properly. That folder was also inaccessible, so he went to his educational module one. They'd left it public to avoid timeline disruptions: there was no need for Raymond not to know basic things like driving.
He needed forty-four seconds to learn everything there was to know about any known 2019 available auto model.
Luckily, Ti hadn't bothered to research how cars worked, so he took Raymond's silence as acceptance, despite seeing his foot hitting the gas pedal. He was happy Raymond had been reasonable and his mission would be short.
So when the engine started it was easy for Raymond to say, "It does this because we're not wearing our seatbelts." He calmly put his own, then put Ti's on too, he had no fingers, never having needed them. He just accepted, nothing in 2019 made sense to him.
With the acceleration pedal suddenly working, the car burst into speed, flattening Ti into his seat like a pancake. Raymond sped through the streets, knowing he had to be as far away from the parking lot as possible. It was where they would open the channel that brought him back to his old life. There was no technology that could facilitate time travel in 2019 so all travels were made by opening a channel, an operation executed by the people in the future, who did have the means. Since the transfer had been set in the parking lot, they had to get approvals to change it. It might hinder the process if Raymond didn't accept it peacefully. They wouldn't send an agent until they were certain Raymond wouldn't show up at Claire's door. And that was only if they thought she didn't know about his real identity -- otherwise, they'd try to clean up: talk to her directly, putting some predefined choices in front of her, asking her approval to reset her on the path she'd chosen. Raymond wasn't one: he wasn't an agent and he wasn't Tony Wesley.
The car was already on its way out of the city when Ti realized what was happening, needing a few minutes to vocalize it.
"Are you seriously going to continue with this?!" he almost suffocated, the reaction being exclusively localized on his face, his body flaccid.
Raymond only needed a few hours: The Superiors wouldn't send anyone as long as the risk remained that he'd be back, deepening the effect he'd had on the timeline. On Claire.
