The Business of Time Travel Tourism

Chapter 8: Sally, The Time Cop

June 25, 2014. Wednesday.

George dressed in his common white clothes, sat together with Sally in the kitchen. Both held big cups of coffee in their hands. Beams of light poured into the room through the open window and fell on George's dark hair.

"Mister George—"

"Please," he interrupted. "Just call me George."

"Mis—" Sally paused. "George, I came here to stop something devastating from happening to the world. There is a chance that a new powerful timeline might be created sometime in the close future. We need to prevent it from coming to existence."

"Hmph." George shook his head. "Timelines? Aren't there many of them? Don't we create them whenever we make a choice? I kind of never gave much thought on how the time travels work."

"Well, time is tricky. If you looked at it from a distance, you would see that it's a line, but if you checked the line through a magnifying glass, you'd see that there are points in which tiny branches are created, these are small alternate timelines caused by time travelers. Those little lines always converge into the main one.

"The future would not change if I stepped on a bug, killed you, or exploded a building, it would make only a tiny branch. The time stream finds ways to fix itself, align incidents in such way that the distant future remains the same. The harder you try, once you get to the past, the larger branch you can make. If you produce a powerful branch, there is a small chance that the main timeline might converge into it, and not the other way around. That anomaly, for which I came here, occurs because someone came to your time and is trying to change the future really hard.

"You see, back in my time, scientists devised a time variance detector attachable to a time machine. It detects timeline fluctuations caused by time travelers. And when they attached it to the first time machine ever built, the one through which all the people are visiting you, and which I used to come here, we found that an anomaly occurs somewhere in the close future of this time. The scale of the anomaly is incredibly huge compared to the other ones. It seems as if the world does not exist in the branch it causes and its point of convergence is in the future, far beyond the time I live in. I'm here to investigate and 'cure' it. The time needs a bit of help from Sally."

George sat speechless and Sally continued, "Someone came from the future to your time and is trying to make a new timeline. I need to prevent from happening. If I don't, the future might converge into it. If we cut it fast and quickly, it would only turn into a teeny meanie little harmless branch."

"I know it all sounds confusing, but you will figure it out. It took me fifteen years of training to understand what I had just told you." Sally smiled dumbly. "George, could you tell me if any of the recent visitors had acted strange or escaped?"

"Perhaps."

"Have they or have they not?" Sally smiled.

"Shall I get rewarded for helping you?"

The question took Sally by surprise. Confused, she said, "You are the great George Bottlemore, you always help. There are many tales about your heroism. How can you speak about rewards when the world is in danger?"

George's stare froze. Did she just called him great? A hero? What? He thought for a long minute before replying, "Well there was one mean time traveler who escaped..."

"We should get him."

"Hold your horses. I'm no action hero. I don't know how the 'saving the world' thing is done. All I want is to gather a bit of wealth and live happily ever after, experience small adventures along the way."