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."
"But that's adventures we'll find, George. It will be fun. You'll see."
"Fun you say. But I'd prefer an adventure of traveling to the future and seeing how things are there instead of meeting my end in the boring today's world." He sighed.
"There might be no future to go to if we fail."
George stood up and walked to the kitchen window. He stared at the bushes obstructing the garden view weighing all pros and cons of Sally's proposal for a couple of long silent minutes. The idea that by helping he might get famous, even called a hero, fascinated him. Facing challenges with a competent time cop should be not a dangerous nor difficult task, he figured.
"Ok, I'll help."
"Great!"
"The man who escaped..."
"Yes?"
"He called himself Alfonso Duval."
"Did he carry any suitcase?"
"No. Why you ask?"
"It's the object villains prefer to hide their bombs and weapons in," Sally explained.
"He had no suitcase, only a strange box on his hand that teleported us from the city to my home. Worked similarly to the dissaperator."
"What? George, using the space-time travel technology we can only jump to a single point in time and back. Teleportation and space jumping is still a science-fiction back at my home. I have never heard of such technology. It sounds troublesome." Out of a sudden, for a short moment, she looked very troubled. Then as George continued speaking, her troubles seem to vanish for she focused very much on what he was saying.
"Alfonso escaped with a heavy stone that came from the future a few days before him. There were two stones at first, but one got lost days before."
"Could you describe them?"
"Round smooth, gray. Such size." George showed the dimensions with his hands. "Heavy."
Sally leaned backward and shook her head. "My, oh, my."
"Something wrong?"
"It must be the CXX8."
"What's that?"
"An explosive working on the principles of mechanical resonance. It is used to blow asteroids up. It could wipe a smaller continent such as Africa off the map if used properly. I bet he wants to explode a half of the world. Just for the fun of it. That's what those scumbags always do. It's good that the villain chose to use CXX8. It gives us additional time to find him. A special, sophisticated tool is needed to detonate the explosives." She thought for a moment, then added, "Do you have any ideas how we could find that Alfonso person?"
George felt that Sally had stolen his question. "Well, I guess we need to search for places where he can get that detonation equipment you mentioned or we could just try to google Alfonso on my computer."
"A perfect idea! Let's search for that equipment!" Sally stood up and was about to leave through the back door, but noticed that George did not share her intent.
"I can't just leave like that. What if people from the future keep on coming? Who's going to take care of them? I need to get a substitute."
"Ok then." She got back to the table. "What's that google thing you mentioned then?"
"It's a search on the world network."
"Ok, sounds as an amazing ida. Let me do the google and you get the substitute!"
George led her to his room and explained how the ancient computer works to the new hard learning, but very motivated student and taught her how to search and surf the net. He then sat down on the stairs to the second floor and called John. George did not go into details on the phone. He chose to explain everything in person once his first employee arrived. The mentioning of money was enough to drag John out of his lair.
Sally had a difficult time understanding the internet and computer working principles. She tried really hard to search for things, but failed each time, mostly because of the typos she did. The awkward keyboard layout annoyed the hell out of her.
Waiting for John, George spent the time helping Sally with the search. The task for the master surfer did not appear to be difficult as the sinister visitor did not change his name in public. Alfonso Duval was all over the news websites of one of the largest state cities, Crossroad.
A streak of luck in sports bets led Alfonso to quick wealth. Over two days, he turned from nobody to a millionaire. George easily found a couple of interviews with the man, as media always rushed to highlight incredible stories of success.
In one of the interviews, a journalist asked Alfonso a simple question. "How do you think of spending the money?"
With a wide grin, Alfonso replied, "Build a bomb, or a rocket, or both and put one into another."
The journalist accepted the answer as a joke.
To the following question: "What helped you to get lucky?"
Alfonso replied, "A time machine."
George shared his frustration with Sally, "Damn, how can he say such things with a straight face? The stupid journalist only laughs."
A chirping doorbell stopped his complaining and George rushed downstairs.
His friend was dressed in his trademark black summer clothes, wearing the NY baseball cap. John's face was hidden under the greasy hair in a similar fashion to ghost children from Japanese horror movies. This effect added to the mysteriousness of this, currently not so mysterious, person.
"So, what is that exciting job offer?" John asked inside.
"Well, John, I need to go on a trip and you'll need to take care of my house and cellar while I'm away. With the money you gave me I..." George led John to his room, introduced him to Sally and told him everything that happened up till now adding colors to make it more exciting, concealing some irrelevant facts, such as the evening spent with the homeless people, or that the king of Kakamaqua had escaped. He even softened the facts about the radioactive silver the Kakamaquans preferred to pay with.
John was amazed. "Wow, man. What a story. You're a true friggin genius."
"Nah, I'm not."
"From all the things you told me I find a few of them weird. Got some questions. May I ask?"
"Go ahead."
You instructed the visitors to appear outside of your house, then why do they come to your cellar? What if I miss a person out there?"
"Yeah, why the cellar?" George turned to Sally.
She explained, "The first time machine was built there and the time stream is the strongest in that place. It's possible to appear in other places, but only in the distant future where more time machines are built."
John asked one more question, "What if a person comes during the night and I miss it?"
"They won't. The machine that brings people to the cellar can only transport them to nine AM of this time zone Mondays-Fridays. It was him who had built the rules into it." She pointed at George. "Many government approved time travel machines use the identical rules."
The answers satisfied John.
"You think you can manage this?" George asked.
"Sure, but what about your mother?"
"Well, I'll lie to her that I'm going on a business trip and give you the keys to the house. You should never meet her, but in case you do, I'll tell her that you promised me to get some junk out of the cellar."
"Told you. You're a genius." John's face was shining with excitement.
"Your words are too kind." George grinned. He then walked to Sally and sat beside her to help with the computer. He continued the conversation with John, giving tips to Sally every now and then. "How is the money problem? Have you sorted it out?"
"Not really, but I'm still alive, so it's kind of ok. At least I have a plan."
"Nice, what is it?"
"To get the money I started to sell my services on the net."
"Huh?"
"I do things in games for money, help people, power level them, etc. If all goes well I should return the money in about forty years."
"Sounds terrible. John, if anyone brings payment while you're in my place, you keep it. Just don't forget to refuse to take the silver from the little people. "
"Ok."
Sally turned her attention from the PC to George, "Now that you mentioned them for the second time, what are those little people?"
"The ugly guys from Kakamaqua. Haven't you met them?"
"Of what?" She laughed, "Nah, never have I seen people like that. Not even read or heard about them before. Hmph..." She thought for a long minute. "People that I have met from the furthest future were two evil teens; I believe they mentioned their second name was Kerr."
"Creepy aren't they?" George asked.
"Yes, almost got bitten by their lion." She giggled. "We are going to throw them back to where they came from if we ever see them again."
The trio shared their ideas and information about the time traveling. They discussed about Alfonso and his goals that according to Sally must have included sinister and mindless blowing up of the world. There was no way that anomaly on the time variance detector in her time could be caused by another probable event, she explained.
When George's mother returned, he introduced Sally as his co-worker and told her a lie about the business trip that awaited them tomorrow. He then explained that John might come to take care of old Jim and take stuff from basement if he felt like it. Mother seemed to be pleased by the progress George did, in her eyes there was a glimmer hope that perhaps one day he could become a decent man after all.
At the end of the day, Sally went to sleep at John's place. The trio was to meet again the following morning. According to their plan, George and Sally were to leave John at the basement and head for the train station just after the sunrise.