The Sins of 0-Mission
There was a date written in the upper left corner of the whiteboard in Carla Pressman’s office, boxed off in green marker. That date was 5.11.2012 10:33 a.m. EDT. She didn’t need it written down, of course. It was the most significant moment in her life - and perhaps everyone else’s too. But she wrote it down just in case, on the white board, on the back of her cellphone, on random receipts she’d find in her pockets or purse. That was the moment she’d had the idea for the Time Exciser - or rather, it was two minutes before. Her dad had called, and something he’d said had sparked a fire in her mind, a tumble of connections and a torrent of ideas. She’d hung up on him, actually. She rather regretted that now. Still, you couldn’t do things over. You could only not have done them at all.
~~~
The device itself looked something like an old hand-held calculator, chunky and rectangular. There needed to be three in an area for it to work at all - between them they determined the spatial area of time to be excised. It couldn’t be very large - no more than 100 yards on a side. And the amount of time the devices could get rid of was inversely proportional to the size of the area defined. The smaller it was, the more time could be snipped from existence, with an upper limit of about five minutes. There were a lot of limitations, but when you were talking about changing history, well, it wasn’t an easy thing. Perhaps it should be a little difficult. That’s what Carla told herself, anyway.
You couldn’t wipe out World War II with the excisers. You couldn’t get rid of Kennedy’s assassination or stop the sinking of the Titanic or any of the things people tended to think of when they thought about erasing moments from time. They were too big - they either encompassed too much space or there was no singular moment to excise which would inevitably change the course of history. Carla thought the technology was safe - safe enough, anyway. Little changes, personal changes, that’s what she was interested in.
And she knew exactly what she was going to use it for.
~~~
The fractures in time were strange lightning cracks of light and sound. Standing near them made people feel vertiginous, as worlds of possibility swirled just out of reach. Objects near the fractures looked more solid and real than things further away; their colors were brighter, their edges sharp and clean. To touch them, though, was truly disturbing, as fingertips sunk through solid surfaces and textures were somehow entirely wrong. It was obvious to everyone who saw the fractures that something was terribly, horribly wrong. And Mission Zero was formed to investigate and solve the problem.
~~~
Carla did her research, found the death certificate for the man she’d seen die. She thought she knew the exact time of the accident, and the address wasn’t one she was likely to forget - it had been just in front of the house in Morris where she’d grown up. It wasn’t easy going back to the old neighborhood, but she was braced for the weedy lawns and sagging chain-link fences, the spray paint on the stop signs and the closed corner store. What she didn’t expect was that her old house would actually have anyone in it. The whole neighborhood seemed abandoned, but there was a plastic tricycle turned on its side in her old yard, and the blue sheets covering the windows twitched when she parked in front of the house.
Carla resolved to just ignore the people in the house. She set up the other two excisers across the street, and stood just inside the fence while she put in the target time range on the third. She held the memory in her mind - the motorcycle’s wheels squealing as it came around the corner, the sound of brakes, the terrible crunch when the man collided with the car. The bones, the blood… and she’d stood here, just inside the gate, holding a plastic bucket and spade. She’d been five years old. It hadn’t taken more than two minutes, but it had seemed an eternity. She nodded decisively to herself and activated the devices.
~~~
Mission Zero had a simple goal: close the fractures in time. Repairing time, however, meant finding the technology to do it and understanding the fundamental problems that had occurred in the past. Their budget was outrageous, and their work was mostly done in secret. The public was assured that every possible avenue was being explored to fix “the anomalies”. They managed to find the excisers and Carla Pressman’s research journals remarkably quickly, all things considered. Still, the fissures widened, and more appeared. They knew they had to take risks to get results. Time, it seemed, was not on their side.
~~~
Carla was disappointed with the first experiment using the excisers. She thought she understood what had gone wrong - she’d underestimated the resiliency of the surrounding moments - they were shaped by what had happened, and so a broader area had been impacted than she had originally estimated. Her memories of the accident were fuzzier now, more vague - there was definitely something different now, but it wasn’t gone, erased, missing. She was tempted to try again, with a broader field, but she wasn’t sure what that would do to the timeline. She didn’t want to cause any lasting damage. So she chose another time, another place, another thing she wished had never happened.
~~~
Two hundred people were dedicated to researching every aspect of Carla Pressman’s life. Mission Zero operatives had memorized huge portions of her timeline, and some of the more dedicated members could recite her movements in a given week like a mantra. Woke up 6:34 a.m., showered for twenty-two minutes, checked email (three accounts - two personal, and one for work), logged into Facebook, fed the cat, biked to work… they were all familiar with long-dead social networking sites and technology that had been obsolete for more than a century. Legacy experts were called in to help recreate her experiences. Social psychologists and early 21st century history experts were on-call at all hours to answer obscure questions. “What was foursquare?” “What kind of retail market was Open Pantry?” “Would she have been much impacted by current events on this particular day?”. Luckily, she had lived in an amazingly connected time, and her life unfolded before the team, piece by tiny piece. The biggest find of all was her online journal. After that, figuring out where and when and why she’d used the excisers became easy.
~~~
Carla was incredibly depressed. Every time she used the excisers, something seemed to go wrong. She was sure the technological principles were sound, but the actual implementation seemed to be amazingly finicky. She couldn’t talk to anyone about what was going on - she shuddered to think what someone else would do with the excisers. She’d spent years developing this technology, and now that she had it, she felt like a failure. She knew her life could be better, minus a few moments. She could be a different person - productive, happy. She might even have some friends. As things were, she couldn’t even tell that her cat liked her. She hated her life. She thought of everything now as negotiable - the hurtful arguments she’d had with her parents before they died? They didn’t need to have happened. Her sister’s disastrous marriage? If she’d not agreed to go on that first date with Jason, things would have turned out differently. How many dates had Carla turned down, though, to work on her personal projects? Her job was feeling more and more tenuous. She didn’t have the energy or the time to pursue grant money and her coworkers found her rude and self-absorbed. She needed to fix her life. But the thing she’d poured her heart and soul into, the sure-fire way to solve the problem of Carla, wasn’t working.
~~~
Mission Zero systematically and carefully used the excisers to erase each and every instance of Carla Pressman activating the excisers to change her own timeline. There was a big fuss about using the excisers at all - there were inquiries and investigations and all manner of justification from the team leaders. But in the end, it was the only way to repair the damage, and the cracks were slowly narrowing and closing. The physicists all agreed, though - the final excision couldn’t come from the future. They’d had Carla’s magic date from the beginning, but erasing that moment from here wouldn’t heal the cracks in time. It might even make them worse. The only thing they could do was go behind her from the front, undoing what she undid.
~~~
Carla wiped the whiteboard clean, rubbing marker and dust off the edge of her hand. She carefully placed an exciser behind her chair, and another on the other side of her desk. The third she kept in her hand. She stared at her computer and shook her head, sadly. None of this had been worth it. It was all a waste of time. She could only hope that she’d gotten it right for this one tiny last act, this one minor omission. She set the exciser for 5.11.2012 10:33 a.m. EDT, closed her eyes, and pushed the button.
~~~
The device itself looked something like an old hand-held calculator, chunky and rectangular. There needed to be three in an area for it to work at all - between them they determined the spatial area of time to be excised. It couldn’t be very large - no more than 100 yards on a side. And the amount of time the devices could get rid of was inversely proportional to the size of the area defined. The smaller it was, the more time could be snipped from existence, with an upper limit of about five minutes. There were a lot of limitations, but when you were talking about changing history, well, it wasn’t an easy thing. Perhaps it should be a little difficult. That’s what Carla told herself, anyway.
You couldn’t wipe out World War II with the excisers. You couldn’t get rid of Kennedy’s assassination or stop the sinking of the Titanic or any of the things people tended to think of when they thought about erasing moments from time. They were too big - they either encompassed too much space or there was no singular moment to excise which would inevitably change the course of history. Carla thought the technology was safe - safe enough, anyway. Little changes, personal changes, that’s what she was interested in.
And she knew exactly what she was going to use it for.
~~~
The fractures in time were strange lightning cracks of light and sound. Standing near them made people feel vertiginous, as worlds of possibility swirled just out of reach. Objects near the fractures looked more solid and real than things further away; their colors were brighter, their edges sharp and clean. To touch them, though, was truly disturbing, as fingertips sunk through solid surfaces and textures were somehow entirely wrong. It was obvious to everyone who saw the fractures that something was terribly, horribly wrong. And Mission Zero was formed to investigate and solve the problem.
~~~
Carla did her research, found the death certificate for the man she’d seen die. She thought she knew the exact time of the accident, and the address wasn’t one she was likely to forget - it had been just in front of the house in Morris where she’d grown up. It wasn’t easy going back to the old neighborhood, but she was braced for the weedy lawns and sagging chain-link fences, the spray paint on the stop signs and the closed corner store. What she didn’t expect was that her old house would actually have anyone in it. The whole neighborhood seemed abandoned, but there was a plastic tricycle turned on its side in her old yard, and the blue sheets covering the windows twitched when she parked in front of the house.
Carla resolved to just ignore the people in the house. She set up the other two excisers across the street, and stood just inside the fence while she put in the target time range on the third. She held the memory in her mind - the motorcycle’s wheels squealing as it came around the corner, the sound of brakes, the terrible crunch when the man collided with the car. The bones, the blood… and she’d stood here, just inside the gate, holding a plastic bucket and spade. She’d been five years old. It hadn’t taken more than two minutes, but it had seemed an eternity. She nodded decisively to herself and activated the devices.
~~~
Mission Zero had a simple goal: close the fractures in time. Repairing time, however, meant finding the technology to do it and understanding the fundamental problems that had occurred in the past. Their budget was outrageous, and their work was mostly done in secret. The public was assured that every possible avenue was being explored to fix “the anomalies”. They managed to find the excisers and Carla Pressman’s research journals remarkably quickly, all things considered. Still, the fissures widened, and more appeared. They knew they had to take risks to get results. Time, it seemed, was not on their side.
~~~
Carla was disappointed with the first experiment using the excisers. She thought she understood what had gone wrong - she’d underestimated the resiliency of the surrounding moments - they were shaped by what had happened, and so a broader area had been impacted than she had originally estimated. Her memories of the accident were fuzzier now, more vague - there was definitely something different now, but it wasn’t gone, erased, missing. She was tempted to try again, with a broader field, but she wasn’t sure what that would do to the timeline. She didn’t want to cause any lasting damage. So she chose another time, another place, another thing she wished had never happened.
~~~
Two hundred people were dedicated to researching every aspect of Carla Pressman’s life. Mission Zero operatives had memorized huge portions of her timeline, and some of the more dedicated members could recite her movements in a given week like a mantra. Woke up 6:34 a.m., showered for twenty-two minutes, checked email (three accounts - two personal, and one for work), logged into Facebook, fed the cat, biked to work… they were all familiar with long-dead social networking sites and technology that had been obsolete for more than a century. Legacy experts were called in to help recreate her experiences. Social psychologists and early 21st century history experts were on-call at all hours to answer obscure questions. “What was foursquare?” “What kind of retail market was Open Pantry?” “Would she have been much impacted by current events on this particular day?”. Luckily, she had lived in an amazingly connected time, and her life unfolded before the team, piece by tiny piece. The biggest find of all was her online journal. After that, figuring out where and when and why she’d used the excisers became easy.
~~~
Carla was incredibly depressed. Every time she used the excisers, something seemed to go wrong. She was sure the technological principles were sound, but the actual implementation seemed to be amazingly finicky. She couldn’t talk to anyone about what was going on - she shuddered to think what someone else would do with the excisers. She’d spent years developing this technology, and now that she had it, she felt like a failure. She knew her life could be better, minus a few moments. She could be a different person - productive, happy. She might even have some friends. As things were, she couldn’t even tell that her cat liked her. She hated her life. She thought of everything now as negotiable - the hurtful arguments she’d had with her parents before they died? They didn’t need to have happened. Her sister’s disastrous marriage? If she’d not agreed to go on that first date with Jason, things would have turned out differently. How many dates had Carla turned down, though, to work on her personal projects? Her job was feeling more and more tenuous. She didn’t have the energy or the time to pursue grant money and her coworkers found her rude and self-absorbed. She needed to fix her life. But the thing she’d poured her heart and soul into, the sure-fire way to solve the problem of Carla, wasn’t working.
~~~
Mission Zero systematically and carefully used the excisers to erase each and every instance of Carla Pressman activating the excisers to change her own timeline. There was a big fuss about using the excisers at all - there were inquiries and investigations and all manner of justification from the team leaders. But in the end, it was the only way to repair the damage, and the cracks were slowly narrowing and closing. The physicists all agreed, though - the final excision couldn’t come from the future. They’d had Carla’s magic date from the beginning, but erasing that moment from here wouldn’t heal the cracks in time. It might even make them worse. The only thing they could do was go behind her from the front, undoing what she undid.
~~~
Carla wiped the whiteboard clean, rubbing marker and dust off the edge of her hand. She carefully placed an exciser behind her chair, and another on the other side of her desk. The third she kept in her hand. She stared at her computer and shook her head, sadly. None of this had been worth it. It was all a waste of time. She could only hope that she’d gotten it right for this one tiny last act, this one minor omission. She set the exciser for 5.11.2012 10:33 a.m. EDT, closed her eyes, and pushed the button.