Table of Contents

PART 1: The Job is the Life

CHAPTER 1: The Mess

CHAPTER 2: Ghosts

CHAPTER 3: Echoes

PART 2: Rotten to the Core

CHAPTER 4: Breaking the Walls

CHAPTER 5: Business as Usual

CHAPTER 6: The Threat in Politeness

PART 3: Severance

CHAPTER 7: The Plan

CHAPTER 8: The Blue Bean

CHAPTER 9: Off The Clock

PART 1: The Job is the Life

"The past is never dead. It’s not even past."
– William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun, 1951

CHAPTER 1: The Mess

Year: 1485
Location: England. Battle of Bosworth Field. Moments after the last charge.

PHE

The drop punched me in the gut. One moment, the sterile white hum of the Bureau’s jump platform. The next, the world reformed around me as mud, screaming, and death.

Rain plastered my hair to my skull, cold water streaming down my neck. The air was thick with the copper tang of blood and the wet sounds of dying men. Bosworth Field marked the death of a kingdom and the birth of another.

For me, it was just another Tuesday.

"God, it smells worse than the Cretaceous Swamp run," Alex muttered into the comms, her voice a tight buzz of static fighting the downpour. Her silhouette was a dark smudge against a gray sky, multi-spectrum scanner already sweeping the carnage.

"I gladly take the smell and mud over Dinosaurs trying to eat us every day. I’m calling that an upgrade," I grunted, shifting the weight of the temporal dampener on my shoulder.

"The bar for 'good missions' keeps getting lower…​" Alex sighed into the comms.

My gaze skipped over the plethora of bodies during my perimeter scan. Men moved between the fallen, finishing off the wounded with brutal efficiency. Standard post-battle cleanup. Just not the kind we were used to. Our "trash" was usually smaller. More…​ anachronistic.

"Anything yet?" I sighed.

"Beyond gore and misery all around? No…​ There’s enough ferrous particles in the soil to throw off any compass, let alone a resonant frequency scan," Alex sighed. "'Leave no trace behind' isn’t a mere suggestion, it’s the first and only rule in the damn travel brochure! You’d think a client paying a premium for 'authentic historical immersion' would bother to read it."

Alex’s fingers drummed against the scanner casing. Three short taps, pause, two more. She swept the same area twice, then checked the calibration readout a third time. I’d learned to trust that pattern more than any instrument.

Her anxiety had caught the thermal variance in Prague three seconds before the wall exploded. Had spotted the timeline echo in Damascus that could have erased us both.

My rifle protected us from what I could see. Alex’s paranoia protected us from everything else.

ALEX

The air tasted of death and despair. It settled in my lungs like rust and regret, coating the inside of my throat with a film that wouldn’t clear no matter how many times I swallowed.

Every timeline had its particular flavor of decay, and this one was organic, metallic, with a certain finality to it. Where Phe smelled blood and gore, I smelled equations. The slow, inevitable collapse of complex systems into entropy.

Into mud.

My scanner felt like a delicate, pointless toy compared to the crude butchery done by sword, bows, and pole arms. But it spoke the only language I truly trusted: rogue frequencies, temporal echoes, quantum signatures. These were the ghosts I hunted. Phe provided a shield of pragmatic reality between me and a world that could swallow me whole.

"They’re tourists," Phe’s voice crackled, pulling me from the data stream. "They get excited, get cocky. Pay a fortune to 'witness history' and treat it like a theme park ride."

A tiny, perfect spike of temporally displaced energy appeared on my scanner amidst the surrounding chaos. The unmistakable signature of a 23rd-century composite material. A tourist’s goddamn cellphone.

"Hold on, I think…​ yes! There it is. About 250 meters north-east."

The tightness in my chest loosened. I transmitted the coordinates, fingers steady on the scanner for the first time since we’d landed.

PHE

Something was approaching in my peripheral vision. A maimed soldier clutched a broken sword in his remaining arm, staggering towards me, his eyes wide and vacant with shock.

I raised the dampener and pulled the trigger. The recoil was soft, almost gentle. A silent and almost invisible pulse rippled towards him. His eyes rolled back into his skull, and he collapsed instantly. Not dead, just…​ paused. Temporarily displaced in his own mind.

Better for him.
Better for the timeline.

"We have to be careful. I don’t want to have to memorize a lot of new kings when we get back!" I joked, but Alex was too focus-locked to her scanner to even crack a smile.

We moved in a fluid, practiced rhythm. I took point, ensuring a clear path through the human wreckage, and Alex followed closely, eyes locked on her scanner’s display. The mud sucked at my boots with every step, trying to claim them. But Alex seemed to almost float over the misery, barely leaving a print.

The locals we passed were too lost in their own bloody reality to register our dark figures in the seamless gear. To them, we were shadows wading through the storm, apparitions in the slaughter.

Close enough.

ALEX

"Got it. Ready for extraction…​ wait!

Something’s not right. There’s another spike on the scanner. The signal is faint, looks like a shielded device. Definitely not touristy tech."

A few meters further, I dropped to my knees and dug into the cold, wet earth with my gloved hands. My fingers felt something smooth. Something wrong.

What I pulled out of the mud was a sleek, black data puck without any markings or seams. A knot of ice formed in my throat. The scanner nearly slipped from my suddenly nerveless hands.

This wasn’t a tourist’s device. Military-grade, a generation or two beyond our standard-issue equipment. A quick preliminary scan revealed nightmarish layers of encryption. Beneath it all, a faint but familiar temporal signature pulsed like a watermark. And I knew that mark as well as my own heartbeat.

It was the signature of the Bureau.

Not exactly our Bureau, though. Not even close.

I looked up, seeking Phe’s gaze. She stood a few meters away, my ever-vigilant, silent guardian, the dampener held at low ready. She’d been securing the perimeter, so I could work uninterrupted. But the moment my posture changed, the instant my body went rigid, her head snapped toward me.

Phe saw the device and questions started to form in her eyes. They quickly resolved and were replaced by something quieter.

Trust.

No need to lecture me about protocol or taking control of the situation. She didn’t speak at all. Just a single, almost imperceptible nod.

My heart hammered against my ribs like a frantic drum. Breaking protocol wasn’t a simple demerit or demotion. It could mean erasure. But this thing…​ it was so far beyond protocol. Leaving it here, this impossible piece of our own future’s tech, burrowed in a dead king’s past, felt like planting a temporal bomb.

I palmed the device, my thumb tracing its unnaturally smooth surface feel, and slid it into one of the shielded pockets of my suit.

Just as I stood, a high-priority alert chimed in both our ocular HUDs. Control's synthetic calm voice cut through the storm. "Urgent sanitation request. Witness glitch confirmed. 2296. Havana Arcology."

Phe’s shoulders dropped as she let out a long breath.

"No rest for the wicked."

CHAPTER 2: Ghosts

Year: Unknown.
Location: The Hub.

PHE

The jump back from Bosworth’s mud and misery hit like whiplash. My boots materialized on sterile white tiles, still caked with medieval filth. The copper tang of blood in my nostrils scrubbed away, replaced by the Hub’s recycled nothing-air.

Moments ago, a visceral assault on every sense, now reduced to clean data filed in antiseptic silence. Several years of calling this place "home," and my body still recoiled from the pristine wrongness of it.

A service droid glided past without acknowledgment, its chrome surface reflecting our mud-streaked figures. There were never other people around in the Hub. Our only coworkers were these silent machines maintaining spotless corridors and tending to our needs.

Alex and I tracked medieval grime across their perfect white floor. The droid swept behind us within seconds, erasing our footprints like we’d never existed. Just clean, efficient movement through spotless corridors. It was the cleanest and coldest place I’ve ever known, and we’d had missions in the Arctic before.

The new mission was a witness glitch. Not my favorite. Sloppy tourists dropping their phones was one thing. But a witness glitch could grow cancerous on a timeline. A person out of their native timeline, their very existence a paradox that could unravel it by just 'being witnessed'.

The fix was simple, clean, and efficient. And absolute.

What do you do with a possible cancerous growth? You cut out the tumor.

Blinking someone from existence, not just relocating them, always felt…​ loud, in the quietest sort of way. I was a clean and absolute solution. And it was our job.

No time to process the future-tech puck weighing down Alex’s pocket, not with the priority alert pulsing red in our HUDs. No shower to scrub off the medieval grime. Not even time to choke down one of the Hub’s tasteless protein bars.

The decontamination cycle hissed over us with its scalding mist that left any exposed skin pink and raw. Alex moved through gear swap on autopilot, her hands checking power cells and calibrations while her mind was clearly elsewhere. I caught her fingers lingering on the shielded pocket containing the puck. She met my eyes.

Later, that look said.

Twenty minutes after arrival, we were back on the jump platform. Once again, our reality dissolved into white noise.

Year: 2296
Location: Cuba. Havana Arcology

Another gut punch. At least this time no mud. Instead, the air was thick with the taste of chemicals and scorched rust. A bruised purple sky, choked with smog, blotted out a sun this timeline might have already forgotten. In the distance, the sporadic chatter of automatic weapon fire echoed through canyons of decaying biotech and fungal overgrowth.

This was a failed timeline, a dystopian postcard. No wonder Control authorized a lethal loadout on this one.

I glanced at Alex. "At least the scenery’s more colorful this time."

She didn’t even look up from her scanner.

"Purple smog and fungal rot. Real vacation spot, Phe."

"Better than the beige smog last month."

"That was ochre."

"Still beige to me."

ALEX

Where Phe sees a decrepit postcard, I saw a temporal cascade failure rendered in flesh, rust, and climbing fungus. The ambient temporal background noise was a chaotic storm of interference, my scanner working overtime to get a fix on a signal that’s truly out of place and time.

This is what we do.
We find the single, discordant note in a timeline’s symphony.
And silence it.

The Bureau called it "Retroactive Continuity Device." Such a soft, clinical term for permanent temporal erasure.

My hand rested on the device’s cold housing. We deployed it because a complete timeline collapse was the worst outcome. Or so we’re told. Every person we "sanitize" was a loose variable removed from an equation I can no longer bring myself to solve.

My scanner filtered out the local weapon signatures and interference from the Arcology’s failing bio-architecture, so I can hunt for the impossible: a clean, stable temporal trace of the person that doesn’t belong.

"Got them," I said over comms, my eyes locked on the wavering lines of my scanner. "The signal is stationary. Building to the south-west, three levels up."

PHE

I took point, rifle at high ready. We moved into the dripping superstructure, and as soon as we entered, it started.

Something was wrong. My feet moved before my brain caught up, hugging the walls, eyes tracking dark alcoves on instinct. I’d never been in this timeline before. But the taste of the rusted bio-plating felt like a ghost on my tongue, an unsettling memory I simply couldn’t place.

My instincts, honed over countless missions, were screaming that I knew this place. I didn’t like knowing things I shouldn’t, even if it provided a tactical advantage. Alex needed to focus on her task, so I kept my mouth shut. No upside in worrying Alex about my mind going weird when she needs to focus on the numbers.

We reached a collapsed walkway, and my gloved fingers found a handhold in the dark, as they’d known it was there for ages. My stomach twisted. Sweat prickled along my spine beneath the suit.

Our target occupied a cramped habitation unit, surrounded by junked electronics. Stale air, recycled one too many times, caught in my throat. Water damage streaked the walls in dark veins. An old woman sat among the debris, draped in rags. Worn-out augments ringed her right eye, cables trailing from ports that wept with infection. Frayed synth-skin peeled at the edges of her visible flesh like old wallpaper.

As I entered, weapon at high ready, she looked up. Her eyes were dull, unfocused. Not surprised. Not afraid.

Just…​ waiting.

And beneath the wrinkled skin, faded augments, and the weariness of a life I’d never seen, the face was unmistakable. The curve of her cheekbones, the set of her eyes, the line of her nose…​ it was Alex.

"You left something," she rasped in a thin, dry voice. "Near the lift. Bleeding. You always bleed."

Before I could even begin to process any of it, Alex, my Alex, came around the corner behind me.

"Phe, the integrity field is destabilizing, we need to hur-"

Her voice died mid-sentence. I turned and saw her frozen in the doorway, the blood draining from her face. Her scanner clattered against her thigh, forgotten, the readings still scrolling across its display. Driven by instinct, I shifted in an attempt to block her view. A stupid and useless gesture, it was too late.

ALEX

A splinter of a second. That’s all it took. Phe’s protective gesture was a half-second too slow, a lifetime too late.

I saw her.
Saw the ghost of myself.

An old woman with an echo of a face I saw every day in the mirror. My mind, usually a chaotic swirl of numbers, equations, and branching possibilities, went blank in an instant. There was a memory there, a ghost of a feeling, a loop I was observing from the wrong end. The paradox was complete.

The witness had been witnessed.
By herself.

"We need to retcon NOW!" The words tore from my throat, an automatic response from a mind in free-fall.

Phe’s eyes locked with my terrified ones. She understood and hit the button on the device attached to her gear belt.

There was no sound, no build-up. The retcon device simply hummed a frequency too low to hear, but I still feel it in my bones.

Then, an implosion of light, a sudden violent theft of all color and noise. The space where the old woman was sitting folded in on itself, reality clenching like a fist, pulling the world into a singular white point before snapping back, leaving only an empty chair behind.

For a heartbeat, I couldn’t remember if there had been anyone there at all. I slowly regained control over my blank mind.

"What…​ who was…​ ?"

The question died on my lips. I already knew the terrifying answer.

CHAPTER 3: Echoes

Year: 2296
Location: Cuba. Havana Arcology

ALEX

The empty chair seemed to radiate a cold that had nothing to do with the room’s temperature. Phe’s hand landed on my shoulder, the solid, physical contact an anchor in a storm of collapsing possibilities.

"You were me, weren’t you?" I whispered into the void where my older self had just ceased to exist.

"I saw her, too, Alex," Phe said, her voice a low rumble.

The air felt thick, pressure building in my ears like before a jump. We both knew. Somehow, impossibly, we’d done this before.

PHE

"We need to go. NOW."

I grabbed Alex’s arm, pulling her back into the decaying corridors, my mind switched back into tactical mode.

On our way to the extraction point, the old woman’s final, rasping words, Alex's words, echoed in my head.

Near the lift.
Bleeding.
You always bleed.

Then, I found it.

A maintenance panel next to a rusted lift shaft, the surrounding wall blackened with scorch marks. The air right in front of it shimmered a slight temporal distortion making the grimy architecture ripple like heat waves. As I reached toward it, the hairs on my arm stood up, static prickling my skin. Tucked inside the warped space was a small metallic capsule.

My gut screamed "it’s a trap," but her warning, Alex’s warning, felt like a directive. I shoved the cold metal into a shielded pocket, a burning secret against my hip.

We moved further into the building, but didn’t get far. The firefight we heard in the distance earlier had crept up on us. A half-dozen figures in scavenged gear appeared at the far end of the corridor, raising patched-together ballistic and Las rifles.

Local militia. Just my luck.

Instinct took over. I shoved Alex behind a support pillar for cover and opened fire. It was a dance I knew too well.

Aim.
Fire.
Move.
Repeat.

Two down. Moving to next position. A third. It should have been routine, but nothing about this mission was routine anymore.

As the last one fell, a searing pain, masked by the adrenaline before, blossomed in my lower left side.

Looking down, I pressed my hand on the wound to inspect the damage. It came away slick with fresh blood.

You always bleed.

ALEX

Phe froze, staring at her hand as if she’d never seen blood before. She dealt with the immediate threat. Now it was my turn.

I dashed from my cover, my heart pounding a frantic rhythm in my chest.

"Phe, talk to me!"

Tearing away her tactical fabric revealed an ugly, deep char from a Las-bolt. The tissue was mainly cauterized, but there still bleeding. Thankfully, nothing critical was hit or reduced to solid carbon.

"It’s just a graze. Time to go, my love!"

That finally snapped her out of her trance.

"You say the sweetest things when I’m bleeding."

With her arm over my shoulder, we limped towards the extraction coordinates: a vast, desolate plaza littered with rusted husks of transport vehicles;

As we stumbled into the open, we almost didn’t notice them. Two figures were moving across the far side of the plaza. At first, I thought they were more rebels and feared how Phe could fight them in her state. But at second glance, their gear was too neat, movements too precise and fluid to be rebels. I raised my chrono-culars to get a better look, and my stomach plummeted as the image resolved.

It was us.

Older, harder, but unmistakably us. In a multiverse of infinite chances, you’re bound to meet the echoes of paths not taken.

More scars crisscrossed the other Phe’s face. My older self sported a web of silver wires snaking from a synthetic eye that glowed faintly in the smog.

As if sensing my lingering gaze, my older self’s head turned. A flickering cybernetic eye locked with mine across the plaza. There wasn’t hostility in her expression. Her shoulders sagged like she carried the weight of a thousand failed timelines. But her jaw was set, her stance wide.

Ready.

They disappeared behind a rusted transport hulk and didn’t re-emerge. Seconds later, our extraction field shimmered into existence, and we jumped. Haunted by the ghosts we had made and the echoes we were destined to become.

Year: Unknown.
Location: The Hub.

From the decay of Havana to the seamless, soundless white of the Hub, we materialized on the jump platform. The lingering smell of chemicals and rust vanished in an instant.

We just stood there, staring at each other. There were no words for what we had just experienced. After what felt like an eternity, I finally broke the silence.

"Med bay. NOW."

Before Phe could do her typical "I’m fine" shtick, I steered her out of the jump chamber towards the medical facilities.

PHE

The auto-doc was as efficient and impersonal as everything else in the Hub. I sat on the edge of the diagnostic table while the machine stitched me up with robotic calmness. Its articulated arms moved with mechanical precision as I felt the sharp kiss of the anesthetic, then nothing as the machine went to work. A faint burning smell of cauterized flesh. The soft hiss of synth-skin applicators. The deep, bone-level ache as nanite scaffolding fused cracked ribs back together.

Getting shot comes with the territory, especially when you’re "the muscle" of the team. Just another day in the office. Except for the old woman’s face, Alex's face still burned into my retinas.

A memory of something that hadn’t happened. Yet.

While the auto-doc did its thing, I pulled the capsule from my suit’s hidden pocket. The cool metal felt heavy in my palm. I traced the etching of the words in my own handwriting, imagining creating them in the future. A cold knot formed in my stomach, my fingers hesitated on the pressure seal.

Only one way to find out, so I cracked open the capsule. Inside, instead of something like a memory chip, was a single piece of folded, beautiful paper.

They’re lying. Don’t trust them. You’re all each other have left. Don’t make our mistakes. You need to cut the tether.

P

I stared at the words, my words, from another me, and my hands suddenly stopped shaking. My blood ran cold, but instead of freezing in place, it cleared my thoughts. This wasn’t a plea for help or a love letter from a ghost. It was a mission brief.

Now, I had my orders.

ALEX

I was pacing in front of the med bay as Phe finally emerged, all stitched up. It was time for debriefing.

The Hub was never just quiet, it was actively silent. The acoustic dampeners in the floor and walls were sometimes too perfect. Occasionally, they swallowed the sound of your footsteps entirely, making you feel like you’re lagging behind your own body. The air didn’t move. No circulation, no drafts. It just…​ hung there, temperature-controlled to precisely 21 degrees Celsius.

Every. Single. Time. Everywhere.

I swear the uniform matte white walls shift to a different shade when you aren’t looking directly at them. It feels less like a real place and more like an unfinished render waiting for the final textures to load in.

We reached the debriefing chamber and stood in the middle of the room. As everywhere else, we were alone, except for the big lens in the ceiling.

"Agents," a disembodied voice said, filling the rooms from no discernible source. Mr. Sands, our handler and only contact with the Bureau, appeared as a hologram in front of us.

"Begin your report, Agent Alexandria."

His voice was calm, polite, and utterly devoid of anything resembling a human.

"Jump was clean," I said in a flat voice. "We located the target’s coordinates and deployed the retroactive-continuity device as per protocol. The anomaly was successfully removed from the timeline."

My heartbeat was so loud in my ears, I couldn’t even hear my own words.

"Excellent mission metrics, agents. Timeline integrity in the sector has stabilized at ninety-nine-point-eight percent."

The sterile and meaningless corporate praise washed over us. A beat of perfect silence, enhanced by the acoustic dampeners, followed, just long enough to feel like an unspoken accusation.

"Any deviations from mission parameters to report?"

PHE

Alex went rigid beside me. I didn’t need to look. I felt the change in the air between us.

The mysterious data puck in Alex’s pocket. The future ghost of her in a collapsing timeline. Our scared older selves across the desolate plaza. The message capsule from another me in my own pocket.

There were nothing but deviations from mission parameters lately. But my loyalty wasn’t to a soulless voice coming from the ceiling. It was to the woman next to me.

"No, sir. Both missions were entirely by the book." I said without skipping a beat.

"Very good, Agent Ophelia."

He, or better it, always mispronounced my name. O-FEEL-ia, not PHE. Every single time. A tiny, constant assertion of control.

"Thank you, agents. Operational integrity is paramount. Dismissed."

The presence in the room vanished, and we were alone again in the deafening silence.

PART 2: Rotten to the Core

"Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures. In one of them I am your enemy."
― Jorge Luis Borges

CHAPTER 4: Breaking the Walls

Year: Unknown.
Location: The Hub.

PHE

After another med-bay visit for a check-up, I was cleared again for duty. But the wound remained a dull ache, a physical reminder of all the weirdness going on. I walked to Alex’s lab, the Hub’s silence feeling thin and stretched out.

Alex was hunched over her console, vertebrae visible through her shirt. Shadows were carved so deep under her eyes they looked like bruises. Lines of code scrolled across a dozen holo screens. Most of the screens ended up with flashing "Access Denied."

How long had she been at this? Her water bottle sat untouched.

She attacked the encryption from every conceivable angle, throwing every algorithm at her disposal against it like waves battering a cliff. But the cliff wasn’t breaking.

I walked up behind her and placed the small metallic capsule next to the data puck. At first, she didn’t look up. Her focus was absolute. Then, she registered the new foreign object in her periphery. Slowly, she reached out and picked it up, her eyes scanning the familiar, elegant etching on it.

"Where did you find this?"

Her eyes moved from the capsule to my face. Her pupils dilated. Color drained from her cheeks. But her confusion was replaced with a dawning horror in the blink of an eye. I knew no answer was necessary.

She already knew it.

ALEX

Opening up the capsule revealed a message on the most elegant paper I’ve seen in a long time. The message was something else. It wasn’t a warning. It was a physical confirmation that everything we glimpsed at in the dystopian timeline was not a mere possibility but a destination.

My hands stopped shaking. The fear crystallized into something harder, colder. I turned back to the screens. It was the emotional key I needed to ignite my mind to put everything I had into cracking the data puck. The time was over for carefully prodding at it and starting to compose a symphony of raw destruction. I started clawing at every layer of encryption, tearing them down bit by bit.

Hours bled into one another. I didn’t notice Phe taking refuge on the cot in the back of the lab and fell asleep at first. She was a silent, steady presence in the lab, her slow breathing the only sound besides my frantic keystrokes. She definitely needed more time to recuperate from her wound.

My eyes burned from endlessly staring at the holo screens, but I couldn’t stop. My fingers stopped trembling. The code that had been a maze became transparent, obvious. Rage burned cleaner than caution ever had. I no longer was trying to solve an intricate puzzle. I was rewriting the question.

Instead of fighting the encryption’s logic, I began listening to it, following its recursive loops not to an exit, but back to the source itself. And then, it finally happened.

The code didn’t just break, it collapsed, cascading into a torrent of raw, unencrypted data. My screen went white, then flooded with text. So much text. I couldn’t blink or look away. The content of the puck appeared right in front of my eyes, and my blood went cold.

It was a ledger of all our missions. But not in the way we remembered them.

PHE

Alex woke me up from a dreamless, shallow sleep, with a flushed face, eyes red-rimmed and bright with an unhealthy glitter. Her mouth was set in a tight line, a mix of triumph and fury.

"You got in," I said still slightly asleep.

She nodded once. "I got in."

The puck was open.
I never had a doubt she couldn’t do it.

She showed me the ledger. It was all there.

I saw the Tunguska event, dated and timestamped, but it wasn’t logged as "containment cleanup," as it was the mission parameters at the time. Instead, it was listed as "Asset Expenditure: Field Test 7."

Even the Battle of Bosworth Field was there, the one we just cleaned up. The event was cross-referenced with a commodities futures algorithm that tracked the rise of the Tudor dynasty. They didn’t send us to clean up a tourist’s fuck-up…​ they were hedging a bet on a kingdom and wanted to collect metrics.

These were our missions, all of them.

We weren’t peacekeepers, cleaning up and fixing broken timelines. We were glorified mob cleaners, sent to protect the Bureau’s investment across time.

ALEX

Phe’s jaw clenched. Her knuckles went white on the edge of the desk. And I knew, all of this was my fault.

My code.
My algorithms.
My tools, twisted.

Our entire career, our sacrifices, the lives we stole between the cracks of history…​ all just for a number going up?

The truth started to fill the room, like a silent, suffocating gas. I had to steady myself against the console. The puck’s numbers on the screen seemed to be in constant flux. Not just from eye strain, but as if they refused to hold form, bleeding between the different timelines.

The ledger wasn’t enough. I needed to know more, understand how deep the rot went.

With trembling hands, I opened a direct connection to the Bureau’s long-storage archives, the "ice box." The firewalls were filled with my code, the security protocols were my design. I knew them like the back of my hand. Soon, we should know all their secrets.

The security measures were of no concern, and I pulled the mission logs from the last few years, setting them side-by-side to my own meticulously kept personal notes. The discrepancies were subtle, but they were there. Arrival timestamps were shifted just enough to hide certain events from history. Mission classifications were softened, like "sabotage" becoming "malfunction." My own conclusions in the official reports were altered to steer the narrative away from anything that would suggest a pattern of maleficence.

A carefully curated lie, manufactured by the Bureau, with my signature at the bottom of every doctored page.

PHE

Alex hadn’t looked at me once since pulling up the data. The glow from the screens lit tear-tracks on her face. Her suffering hurt me more than any Las-bolt ever could.

To clear my head, I got up and walked over to my gear pack, taking my service weapon. I sat down on the floor across Alex and started to field-strip my gun as my way of thinking. The slide, the barrel, the recoil spring. Each piece laid out in a measured, deliberate act, to give this chaos some kind of structure back and let me focus, to think about what we should do next.

The Bureau betrayed our trust and used us for their dirty deeds. We weren’t janitors, we were mob cleaners. And the witness glitch in Havana wasn’t a glitch. It was planned obsolescence. Erasing one of our futures. Permanently.

Alex finally broke under the weight of it all, and a single, sharp sob tore through the silence.

"They’ve used us," she whispered, her hands covering her face. "Everything we’ve done, every timeline we saved…​ they were just…​ profiting from the wreckage.

I set the frame of my weapon down and went to her, pulling her into my arms. She collapsed against me, her body shaking. I held her tight, an anchor in the storm. Over her shoulder, the screens scrolled endlessly, our lives reduced to ledger entries, profit margins, acceptable losses.

A cold certainty crystallized in my chest: We were done being used. We had to fight back and reclaim our lives' future. Instead of working on a plan, we were immediately interrupted by another mission alert.

For now, we needed to keep up the charade. After composing ourselves, we gathered our gear and walked to the jump platform once again.

CHAPTER 5: Business as Usual

Year: 2189
Location: Chrysalis Orbital Assembly

ALEX

The jump didn’t even grant us the mercy of a fundamentally different environment. We landed in another sterile facility, but this one in Earth’s orbit. Through the viewport, the planet swirled blue and peaceful.

Inside, silent robotic arms wove exotic filaments around satellite skeletons in balletic precision. Zero-G made everything feel detached and unreal. My stomach still hadn’t adjusted and kept trying to tell me which way was down when there was no down anymore. Every movement required thought. Push off too hard, and you’d drift for minutes before finding a handhold.

The mission was simple. A temporal echo in the wake of a passing trans-orbital freighter had induced a minor rift in Assembly Line Gamma’s core sequencing. We were sent to "sanitize the rift and restore normal operations." An absolute nothing-burger of a mission designed to look like mundane work, at least on paper. But now, I knew there was no such thing as a simple mission. Every aspect of it a potential lie.

I drifted towards the affected conduit, my trusty scanner in hand, magnetic boots clicking against the deck plates with each step. In zero-G, the scanner’s haptic feedback felt different—vibrations traveling through my gloves with nothing to dampen them. I almost immediately noticed the first inconsistencies, and my paranoia went into overdrive.

Every shadow looked suspicious.
Every data pattern, a trap.

My hands trembled as I adjusted the scanner’s sensitivity for the third time. The temporal signature was wrong. Not the messy, wide-spectrum smear a freighter would leave. This was clean, with a machined-perfect waveform that hummed with a sterile echo, devoid of the usual chaotic entropy a real temporal event leaves behind. It was less a tear in reality and more like a surgical incision.

The data drift wasn’t random, either. Worse, as I peeled back the initial layer of scrambled code, my blood ran cold. It was a derivative of a temporal encryption algorithm I had written in my Academy days. They were twisting my own work against me.

Under the surface-level static, I could detect faint ghosts of the Bureau’s patterns, now that I knew what to look out for. I’d heard this whisper before…​ in the Hub’s jump chambers, in the hum of Bureau equipment. They’d made this mess themselves. And now they’d sent us to clean it up…​ why?

Did they want to know if we’d notice?
Is our loyalty tested?
Or are we simply cleaning up after another team?

PHE

Alex read the code while I read the room. My job specs were a joke: "Provide security."

Security from what? Rogue drones? Spacewalking pirates? Even the mission file listed no active threats.

From my vantage point near a massive viewport, I watched the maintenance drones. Their flight paths were supposed to be perfectly optimized and economical. But they stuttered occasionally, hovering a few microseconds too long before correcting their course with little bursts of compressed air.

Ghostly heat signatures flickered in the gantries above, gone the instant I tried to lock my rifle’s scope on them. Just system glitches, I told myself, but my instincts screamed otherwise. Was there actual movement or just my nerves painting targets in the dark?

"The data isn’t just corrupted, Phe," Alex’s voice came over the comms, tight and low. "It’s layered. It feels…​ intentional. Like it’s hiding something underneath."

Alex described the discrepancies between the "official" mission parameters and what was actually happening. I understood only half of it, but talking to me helped her focus.

Her mind was the sharpest weapon we had. Mine was mostly good for pointing at things and shooting them, to keep her safe long enough to wield hers.

ALEX

"Got you," I whispered to myself, the sound dead in my helmet. The isolated corrupted code block was quarantined by the assembly’s automated security routines. Peeling back the layers of corruption, I still hoped I was wrong about it and would find the remnants of an ordinary temporal echo. Instead, it was another heavily encrypted data packet. My heart started hammering in my chest again.

Bypassing the security key was trivial, since the core command structure was based on my own early work. A bunch of mission logs revealed themselves and the designation headers attributed them to the Agents OR-02 and AL-07. They belonged to the older, scared selves we’ve encountered in Havana.

"Phe," I transmitted, my voice nothing more than a faint whisper. "You’re not going to believe this. It’s their mission logs. The data-drift we were sent to fix…​ it wasn’t a mess they made. It’s a trail they left behind, camouflaged as a system error. The Bureau sent us here to erase our own tracks from another timeline."

My training screamed at me to follow protocol.

"We should flag this. Protocol demands we report data tampering of this magnitude."

I looked towards Phe, floating a few meters away. Her rifle was up, but her helmet was turned to me. Behind the visor, her eyes were chips of flint. She drifted closer, her face resolute.

We do the job we were given. We fix the data-drift and file the report Control wants. And we say nothing else."

CHAPTER 6: The Threat in Politeness

Year: Unknown.
Location: The Hub.

ALEX

The jump back was once again a silent fall into a void. During debriefing, Phe delivered another masterpiece of tactical omission. Mr. Sands accepted it without comment. No red flags, no questions, no alarms going off. For a moment, a foolish part of me actually believed we slipped through the cracks unscathed.

Back in our quarters, we immediately received a ping from Control. A simple notification dot appeared in the corner of our HUDs. Its content was anything but mundane, though.

ATTENTION: Clearance Temporarily Restricted For Security Alignment.

SCHEDULED INTERVIEW: Division 3 Admin Wing. 0500 Cycle.

So much for getting away with it.

I rushed to my personal console to run a diagnostic. My first instinct was damage control. I tried to pull the raw data logs from the Chrysalis mission to see what flags we might have tripped. A sterile red banner flashed across the screen: "ACCESS DENIED"

"They must have flagged the timeline discrepancy," I said, more to myself than to Phe.

My fingers flew across the interface, entering a string of override codes I’d built into the Hub’s OS years ago, hidden in a benign system file for just such an occasion. The system processed my commands, and for a heartbeat, I thought I was in. Then the same banner appeared.

ACCESS DENIED

A cold dread began to pool in my stomach. The lockout was deeper than I thought. As a final, desperate test, I tried to pull up my own private logs, notes completely disconnected from Bureau operations. My research and personal journals.

Access to all personal archives has been temporarily suspended pending security review.

Nothing worked.

They weren’t just locking us out of the system. They were locking us out of our lives.

I looked at Phe.

"They locked us out. Completely," I whispered.

This wasn’t a security precaution, it was a message. My own code was not mine anymore. Maybe it never was.

"Phe…​ do they know?"

PHE

Before I could even answer, Mr. Sands' holo projection materialized between us. It didn’t announce itself, just suddenly occupied space where there had been none. Impeccable gray suit, symmetrical features, the kind of face that corporate algorithms generated when they wanted "trustworthy authority figure." The kind of face you’d forget the moment he left the room. His edges were too clean, with no light scatter, and no depth. Pure projection.

"Agents," he began, voice smooth as the Hub’s white walls. "I want to commend you on your recent performance in anomaly containment. Your work has been exemplary."

We both said nothing and just stood there, letting the hollow praise hang in the air. A beat of silence followed, thick and absolute, designed to make you want to fill it, to confess something you hadn’t even done.

"To maintain your continued safety and operational security, we have found it a necessity to temporarily adjust certain system permissions. Just a precaution. Until things…​ stabilize."

I nodded, a deliberate motion, my face a mask of tactical understanding. His smile tightened just so slightly.

"Is there anything you would like to add, Agent Ophelia?"

There it was again, the mispronunciation of my name, reminding me who was in control here. The words of the note from my other self hammered in the back of my skull. I wanted to scream, but I kept my voice perfectly level.

"No, sir."

Mr. Sands held my gaze for an unnerving long time. Finally, he nodded.

"Good."

A single word landing with the force of a sledgehammer.

"Operational integrity is paramount," were his last words before dissolving into the deafening silence again.

I looked at Alex. Her eyes were too wide, her breathing had gone shallow. Finally, I could muster an answer.

"They definitely know."

ALEX

As if to keep us on our toes, not to form any plans, a new mission alert chimed in.

PRIORITY ONE: Routine Paradox Sanitation. Unregistered Temporal Event.

TEMPORAL COORDINATE: 2078. October 12th. 1430 PST.

LOCATION: Neo-Seattle. Sector 9.

The coordinates flashed in our HUDs. For a split second, the sterile air of the Hub vanished. I smelled rain on wet pavement and the rich, dark scent of roasted coffee. I felt the phantom warmth of a ceramic mug against my cold fingers.

The blood drained from my face. My knees went weak, and I gripped the edge of the console to stay upright. We didn’t need to look up the briefing file to know the mission details.

The coordinates weren’t just another date. They were a memory we both shared. The moment a cynical soldier, bored with the endless cycle of deployment and leave, walked into a coffee shop. The moment a clumsy grad student looked up from her spilled latte to find someone smiling at her for the first time in months.

The moment Phe’s and my timelines began to intertwine, building our own future together.

I looked at Phe.

She was staring at the mission alert, her face carved from stone. When she finally met my eyes, I saw the soldier I’d glimpsed in old photographs. The one who’d learned to kill before she’d learned to love.

The Bureau wasn’t just firing us. It was issuing a kill order for the moment we began.

PART 3: Severance

"We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them."
— Albert Einstein

CHAPTER 7: The Plan

Year: Unknown.
Location: The Hub.

PHE

The mission alert for Neo-Seattle still pulsed in the corner of my HUD. A calm, corporate cornflower blue death sentence. I leaned against the wall of our quarters, running any tactical scenario in my head I could think of, hoping to find a glimmer of a chance.

If we refuse the mission, the Hub’s perfectly white walls would reveal their hidden turret emplacements and null-field generators. We would last for seconds.

Jumping, and making a run for it would be another pointless gesture. We might get out of the Hub, but our temporal anchors, the very things that allowed us to exist outside our native timeline in the first place, would just drag us back on the Bureau’s leash.

If not, they would send the Eradicators. We were mere Janitors, supposed to clean up messes and restore timelines. Eradicators weren’t bound by such restrictive mission constraints.

No matter how many options I played out in my head, each attempt would eventually end in our permanent erasure.

The confined space of our quarters became suffocating, the white surfaces pressing inwards. I looked over to Alex sitting at her console, her mind most likely doing the same thing that mine did, but with a more scientific approach.

Without any scenario that had even a little of hope of success, I broke the silence.

"We can’t outrun an enemy who owns the racetrack," I said, the admission leaving a bitter taste in my mouth. I still looked at her, the smartest person I’ve ever known, our last and only hope to find a way out.

"Isn’t there something we could do? Anything? I’d settle for some crazy, half-baked theory that’s way too out there. Something you’d normally wouldn’t consider because it would break the system itself?"

My question hung in the sterile air. The silence returned for what a felt like an eternity.

Then, Alex finally broke it again.

ALEX

Phe was asking for a miracle, and we desperately needed one. A "mistake" in the perfect equations of the multiverse. The only way out was to shatter it.

"There might be," I heard myself say, my voice a hollow echo. "But it’s not even a crazy, half-baked theory, it’s a suicide note I once scribbled in the margins of a textbook."

It took all my willpower to compose myself and finally face Phe’s gaze.

"The primary problem is our temporal anchors. We can’t remove them, can’t disable them, and definitely can’t outrun them. The only option is to sever the connection. Abruptly and violently."

A glimmer of hope sparkled in Phe’s eyes.

"Is that even possible?"

"Theoretically, yes," I began, with a trembling voice. "We utilize the temporal background energy of our own temporal origin point to trigger a controlled integrity cascade failure. We would weaponize our own origin story. It would create a paradox so massive, so nonsensical that the resulting feedback would overload our anchors and shatter the connection to the Bureau’s network.'

Phe’s gaze intensified.

"What’s the catch?"

A hysterical laugh escaped my lips.

"The catch? Well, "shatter" isn’t exactly a clinical term. We’re talking about a feedback loop that could erase us completely so we would retroactively never have existed. That’s the best-case scenario. The worst case? It fails to erase us cleanly, and our consciousnesses gets splintered across endless timelines. We’d become screaming ghosts trapped in the static between time. Forever. Phe…​ it’s not a plan, it’s suicide!"

I buried my face in my hands, the weight of the odds lying heavy on me.

"It won’t work," I sobbed.

I felt Phe’s hand on my shoulder. Looking up, I found clear eyes. Steady hands. The same expression she’d worn when she’d walked into fire to pull me out in Mumbai. When she’d taken a blade meant for me in Constantinople.

"If someone can do it, it’s you. I trust you. That’s enough for me," she said, her voice quiet, but unwavering.

Her trust in me was the lighthouse in the storm of my own panic. It’s light cut through the impossible odds and screaming variables to show us a way.

"Oh, you fools," I whispered. "You arrogant fools. They’re not just sending us to die, Phe. They’re sending us home."

Phe’s gaze intensified. "Yes, the coffee shop."

"Exactly! The epicenter of our personal timeline. They’re sending us to the only place in the multiverse with enough unique temporal resonance to actually pull this off. They’ve given us the gun and pointed us at the ammunition."

No more words were necessary. We got up and moved with the fluid efficiency of decades together, working and sharing our lives.

I gathered the required equipment, no more signs of trembling, replaced by sharp and deliberate movements. The cylinder of the portable paradox engine was heavy. We only used it with low intensity on minor timeline slips. Besides it, I grabbed a few resonance dampeners. Designed to contain ripples in time, we would ask them to hold back a tidal wave. The final piece of gear was a chrono-meter I’d built myself a few years ago. Its casing was crude and unpolished. It was ugly, offline, and, most importantly, invisible to the Bureau.

Phe did her own inventory. Fresh power-cells for her rifle, clicking sharply into position. Checking the charge on a row of temporal grenades—designed to displace, not kill. The trusty sidearm as a familiar weight against her hip.

Each click of gear locking into place, each hum of a device powering on, was another sentence in our final statement we were about to make. Locked and loaded, we walked down the silent white corridors to the jump platform.

For the last time.

CHAPTER 8: The Blue Bean

Year: 2078
Location: Neo-Seattle. The Blue Bean Coffee Shop.

PHE

The jump hit, and the tasteless air of the Hub was replaced by the rich scent of freshly roasted beans and steamed milk. A wave of temporal nausea threatened to buckle my knees, but the familiar sight grounded me back in reality.

I was home, at least in a way.
The worst way.

My tactical senses kicked into action immediately. The window table. There we were.

A younger me, stiff and cynical in her off-duty fatigues, thoroughly bored with a life lived on someone else’s orders. Across, a younger Alex, a frantic, beautiful storm of anxiety and brilliance. Her hands fluttered like captured birds as she tried to explain quantum theory to meat-head me, oblivious that her whole life was about to change.

A jolt of impossible nostalgia hit me so hard it physically hurt.

Then, my eyes snapped onto the baristas. Behind the counter, wiping down the espresso machine, was another woman with my face. Older and etched with deep-running scars. Besides her, stacking cups with a scarred, synthetic hand was the other Alex.

My hand went to grip my rifle harder. But I stopped. This wasn’t a confrontation. The grim set of her jaw, the way her eyes were locked on the door. I knew the look. The look of a soldier waiting for the mission’s actual start. They weren’t here to fight us. But they weren’t focused on us.

They had been waiting for someone, and as on cue, the bell above the door chimed.

Two figures stepped inside the coffee shop, but they weren’t mere customers. They were wearing seamless, matte-black gear similar to ours, but without any scuffs, field repairs, or visible history. They moved with an unnatural step, more akin to gliding over the floor without resistance. Faces were obscured by polarized visors that reflected the warm coffee shop in a dead, chilling monochrome.

Eradicators.

So the Bureau wasn’t taking any chances and sent their elite kill forces to ensure our "sanitation" proceeds without so much as a fingerprint remaining.

One of them raised a slick weapon that didn’t look like anything in my arsenal. It didn’t aim at me, Alex, or our older selves, but turned towards the two oblivious kids by the window. Before I could even fully process the situation, the older Phe was already on the move. She shoved the window table hard, our younger selves hitting the floor in a shower of splintered wood and scalding coffee. A silent, white-hot beam discharged from the Eradicator’s weapon, leaving a sizzling, fist-sized hole in the flipped furniture where my younger self’s head had been moments before. The wood around the hole didn’t burn. It just ceased to exist.

The fight for our future, our very existence, has begun. The chaos was immediate and brutal. The Eradicators were a terrifying force like nothing I’ve encountered before.

They didn’t simply dodge my shots. Their forms would just…​ moved wrong.

My training screamed to track center mass, but they’d already displaced before my finger tensed.

Three shots.
Three afterimages.
Zero hits.

Like they were moving between heartbeats, too fast to comprehend.

Their weapons used temporal ammunition. A devastating, but valid strategy if you have no concern for timeline integrity or collateral damage. The disruption beams caused the air to stutter and age anything they touched in both directions of time.

Trying to escape one of their beams, I dove behind a merch display. The beam sizzled past my head, momentarily aging the air it touched, filling my lungs with the dust of millennia, the scent of ancient decay.

"Alex!" I screamed through the chaos, "How much time?"

"For what? The paradox or my nervous breakdown? Both are ahead of schedule."

ALEX

My HUD was a nightmare, a raging storm of colliding temporal signatures. Each shot from an Eradicator created micro-paradoxes, ripples of temporal instability that were actively adversarial to my attempt to create a stable cascade and use our origin point as a bomb to shred reality itself.

I slammed the paradox engine onto the floor, its core starting to intensify its constant hum.

The Eradicator closer to me pivoted, its fearless visor locking onto my position. I was exposed with little cover as it raised its weapon. And pulled the trigger.

Had we failed before even trying this suicidal escape attempt?

My other self was already there, moving with the same clumsy grace I recognized in the mirror every day, but with a terrifying purpose. She threw herself in front of me, and the white beam hit her squarely in the torso. Her form in this reality began to stutter violently between different possibilities of her. The scarred augmented woman, the young student who sat at the table, potential versions I’ve never known.

With her last flicker of energy, she turned her head towards me. Her one real eye, wide and full of resolve, locked onto mine. A ghostly whisper layered with temporal static came through the comms.

"Our calculations are correct. Make the jump."

And then, she was gone as reality collapsed on her.

PHE

The sight of Alex, any Alex, blinking out of existence, ignited a burning fury in my chest. I rose from my cover, my sights landing straight on the Eradicator that had fired. But like with Alex’s older self, mine was faster, as they had lived through this fight before.

Older Phe was bleeding from wounds I hadn’t even seen her take. Her movements were ragged but focused on a singular purpose, fueled by the same rage I felt. She tackled the remaining Eradicator with the full weight of a collapsing star, a temporal mine in her hand.

There was a flash of corrupted, sickly light. And then, both of them were gone.

Our older selves' sacrifice bought us everything. I sprinted behind the counter, grabbing my beloved’s hand.

"Alex! NOW!"

ALEX

The paradox engine was almost ready to go off. Phe’s hand in mine was the only real thing in a world that would come apart at the seams as I pushed the button.

Reality started to break down immediately. The first thing to blip out of existence was the remaining Eradicator, as it had no relation to this timeline to begin with. Next, the dark wood of the shop’s wall began to bleed unimaginable colors, dropping impossible light in all directions. The rich smell of roasted coffee beans in the air turned sharp and metallic, screaming in my eyes. My own fingers left a frosty trail in the warm, humid air.

We were the epicenter, the paradox engine was the detonator, and her hand in mine was the anchor. Gripping Phe’s hand as hard as I could, I triggered the last sequence.

For one silent, eternal second, every possible moment this place had ever seen across the timelines happened at once. Me spilling latte on Phe. The silent flash of the Eradicator’s beam. A future where we stayed and joined the Bureau’s elite. Another one of us being dead, our blood seeping into the floor.

As reality fractured, I saw them again, the two kids on the floor. They didn’t scream or vanish. They simply dissolved, like ink washing from a page, their moment preserved and pulled free from the Bureau’s ledger forever.

All of it, our past, the present, possible futures…​ all fracturing and collapsing into a single, unbearable point of light. Then came the lurch. A silent, violent, ripping sensation, like pages torn out of a book.

The world dissolved, and we fell into the void.

CHAPTER 9: Off The Clock

Year: Unknown
Location: Unknown

PHE

This wasn’t like any jump I’d experienced before. It was a violent tearing, a ripping from one page of existence, and a messy gluing onto another. There was a moment of absolute, crushing "non-being," then a hard impact back into reality.

I came to on the harsh grate of wet pavement under my cheek. Rain was falling, a real, cold downpour hammered against my armor mesh, and hissed on the glowing neon signs of the surrounding buildings.

This was real. We made it.

ALEX

For my entire career, it had been there. The temporal quantum tether, a carrier wave of pure control humming in the back of my neck, just beneath my conscious thoughts. An anchor grounding us in the myriad of timelines we moved through.

Phe always felt it as a pressure pushing down on her neck. For me, it was a single unchanging note in the symphony of the universe.

The cascade failure didn’t just break the connection. Stretching the tether to the point it almost tore us apart before finally snapping. For a terrifying, yet beautiful moment, I was adrift in a sea of pure static. Then, our new reality coalesced around us, and the note was gone.

Forever.

The resulting silence was the loudest thing I’ve ever heard. But for the first time in ages, the calculus of my own existence was solely mine to solve.

PHE

I pushed myself up, every muscle and joint screaming in protest, my armor mesh scraping against the pavement. Most of my gear was fried, sparking feebly in the rain.

And then, I felt it. Or rather, I didn’t feel it. The constant, low-grade pressure on the back of my neck, a weight I had carried for so long I had almost forgotten it was there, was simply gone. For the first time in years, I felt entirely my own.

A few meters away, Alex was on her knees, reaching out a trembling hand. She wasn’t checking her gear or scanning the surroundings. She was just pressing her palm flat against the grimy brick of an alley wall, as if to prove to herself it was real.

We were temporally adrift fugitives from reality itself, with nothing left except a few ruined pieces of gear impossible to fix.

But we had each other. That’s enough.

I stumbled over to Alex and helped her to her feet. One piece of her equipment had survived: the crude, but hardened chrono-meter on her wrist.

But instead of giving us a hint when and where we might have ended up, it only showed a meaningless jumble in an almost alien language.

"Alex," I finally managed to ask, the words a rough rasp in my throat. I looked down the alley, and saw a chaotic, rain-slicked street beyond with gliding vehicles and towering futuristic architecture.

"Where the hell are we?"

She looked at the chaotic street, then back to me, a smile touching her lips. Not a triumphant grin. Instead, it was the quiet, weary smile of a mathematician who has just solved an impossible equation and can finally put the chalk down.

It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

"Off the clock," she answered, her voice quiet and filled with a sense of joy.