The Time Traveler
By Tom Mercer
Charles “Timely” Smith was a relatively inconspicuous man. In fact, Charles was very close to unnoticeable, and that quality served him well as a professional “temporal violation agent” for his employer, ChronoCorp. When dressed appropriately for his target year, Charles could slide up unnoticed right behind a chrono-transgressor (aka a time-traveling tourist without the government’s permit to jump time periods). It was illegal to time travel without a license because after time travel became possible it quickly became apparent that many people suddenly had a serious desire to return to the past, in hopes of righting a wrong, correcting a calamitous personal mistake, or — most often — making investments that would greatly enrich their future lives with the passage of time. Consequently, in the year 2695, all time travel had to be approved and licensed by the government. Still, some wannabe time travelers found ways to take their potentially profitable time-vacations without a government permit. Government had its hands tied just controlling terrorist time travel, which made it that much easier for “temporal scofflaws” to slip into the past.
In his time at ChronoCorp, Charles “Timely” Smith had earned an excellent reputation as a temporal violation agent. He had single-handedly disarmed illegal schemes, foiled political conspiracies, and stopped no less than eight planned assassinations. However, as time went by, he became increasingly envious of the people he knew who had successfully enriched themselves, their families and their descendants by employing a few illegal-but-smooth moves during their ChronoCorp missions into the past. So one day, Charles “Timely” Smith decided that he too would take advantage of his position as a ChronoCorp agent by arranging a few good investments of his own during a ChronoCorp mission. His next assigned target was a sketchy Chicago financier by the name of Gerald Wilson. Charles had heard about the “slight-of-hand” financial moves that had led Wilson to immense wealth. After all, it was just a matter of knowing the target’s history. Charles “Timely” Smith knew how the schemes worked and how to evade detection. As a result, he was confident that he too could come up with a plan that would generate vast wealth as time passed — wealth which could be easily accessed by him upon his return to his own time period.
Charles “Timely” Smith arrived in the Chicago of 2027 on a cold midwestern day. A freezing wind was blowing into the city from Lake Michigan, and the city’s pedestrians had covered all but their eyes as they made their way down the frozen sidewalks that bordered the streets of Chicago. Charles knew that he had to accomplish his assigned mission before implementing his own plan, so he arranged the freezing of his target’s assets and delivered information about the man’s unscrupulous, illegal investment practices to the appropriate authorities. It was easy to provide convincing evidence as Charles had brought the incriminating information along with him for the trip to old Chicago. Then, having accomplished his mission, Charles made some significant investments in companies and projects that he knew would see great success in the future — success that would generate huge profits for savvy investors. With his assigned mission completed, Charles placed the records of his Chicago investments into his briefcase and planned the return to his own time period in the future. He smiled as he packed his suitcase. He and his family would lead worry-free lives after he retired from ChronoCorp! Charles and his wife would drink the finest wines and take extravagant vacations to exotic islands in the Pacific! With his packing finished, Charles checked out of the hotel and stepped out onto the city sidewalk. He was still daydreaming about his golden future when the steel beam fell to the sidewalk below from a nearby building under construction. As John Lennon wrote in the lyrics for “Beautiful Boy”…
“Life is what happens while we’re making other plans.”