Rantings of an Arranged Mind

I stared at the watch on my wrist. Unless I was delusional, it was a chronometer from the future. The Federal Bureau of time Investigation used devices like this one to create stable time portals. The Continuity Integrity Agency had given me mine so I could communicate with Dahlia Sorley after rescuing her from the time-terrorist, Zebediah.

It had been designed to look like my previous watch. So, unless it worked, I still might be delusional. All I had to do was activate it, and see what happened.

No, that wasn’t right. I had to have a witness. I had to trust someone with the secret. The best choice would have to be Calla. She was a scientist, she’d know what the device was capable of, after studying it. The only way to be sure that I wasn’t crazy was to share the time machine with the most rational person I knew.

That might solve everything. I’d know I wasn’t crazy. Once she knew about the time machine, I could warn Calla about the various organizations that were probably going to be interested in the fact she was studying tachyons and would one day develop a time machine of her own. The chronometer would give me proof that she’d be able to see for herself, and then we could deal with the rest of it.

I could even tell her about Dahlia. Why hadn’t I thought of this sooner? I’d been wearing the chronometer for weeks and weeks. It was the best evidence of my adventures through time. How could I have forgotten?

I looked at it carefully in the dark. That was how all of this worrying had started. Forgetting things. I thought hard about what I knew about time travel. I’d been exposed to it a lot since September, in different forms. Calla from the future had said transition was disorienting. It made her forget things. Agent Jameson of the FBI had erased my memory with temporal energy once. Agent Johnson of the CIA was wandering the streets because he couldn’t remember who he was.

The device on my wrist suddenly looked a lot less ordinary. It looked menacing.

The CIA had sent a capsule through a time portal to warn me not to use it. They’d said that temporal energies were randomly fluctuating in the city, and so agents wouldn’t be active until the situation would be resolved. Time travel had become dangerous.

Calla had discovered tachyon particles in her lab while experimenting. She was designing a device that would allow her to study them further. I had no doubt but that this process would inevitably lead her to building the time machine that allowed her to come back from the future in September to warn me about my death in a year’s time.

The most obvious hypothesis was that her experiments were causing the time disruptions. I wasn’t a scientist, but I could recognize cause and effect. The experiments and the disruptions had started around the same time. I’d already seen how temporal energy could mess with someone’s memories. I just hadn’t put two-and-two together. Calla’s experiments had likely interrupted Johnson during a time jump, and he’d lost his memory in the process. That made sense, didn’t it?

That meant that if I activated the chronometer, there was a good chance it would malfunction. I had no idea what that could do to me. Erase my short-term memory? Mess up long-term ones? Eradicate my entire identity? Blow up?

I untied the strap and put the watch down on my coffee table. I stared at it, holding my face in my hands. What if the blasted thing had been causing my recent memory problems? What if just wearing it was dangerous? It wasn’t doing anything, but it still had the capability of travelling through time. What if the way it was constructed gave off some kind of time radiation?

I didn’t know. I had no idea how to check. I needed the chronometer to prove I wasn’t crazy. But, if I activated it, the results might be catastrophic. What a horrible Catch-22! I chuckled at the preposterous situation I had gotten myself into. I didn’t know you could laugh out of sheer frustration.

I got up and took the watch to my front hall, where I opened the closet. I put it in the pocket of my coat. I didn’t know what to do yet. But, until I figured it out, I wanted the chronometer away from me. I would put it in one of my safety deposit boxes on Monday, so it was in a secure location and unlikely to hurt anyone.

I could worry about figuring out my sanity later. Calla was slightly worried about me “over-working,” and that would be over with soon, once the Board was up and running at Franklin Investments. She wasn’t going to judge me “insane” anytime soon. Removing the chronometer might even solve my memory problems, and then I could stop freaking out about it. I could put the issue to rest.

And, if I ended up needing the chronometer after all, at least it would be in a safe location.

“Frank?” Calla said softly from the hallway. “What are you doing up?”

I turned and smiled at her.

“Nothing. I just had some trouble sleeping. It’s okay now.”

“Good,” she smiled tenderly. “Come back to bed.”

Calla held out her hand. I walked forward and took it, and she led me back into the bedroom.

We didn’t fall asleep right away, but that wasn’t a problem. That was awesome.