“Do you understand your rights?” The detective said. He was at that stage of his life where he was steadily going to seed, with the slowly sagging neck skin that had seen too few razors the last couple weeks, and a soft sallow complexion that comes with the unyielding glare from the overhanging yellow sodium lights. He probably had been handsome once, but the job had worn on him down like an overused pencil.
“I do.” The criminal replied, chained to the metal table on his side of the interrogation room. He was a nondescript man, the kind of man that could seen by many and dismissed by most.
“You have the right to have a lawyer present with any questioning. Anything that you say can be held against you in a court of law.” The detective said as plainly and obvious as he could.
“I understand my rights.” The criminal replied again, smiling just slightly, as if amused in the detective’s thorough manner being a complete waste of everyone’s time.
The detective leaned forward and clicked his tape recorder on, but it wouldn’t start. He pulled the case apart in an assured single motion, switched out the batteries, then tried the the record button again to no avail. “Well, shit. Guess I am using pen and paper today. Hmmm… State your name.”
“I have no name.”
“You have to have a name. What do people call you?” The detective insisted.
“People call me nothing. I do not have any… people.” The criminal pulled at his bonds slightly, the thin prisoner gown crinkled as he moved, the chains sang against the metal rings in strange harmony.
“Fine. Mr. John Doe it is. We took your fingerprints, I am sure something will pop up.”
“Nothing will.” The criminal sighed, shaking his head with exasperation.
“Well, we will agree to disagree. You do know why you are here?”
“Yes. I shot a presidential candidate twice. The first round entered his right eye, the second entered his forehead, one inch above the bridge of his nose. He died instantly.”
“So candidly explained. But yes, we are alleging that you shot David Falkes, but what we don’t know is why. Would you tell us why you would kill a presidential hopeful almost a year before the vote?” The detective said.
“I could. But it doesn’t matter.” The criminal shrugged.
“It does matter. especially to his family. His wife and his daughter are now without him. They care. His employees care. His campaign probably cares. All the people hoping to vote for him, they all care. I think that makes it matter.” The detective put his pen to his paper again. “Now, tell me what I want to know.”
The prisoner sighed. “My only regret is the third shot.”
The detective flipped open the folder on the table, and started riffling through the papers. “There was no third shot. Your gun was only fired twice.”
“I know.”
“What do you mean then? You had another target?”
“No. I was to kill myself, Detective. A single shot under my chin at an axial tilt of eighty-five degrees.”
“But you were tackled before you could take your own life?”
“Obviously.”
“Why tell me this? This doesn’t help you.”
“You are correct, it doesn’t help me. It helps you. It helps you understand that there is no deal that you can give me, there is no threat you can deliver to make me comply to your demands. I was willing to take my own life, and I still will make that attempt every chance that I get. I am here against my will. I was shocked to be taken down, but… it seems the… circumstances lead me to you. I am here.”
“Yes, and I really want to know why.”
“Why I shot and killed David Falkes.”
“Yes.”
“Would you believe I did it to save the world?” The criminal sighed.
“No.”
“Would you believe I did it to save other lives?” More serious.
“No.”
“Then what would you believe, Detective?” He had moved on to resignation.
“A true motivation. I would know it when I heard it.”
“I killed David Falkes because he was what you call a ‘blow-hard’.”
“That sounds true. So you killed David Falkes because you thought he was a blow hard.”
“No, I killed him because of his attitude towards the rest of the world. I killed him to protect you and every single person in this country. I killed him because he was the wrong person in the wrong place.”
“Wow. So you are a bona fide hero, huh? A regular guy-pops-another-guy-twice-in-the-melon kind of hero?”
“Save your sarcasm for the next arrest, Detective. Right here, and right now, I know my actions were for the greater good. The fact that I am still alive is a source of disappointment, but the act itself carries none of its own.” The criminal frowned.
“Then why? Why did you do it?”
“You already said you wouldn’t believe me. I think you wouldn’t believe me even if I told you the whole truth of it.”
“Fine. Fine. Try me.” The detective raised his hands in the air in resignation. “Give it your best shot, Mr. Doe.”
“I am from a… subsumed… a nonexistent timeline. That is to say, once I acted in the way that I acted, the timeline was changed and my future, the future I knew, became inaccessible to me. From my frame of reference, it no longer exists. I traveled through time and space to kill a man. It sounds simple. Perhaps it is simple. An elegant truth.”
“You are a time traveler?” The detective shook his head in dismay. “Fine. I said I would try it. So I will play along. Why David Falkes? Why not Hitler?”
“I’m sorry?” The criminal frowned.
“I mean, why kill a blow hard like David Falkes? When you could travel back to World War Two and take out Hitler? That would save, what? Millions of lives?”
“Oh, we did. The agency did fix World War Two. The current history is the best outcome there is.” The criminal shrugged.
“The best outcome? How would you know you fixed it? How would you know if the timeline changed? I am not a dumb man, Mr. Doe. I can put what you just said about your what, your lost timeline? I can put togehter with what we are talking about now. It’s simple math, right? If your ‘agency’ fixed WWII, then the timeline your agency was in would be gone. Right? It would be another lost timeline.”
“True. If one is going to manipulate time, then one needs to ensure that the timeline is adjusted in such a way we know that time has been manipulated and exactly how. So we leave markers.”
“Markers?”
“There are multiple forms of time intrusion. The first and most dangerous is what I did… actual event adjustments. The second type is less so, they are minor course corrections, if you will. Cleaning up the major events, and that sort of thing. The last type is not intrusive at all. It is so absolutely minor that no one ever notices, and if they do, it is passive and has no affect on the minor and major casual threads.”
“So Hitler. You blow him away. And what? Some super-Hitler comes to power?”
“Oh it is far worse. The entire course of the 20th century is changed drastically. Without Hitler, the German people wither in some ways, but advance in others. The world war one armistice was only a delayed guarantee that another war was going to happen. And it happened. It started in April of 1954, and the resulting nuclear exchange in 1961 wiped out over half the human race. Imagine a truly world-wide war, not constrained on the European continent and the Pacific ocean. Imagine a huge War fought on every single continent, in every single sovereign nation, and the potential loss of life. We know.”
“So you fixed it? I supposed you are from that timeline as well?”
“No. But we keep records, passing on the records of the Agency’s changes over the millennia to the next Agency.”
“How?”
“Oh, yes, that makes perfect sense. Let me answer every question you ask.” The criminal said sarcastically, while he shook his head. “No, detective, I am explaining David Falkes to you, not the matters of the Agency. I am not going to impart any info to you that has any chance of changing this timeline outside of my assigned adjustments.”
“So David Falkes was the next Hitler?”
“He was a stupid prideful man. A man that could bluster his way through a thousand meetings and make deals that would make him a billionaire. That is not the ingredients for a leader of this country. He wins the election because Americans are so very sick of the politics of a failing system. Most people think it is funny. A way to insult the very system that runs their country. Its a lark. But David Falkes is not a ‘lark’ kind of man. He uses the little power he has as president to insult, isolate, and further damage relationships with other countries around the world. In thirty four years, the US is invaded by a conglomeration of powers because of the mistakes that David Falkes makes intentionally during his limited, yet disastrous four year run.”
“So one man without any actual power, just a figurehead for our government, screws it up so badly that the US is invaded?”
“And two billion people die.”
“Bullshit.”
“Its the truth, Detective.” The criminal raised his hands plaintively, the chains kept the movement to a fraction of what it would have been.
“Uh-huh. I think that is enough of that. I will ask for a psych eval for you. Not sure how long it will take. But with your confession on tape, we should be able to arraign you.”
“There is nothing on tape.”
“Everything you just said is on tape. Not the one on the table, since I can’t get it to work, but the cameras behind the glass caught everything.”
“No they didn’t. My subdermal implants prevent any electronic device to work in my surrounding area. Like the cell phone you have, or that tape recorder, or the surveillance gear behind the glass. Its all rendered functionless. But that does not matter. Because what is about to happen is far more important than David Falkes.”
“What is about to happen, Mr. Doe? You are locked up. Your craziness won’t hurt anyone any more.”
“I am about to bite down on a poison capsule in my mouth. It is in a hollow tooth that was inserted during your Police department processing by a fellow agent in disguise. He is also the agent that tackled me and prevented me from killing myself like I was supposed to. He is also the agent that I was so glad to see when I had thought I had failed.”
“Who?”
“It was me. A different me, but me. See, I can kill myself, but I go on. It is the benefit to working for the Agency. I have seen myself kill myself many times now. It gets easier every time.”
“What if I stopped you?”
“Then the message would happen some other way.” The criminal raised his hand as a signal of calm. “You have a daughter. She will be brilliant. What I am about to tell you, you need to tell her. And you will. When you realize that what I said is true, when that seed of doubt you have now blossoms into something great when you realize that all the proof of my existence seems to run through your fingers like smoke, when all of that culminates in a single far fetched story you mention to your daughter someday… and it makes a very important impact.”
“How do… what… my daughter… now what a goddamn minute. Why would I do that?” The detective’s face went red, his eyes bulged.
“This message needs to suffuse your brain and your being, Detective. So… listen… very carefully. ‘Remember that life is finite, but in the case of the past, the present, and the future, there is no such thing as a closed loop.'”
“What does that even mean?” He blustered as his pen rolled off the table, unnoticed.
“Remember that life is finite, but in the case of the past, the present, and the future, there is no such thing as a closed loop.”
“A closed loop?” The detective stammered.
“Like me.” The criminal bit down hard, his face went slack, and he died.