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The Retcon Man

by Cameron Fischer

Never look for evidence of your future self in the past. Doing so can close your mind to alternative plans if you think you see what you’re destined to do.

It was a hard rule for me to follow, especially when my client was half an hour late. It left me ample time to explore the storage facility, but apart from noting a security camera at the entrance, there wasn’t much to see: five lanes of asphalt with plowed snow mounds melting in the corners. Along both sides were rows of bright green roll-up doors matching the color of the City-Store logo. Many were still embedded behind packed snow.

The key card vending machine near the front had a listing of which storage pods were free. The crime-scene pod was unavailable, but I was more interested in the pods surrounding it. They were already owned. By who? By me? It was best that I couldn’t tell. This was where the don’t-look-for-evidence rule came into play.

A single Drifter car pulled into the row and parked in front of the crime-scene pod. Her headlights glared on the green door like stage lights. I was surprised to see only the driver; I’d have thought she’d have a security detail in light of recent events.

She rolled down her car window. “Mr. Roper?”

“Mrs. Lynch?”

She climbed out.

Jeans.

Every photo I’d seen of her showed her in pant suits, but those photos were always alongside congressmen or admirals. It made sense that she would dress down when doing something illegal. Her lined frown was the same as it was before her husband’s death—probably fixed from her decades in national security.

“It’s a pleasure, ma’am,” I said.

“I’m sure.” She handed me a manila folder. It was thick. The woman certainly wasn’t a corner-cutter. “It’s this pod here. I own it now, but you can use it for whatever you need.”

The key was a microchipped card on a retractable lanyard. The wall sensor beeped when she swiped it, and the door came up. Nothing was inside except for a clean cement floor, fresh white walls, and the lingering smell of paint and cleaning chemicals.

“They already cleaned up?” I asked.

“I had a team come through as soon as the police released the scene. I didn’t want any reporters seeing it. I trust that won’t be a problem.”

“Shouldn’t be. Do you still have the key the kidnappers used?”

She handed me a second microchipped card from her jean pocket, identical to the first. “The police said it’s deactivated.”
“That won’t matter. What about the timeline?”

She nodded toward the folder. “The top file is the one you asked for. The kidnapping lasted about ten hours. They pulled him from his car in the morning, tied him up here, and left him. Then they came back four hours later to take his finger. I expect you to rescue him before that point. I want my husband back whole.”

“Why did they wait four hours for that?” I asked. “Don’t they normally do that first to prove that they have the hostage?”

“They were trying to shock me. The first time they called, I told them to either kill him or let him go.”

“You really said that?”

“I am not going to betray my country over my personal life, Mr. Roper. Thugs can threaten me all they want, but I can always get another husband. I’ve had four now.”

“What would you have done if they’d taken your child?”

“I don’t have a child. You should know that by now.”

“I do, but if you had?”

“I don’t. It is an irrelevant question.”

“Then if you don’t mind me asking, if you care so little, why don’t you just get another husband? You divorce them readily enough. What you’re hiring me to do could put you in far greater trouble than a few leaked state secrets.”

She shrugged. “I’m fond of this one. I want him back. Can you do that?”

“I can, but let’s be clear. Those people kidnapped your husband, and they killed him right here. It’s done. The past cannot be changed.”

“I understand, Mr. Roper. I knew that before ever reaching out to you.”

“Are you sure? Because eventually you’re going to wonder whether you can get away without doing your part. Everyone does. You’ll think you can push it off longer and longer until—”

“I know exactly what will be expected of me. I said I will do it. I assumed you called me here to discuss what more you need to do your part.”

“Nothing. I have everything I need.“

“Then when can I expect my husband back?”

“Soon.”

“I should hope so, Mr. Roper. I don’t pretend to understand how you operate, but I do expect to hear from you shortly.”
I stayed behind after she drove off. More likely than not, she was going to get held up at the storage lot exit, and I’d best wait until that was done, so I sat in the pod and read from the folder. The top paper was the record of the kidnappers’ interrogation. Mrs. Lynch was in luck. The first four-hour window provided plenty of time for the rescue, and apparently the kidnappers destroyed the facility’s security footage for the entire day after the ransom went bad. The paper underneath that record was the storage facility’s key access log for the pod.

This was the sort of data I should avoid looking at beforehand, but it was too late now. The record had a log entry within that four-hour window which the kidnappers’ stories didn’t account for. Mrs. Lynch had circled it in red for me. Quite a strong nudge from someone who didn’t pretend to understand how I operate.

Next came a drive across town to one of my time relays. In my business, you never have just one. You set up dozens scattered around the city in hidden nooks, partly because unsanctioned recalls were illegal, but also because each relay can only be used once. When it shuts off, it sends whatever is currently on its platform back in time to when the relay first turned on, regardless of when or where it was back then.

Today I chose a relay I set up nearly two weeks ago by the wharf, snuggled in the back of a shipping crate and illuminated by the light of a single LED lamp, like a campfire in a cave. The machine wasn’t much to look at: a large diamond-plate platform and a pair of arched pylons overtop, all wired up to a store-bought hydrogen cell. Anyone who saw this clunker would guess it was built with spare parts, and they’d be right. I didn’t care so long as it got me from A to B (“A” being now, and “B” being two weeks ago). It was also important that they could be folded up, like the extra relay I’d brought in my pack.

I hunkered onto the machine’s platform and triple tapped a button on its control processor. It gave me several warning chirps and five seconds to make sure all my limbs were inside the field, and then the machine shut off. I, along with my travel pack and every air molecule inside the field, popped back in time to when the machine first turned on. My ears popped, and it took a moment for the extra air to flow out of the seams of the cargo container.

In two weeks, I’d come back and pack up shop, but not now. An autotaxi took me back to the storage facility, paid for with debit from a small bank account I never looked at until after I’d done a job. First time I ever recalled, I tried getting around using a prepaid cash card. Whoops. It may have been prepaid, but the database record stating my balance didn’t exist once I went back in time. I could fill a book with the amateur mistakes I made in that first recall.

Now that it was two weeks prior to my meeting with Mrs. Lynch, the key card machine at the facility showed that the storage pod hadn’t been rented yet. I could try renting it for myself. In theory, the kidnappers would have to rent a different pod, but I didn’t try, because the past is fixed. The kidnappers did rent this one, and there’d have to be some reason why I didn’t. Who knows what? Maybe someone might rob me before I could hit “confirm.” More likely, my debit card wouldn’t have worked for some reason. It was better to go along with the universe and control the reason I didn’t rent the pod: because I chose not to. Instead, I rented the pod next to it using one of my pseudonyms. Length of rental: five years. A key card slid out.

The first time I ever built a relay, it took me three years. The Federal Continuity Department had censored any useful information on the internet. Everything left was either wrong or deliberately misleading. Even searching for information without taking precautions could get you a knock on your door. Today, it took me only two hours to assemble the bundled relay from my pack, and that included the test run. Now it was all set up inside the pod I’d just rented.

Then came six days of nothing. After leaving a call with my forger, I got a rental car and drove out of town to one of my pre-vetted bed and breakfasts—one run by a country couple, where Maggie the Wife pressured me to come down for breakfast every morning. She made her own butter. I couldn’t tell the difference from store-bought, but she was a friendly chatter.

The day of, the newscasts didn’t report on the kidnapping. Mrs. Lynch’s security team had done a good job of keeping it quiet until after everything went to hell. The storage facility itself was certainly quiet.

I parked in front of the pod, just as she had. Why not? The kidnappers had never mentioned me in their interrogation, so I must never get caught. The “deactivated“ key card Mrs. Lynch had given me worked fine now that I was in the past, and there was Harold Lynch in the back of the pod, wincing in the headlights of my rental.

He wasn’t much to look at, but no one was when they were tied to a chair. Somehow he’d managed to soak his suit through with sweat despite the late winter chill. Fear, I guess. He cringed from me and mumbled into his duct tape gag.

“You’re going to be okay,” I said. “Your wife hired me.”

He relaxed, probably because he didn’t see the needle until after I’d stuck him.

I’m fond of this one.

That’s how she’d put it. For whatever reason, those words rubbed me the wrong way. Even in my most transient past relationships, I could have always mustered something warmer to say than that, but then again, Mrs. Lynch was the kind of woman who refused to pay her husband’s ransom as a matter of principle.

The man was heavy. It would have been nice to have him walk to the car before drugging him, but I’d learned many jobs ago that a scared hostage was an unpredictable one. A teen girl I once rescued kicked me between the legs and darted down an alley. I already knew that she wouldn’t make it home. The past never changes. I’m just glad I was the reason why, and not something tragic. I caught her one street from her house.

Getting Harold’s suit off proved laborious. I was glad no one was around to see. With him locked in the backseat, I went to the adjacent storage pod—the one I’d rented. My relay was just as I’d left it. I booted it up. Start delay: zero seconds. With a pop and a gust of air, there was Harold’s replacement hostage, drugged and tied. He didn’t look much older.

It took me so damn long to get this man into the suit that he was coming around by the time I was tying him to the chair.

“…What?” He got a look at me and registered his surroundings. “No, no no no. Not back here. Please, listen to me. You don’t have to—”

I pressed duct tape to his mouth. He was struggling now, making a lot of noise. I wasn’t worried about him attracting attention. Historically, no one would find him until after the kidnappers killed him, and nothing could change that, but good Lord did he make tying down his legs a pain.

Once he was tucked away, I closed all the pods and drove off. Harold didn’t come around until we were halfway back to the bed and breakfast.

“Where are my clothes?” he asked.

“There’s some sweatpants and a tee-shirt under the seat for you.”

He looked out the car windows while pulling the clothes on. “Where are we going?”

“Out of town.”

“I want to see my wife.”

“And you will, but not yet. You need to understand what’s happening here. Your wife will hire me to rescue you, but not for six days. We need to stay off the grid until then.”

Sometimes the people I helped understood right away, and they could answer their own questions. He was not one of them.

“…You’re one of those time travelers?”

“Yes. I’m a time traveler. The ransom went badly, and you died, and so your wife hired me to go back and rescue you.”

“But I thought the past couldn’t be changed.”

“It can’t. That’s why you’re legally dead now. I’ll be giving you a new identity, and you’ll be staying indoors a lot more from now on. The world can’t know you’re alive anymore, or we’ll all get in a lot of trouble.”

“What about my family? I have to tell them.”

“You can tell people, just not a lot of people. There are rules you’ll be following from now on.”

After six days he had those rules memorized, but he never fully got this time travel stuff. Every day I needed to explain again why we couldn’t leave the bed and breakfast, or why he couldn’t call his wife and family yet. He constantly complained. I couldn’t for the life of me understand why Mrs. Lynch was fond of this one.

The day came. My forger delivered Harold’s new identity. I wished Maggie the Wife the best with her family-run haven and drove Harold back to town. If not for the child locks, he would have clambered out of the car the moment we saw his wife’s Drifter pull into the storage facility. I counted off a minute. “Cover yourself,” I said.

Harold hid under a blanket while I drove in past the security camera. Two minutes later, the Drifter came back around to leave. My talk with her was shorter than I remembered. I flashed my high beams, and she pulled up beside me. Given her impatient look, she hadn’t yet realized that I was not the Mr. Roper she had just been talking to, but then she saw her husband fighting to get out, and the look on her face was half the reason I do this job, even if it was there for only a flash.
I unlocked the door, and Harold hurried to her window. “Nora? Thank God.”

“Get in the car, Harold.”

While he circled to get in the passenger seat, Mrs. Lynch nodded to me. “Very impressive, Mr. Roper.” We exchanged a long look instead of the final words we wouldn’t say in front of her husband. I’ll be seeing you later.

I’ve had a few clients that I’d had to chase down in order to finish the job and send back the replacement. She wouldn’t be one of them. In five years at most, so Harold wouldn’t look much older, she’d hand him his morning coffee with a little something extra in it. I’m fond of this one—husband number four. I’d probably get the phone call from her in a lot less than five years.

I turned the car around and headed out before my past self could finish up. He’d still be sitting in that storage pod behind the yellow police tape reviewing the folder of facts. He didn’t know it yet, though he suspected that in the pod right next door was a time relay, humming away quietly, waiting.

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Host Commentary

I won’t lie- Retcon man is darker than we usually like to post here. There’s no redeeming characters and no hope. But I maintain that is it s fun story because it feels like a classic Twilight Zone episode.

I can see Rod Serling coming out in a haze of cigarette smoke (don’t smoke, kids), saying “Mrs. Lynch is a wife, politician, a national security expert, and a cold hearted pragmatist, but not in that order. She knows how to get what she wants, and knows that there will always be a price. But is she paying the price, or is her husband? Perhaps they’ll meet again, in the twilight zone…”

Yeah, I’m no Rod Serling. But time travel stories have to work to remain fresh and interesting if they’re trying to give us something we haven’t already read a hundred times.

Our closing quotation this week is from Martin Scorsese, who said, “You make a deal. You figure out how much sin you can live with.”