Vectors

I could sneak into the labs at night with my own pass, but I swiped my boss' when no one was looking. It would be back in moments. Just in case.

Security had gotten lax since the last unauthorized use of the time machine. There are fail-safes built in. It takes time for an altered event to cascade and crash into its own future; the chess moves play out slowly. Does this person live or die? Does that kingdom rise or fall? Does this person even meet and marry that person, do their children live to create this to-the-fourteenth grandchild who's destined to save the world? Delicate, tricky, hard to track. You have no idea about the redundancies built into the programs.

And I'd been doing false alerts for a long time now. Just going back and relaxing on a beach somewhere in the middle of nowhere. I know I was spotted when I visited Mesoamerica a century or two B.C. My blonde hair is usually covered by brown dye.

I needed a break from the Jesi Debacle. That whole mess in the New Testament, about all those people claiming to be Jesus? Yeah, that was a PR nightmare. Forget the Kill Hitler movement! The people who'd sneak back to kill a certain Joshua bar Joseph far outnumbered them. Luckily the place seems to spontaneously spawn people claiming to be the Messiah, we could rather easily slip another kid in the original's place to keep the timeline going. And another, and another. But then some sneaky agent played to Herod's paranoia, and he started killing the kids before we could switch them...

It's our job to stay out of the history books. It's our job to figure out what every other agent's hidden agenda really is.

Because we all have them. We all break, and get forcibly retired. If we're lucky. It's too much of a temptation for humans to handle, of course we all turn ourselves into gods. Being mistaken for Quetzalcoatl cemented my chance, you see, so everyone thinks I got it out of my system. Sliding Cortes into place to take out the sacrificing tribes at the "right time" was a brilliant move, and got me off the hook. That's what gave me the idea to do the same for Cook when he reached Hawaii, and settled that issue before it exploded again. Unfortunately there's a reason the Mayan and Easter Island books were "burned." They caught us working, and wrote about it. The originals are safe in our special library down the hall.

There are whispers that it's a guaranteed promotion, being mistaken for a god. I'd prefer if the whispers meant that you were promoted to actually being a god, thanks all the same.

Card himself got fired over that one, safely put out to pasture, then the weasel turned my freaking "adventure" into his novel! I'm still angry about that one, though the higher-ups did make him split the profits with me. Jerk.

At least they weren't looking at me when the dust settled. Card was out, "Cook" was killed "in action," and they relaxed a bit. Notice how Cook seemed to go mad suddenly? That's when we switched the original captain for our agent. We play for real when your hand's caught in the cookie jar.

Something about a temporal field around the building the machine is in, extended out so many miles. We all live within it, deliberately, so they can't just go back and obliterate us out of existence. We all do it. What are they gonna do, wipe everyone out simply for being human?

Don't look at me like that. Yeah, Oppenheimer was fed information to give him the idea. Someone very high up was a plant in the Manhattan Project, and I'm not cleared to know who.

See, the only way I'm getting away with this is because I'm not thinking big. I'm not out to change the world-building or world-shattering things. I don't care. Knowing that even breathing wrong can drastically alter the time frame is enough to keep me from messing around. I like living, thank you.

But, hey... Dropping poison arrow frogs into a particular pond, in a particular state, when my childhood tormentor grew up and used to brag about swimming there and licking toads for kicks... That one went under the radar. We do have a specialist who tracks bizarre deaths obsessively, but even she's been known to turn a blind eye to a judicious homicide here and there. As long as those particular ripples don't start up, she doesn't alert the higher-ups. And I know I'm not the only one to do those, my boss took out his own grandparents. Not early enough to obliterate himself, but late enough so that he got the whole inheritance to set himself up for life. What doctored will? Don't know what you're talking about. Tidy revenge on his oh-so loving family for his rotten childhood.

But this one....

Look, I'm the one who discredited the theory myself. There were a lot of crackpot scientists, and a bunch of research just evaporated with the cash flow after the dot com bust. I knew I could use a strategy based in its principles to get my way, without a lot of deaths. If you vaccinate a population centuries before vaccines exist, you'll get attention. If you cough on your target with a mouthful of Yersinia pestis, you'll kill tens or hundreds of thousands more than your intended target. Then there's those telltale ripples, and you're screwed.

So. Small ripples, or ripples so big you can't put the genie back in the bottle.

Not many died in the superstorm, but there was so much damage and destruction that millions more people's lives were completely shattered. Including my girl, she chose to move with her family instead of staying with the single guy who begged her to. A guy with no prospects at the time, but a smart brain and a drive to love her at any cost. An "un-cost" should be even better.

My boss killed to sit pretty on his millions. I just dropped a nickel in a fresh-opened bank account with lots of interest, and kept inventing heirs who "took it over" at regular intervals till it ended up in my hands.

So they knew I would go and sit on beaches to relax.

This time, I brought a cage.

I picked Lorenz' brain when I met him. I triple-checked the calculations myself.

The time machine is based on weight. Something heavy, like a knife, even a bow and arrow, will get caught. That's why the sneaky ones went to viruses, or bacteria. Or fleas. My little frog weighed practically nothing.

For these little beauties, a large plastic cage weighted even less.

I found the right beach, on the correct continent, I even made sure they were the right species to blend in with the locals. So many, many more than normal.

For Sandy, I thought.

Then I released the butterflies.