MINUTES FROM THE SPECIAL MEETING OF THE EXECUTIVE BOARD

███: I say we bottle it.

█████ ███: Come again?

█ ██: We can't control it. The genie is already out of the bottle. Every little thing those kids do has repercussions, and it's replicating.

███: No, seriously. We bottle that up and sell it. Rebellion! Thinking for yourself! Save the world!

█████ ███: Save the god damned whales.

███: Slap that on some bottles...

█ ██: Or gummies...

█████ ███: And we can sell it right back to them. Feed it all back into the supply chain as a recursive loop.

███: Equality! Freedom! Live Woke!

(group chuckles)

█ ██: I'll have the product team draw up a plan. We can have it in stores by Monday.

I'll admit, seeing your whole life out of order can be pretty confusing. Especially when you haven't lived it all! I was lost. Confused. I didn't know where to turn.

Until I met Thom Thomlinson of Thomlinson Time Holdings.

"Thom Thomlinson? Who's he?"

Just the highest producing Time Broker this side of the Prime Meridian!

"Sounds expensive."

Oh he is. But you'll make such great differentials on your Futures, you won't even notice!

Let Thom show you how it's done. He helped me, and I'm ready to retire at 17!




PAID FOR BY THE THOM THOMLINSON FOR TIME JUDGE SECTOR FIVE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE

when i was little i had a dream about being a diver in the ocean. swimming around a colorful reef, a shoal of bright fishies darting by. then i realized i didn't have any scuba gear on, but i was breathing just fine. because there wasn't any water in the ocean! but everything still had those rich colors, like the inside of an aquarium. when i realized i shouldn't be able to swim if there wasn't any water, i woke up.

buzzing around the cells in the time hive is a little like that, but somehow i'm keeping from waking up. like you're swimming in a medium that doesn't exist, or is just so natural you don't notice it. as a result, everything is hyper-clear. it's the most beautiful planet as far as i can see in all directions, gridded out like a giant honeycomb. parks and forests and mediterranean villas. 

well, not all beautiful. i see a section up ahead and to the north that looks darker. as we fly closer, i can see blighted trees, and smoke, and rubble.

"cawwwww!"

betsy the black bird says not to go that way. she veers us to the west.

The children are responding well in the temporal dysmorphia chambers, and I expect them to be released soon and lead relatively normal lives going forward. My own fate, however, is more problematic.

The Executive Committee has thrown the book at me. Several of the pages flew out and become Mephshædes, who now lurk outside my door and approach me menacingly whenever I leave the building. I can shake them easily enough, and am turning them back into paper one by one, which I then place in the recycling.

The book itself, left in a heap at my doorstep, molted and took root. Vines and thorny brambles are now attacking the foundation of the building, and the tiny flowers that cover them emit a pollen that makes my skin itch.

It's clear they're hoping to drive me out, but if that doesn't work, how far will they go? I could easily pick up and leave for Florida, but I've put so much work into this position, it's hard to give up. Plus, I love the children.

"What if we turned all the diesel to wine?" I asked the black bird.

We have a thirty thousand foot view of the battlefield. Tanks and armored personnel carriers grind to a halt. Fighter jets fall out of the sky. Soldiers on both sides discover the issue and begin to siphon their own tanks into straws and drink from liberated tanker trucks.

"And all the bullets into vegetables?"

Machine guns and rifles jam, suddenly filled with peeled baby carrots instead of bullets. Enormous pumpkins and turnips splatter harmlessly on ruined buildings.

"Miracles are off limits," said the bird, catching an incline. "I mean, you could do it but it takes thousands of years to set up."

"Ok then, we get into the heads of the leaders," I said. "Make them experience all the horror first-hand, a thousand times over. In a dream. Then they wake up the next day--"

"Get all ghosts-of-Christmas-past on them? The next day they give a press conference--"

"And call it all off. Yeah."

We zoom over national capitals, swooping between the Kremlin and the Knesset and the White House and through Azadi Tower. The black bird poops on all of them,

"They already wallow in it. The feed on that kind of thing. Plus," said the bird, "some new version of them always pops up. They're contextual. No great men."

The black bird did a loop.

"You gotta think root causes," said the bird.

MINUTES FROM THE SPECIAL MEETING OF THE EXECUTIVE BOARD

███: You've each seen the numbers on Rebél, and you can see it's doing even better than we'd hoped. Rebél Water is already beating out both Liquid Death and Pumpkin Spice Mountain Dew in our most crucial markets, and Sooper Sour Rebél Gummies are doing better than expected in the 11 to 15 year old market, which is our sweet spot.

█ ██: And we're already seeing positive effects on the time curve projections. We might even end up with a net bonus here, and hit our pre-incursion KPIs ahead of schedule.

█████ ███: Brilliant. And we would have never come up with that angle if it weren't for those meddling kids...

(group chuckles)

█████ ███: But now that we've captured their attention, we've gotta keep it headed in the right direction.

█ ██: The temporal abattoirs. It was always going to take a lot to get them cranking at full capacity...

███: Which is why it's time to pull out the stops on the Time Broker campaign. The pilot program has been really impressive (see the appendix to the Rebél report), and I think it's time to go all in on that.

█ ██: Carpet bomb the feeds!

█████ ███: Agreed. Unleash the Time Brokers!

So I became a Time Broker.

When you're young, you don't really think about investing your time. But all that time has got to go somewhere! All it takes is a little planning and even less compassion, and you can make sure you've got the newest cars and housekeepers to boot.

The temporal-linear buying and selling process can seem complicated, but the deals are amazing! Invested strategically, a mere 100,000 hours of your time can provide big payoffs. Set your sites on the top of the pyramid and you'll never even have to see all those less fortunate than you, except on newscasts.

I have an unwavering focus on your success. My unmatched expertise, personalized service, and attention to detail make the process as painless as possible. You'll forget you ever really had a choice!


"Grips Courtesy is a top-producing Time Broker professional with a proven track record of success in the UTC+, CE, BCE and ACE subsectors. Known for exceptional chronometric and intervallic knowledge and a commitment to client satisfaction, Grips has helped countless buyers and sellers achieve their temporal real estate goals with confidence and ease."

flying up above it you can see the time cells in all directions. little walled gardens with trees and grass and life and clay roof shingles on their little villas and the people look just like ants, moving through the honeycomb through the little doors in the walls. moving in all directions.

but sindra why are they moving in all directions if this is the time STREAM? shouldn't they all be moving to the beat of the same mean ol' drummer like a slave ship with some grimy guy in a dark robe with a sickle grinning at them with bad teeth?

well NO it is not like that. like i said there are the encodings in the cells and if you read them some just shine like a happy place and based on each one its a clue and gives you hints. but many people do not take the hints and that's why there is so much movement to the unhealthy cells like the burned ones or the dried out ones or the dead ones.

that's why betsy the black bird is teaching me to read the codes. a lot of them you might not even notice but once you've got the feel for it they just start showing up everywhere.

"cawwwww!"

"Your time is almost up, you know," @Temperance Fugit said.

I looked at her, aghast.

"Oh, no, not like that. I'm so sorry to have startled you!"

Time in the temporal dysmorphia chamber (or the back rooms of a church, which is what it felt like) didn't seem to go anywhere. I napped, and woke, and sometimes Temperance -- High Counselor of Time Sanctorum -- would be there. But the light through the little stained glass windows never changed.

Temperance was really sweet. She definitely didn't want to scare me, but for some reason I wasn't that scared anyway.

"It's because you really don't have any way to process this except as a dream. You're almost fully healed now, and once you leave it'll seem even more like a dream. Especially since none of it will have actually happened."

"You mean for all of us? @Grips Courtesy, @Astrid LaFlame, and @Sindra the Bee Tamer too?"

"That's right," she said in her kindly second grade teacher way. "I've decided the best way forward at this point is to nip the whole thing."

"Nip it?"

"Yes. I do it somewhat frequently, actually. The Executive Board doesn't even know it's something I can do. I'll bring us back to a stable point just before the branching and we'll be back to business as usual."

From what I'd seen from my time in the temporal dysmorphia chamber, that didn't really seem that great. In fact, it seemed terrible. I'd learned "business as usual" was frankly a lot like "hell." And getting worse.

"Yes, well, it is certainly a lot of work," she said, "managing the time stream. It took a quarter of a million years just to start painting on cave walls, you know."

I did not know. What was she even talking about?

"However, you'll each have a residual memory. Even clipping a divergent timestream leaves a trace. And that will continue to have ripples throughout your lives. In a good way. Remember, it's a long game, and just giving it a slight lean for a long time has a more permanent effect than some big one-off."

I really had no idea what she was trying to say.

"That's because you're already starting to re-coalesce, even though I haven't done the clipping yet. Like when you have a little indigestion before a big meal? You're sensitive that way. Maybe more so now...."

I was already back in my little cot in the little room. It smelled like old people. Temperance was tucking me in...

"You just close your eyes..."