reddit writing prompt entry
The old man paused, smiled and picked up his cup.
I don't remember how I got to talking to him at the library's cafeteria, but there I was, wolfing down the sandwich on which I'd put ketchup. One buys sandwiches at the library for the same reason we look at our cellphones even when we know there's nothing there. Then we put ketchup on it and wolf it down, or unlock the thing and play with a couple of buttons and then put it back in our pockets again . It's a pretense.
"I don't get that type of music", he said. "Never got past the first track of any record ever... "
Ah yes, we both had been standing at the bargains shelf, looking at $1 CDs, and I had picked up a Jazz one.
It had a black & white photo of a man in a checked jacket holding a saxophone on the cover looking .. well ,looking blank.
But I too had never gotten past the first track of any jazz record myself. And here was Bob saying the exact same thing.
"Coincidence !", I said to myself, as I filled it in my trip report. The console blinked and the detailed-incident-report indicator flashed on. I flipped the device to voice mode and started narrating the incident in detail - where I'd landed, what I looked like, when it was , how I met the man in the library named Bob , and what his thoughts about music were.
My next case was an investigation. A senior agent had died recently, somewhere in Ardennes, in 1941. This was surprising, because the agency has all sorts of protocol and regulations & permissions in place just to avoid this specific type of event. Contaminating a timeline by choosing it to be your final resting place is strictly frowned upon. Influencing is allowed , interference is not. Time is a place you can visit but not stay - Agency motto. I had been in a future time at that time, sneaking some hashes into certain bankchain thus short-circuiting the spiralling growth of a certain family-run business . The agency believed in redistribution whenever possible, and interference in events before they were extensively manifest. Actual interference needed approvals. Influencing by nipping in the bud was supervisor-sanctioned. I remember a couple of us had visited his graveyard, in the middle of a war, to see if we could make some sense of the act. We found a minimal grave with the most basic headstone . The epitaph, also carved crudely and in a hurry, read " God split himself into myriad parts so that he could have friends ", which was decidedly off for that age. Scans revealed skeletal remains which matched our agents', and spectral scans confirmed it. A Timeline Archive Search Report flagged the epitaph to be the contaminant. Nobody'd've noticed anything odd about the grave or its contents at this time or place, but someone could find the epitaph anachronistic,said The TASR. It said it shouldn't exist until 1973. - to be completed
I don't remember how I got to talking to him at the library's cafeteria, but there I was, wolfing down the sandwich on which I'd put ketchup. One buys sandwiches at the library for the same reason we look at our cellphones even when we know there's nothing there. Then we put ketchup on it and wolf it down, or unlock the thing and play with a couple of buttons and then put it back in our pockets again . It's a pretense.
"I don't get that type of music", he said. "Never got past the first track of any record ever... "
Ah yes, we both had been standing at the bargains shelf, looking at $1 CDs, and I had picked up a Jazz one.
It had a black & white photo of a man in a checked jacket holding a saxophone on the cover looking .. well ,looking blank.
But I too had never gotten past the first track of any jazz record myself. And here was Bob saying the exact same thing.
"Coincidence !", I said to myself, as I filled it in my trip report. The console blinked and the detailed-incident-report indicator flashed on. I flipped the device to voice mode and started narrating the incident in detail - where I'd landed, what I looked like, when it was , how I met the man in the library named Bob , and what his thoughts about music were.
My next case was an investigation. A senior agent had died recently, somewhere in Ardennes, in 1941. This was surprising, because the agency has all sorts of protocol and regulations & permissions in place just to avoid this specific type of event. Contaminating a timeline by choosing it to be your final resting place is strictly frowned upon. Influencing is allowed , interference is not. Time is a place you can visit but not stay - Agency motto. I had been in a future time at that time, sneaking some hashes into certain bankchain thus short-circuiting the spiralling growth of a certain family-run business . The agency believed in redistribution whenever possible, and interference in events before they were extensively manifest. Actual interference needed approvals. Influencing by nipping in the bud was supervisor-sanctioned. I remember a couple of us had visited his graveyard, in the middle of a war, to see if we could make some sense of the act. We found a minimal grave with the most basic headstone . The epitaph, also carved crudely and in a hurry, read " God split himself into myriad parts so that he could have friends ", which was decidedly off for that age. Scans revealed skeletal remains which matched our agents', and spectral scans confirmed it. A Timeline Archive Search Report flagged the epitaph to be the contaminant. Nobody'd've noticed anything odd about the grave or its contents at this time or place, but someone could find the epitaph anachronistic,said The TASR. It said it shouldn't exist until 1973. - to be completed
posted by yesbob at Wednesday, August 09, 2017
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