Displaced - Day 7

The streets were busy, but his 2041 sensibilities found it quiet, almost sedate. The vehicles—cars mostly, with a mix of small trucks, busses and streetcars—seemed few and far between to him, though around him people complained about the absurd traffic.

It was even possible, though rare, to see people riding horses or genuine horse-drawn carriages. Before he’d come back to the past, he’d never seen a horse outside of a video.

The lack of traffic left the city feeling quiet, which was both invigorating and oddly disquieting, as though he’d found a kind of peace but that he’d gained it at a cost he couldn’t put his finger on. People talked more, all around him, even to him so that he had to make an effort to respond. He found himself smiling involuntarily, and chastised himself for it. He limited his conversations to a pleasant “Good morning!” in passing.

He had to walk to his destination. He didn’t know how to drive the contraptions that passed for cars in this time, and had been too busy to learn. There was public transportation, but he hadn’t learned to use that either. He’d memorized the location of the building he sought though, and the streets were laid out in an easy to navigate grid, so he thought he shouldn’t have much trouble.

He made his way south for a time, approaching the lake, which made itself known by the unmistakable smell of the open waters. Everything smelled stronger in the past, the good and the bad alike; he’d noticed that within days of arriving. Or maybe it was simply that his nose had recovered from a lifetime of living in pollution-laden air. He found himself breathing in deeply as he walked.

He turned to parallel the lake shore and started to finally recognize things as busy, at least as far as pedestrian traffic went. The piers were a popular spot for boaters and those just out for a walk and fresh air. He pushed on, trying to keep to himself as he passed the great downtown train station and a series of ornate hotels, some of which still stood in his time.

Displaced - Day 6

He shut down the vid feed. “So I’ve got two choices,” he said to himself. “I can move, or wait it out and hope.”

Neither option filled him with joy. Moving would be difficult; he’d literally have to relocate to another living space, and he’d have to find a suitable one first, one that still existed in at least a comparable physical state in the future, and which was unoccupied in both 1930 and the present of 2041. If he waited, those who’d busted into ‘his’ unrented place in 2041 might have left, but he’d never be certain it wasn’t being watched.

The problem was time. Both options required it, and without knowing if anyone was on to him or Silvia, that was time he didn’t want to spend.

He stared bleakly at the tablet. “I guess it’s time to move.” Thankfully the place was fully furnished. He barely owned a thing. A few clothes, his trade supplies, his mobile gear, some groceries he’d bought at the market down the street. He could leave those. The rest belonged to the landlord, whom he paid weekly.

He sat back at the desk and started scanning real-estate possibilities. Empty or abandoned places were the best. Unrented rooms were rare, but on his initial location scouting, he’d come across some abandoned places that might do. He’d passed them up because of the risk of vagrants seeing his comings and goings through time, but now he needed something quickly.

“This might do,” he muttered to himself. Images of a half-collapsed tenement flickered across the screen. “It’s old enough to be around now. Not far from Silvia, either.” The place had apparently been damaged in one of the riots back in 2038. A sad irony, that; the riot had been over the high costs of living, and the building’s collapse had put yet more people out on the streets.

He put $50 in an envelope and gathered his things, plus a little of the food for his lunch, then walked out of the place for the last time. The landlord failed to answer at his knock, so he scribbled a goodbye note and slid the envelope under the door. $50 would have kept him current on rent for another couple of months, but in 1930 money wasn’t a big problem for him.

Displaced - Day 5

He watched with growing anger as the gunmen searched the room. When it became clear there was nothing to find, all but one left. The feed from the Mote camera dust seeded throughout the room was cut off; they couldn’t sever his data stream, not yet anyway; they’d have to jam it. The nano-scale camera sensors were physically present in 2041 though, and so they were fair game.

He cursed and slammed the top of the desk, rose, and paced the room, palm pressed to his forehead. “Calm down, relax, they only know where I am, not when.” But a nagging voice inside his head wouldn’t shut up about the possibility that they knew where Silvia was too.

Displaced - Day 4

He glanced at the kitchen wall clock. The operation was to begin in earnest in another couple of minutes. He finished the coffee, then poured a third. It was just about time to do something about that lack of funds.

He returned to his desk and brought out the equipment again, sipping his drink while waiting for the temporal hub to re-establish contact with the future. When his connections sprang to life across the displays, he strangled the urge to check Silvia’s location and status. When working with skimmers, don’t be stupid and access stuff you want to keep hidden, he thought.

He had no reason to think the other skimmers had any interest in his sister, but he had no reason to think they didn’t, either. At the very least she could give them a link to him, one he’d prefer they didn’t catch wind of.

“Let’s move.” The chat message appeared and he swiped it out of his way, launching the tightly coordinated infiltration operation into action.

Within thirty seconds, skimmers from around the world had latched on to ephemeral streams of data in and around the Goldstream. They blocked data streams, substituting carefully crafted streams of the skimmers’ devising to defeat banking system security.

While they handled the security, Charlie struck deep into the Goldstream, skimming the tiniest amounts from randomly chosen accounts among the billions represented. The money funneled itself through a labyrinthine maze of accounts manned by other skimmers before finally coming to rest in the account they’d set up for the operation. They were accomplishing a skim the likes of which nobody’d been able to pull off before.

But nobody else had gear like he had.

He sent out some extra skims to top off his own accounts. It was risky; his gear could handle the security behind the screen the other skimmers had set up for the main op, but his account didn’t have the additional cover of the account maze. A slow smile crossed his face as his personal total ticked up quickly. Risky, but worth it.

All that electronic money would’ve made him a billionaire in the 1930s, even adjusting for inflation. As it was in 2041, he and his sister could live off it for years, maybe even a decade.

Within four seconds, the whole operation was over. The skimmers’ connections cut out, security was reestablished as if nothing had occurred.

“That’s that. Good job, guys,” Charlie typed. There was no reply. He frowned. He had a bad feeling. On a hunch, he tapped an icon representing the feed from a video feed he’d left in 2041. It was set to monitor the physical location of his ‘net signal; the same physical location he occupied in the 1930s, in fact, after you adjusted for the movement of the planet, and the solar system, and the galaxy, and the expansion of the universe itself.

The building had been converted into office space at some point in the future, but it was old and abandoned in ‘41. His feed gave him a real-time view of the area. He switched it on just to see the door into the room explode with bullet strikes seconds before masked figures kicked the remains down.

He cursed as he watched them search. They’d find the microscopic cameras seeding the area quickly enough, but that was all they’d find. The source of his ‘net connection was on his desk, more than a hundred years in the past. But it meant that someone was on to him. If they could localize his signal that precisely, it was possible they’d traced his activity and had some idea of what he was capable of.

It also meant he’d have to shift his physical connection point before he could return to 2041. For the time being, he was stuck.

Displaced - Day 3

He unclenched his hand; his knuckles had gone white on the cup’s handle. Silvia was fine for the moment. “For the moment,” he said aloud, letting the irony wash over him. Technically she hadn’t even been born yet, wouldn’t be for almost a century. Their great grandparents, maybe even great-great grandparents were probably walking around about now.

His point of temporal reference was fixed in relative time. If he spent a week in 1930, a week passed in 2041. If there was a way to change that, he didn’t know the equipment well enough to make it work. “Not that I’d change it if I could. Makes using the temporal hub a whole lot easier.”

Slipping into other times was new tech, not even leading edge. It was firmly on the bleeding edge. He’d cracked it though, siphoned off the tech from a top global corp’s military-contract think tank. As far as he knew, nobody knew he had it, let alone knew that he’d made the tech and actually time-slipped. He’d grabbed some flashy, lower grade files at the same time to prove he’d done it; he’d cemented his skimmer rep with it. But the time tech, that he’d kept.

Initially he’d hoped to try the classic time travel gambit with it. Go into the past, deposit a penny in the bank, come back to a big fat bank account in the present. When it hadn’t worked, the feeling of defeat had been soul-crushing. He’d tried all kinds of tiny experiments to see what had happened; hiding objects in places he was sure wouldn’t be disturbed, all that stuff you see in old videos. None of it worked. Nothing he did in the past changed anything at all in the present.

Eventually he’d given up on that angle. There was an idea the scientist types had come up with that changing the past would create alternate futures. All he’d managed to do was to maybe make some other version of himself really rich.