At Loop 2500, you have your first visit. Your caseworker, wanting to know how you’re settling in. They don’t know because you’re not observed. Even if they could, there’s no need. What you are doing, you’re doing in the distant past. If there was a ripple in the Standard History Eventline they’d know about it, but there is nothing. In these sixteen marooning minutes, fixed somewhere in a backwater of the 1990s, you’re temporally insignificant. A very small pebble in a pond with much larger, more recent and more relevant ripples.
Your caseworker doesn’t stay for long; just to tick a few boxes and move on to the next parcel of time. You ask him for outside news.
“There’s no news,” he says. “This is 1996. Everything you ever did, all the wrong you’ve ever done, all the happiness you’ve ever had—it hasn’t happened yet.”
“Then I haven’t actually committed a crime either.”
“Not yet,” he agrees cheerfully, “but you will, and with a hundred percent certainty. If it’s in the Standard History Eventline—which it is—it will happen, it did happen, it has happened. The fact that you’re here proves it.”
The logic isn’t totally sound, but then in the time industry, very little is.
“Has my lawyer lodged an appeal?”
The caseworker points to a pram the other side of the food court.
“That’s your lawyer. She doesn’t even know she’s going to be a lawyer. Take it up with her.”
He was bluffing. The toddler’s name is Charlotte. Her mother is Keilly, waiting for an old friend from school who is having a hard time. Good person on the whole, doing the best she can. You know, because you’ve chatted. Twelve times.
By Loop 5000, you’ve pushed the geographical boundaries of your prison, and discovered just how far you can get in your minutes. You can catch a bus or a train or even a cab—but the furthest you can get, furthest you ever got, is on a stolen motorcycle. Not the most powerful you could find but the fastest within the shortest time frame. You get almost twelve miles out of town to the south, but your time runs out within sight of the cast-iron road bridge. And no matter what you do, you can’t change that. You challenge yourself, you practice endlessly, you push too hard and you die in the attempt. It’s painful, but you come back, right as rain, just with a scuffed coat. No matter what you try, you never cross the bridge; it is the limit of your time and space. It’s the horizon you won’t ever cross.
By Loop 10,000, you’re starting to get weird, and angry, and desperate. You stop logging how many loops you’ve been in, and you kill yourself for the first time, then, when that doesn’t satisfy, you kill someone else. Someone you didn’t like to begin with, then just random people. But you don’t actually kill anyone or at least, not for very long. You may go on an orgy of violence just then, and work through your fury in a hundred or so loops until you calm down and start to log your loops again.
By Loop 20,000, you’ll have been Looped for over six months, and pretty much every sound, movement and scent will be familiar to you. You can predict what people will say, what people will do. You start to relax, read books, sketch, learn a musical instrument.
You start to count how many loops to go, rather than how many have been. Eight hundred and twenty-two thousand, six hundred and fifty-four, or thereabouts: about twenty-two years in sixteen-minute hexitemporal segments. A couple of days later, when the subtracted Loops don’t seem to be making much of a dent from your tally, you go back to counting up again, and life gets back to normal.
You start talking about yourself in the second person. You’re not sure why.
You eat, you sleep, you shit, you wash, you exercise.
You are Looped. You are relooped, you are relooped again. Again, and again, and again.
“Will sir be having a dessert today?” asks the same waitress, taking away your plates and smiling in a friendly yet mechanical manner. You usually eat here and always the same—a ready-made burger that you divert to your table using some pretext or other. You’ve become connected to the waitress, but she doesn’t know it. You know her name, and what her mother thinks of her new boyfriend. Little by little you get to know everything about her, but she knows nothing of you. To her, you are just one more faceless customer on an unremarkable Wednesday late in the summer of 1996. You don’t know how her life turns out.
“Time is short,” you say, “but thanks anyway.”
“I’ll get the check.”
She doesn’t have time to get the check but you knew she wouldn’t. The world resets to the beginning of the loop. You are back outside in the parking lot, the place and time where your loop always begins. You have a generic car key in your pocket but the parking lot is large. Every tenth loop, you search for the car you arrived in, but you have yet to have any luck. It wasn’t in the multi-story, nor any of the open-air lots. You are slowly working your way through all the parked cars, but it will take some time. Hereford is a big place.
That’s when Quinn arrives. You haven’t seen him since your trial. He won, you didn’t.
“Hello, Algy.”
Anything remotely new in the sixteen is so utterly alien that it leaps out at you like a chainsaw on full power. You jump.
“Sorry,” says Quinn, looking around. “Want to talk?”
You know it’s a dumb question. Of course you want to talk. You go to a cafe. You order coffee, he orders nothing. The rule is never take anything out of the loop – not even liquid.
He asks how it’s going.
“It’s kind of samey,” you reply, trying to be sarcastic.
He asks if you’re past the berserker stage and you say that you are.
“How many did you kill?”
“One day it was eighteen, I think. I wasn’t really counting.”
“It gets tiresome, doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” you say, “and messy, and pointless. What do you want?”
“We want to know who was responsible. Who gave you the access codes, whose bright idea it was to go trolling around the Middle Ages. Most of all, how you all got past the 1720 pinch point without setting off every trembler at head office. That could be real useful to us.”
You tell him you flashed through during the monthly telemetry squirt from the Renaissance, but you know he knows this. What he actually wants is the gold. Taking that much historical gold destabilized the monetary supply in the early history of banking. And banking doesn’t like to have its history pissed around with. The ripples cause crashes. Our heist has already been blamed for two depressions, the crash of 2008, and some inexplicable currency variations. Historical gold is a good moderator. You want financial stability? Flood the past with gold. Lots of it.
You tell him it’s in the Holocene.
“The Holocene is a big place,” he says. “You need to be more specific.”
You tell him you never knew where the gold went. That only Kitty knew.
“Kitty says that you know.”
“Kitty’s lying.”
“One of you is.”
“I was only a small cog,” you tell him, “blinded by cash and the misplaced hubris of down-streaming. I’d never done the Middle Ages before. Kitty asked me to join her. I was… flattered.”
Quinn takes a deep breath. Your sixteen minutes were up long ago and you haven’t reset. That’s what happens when they drop someone into your loop. You hear new stuff, see things that hadn’t happened, like you’re watching a sequel to a film you’re very familiar with.
“Last word?” asked Quinn.
“Last word.”
And you are back at the multi-story, Loop 42,001. All the players have reset themselves to their start positions. The kid on the bicycle, the balloon seller, the harassed father with the two unruly kids, the busker with the accordion. The same sixteen-minute section all over again. You look for your car, and you don’t find it. You give up at Loop 61,200, and never look again.