Chapter 1: Catch Up

I spent the majority of my life in an orphanage. No, it wasn't a terrible place. I was treated more than well. It was, however, incredibly boring. Everything I did was strictly scheduled, down to the minute. Breakfast was at a certain time every morning, followed by classes, a brief lunch break midday, more classes, dinner, and a brief period of free time before bed. The term 'free time' is sort of misleading, though, considering we were extremely limited in our options; Board games, local television, and studying were about our only options.

I was bullied, but it wasn't too terrible. Sure, I got bruised and scratched, but that's about it. I never sustained any long lasting physical or mental damage from it. I think the reason most victims of a situation like this are scarred for life is that they take it too personally, whereas I realized that I wasn't picked on because I was different, I was just there, and I wasn't exactly the only one. There were the big kids, and then there were the small kids. I just so happened to be one of the latter, and I more often than not happened to be in the way of one of the former. It was nothing personal, and the ruffians had to take their aggression out somewhere.

One good thing about living in an orphanage was the medical care. If I got sick, my prescriptions were paid for. If I ever would have needed extensive surgery, which I didn't, it would have been covered. When I broke my arm, I even received a bit of special treatment at the house, but nothing too big. I didn't have my meals bussed to my rooms on silver platters.

Sometimes, the kids would joke with me about my parents. Sure, none of them had parents either, but 99% of them lost theirs from car crashes or sickness, and the occasional few had living parents that just weren't fit to raise them because they were meth heads, but very few of us had to deal with “Hey, Jason! So...was your old man a double agent? I bet the Russians had him killed because he was leaking information to Canada!” Very few of our parents were murdered in cold blood. Even fewer of us saw it happen.

It wasn't a cliché, rainy night. It was warm out, mid August. The eighteenth, to be exact. Technically, it could have been the nineteenth. I was young, scared, and wasn't really watching the clock.

I was in my room, sleeping, when I heard screaming down the hall. At first, I just thought it was the television. But it didn't stop. It just got louder. Some of the screaming was in anger, some of it in fear. Some both. There was too much of it to differ my father's voice from the voice of the other man, and I just assumed that my parents were arguing.

So, I got out of bed, walked down the hall, and opened the door to their bedroom. My mother was standing in the back corner of the room, my dad was in front of her, arms raised to his sides. And a third man was standing with his back to me, not two feet from me, with his arm raised. Of course, now I know he was holding a gun, but I couldn't tell at the time. I'll never forget the look on my mother's face when she saw me open the door.

Before I had time to blink, I woke up in the hospital. A tall, sort of biggish man came in after I had eaten. He told me that my parents were shot, that my father was dead and my mother in surgery. They thought the killer panicked when I entered the room, shot them in haste, knocked me out with the butt of the gun, and left. A botched robbery. A death for no reason " Two, actually. My mother died within the hour.

Yeah, it sucked, but I got used to it. I moved into the orphanage, adjusted to life, became stagnant. S**t happens.

Oh, my arm? Yeah, I sort of have to go back to the bullying thing for that one. Most the time I just dealt with it, like I said, I never sustained any real injuries. They were just superficial, nothing that didn't heal over the span of a few days. But, y'know, we all have our bad days.

I was curled up in a ball to protect my face; Not that I'm a vain person, facial injuries just aren't very fun. You can keep yourself from moving most injured areas to avoid discomfort, but it's hard to prevent yourself from moving your face. There were a couple of kids, two or three, maybe four, kicking me, hitting me, I think one had a stick. But, again, it wasn't that bad. It sounds like it, I know, but I would have been fine.

And then, well, I just sort of...snapped. It was the strangest thing, really, I don't even remember doing it. One second I was curled up, trying to guard myself, and the next...well, I was being held very tightly by one of the older kids, maybe sixteen or seventeen, and one of the bullies was laying in front of me, bleeding profusely from the face, and there was a screaming throb pounding through my right arm. One of the nurses were checking his pulse, said he was fine. Turns out I broke his nose and tried to choke him.

I wasn't really punished, though. Self defense and all that jazz. The other kids didn't really bother me very much after that, considering I nearly killed one of them. There were a few 'Hey, Jason! Did you pick that up from your secret agent parents?' comments, though. God, some of those kids were so f*****g stupid.

Other than that, though, I don't have much of a history of violence. I'm a pretty tame dude.

Oh, right, the adoption process. Well, the couple that adopted me were sort of...hippies. The reason they adopted was that my adoptive mother was a total feminist, and didn't want to fall into the gender role of having to give birth, and they decided to adopt a kid instead.

They wanted a smart, creative, but level kid. They wanted a male so that they wouldn't have to deal with all the stress of raising a girl, with all the periods and risk of getting teen pregnant and all that. My mom may have been a feminist, but she at least knew that guys were easier to raise.

So, they talked to a few kids, interviewed them to get to know them better before making their decisions. When they got to me, they asked the obvious questions like what I did in my free time, and s**t like that. Then they asked me what my least favorite thing about the place was, and I just went on a tangent about how the scheduled life was such crap, how having someone over my shoulder at all hours of the day really irked me. It was just the sort of “Down with Big Brother” thing they were looking for, I guess, and they adopted me. They, and I, quickly learned that there was a difference between “parents” and “mom and dad”.

Dad was a freelance writer, and did pretty much everything anyone would pay him to do. He complained about it nearly all the time, said he felt like he was giving in to capitalism, but that there wasn't much he could do since he had a family to feed. Mom painted, and she was actually really good, but you can't make a living off of it. Occasionally she'd rake in some dough on a few that had caught some guy's attention, and we'd have some cash to play with for the week, but other than that, it was a pretty modest living. Two bedroom, one story, one bathroom, small kitchen. It was small, yeah, but we didn't really need any more than that.

School outside of the orphanage was way different, a lot harder. I was so used to not having to try at anything, it took me nearly 2 years to get into the right rhythm. I didn't have very many friends in school. I was pretty introverted.

After that, though, it was smooth sailing. I got honor roll, I got my scholarships; Partly for doing well in school, but mostly for being dirt poor.

I went to a small school, majored in Psychology. I figured it wouldn't be too hard. Into the first semester, though, I realized it wasn't really for me, and switched to English. I thought: 'Hell, if dad can do it, I sure as hell can.' But, well, I couldn't. It just bored the s**t out of me. Psychology, English, mathematics, history, sociology; I just couldn't dedicate myself to anything. So, I dropped out, and now I work a dead end job managing a retail store. The way I saw it, I could either spend my life doing something I didn't like, or I could waste lots of time and money going to school, and then spend the rest of my life doing something I didn't like that paid well. I was raised by hippies, I'm not a materialistic person. I dropped out.

Oh, you heard about that, did you? Yeah, I guess that could be sort of important to the process. Short term memory loss could have mucked up my head. Really, though, there's not much I have to say about it, other than that it was weird as s**t. It was a Friday evening, I'm biking home from work, and then I wake up in a hospital four weeks later, covered in blood that wasn't mine, with no memory at all of what happened. They tried running DNA scans on the blood, but there was never anyone that seemed suspicious enough to test. They figure that a guy end up covered in someone else's blood, they can keep an eye out for suspicious people that have lost a lot of blood at nearby hospitals, check their DNA, and if it was their blood, maybe figure out what in the hell happened. They tested a few people, but nothing ever turned up. I don't think the police were very optimistic about it, though. I mean...I didn't remember anything. Even if they found the guy, it's not like I'd be able to testify to anything in court. So...yeah, whatever. I'm fine.

Yeah, Dick introduced me to the program. He thought it might be able to help me identify my parent's killer. Dick was the detective that worked on my parent's case, hopeless as it was. The orphanage paid for his investigations, actually. I had to go through a private investigator because the police closed the case after a few years; They had absolutely no leads. Dick was a nice guy. Not very compassionate, he liked to keep his work separate from his personal life.

He didn't have much of a sense of humor, though. His name was actually Richard Greaves, but I called him Dick because I thought it fit better. It was funny. What, really? You don't get it? Richard? Dick? Detective? Jeez, you guys are heartless. Whatever, it's not important.

Anyways, after I left the orphanage, I dropped out of touch with the guy. He had just as many breakthroughs on the case as the police did, and I couldn't really afford to pay him any more without the orphanage covering the expense. Sometimes I saw him around town, his office was local, and we'd chat. We were casual friends, I guess.

And then, on a...Wednesday, I think, last month, I get a phone call. Caller ID says 'Richard Greaves'. I don't immediately recognize the name, but it does sound familiar. If it he was registered as 'Dick Greaves', I probably would have realized that it was him. But I answered anyways. He says he had moved office awhile back, and he was picking up some paperwork from his old one, and had stumbled across my file. Said he had something that might actually help me find out who killed my parents, but said it was too weird to discuss over the phone. Said that he didn't think that I'd take it seriously, so we met for coffee the next day.

He says he has this friend, that runs a small but innovative company based in Europe that might be able to help find the guy. Says they have this weird experimental process that might do the job, but the catch is that I'd have to go through a lot of training. Very extensive, very expensive training. Employees get the training for free, so my options were to either pull a loan, or work for the guys. But right now I'm still on the fence, considering he hasn't even told me what the process is. I ask him, but he sort of dodges the question. I'm thinking that whatever it is, it must be pretty ridiculous for him to keep avoiding it like this. Sure, he said that I wouldn't take it seriously, but it was starting to get on my nerves. So I stop the conversation, tell him that we're not continuing until he tells me what in the hell this process is. And, you know what, I'll never forget this moment for as long as I live.

Dick looks down at his hands, knots them up, unknots them, downs the rest of his cold coffee, knots his hands again, looks at me, stone faced, and says the two most absurd words I've ever heard come out of the mouth of a man that I respected.

“Time travel.”

I laugh at him, I say he's got to be pulling my leg. 'You can't really expect me to believe you, can you?' But then he says that it's not time travel in the sense that most people think about it. He says this company has developed some rather interesting theories, and the process actually works, despite the fact that it hasn't really made the news. They keep it pretty tightly wrapped, and any leaks are usually covered by the fact that no one believes this s**t.

He says that you can't take your physical body back in time, but using a weird a*s quantum machine, they can pop your consciousness back to any point in time that you've experienced. He says maybe, since I saw the killer, maybe I can pop back in time, analyze the guy's face on pause or something, use it to maybe find out who it is.

At this point, I'm still not all that convinced. I mean, weak time travel is still time travel. It's the sort of thing you see in cheap science fiction books and movies that artsy teenagers like. But, you know, I figure what the hell. I pull a loan. I take a leave of absence from work. I fly to Europe. I enroll in the program. F**k, maybe it's crazy, maybe it's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard of, but it sure as hell beats filing paper work and running a cash register. And maybe I can get some sort of f*****g closure.