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Chapter 1. Crime Scene
Steve
was strangely pensive, in an uncharacteristically focused state. Early
that morning, the veteran detective had arrived at the crime scene with
his partner.
After a thorough investigation, he had been engrossed in the matter for several hours, turning it over and over in his mind. Time was of the essence. His conclusions led to only one possible solution. And that bothered him to the point of irritation.
Under the table he stroked his 9mm, which remained holstered, silent and cold, as if patiently awaiting the decisive moment of the outcome.
Steve Crettan was an old-school detective. Now he shared a table, watching as the steam from his coffee cup generated wisps of vapor that rose into the air and mingled before disappearing from sight.
His companion was chattering happily about some incident from the previous night. Steve wasn't paying much attention to Nesko Cleonis's story.
I couldn't help but watch him, mesmerized. As Nesko spoke, his mouth seemed to gesture slowly, in a grotesque, sequential dance that contrasted sharply with the rapid up-and-down movements of his throat.
It was summer and it was raining lightly. The odd couple sat under a flimsy awning as the drops fell softly and steadily onto the sidewalk and street. The air had a typical mix of smells, reminiscent of dampness and ozone. In the distance, they could hear the echoes of distant thunder. The weather was awful.
The colleagues were killing time during a break, sitting at a table in the tiny café. They were waiting for the arrest warrant for the suspect, but the judges were taking their time.
The individual they were supposed to capture was across the street. They saw him intermittently through the building's windows. He was staying at an old hotel that had seen better days, and by a stroke of good luck stemming from a bribe, the concierge had given him the room facing the street.
If an unsuspecting observer were to look closely at the suspect's image, they might see that he was suffering from a trembling, intermittent, and irregular movement. It wasn't immediately obvious, but upon closer inspection, this unnaturalness became apparent. The suspect's image would briefly shake, like an unstable, slightly out-of-focus television signal.
At dawn, the day seemed promising, but the routine was interrupted by a call Nesko answered. An officer informed him from a crime scene that a murder had occurred. A disheveled old man had witnessed the incident.
The report was out of the ordinary. The old man described how the killer had materialized before his eyes. The police officer thought the old man was completely drunk, but after reviewing the security camera footage, he couldn't believe his eyes.
After a preliminary investigation, Nesko had the good sense to call Crettan. In unusual cases, only the detectives in charge could investigate.
Steve arrived after Nesko took a quick statement from the disturbed old man.
These types of investigations almost always ended with the witness being dismissed as crazy, drunk, or on drugs. But this had not been the case.
As seen in the videos, the elderly man's account showed the suspect materializing. And this had been corroborated by security cameras.
The victim's body was found near the police station, on the sidewalk, directly under the roof of a bus stop. The unfortunate man had tried to reach the station with his last bit of strength, as could be seen from the car. The stab wound was deep.
The deceased turned out to be Lenny Pickford, a prominent member of the Republican Party. He was about 36 years old and had a considerable fortune, which came from a steel empire owned by his family.
If it had been anyone else, identification would have been more difficult, but Lenny was a famous media personality. His penchant for the spotlight had led him to star in some dramatic scenes on news programs and information shows.
The victim had strange ties to certain unions that had not yet been fully identified. It appeared that his wealth had bought many influences.
Chapter 2. Reflecting on Life
As
he sipped his coffee and focused on his watch, Steve felt a mixture of
nostalgia and pity. An uneasy feeling gnawed at him, as if he were both
far away and close at the same time. With the evidence he had, under
normal circumstances, he would have wanted to blow the hitman's brains
out with a bullet to the forehead. The regulations allowed it.
Over the years of working together, she had grown fond of her colleague Nesko. As she wrestled internally with these conflicting feelings, a sense of anger began to take hold as questions flooded her mind one after another.
"Why did Nesko never get a vasectomy?" the detective thought.
Shit. There was no way to get that idea out of my head. Wasn't having sex freely something every young person enjoyed? Sex without commitment… Not even for that? If Nesko had been sterilized, this day wouldn't be as bad as it is now.
Steve reflected on how complicated police life had become lately.
The retro-chronological crimes had multiplied, and the police were simply overwhelmed. They were almost always involved in acts of extreme violence.
After the initial morning investigation, a busty girl named Assel "Somebody" came to the crime scene. She identified herself as the victim's girlfriend. She had learned of Pickford's death through the media. Lenny's father, Russell, was in Moscow to finalize a contract.
Crettan knew this would be a marathon race against time. The fallout from this murder would hit him fast, because the Pickford clan's political connections were going to influence his department head. Fucking Lenny. You had to die right on my shift.
Nesko Cleonis had confirmed that Pickford drove his car to within a block of the police station while in agony. He lost control of the car and crashed onto the sidewalk. Staggering, his last steps led him to the bus stop, where he bled to death.
Cleonis was efficient. She had tracked the car using security cameras. And she saw the victim being attacked as she left her home.
After questioning the doorman at the building where Lenny lived, Nesko decided to call Steve Crettan. And there he was, neck-deep in this unfortunate affair.
Two things were clear after the preliminary investigation: no one had ever seen the suspect before, and his resemblance to his teammate Nesko was striking to Steve. The goalkeeper corroborated this: the physical resemblance between Nesko and the murder suspect was uncanny.
Let me be clear: the building manager wasn't accusing the police officer, that much was obvious. He was simply saying that the two looked very similar.
The man who stabbed Lenny outside the building was about twenty years older than Nesko. If it weren't for that, they could have passed for twins. Coincidentally, Steve's young partner had been patrolling the area that morning at the time of the murder. Bad news.
Steve made a mental note of the detail without saying anything to Cleonis, and arranged for the doorman to be taken to the station for his statement and to obtain a rough sketch of the killer. There wasn't much to tell, except for the extraordinary resemblance, which so surprised the portly old man.
The first thing the doorman mentioned was the appearance of a " flash of light " and a noise he described as a snap, followed by the materialization of the killer, who came out of nowhere.
This happened just as Lenny was leaving the building, before getting into his car. The man, who had materialized out of nowhere, was breathing smoke from his hair, and before saying a word, he stabbed Lenny Pickford in the back and disappeared running through the city streets.
Mortally wounded, Lenny got into his car and began a chase that ended with his death at the bus stop. The doorman had tried to call an ambulance, but Lenny, now deceased, had quickly gotten into his car and accelerated, much to the old man's despair.
After taking his initial statement, Steve concluded that he was sincere and was very certain that the killer was a retro-chronological individual.
Chapter 3. During the investigation
The
flash, the snap, and the materialization were very significant to
Steve. The smoke from the head was typical of the procedural manuals.
Detectives like Crettan handled cases that people labeled as " strange ." Materializations, UFOs, unexplained abductions, extraterrestrial contact, and all that nonsense that people thought was just hearsay or madness, but which the police force took very seriously.
This appeared to be a retro-chronological murder. It seemed the hitman had traveled from his own time to the present to commit the assassination.
He fired a couple of orders to Nesko to speed things up.
If everything went as he feared, he had no more than 72 hours to capture the killer, who would then return to his own time, vanishing from this world forever. Literally, he would go back to his own era.
He ordered one of the officers to confiscate the magnetic tapes from the security cameras around Lenny's building. Obtaining a reliable portrait of the attacker was a priority. He ordered a police cordon around the crime scene. Finally, he requested a composite sketch of the killer based on the old doorman's description.
He ended up ordering a helicopter equipped with high-definition thermal cameras and instructed his partner to begin identifying any human being with a body temperature exceeding 40°C. If there was one thing that characterized time travelers, it was their high body temperature.
The training of detectives like Crettan included Forensic Psychiatry, Robotics, Computer Science, Chemistry and Particle Physics, so their criminalistic knowledge was solid, but in retro-chronological cases like this one, it was convenient to refresh their knowledge.
While Nesko was taking care of the minor details, he decided to pay a visit to the Physics Department of the local University.
There was something that particularly worried him, and that was the physical resemblance between Nesko and the knife-wielding killer, which gave him a distressing premonition.
He got in his car and drove to the city's most prestigious university. At the Physics Department, he asked to speak with a specialist in Quantum Mechanics who was familiar with Relativity.
So they referred her to Dr. Stelle McCollun.
Upon reaching the Physics desk, Stelle looked at him with an air somewhere between puzzled and condescending, wondering what the heck a policeman could possibly ask him about quantum theory.
Steve Crettan showed her his holographic Homeland Security badge, and a nervous smile immediately spread across the beautiful woman's face. Homeland Security matters were highly classified, and no one could release information about investigations under penalty of arrest and elimination. Detectives were authorized to kill anyone who violated confidentiality without prior authorization.
After patiently listening to Steve's account, the doctor agreed with Crettan that the killer was a time traveler. Stelle asked the detective to follow him to a nearby laboratory.
The policeman let the doctor go ahead, falling slightly behind so he could get a good look at her backside. He followed the suggestively undulating curves of her calves. Shaped and alluring, they looked good in the high heels. It would be a pleasant chat.
The talk, though informative, didn't add much new to their knowledge. State Security departments had been aware of time travel for several years.
It was known that these events were theoretically possible, but humanity didn't yet have the technology to carry them out. However, for some time they had been receiving travelers who, for various reasons, arrived from the future. They mainly tried to gain some advantage by altering events.
Someone from the future probably needed to get rid of Lenny.
Theoretical knowledge of quantum mechanics had advanced enough to know that time travel was possible. But the problem lay in the amount of energy required, which was not yet available. Current energy sources were not sufficient to power time travel.
Going back to the late 1880s and early 1900s, humanity began recording cases of "ghosts" in various locations around the world. As time went on, extraterrestrial apparitions, dematerializations, and some inexplicable cases of mysterious disappearances were added to the list of reported ghosts. These latter cases were exploited by various charlatans to sell all sorts of stories.
Humanity created thousands of versions that attempted to explain these phenomena, thus giving rise to all kinds of conspiracy theories that tried to explain these phenomena.
Extraterrestrials, beings from beyond the grave, military experiments, past civilizations, and a thousand other ideas had appeared during the 20th and 21st centuries.
But the truth was that ghost sightings during past centuries were actually low-precision holographic apparitions of time travelers from the future.
Over the years, the retro-chronological travel procedure was perfected, and holography was replaced by actual physical journeys backward in time. In the early journeys, a physical distortion at the quantum atomic level was interpreted by eyewitnesses as the typical translucent images or shadows accompanied by electromagnetic disturbances that were perceived as cold or felt as goosebumps on the back of the witnesses' necks.
By Steve Crettan's time, science knew that in some distant future, humanity had perfected time travel to the point of physically sending people for short periods.
The travelers remained for a maximum of 72 hours. And one consequence of the temporary alteration of their physical state was a significant increase in their body temperature.
Specifically, Crettan considered retro-chronological travelers a nuisance.
From the future, all sorts of undesirable elements used to arrive: murderers, psychopaths, pedophiles, and the best of human scum, who used the present era as a garbage dump to commit all kinds of illegal acts.
Detectives like Steve were responsible for "cleaning" them up permanently, since even future humanity had found a simple and clean way to eliminate its disposable elements from prisons by sending them to the past.
In recent years, cases of retro-chronological killers had been detected, occurring because some businessmen or corporations were trying to alter the past, eliminating key elements of society, in order to change the flow of events and alter the status quo in their favor.
Poor Lenny had probably been wiped off the map by some future competitor of the Pickford companies, who had sent their hitman to eliminate some descendant and thus eliminate his industrial empire.
While Stelle chattered happily and enthusiastically, Crettan shook his head, thinking about all these events. He noticed how the doctor's chatter was regularly interrupted as she filled her beautiful lungs with air.
The 72-hour limit was explained simply: for some unknown reason, in the future, the travelers' atomic particles were bombarded with an incomplete energy charge. This generated an alteration that wasn't permanent, and after 72 hours, the particles returned to their original quantum state, taking the time traveler back to the future.
For the killer it was simple: he had to survive for that period of time to automatically return and thus end his journey.
For detectives like Steve, the matter was even simpler: it wasn't enough to capture the hitman because he would eventually slip through their fingers. He had to be eliminated. Otherwise, the crime would go unpunished.
To detect the travelers, it was crucial to track their energy levels by measuring their body temperature. Visually, they were similar to any other human being, but their body temperature reached 43 degrees Celsius, a value high enough to detect them using thermal imaging cameras.
Steve let the doctor speak until she finished her thought and, taking advantage of the moment when she took a breath, interrupted her with a question that troubled him: why did travelers from the future always land by materializing near some blood relative?
The doctor seemed intrigued by the question. With a gesture of surprise at the question, Stelle responded by raising her eyebrows slightly and smiling. The answer lay in particle physics. Apparently, time travel was only possible if the atomic electrons of the transported object had a similar structure near the landing zone.
Something like a close "twin" was a requirement for materialization. At the molecular level, the transported atoms stabilized when a structure was copied as faithfully as possible from local resident atoms. The intracellular DNA strands had to be genetically similar. This explained why the materializations occurred in the physical vicinity of an ancestor of the traveler.
In short, this meant that the error rate of the traveler's materialization was high when they materialized far from their close relatives. It could even be fatal.
Dr. McCollun thought it was fascinating. A living being needed to materialize near someone genetically similar to its structure. If a traveler from the future wanted to materialize in the present, they would have to find a relative so that their genetic structure could stabilize by copying their DNA strands and materialize as close as possible.
That's why time travelers always turned out to be descendants of someone close to them. This time traveler was a relative of Nesko, which had already been verified by the detective.
Steve mentally thanked himself for getting a vasectomy when he was young. No Chicano of the future descended from him would live to see this day. While this hadn't been his initial motivation (which was to have sex in peace), it could be considered a side benefit.
Poor Nesko, the detective thought. Some descendant from the future had screwed him over by arriving in the present. And to make matters worse, the hitman had to be eliminated within 72 hours.
The standard procedure was clear. The time traveler's annihilation was the priority, and ALL possible methods could be used. ALL was the word that bothered Steve at this point. ALL was ambiguous enough for most cops, but not for detectives.
He'd grown fond of his partner, but the manual was clear. He'd do everything he could to kill the assassin without harming Nesko, but he needed to ask the attractive Doctor one more question.
-“Does the return from a trip still have a 72-hour limit?”- The doctor thought about it for a few moments before answering.
“According to the latest research,” Stelle replied, “time travelers are now arriving with fluctuating time periods. It’s possible they have perfected the technology of time travel in the future.”
An alarm bell went off in the detective's brain.
"Is there any way to anticipate the return?" Steve asked.
Stelle's response was emphatic.
- “Yes. There is a window of time that opens up 10 minutes before the return. During that period you will notice that the traveler's body image trembles and fluctuates briefly.”
Stelle described it as an unstable and slightly out-of-focus television signal.
The conversation was interrupted by a call from Nesko Cleonis. They had found the hitman, who was in a hotel in the city. Nesko was waiting for orders, sitting in a café across from the assassin's window. Steve told him he would be there immediately.
- “One last question, Doctor: During those last 10 minutes before the return flight, were the passengers vulnerable to bullets?”
Stelle was energetic.
"No, because the atomic structure in that phase is unstable. You must annihilate it before its image becomes unstable."
"Shit," Crettan thought . "Now they can return at any time and are invulnerable to bullets for 10 minutes before their return."
Checking his watch nervously, the Detective said goodbye to Stelle, hoping to arrive before the assassin vanished. Muttering a quick hello to the hippy Physicist, he hurried out to meet Nesko at the café across from the hitman's hotel.
Chapter 4. When the end rushes in
When
he arrived at the café, he sat next to his partner, who was explaining
how he'd noticed in the last few minutes that the time traveler's image
seemed blurry. After the detective asked, Nesko said it had been about
three minutes. Cleonis mentioned how strange the resemblance between the
killer and his own deceased father seemed.
Steve thought there was no other solution. He waited patiently for his companion to finish his coffee. He wished the young man had gotten a vasectomy. Or at least that the day wasn't cloudy so he could see the sun one last time. What a shitty day. Rain splashed a little on Steve's face as time ran out and it was time to call it a day.
Without thinking too much, Steve pointed his 9mm at Nesko Cleonis's forehead and fired once, much to his friend's astonishment.
Brains splattered across the back wall, grotesquely splashing the clear glass and violet tiles. The waitress screamed hysterically.
From where he stood, Steve heard a scream of agony coming from the hitman. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw an intense flash, and as he turned, he heard the characteristic click. He saw a column of smoke where the assassin's body had been; he had ceased to exist before returning to his own time.
Crettan had erased the killer's timeline by eliminating his paternal grandfather, his partner Nesko Cleonis.
Steve shrugged. The hitman, after all, was never born, and somewhere in a parallel universe, that fucking Lenny was still enjoying his life.
He thought "ALL" was an ambiguous term. Ambiguous enough to warrant rewriting the manual.
"What a shitty day," he thought as he holstered his weapon.
THE END
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