Temp Guard

by Duncan Shields
March 27th, 2008

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

Being a temporal border guard is an okay job. It pays the bills.

It seemed like a cool perk when the position was first created after the The Great Restart of 205?. You’d get to work, do your eight hours, and then get put back into the time stream a millisecond after you’d left.

You would be tired, though, and end up sleeping the day away and then you’d be up all night. Unless you were single or married to another Temp Guard, it sucked. Plus, it aged you a little quicker. Those eight hours didn’t pass for others. After a while, you would be ahead of everyone else in physical decrepitude.

So now, it’s just like all the other jobs. You work eight hours, they put you back into the time stream eight hours after you come to work. It gives the illusion of normalcy that most humans need to cope and survive.

It’s head-bending, really.

There’s a political movement afoot that doesn’t respect the temporal borders. They think it’s all just a nefarious plan by the temporal government to restrict people’s ability to research the past and investigate what they call ‘The Truth’. They use guerilla time sliders to flit about all over the place.

To their credit, these ‘tempests’ generally do seem to leave the time line somewhat intact, keeping interference to a minimum, not a lot of fuss, but it’s the principle, really. If they were to do something in a non-interference time zone accidentally, the consequences could be retroactively catastrophic.

Not that we’d know that difference. That’s why the Temp Guard doesn’t hire thinkers. Me, I don’t get bored easy. I’m great and doing nothing, filling out forms, following orders, or just staring at the wall.

It’s the ones that start to really try to figure out how it all works, what it all means, and whether or not this reality is really the real reality that start to slide off the rails eventually.

It’s actually a rogue Temp Guard that’s leading the Tempests right now. Alazariah Hackson. Reputedly insane but if you ask me, a guy would have to pretty smart to wage a careful non-interference war of attrition with the government.

Myself, I actually take comfort in the fact that I’d never have any idea about retroactive changes.

Like if I woke up tomorrow with one eye and no children, I wouldn’t even know that there had been a difference.

I’m happy enough sipping on my sugarwater and wanding my tachyon detector over the folks coming through the borders and filling out the forms. I’m not even tempted to think about the changes that could be happening around me every day.