A.L.I.C.E. (unfinished)

Time froze.

Reality shivered, as if in revulsion, then reluctantly disgorged a man wearing what appeared to be a mylar balloon covered in blinking lights and a fishbowl for a helmet. The fishbowl still had a price sticker on it. I say man, but that's really being quite generous. His greasy hair, thin frame, and pimply face marked him as late adolescent.

He stood there, wobbling uncertainly for a few minutes while his eyes adjusted and took in the frozen scene around him. He squinted as he walked through the crowd and checked people's faces against a tablet he held up beside them , until he finally laid eyes on me. Me, doing my best to keep still mid-pour as I draw latte-art for the 99th time this morning.

I don't remember the first time it happened. Not... forgotten, I literally cannot remember the first time, because whatever trick these travellers use to move beyond the grasp of time prevents anyone from remembering what has happened while they were frozen. All I know is that one second, I'm dribbling down the soccer field, the next, I'm flat on my back and there's a giant scorch mark with glowing embers marking the remains of the grass right where the ball was.

Nobody else saw or had any idea what had happened. Police investigated for a bit, then chalked it up to a freak gas leak explosion. Gas explosion my ass, there wasn't even a pipe within a hundred yards of the field.

Several more incidents occurred, all of them incredibly near misses. An I-beam from a construction site I was walking by materialized right in front of my nose, embedded in the concrete. A pool I was diving into evaporated right before I hit the water, landing me in the emergency room with a cast. A piano fell out of a window it had no way of fitting through right as I was walking under it.

Then things got weirder. I was walking down Main Street with my friend when suddenly the air turned solid. A second later, I was able to move again, and my backpack had a hole through it ending at a metal pot lid which was definitely not there when I packed it that morning. Whatever this tech was, enough exposure to it apparently built up a resistance.

After a couple more years of near-misses, and I built up enough resistance to the freeze that I could observe exactly what was happening during them. Invariably, someone appeared out of thin air in a way that defied physics, tried to kill me, and was stopped by another physics-defying interloper.

Oh, the methods varied. One time, they stepped through a portal that I could see another world through. Another person climbed out of the ground like there was a staircase I couldn't see. Yet another peeled back a section of space like it was wallpaper before stepping through and sealing it back up with a dab of spit on his thumb. I don't think I saw the same method or people twice, either from my attackers or my protectors.

5 years of mysterious assassins, and even more mysterious protectors. I'd long since decided that it would be best to let things play out. My protectors were clearly more competent than my attackers, sometimes even staying after to clean up a bit after the more egregious assaults. After enough of these ultimately harmless near misses, it became clear that no lasting damage was being done, and I became something of a local curiosity for the gossips in town.

"Did you hear? Alice had another miss today! A telephone line came down on her car right when we had that power outage!".

I even gained the ability to move as well as these mysterious travelers did while time stopped. I'm pretty sure none of the travelers noticed. They certainly didn't act like they knew I could see them.

And so, we return to the coffee shop. This traveler had taken his sweet time getting to me, and my arm was really starting to ache. Have you ever tried to hold a steel milk steaming cup up at the exact same angle for 5 minutes straight? It might not look heavy, but man, try holding anything up for that long and you'll find that it's a whole lot harder than it looks.Hard enough that my arm was trembling by the time he got to the counter to get a better look at me. He held the tablet up to my face, squinting the way he did with every other person in the shop, then turned away to fiddle with something on the side of his mylar-balloon-suit.

I couldn't take it anymore. A loud clang echoed through the room, as the milk-filled steamer dropped to the floor.

The traveler jumped, quickly drew a stereotypical alien ray gun, and looked around wildly to see what had made the noise. He was clearly anxious about being interrupted in whatever he was about to do. When nothing else in the room moved or made a sound, he turned back to me muttering under his breath.

It took him a couple of seconds to realize that something had changed. He frowned, squinting his beady eyes as he tried to process what he was seeing. Hand, cup. Milk going into cup. Milk coming from... an empty hand?

He squeaked and started swinging the ray gun up at me. I panicked and threw the latte at him. Latte foam covered the face of his fish-bowl, and he began blindly firing around the shop in my general direction. I ducked behind the espresso machine, looking for something to use as a weapon.

After a few frantic seconds, I spied the receipt spike next to the register. A quick look at the traveler confirmed that he was still wildly firing everywhere, but now facing away from the counter. I dove to the register, then clumsily threw the spike at him.

I should probably note that I am terrible at throwing things. Another thing to note: weighted receipt spikes are probably the least aerodynamic object in existence, and there's virtually no chance that it will end up anywhere other than on the floor, spike side up.

The spike spun lazily through the air, then fell on the floor in front of him, spike side up. I winced.

Mr. Balloon Suit finally had the presence of mind to wipe the foam off his helmet and turned to me. A vein pulsed on his flushed forehead, and his beady eyes pinned me to the wall at my back. I had nowhere to run, and he had a gun capable of burning quarter-sized holes clear through the backup drip coffee machine. Where was my protector? They always show up, and this seemed like it would be a pretty good time for it.

As he took a big step forward, he opened his mouth to speak and trained his gun on me.

FWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

The color drained from his face. Then more than the color. His suit collapsed around him, and his skin shriveled like an orange left on the sidewalk in the middle of summer.

I gaped, watching as he fell over backward with his deflated suit flapping around him. What the hell?

Then I saw his foot. The small wooden square of the receipt spike was pinned to the bottom of it, having punctured it as he took that single step towards me.

I stood behind the counter, now with a mug held below the spigot for our cold brew machine.

A faint whistle sounded, and a man wearing what appeared to be a neon green skinsuit sprinted around an invisible corner into the shop. He stumbled, tripping over Mr. Balloon's desiccated corpse, and fell face-first into the puddle of cold latte.

Sputtering, he looked around in shock, then groaned and tapped the device on his wrist.

"What the hell command, did you double book me? And where's the other guy? He didn't clean up after himself, and I'll be damned if I'll do it for him! We're supposed to be professionals!"

A mostly unintelligible response came from what was now clearly a communicator of some sort.

"Hold ... repeat..."

Green man, now green and brown from the waist up, started pacing and gesticulating with the arm he wasn't talking into.

"I said, the mission is already complete! The causality bubble is still up, our target is safe, and whoever else you sent just left her attacker lying in the middle of the floor without cleaning anything up!". His voice had a strange lilt to it that I couldn't place. Definitely not an accent I'd ever heard before, but otherwise perfectly understandable English.

He was a little closer to me now, so I was able to make out more of what whoever was on the other end was saying.

"We don't ... record of any ... agents ... mission. Hold while I check ... mission status for other agents. "

He grunted, then pulled a chair in front of the counter and sat on it facing Balloon Man's corpse. This close, I got a better look at the man's suit. It looked like it was covered in a dense felt, with gold tracing underneath forming a dense network of geometric shapes. He also smelled strongly of ozone.

My nose tickled, and I strongly suppressed the urge to sneeze. Thankfully, he couldn't see my watering eyes or scrunched-up nose from his current position.

"Agent, we have no record of anyone else being dispatched to this anomaly. Additionally, all agents downstream have reported that their anomalies were echos. If your anomaly is the last one, and the attacker is taken care of, we must consider the possibility that other organizations have become interested. Secure the causality device, clean up, and watch for more hostile entities."

Organizations? Anomalies? Downstream? What in the world was I mixed up in? This was the first time I'd heard any of these Travellers speak in my presence.

The man swore under his breath, limped over to Balloon Man, and began searching for something in the folds of the deflated silver suit.

My nose tickled again.

And didn't stop.

And I sneezed.

Instantly, the green and brown man shot up from where he was crouched and pointed a now-glowing finger in my direction.

I threw my hands up in a panic and backed away from the counter while spewing barely coherent words.

"Don't shoot don't shoot don't shoot I don't know what's going on please don't shoot me oh god what's going on don't shoot!"

He made his way over to the counter, looking for all the world like a less wrinkly and much more malevolent E.T. as he kept his glowing finger trained on me.

Slowly, he asked in a gruff tone, "Where's your suit? Why are you here? Who are you with?"

I stammered, "S...suit? What, like the one you and the other guy wear? I just work here! Why does this keep happening?"

He took in my clothing. Slightly stained apron in front, drab brown company shirt, cheap jeans, and a hairnet to top it off. Clearly not what he expected from another traveler.

He lowered his finger. Not all the way, and it still glowed, but at least it was no longer pointed at my head.

"Keep happening? Explain."

It was like a dam of words had burst. 5 years of near misses, cumulating in me standing here, glowing finger pointed threateningly in my direction. He tapped his wrist at times, asking me to repeat or describe some incidents in more detail, but otherwise did not interject. As I spoke, however, his face grew more and more concerned.

When I finally finished detailing every incident that had happened since I hit puberty, he stood there with a thoughtful look on his face.

"What happened to him?", he asked, gesturing behind him.

"I dropped a cup, panicked, and he stepped on the spike I threw at him while he was shooting everything around him. What does he look like a mummy now?"

He snorted, a thin smile cracking through the concern. "Causality bubbles are dangerous. Useful, but you can see what happens if you're exposed to one without protection."

He frowned again. "You, on the other hand, I cannot explain. You say that you gradually became aware of what was happening in these bubbles, and recently gained the ability to move inside them as well? I've never heard of such a thing. One moment."

The green man tapped his wrist again and began speaking rapidly into it. "I think I've found the source of the anomaly. The asset is active and aware. Requesting further instructions."

A response came swiftly. "Finish cleaning up, then retrieve the asset for analysis and debriefing."

I jumped. "What do they mean, analysis and debriefing? And who are you people?"

The man gave me a sidelong look, then replied, "Nothing bad, but we need to understand what's going on and why these people are after you. We generally opt for minimal intervention, but clearly, that's no longer an option."

He pointed at Balloon Man with his glowing finger, who then began to rapidly shrink, and in a couple of seconds, no trace of him remained.

With a considering look around the room, he sighed then pointed at the ground to his left. "Stand here."

I walked around the counter and asked again. "Who are you people? I appreciate the protection and all, but I'd really like to know what's going on!"

He grabbed my wrist, pulling me along beside him. As we stepped around a corner of reality, he answered me.

"A.L.I.C.E. Terrible acronym, don't ask me how but the bureaucrats somehow decided it stood for 'Alliance for the covert intervention of timeline anomalies'."

We stepped around an invisible corner, and everything changed before my eyes. It was like a veil was lifted, and I could see, actually see for the first time in my life. Except, I wasn't seeing with my eyes, not exactly. I didn't have eyes. Or arms, feet, toes, a face, or anything else. I simply was.

I saw where I had been pulled from. A thick, bright rope linked from the core of my perception to it, then continued on into the past. Other faint traces looped around it, and as I focused on one which terminated after looping around min, my perception shifted.

An image of the Balloon Man, lying on the floor. His trace had an odd quality to it that my own didn't. A second skin, giving it an almost slimy texture, ending a few seconds before his trace did. On a whim, I gently pulled it a few seconds into the past, and the slippery coating shifted.

Something changed. The traces squirmed a bit before settling into new patterns, and a new memory worked its way into my mind, superimposed over the original.

Balloon Man, firing his laser around the room randomly, like before.

Balloon Man, stepping back onto the spike.

Balloon Man, a desiccated husk on the floor wrapped in a mylar balloon.

I paused. What did I just do? I could feel the changes, and they didn't reach very far, but they were definitely there. I focused on the other bright trace in my recent past. I could feel that it belonged to the Green man's timeline and that it had a skin with a static, almost electric feel to it.

And another trace, farther back. Also slimy. I recognized this man from a couple of months back, he'd taken great care to arrange for me to fall down a set of stairs after tripping over a mop. His trace didn't end there, joining with another protector shortly after, and they faded into the distance in the same direction as the protector's origin.

I slid down my trace. It didn't have a coating like the others, but the differences didn't stop there. Mine had a warm golden hue and a brilliance which other traces did not match. Where other traces took their paths in straight or slightly curving lines, mine twisted to meet others. Loops and whorls, dodging some lines, curving to meet others. It was quite pretty, really.

Soon, I came to a place where two dull, but comforting lines branched off mine. My parents, I could feel. And before that, where they met and my line joined them.

My birth? I considered this intersection, but the thought of going farther back felt strange. Maybe I wasn't ready to see it yet.

I shifted my focus back to the present. The green man's line tugged at mine. Its thin line did not have the strength to redirect mine on its own, but I obliged and shifted my line's path to match his own. Then I focused on the moment and fell into it.

I blinked and looked around. We were no longer in the coffee shop.

A sprawling building surrounded us, filled with anachronistic combinations of hardware, bioware, and other wares to which I could not put a name. CRTs connected to glowing crystal arrays. A server bank running on punch cards was being fed by a stream of drones the size of a bee. What looked like a modern gaming PC was hooked up to a set of pullies moving letters around on a Ouija board. And from it all, a cacophony of sounds rose up to the platform that I found myself standing on with my new companion.

There were a number of platforms scattered throughout the space, all of them different. Some had lines, as people walked up onto them and disappeared, and others, I could see people appearing from thin air.

The green man struggled briefly with his helmet, then sighed in relief as it came undone. He gestured around us. "Welcome to the Hub!"

Too much was going on, and things were moving way too quickly. I wobbled over to the edge of the platform and sat down to collect myself. My head was spinning.

What had happened on our way here? That... void with all the lines which I somehow instinctually knew how to interact with. What was this place? I'd gone from "Ok, weird things happen to me sometimes but I'm otherwise living a relatively normal life" to "Oh hey, apparently some people can travel instantaneously between places or times, and there are enough of them that they have organizations and even transportation hubs where they do this."

I looked back at the green man. He'd removed his helmet and was fruitlessly trying to wipe the coffee off the front of his suit. "Hey, I never caught your name. Am I in any danger?"

He looked up at me, then sighed.

"I suppose this is a lot to take in at once. Name's Cole. No, this is neutral ground between all the orgs. We shouldn't waste too much time, but I can explain a few things to you after we get off the waypoint." He gestured at the platform below our feet.

Tucking his helmet under his arm, he started down the stairs. We made our way between the machines surrounding the waypoint. Most of them, I noticed, were hooked up to it in one way or another. Cole flipped what looked like a glass coin at a man next to one of the machines, who caught it with an appreciative grunt and turned back to the display in front of him.

"First, 'travellers' is as good a description as any for people like us. We all have different abilities, but a lot of them have to do with moving from one place, time, dimension, or 'verse to another. Waypoints like the one we came in on serve as anchors, helping us move to and from the places we want to go more easily.

Like us, they're each unique. Some of them don't require any inherent ability or technology, some produce different effects at their destination, or require rituals, or are operated with linked devices, you get the idea. Nobody is quite sure how they are made, or how we obtain our abilities. One thing they all have in common, however, is that they don't seem to follow any rhyme or reason. All that junk surrounding them is used to control the waypoints and was put together by feel rather than because someone puzzled together how they actually work."

We turned onto a cleared path between machines, and he continued, "Orgs generally rent time on waypoints. Most of them are too specialized to be worth buying up even if their owners were willing, and it benefits everyone to have access to a larger pool of them."

As we walked down the path, it got wider and the trickle of people going to and from the waypoints grew denser. Soon, we were walking down what might as well have been a city street in a more populated city on Earth. People at stalls on the sides of the street shouted about their wares, ranging from chicken on a stick to tech repair services. Buildings in more styles and sizes than I had ever seen before replaced the haphazard clusters of machines surrounding waypoints.

Although the Hub appeared to be indoors, the size of the buildings farther down the street made it clear that something strange was going on with the roof. Cole noticed me looking up at the "roof" of the Hub and continued his lecture.

"The Hub is a pocket dimension, and a waypoint as well. No one knows who its owner is, but it has a couple of properties that seem to operate without any input. First, it always has enough space for whatever we build in it. Second, it seems to protect its own timeline from manipulation. People can leave and enter it, but only at points in time that correlate with their personal timelines.

Leave the Hub to spend 10 minutes of your own time somewhere else, and you can only enter it 10 seconds farther down the Hub's timeline. One person tried to force their way into the Hub farther down the timeline. They were found on their waypoint 50 years later and aged as if they had lived there the whole time.

Don't mess with the Hub." He laughed then, a bit warily.

I thought back to the waypoint, and the void before it. "When we... traveled from the shop. What did you see?"

"See? That waypoint is instant. The owner gives you a poem, you recite it while stepping forwards and to the right, then to return, you think the words backward in your head and step forward and to the left. Did you see something?"

I shook my head. If he didn't see the void, then he probably didn't know about it. Best keep it to myself until I understood what was going on a bit better. "So where are we going?"

Cole stepped to the side to let by a moped carrying a man dressed in what looked like a buffalo pelt, complete with a stuffed head and horns. "Just a bit farther, then we'll hop on the bus to downtown and then walk a couple of blocks to A.L.I.C.E. headquarters. Do you need a bite to eat? It'll probably be a few hours before we get out of the debriefing and leadership votes on what to do. Most likely they'll grant you temporary asylum while we figure out why people keep trying to kill you."

I nodded, and a few minutes later, we were walking down the street while I happily munched down on something the vendor had vaguely described as "street meat on a roll". It tasted like chicken. Cole kept playing the tour guide, pointing out shops or landmarks of note as we made our way to the bus station, and I relaxed a bit to soak it all in.

The bus looked like an old trolly car, except its wheels were replaced by metal thrusters glowing a deep blue. It bounced slightly as Cole pulled me up behind him, and we stood near the back since there was no sitting room left. With a low hum, we were off down the road again, stopping every other block to let people on or off.

Several stops later seats opened up, so we sat down, and Cole continued pointing stuff out through the window. A museum of dangerous artifacts, front facade looking like a sphinx with two paws on either side of the door. A thin tower composed entirely of wires, apparently an attempt to discover exactly how high the Hub would let them build.

They failed, of course, and gave up after nearly a hundred miles. A bathhouse that catered to intelligent felines and contained no actual baths. He kept pointing things out, and the weight of everything that had happened so far today bore down on me, crushing me in fatigue. By the time we reached our stop, I had dozed off, and he had to shake me awake.

We got off the bus and walked the last few blocks to our destination in silence. It didn't look like much. Shadowed by two skyscrapers on either side, there was a two-story brick building with wrought iron letters above the door proclaiming "A.L.I.C.E.".

"This is it? An alliance of time travelers protecting timelines is headquartered in a townhouse?"