I never liked trains. What's to enjoy about a box sliding around on a set path? There's no room for surprise or creativity. Maybe if you derail? People don't seem to like that very much.
This mission required me to engage with one, though. My cybernetics-assisted reflex made jumping aboard the boxcar a piece of cake. How the eleven-year-old in front of me pulled it off, I don't know.
He probably just climbed aboard when the train was stopped, dude.
Oh, yeah. Moving on: this kid would be important to the future. Not in the Terminator sense that he'd save humanity or anything like that. Nothing nearly so dramatic. Instead, he was destined to be the founder and CEO of an international firm called Magna Worldwide. Mind you, he had the "Worldwide" on there even when it was just a tiny office in Brooklyn. He never thought small, not even on the train.
He and the two bums in the boxcar hadn't noticed me hop in through the open door, behind their field of view. I do know how to be stealthy, my loud mouth notwithstanding. For this mission, I needed to look the part. I didn't shave for three weeks, didn't shower for several days. DANTE provisioned me some ragged clothes. If anyone stopped me, I'd just be another vagrant hopping trains, looking for an opportunity somewhere for a hot meal and a place to sleep.
Not much about the kid's history prior to this was known to me. His name was Ryan Andriesen. No record of his parents, and the fact that he was hopping trains by himself suggested he was an orphan. This train was on its way to Texas from Mississippi. The boxcar smelled of sawdust, though it was empty apart from the four of us.
Their squalor disgusted me, if I'm being honest. It was rare in my time. No one would be allowed to live in this kind of filth, not unless they went to great pains to avoid being found and really, really wanted this existence. In that case, they could just as easily hitch a ride to another planet, eke out a meager living on some backwoods planet, doing the thankless work of frontier colonization.
For the many hours I lurked silently in the shadows of the boxcar, the men chatted among themselves and Ryan read some tattered old book. The scruffy gentlemen talked about "digging for diamonds" as we approached Murfreesboro. They invited Ryan to come along, but he just shook his head.
Then they looked at me: "You're welcome, too, if you want."
I'll give them due credit. I had no idea they'd noticed me. They never let on.
"Thanks, but no thanks," I told them.
They were unperturbed by the rejection. I suppose they were used to it. Not long after, they rolled down the slope. Never saw them again. They weren't part of the mission, anyway.
So, I was alone with the kid. He now knew I was there, but he didn't say anything to me or even look in my direction.
I didn't see a child, not really. I saw the man he would become, the menace I came here to stop. It came down to the War.
You can call it "the War" because there's never been another so deserving of the moniker. Anything worse, well, there'd be no one left to talk about it. Three billion deaths. Global devastation. Was it all his fault? No. But enough of it fell on his shoulders that I figured breaking this particular link in the event chain might cast it off in a new direction.
Let me connect the dots. Enemy forces came down through Canada. They had radar-jamming technology sold to them by Magna Black. President Versad Montoya, the man who actually gave the order to drop nukes, only got into office due to a complex chain of bribes and kickbacks that all led back to Magna. After the war, there was a lot of money to be made in cleanup efforts. Emiren Disaster Recovery sprung up out of that. Guess where they came from? Yup, the consolidation of several Magna units. These were just the easiest details to glean from studying the history. Magna's roots went deep into the rot that nearly obliterated humanity. The revolver on my hip could end it all in a few seconds.
I didn't feel right blowing his brains out from the shadows, like a coward. He was a human being. I couldn't expect him to understand why I was here, to forgive me for what I had to do. But I had to acknowledge his humanity, look him in the eyes, and accept what I was doing. I owed him that much, and I would represent everything I hated about the world that made me if I did any less.
"Hey, kid," I called over. "What's your name?"
"Ryan," he said. Kept it terse.
"I'm Todd." That was a lie, obviously. "How long you been hopping?"
"Couple years," he said with a shrug.
"Parents?"
He didn't like that one. "They left me in New York."
"Tough break. So you travel all by yourself now?"
"And I work."
"Yeah?"
"Pick cotton, chop wood, sell papers. Anything."
"Good money?"
He paused. "No."
"You sound like a little businessman. Always hungry for more."
"I'm not 'little,'" he snorted derisively.
"Don't get testy," I said, albeit apologetically. "Just making conversation. What're you reading?"
"The Portygee."
"Dense material for your age, isn't it?"
"I've been reading since I was four."
Good for him? I was a late bloomer in that regard. "You sound smart enough to do better for yourself than this."
He slammed the book shut. "Nobody takes me seriously."
"I'm here, taking you seriously. You saving your money?"
He narrowed his eyes at me. "Why, you gonna rob me like the bulls do?"
"Nah, I don't steal from kids. Just wondering how much you got."
"Fifty dollars. And if you try to take it, I can run out of this car faster than you can catch me."
I whistled at the amount. "What're you gonna do with it?"
"I don't know yet. I need to keep saving. I might buy some land."
"Real estate, eh? Not a bad racket."
"Yeah. I might buy something in Oklahoma. It's cheap now."
"Isn't it cheap for a reason?"
He shrugged. "I don't care why people left. I've been learning about farming. Crop rotation, contour plowing. I'll buy a foreclosed farm and make it run again. I could do that, sell it, buy two or three more farms."
"Damn, you've really got it figured out."
"I don't know," he sighed. "I can't do any of that yet, anyhow. Too young."
He looked at me as if to ask me to handle the legal side. I probably did seem better educated than the average transient who traveled with him. I had to shut that down. "Don't look at me, I already owe people too much money. I can't be much help."
"I'll find someone," he said confidently.
My determination wavered. He was too smart to just do away with. I realized it might make more sense to get him on my side, even if he didn't know that's what was happening.
His biography from that point, prior to any intervention by me, showed that he didn't buy any farms after all. He started in a machine shop, then opened his own. He started making cast hull sections for tanks, then aircraft. He went from shop to factory to full production chain, and by the '90s he had a vast industrial empire, verticals in multiple sectors. I wondered if he had any idea what was in store, if he would believe me if I told him.
"I know you will," I agreed with a nod. "But I'm going to do you a little favor."
"What's that?" he said skeptically.
I asked him for a piece of paper. He looked around, not finding anything. Then he looked at his book.
I nodded. "I can use one of the blank pages. Hand me the book."
He did so reluctantly and I picked up a piece of charcoal. I scrawled a bunch of letters and numbers and handed it back to him. "What am I supposed to do with this??"
"Those are stock symbols, dollar amounts, and buy and sell dates. Buy the amount of each stock I wrote there on the dates I wrote. Sell on the second dates. Don't forget. Don't buy more or less than I wrote. Don't mess around with the dates. Do exactly what I wrote there."
"Are you crazy?"
"Maybe, but they'll have pills for that someday."
"I can't pay you for this, if that's what you want."
I shook my head. "I'm not after your money, Ryan. I am just going to ask a favor."
"What is it?"
"You have ten years until those stock purchases start. Make sure you get together enough money before then to follow through. In about sixty years, keep an eye out for a guy named 'Robert Maxwell'. He will ask for your help. And you will need to give him anything he asks."
He stared at me like I'd just eaten a live puppy whole.
"Can you do that for me?" I pressed.
He nodded slowly.
I leaned in close. "I'm serious, kid. Do what I said, and help my friend when he asks. You do that, everything will be fine."
I ruffled his hair, which he definitely hated, and I hopped off the train. I was somewhere in Texas. It wasn't any better in 1935 than it was in my own time, that was certain. Well, maybe it smelled a little better.
I palmed my revolver, wondering if I'd done the right thing. In truth, I'd know a few minutes later, the moment I returned to Inferno. What I had done would not prevent the War. I didn't expect that it would've, since I made Ryan more powerful. But in the process, I ensured he was beholden to me. And that was the leverage I planned to use to shift the course of events.