Have you ever felt like the universe is trying to stop you from doing something? Like, in a literal way. Every single time you try it, something stops you. So much so, you're convinced it can't be a coincidence.
I feel like I have, but I can't remember a specific example.
There was this kid, Jared Firth. A baby, actually. I mean, he was a baby at the time I was trying to get him.
"Get him"? What, like child abduction?
Um... if I knew a better choice of words, I'd use it. I've killed people, Brynn. Do you just draw the line at child abduction?
I would have drawn a line in front of a lot of things you've done! At this point I don't even know why I'd bother casting moral judgments about any of it. According to you, you did it. It's done. You're just telling me about it. Is me calling you a bad person going to address it in any way?
I suppose not.
Yeah. Anyway, you were abducting a baby.
Right. This was a case where the universe seemed to be handing me something I wanted on a silver platter, which is hilarious because that wasn't the case at all. This particular guy was going to be the CEO of Magna White, and a persistent pain in my ass. Rather than try to convince him like a reasonable person, I thought, "What if I just unalived him before he had any impact on the world?"
Magna being Magna, of course, he was an orphan they took in. So, I knew his parents were dead. Tracing through the records, I figured out they died in a car crash near Toledo. Exactly how he was saved is not clear. Like, normally you'd expect there to be something in a news article about how paramedics rescued a baby from the burning car, but there was nothing like that. He just turned up in the records a while later, already adopted by Ryan Andriesen. Officially, I mean. Unofficially, he was being raised by other Magna staff while Ryan was busy running his empire. The question was, how did he get from his parents' burning car to Ryan's gentle care?
I love a good mystery.
Believe it or not, I wasn't too inclined to solve that. I figured it would be irrelevant if I just took him out. He was already in a burning car. All I had to do was let that take its course.
I'm trying really hard not to say anything judgmental about you standing by while a baby burns to death.
Babies burn to death all the time. You know how many bombs your country drops on babies? You how many babies get burned to death in warfare, all the time? Everybody else is sleeping pretty good at night, despite it. The only difference in my case is that I happened to be about 50 feet away at the moment.
Which would give you more of a responsibility to act. Do you know what a circle of responsibility is?
This is going to be another sociology lesson, isn't it?
Let me cook. Everyone has their own circle of responsibility. Nobody can define it for you. It's purely up to you. It's the people you feel directly responsible for in some way. Like friends, family members, maybe coworkers. That's the basic circle. But we humans are keen to expand the circle as circumstances dictate. If you see someone drowning, do you just ignore them?
If you have any sense, you don't try to rescue them yourself. Statistically, you're more likely to die in the attempt than actually rescue anyone.
OK, bad example. If you knew a disaster was imminent but it didn't affect anyone you knew, but you could also prevent it at almost no risk to yourself, would you? For this exercise, assume you aren't a psychotic time-traveling cyborg, but a normal person.
That wasn't very nice. OK, sure, assuming I'm some regular person with no special knowledge of the future, if I knew a bunch of people were endangered and I could prevent them from being harmed, I would. So?
But they aren't in your circle of responsibility. Or at least, they weren't. But for that moment, you're pulling them in. It's interesting because it doesn't benefit you at all. And you might be risking yourself, at least a little. So, why do it?
Something something humans are social animals, I assume.
Yeah, but it's a little more than that. Most animals with social structures won't help someone outside their immediate structural unit. Or if they do, it's in very special cases, like adopting the young of an otherwise destroyed group. But humans, in general, will tend to drop everything to help someone in immediate peril, if they feel they are in a position to help.
What about the bystander effect? I thought that proved the exact opposite.
Oh, you really got me started now. Did you know the entire concept of the "bystander effect" was invented after the rape and murder of Kitty Genovese? That was in 1964. The story goes that 38 separate people watched it happen and did nothing. So, out of that came the idea that if enough people are around while something bad happens to another person, everyone thinks someone else will handle it. But it's actually not true. For one thing, far fewer people were around for the attack than originally reported. At least one person called the cops! And some witnesses heard screams but couldn't tell where they were coming from, so they couldn't exactly report anything useful. More research proved that this effect is actually pretty rare. From a sample of known cases, it was found that someone actually did intervene 91% of the time. In fact, it seemed like the more people were around to help, the more likely it was someone would help!^1
That's crazy. I'll be honest, I had no idea.
Turns out you don't know everything, huh?
I am a dumbass, as you know. Can we get back to my story?
Yeah, sorry. Lecture over.
So there I was, waiting for a baby to die.
Oh, right, now I remember why I changed the subject.
The story is the story, Brynn. If it makes you feel any better, he refused to die.
What, did he get up and crawl out of the burning car?
Not exactly. But somebody definitely intervened, because after everything was over, they didn't find a baby in the wreckage. The thing is, I didn't see anyone go in to retrieve him, either.
Are you sure he was even in the car?
I thought of that, too. I went back to when they got into the car in the first place. He was definitely there. And I even got a car and tailed them. At no point did I see a handoff or anyone get into the car and take him.
So, what, someone's teleporting him out?
Yeah, that's where my mind went next. Most of the time, nobody is much of a threat to me because of the resources at my disposal. So it was a shock for there to be someone--whoever it was--using highly advanced technology at a time and place it shouldn't have been present.
Did you ever figure out who it was?
Yeah, some guy named Graham Clemens, but I'm pretty sure that's a cover name. He also called himself "the Carpathian."
Now that's dramatic. What was his deal, exactly?
He worked for Magna, obviously. I came to realize that Ryan didn't lean on me as heavily as I expected because he already had access to quite a bit of wild shit, courtesy of Clemens. But Clemens evidently made himself scarce shortly before I joined Magna, and I believe it was to prevent me from learning about him.
So this particular guy was out to thwart you? And he's not the other guy that was after you? The one that clowned you in Peru.
Oh, we've barely begun building up my enemies list. Yeah, Clemens went out of his way to keep me from knowing much about him. He'd go as far as erasing traces of his past at times he thought I was researching him. Now, given how time travel works, this was only useful from his perspective, since he would create timelines where was increasingly less documented in general, which would do more to impede my efforts to research him. At the time I started to figure out who he was, he'd gotten rid of what I believe to be at least two thirds of all records that ever existed of him. Kind of hard to prove a quantity of absence, you know?
OK, but was this about you specifically?
The answer is "yes," but it's literally a whole separate story. For the purposes of this story, the point is that I was starting to think I was going crazy and the universe was out to get me. It just would not let me see that baby die. I went forward in time and even risked a confrontation with Magna staff (before they knew me) to try to get at him before he grew up, and he would always just... not be there. I'd know for sure he was supposed to be at a certain place at a certain time, but it turned out the Carpathian was just fucking moving him! But before I learned that, I thought I was losing my goddamn mind. It was actually a relief to find out my problem was just some guy, and not the actual universe taking out a grudge.
Did you ever take him on directly? The Carpathian, I mean.
Yeah, but like I said, that's a different story.
Why couldn't you kill Jared once you were at Magna?
They would not want to keep me around if I did that, Brynn. Companies don't usually like it when you kill their executives.
Oh, come on. You know what I mean. You could stage an accident or something.
Yeah, well, guess who fucked with it every time I tried?
Ah. Wow, he really had your number.
I'm saying!!!