Graymere

“Ladies and gentleman,” the attractive woman with the bright red lipstick and dark brown eyes began. She recited her little speech for the passengers as she had done on every journey, with an over enthusiastic smile and a tone in her voice like she was speaking to a group of small children. She pulled out what a common person might mistake for an ordinary pocket watch and checked the reading. “We have arrived at our second stop. The local time is a quarter past noon, May 28th, 1851. Those of you exiting, please stay with your tour guide and enjoy the Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace. Everyone else, please remain seated. Thank-you for traveling with Mortimer.”

I pulled out a gadget of my own, a scanner disguised as a small silver coin. I pretended to be absentmindedly fiddling with it as the passengers walked down the aisle to the open door.

Information about them flooded my mind. I sorted through it, but found nothing of any significance. They were exactly what they seemed to be. What I was pretending to be.

The woman, along with some of the other personal, preformed another security check, making sure each passenger’s band was fastened securely to skin on his or her wrist. Then they were gone. The doors closed and the engine started up again.

When we reached our final destination, the woman gave her speech again, this time informing us that it was March of 1864 and we would get to see the royal society.

And then it was our turn for a security check.

I hated this part. It was bad enough having a timebomb surgically implanted in your wrist. Strangers tugging at it made me even more nervous. I looked up from my coin to see who would be checking me this time. A small smile tugged at my lips when I saw that it was the woman.

“Just don’t cut the red wire,” I told her as her cold fingers touched my wrist, trying to ease my nerves with humor and maintain my cover as an ignorant tourist.

“Don’t worry, sweetie,” she reassured in her kindergarten teacher voice. “You’ll be just fine.”

As if to prove her point, she tugged at my bracelet so lightly that I didn’t even wince.

“How many people have been killed by one of these?” I asked, though I knew the answer. She didn’t answer, but she removed her fingers from my wrist and I could feel my insides deflate slightly at the lack of contact.

“You’ll be perfectly safe as long as you follow the rules,” she moved onto the next passenger. I touched my coin and learned that her name was Eliza and she had worked for Mortimer for the past seven years, so she had been an attendant only during the third Incident. A man and a woman left behind in Victorian England. Now there would be nothing left of them except ashes scattered by the wind.

When Mortimer first introduced time travel to the general public, at least the small fraction that could afford it, protesters railed about the damaging effects of paradoxes and other problems untrained professionals could create.

Constant supervision wasn’t enough. So the bracelets were created. First, they just had a timebomb, a device that caused the person to spontaneously combust once the time ran out. Once the trip was over, the timebomb would be disabled, but passengers that stayed in the past would not only be punished for their actions, but erased from a place where they could cause trouble and anachronism. After the third Incident, the bracelets were equipped with a tracking device that allowed Mortimer to track down lost passengers. Since then, we haven’t had any more Incidents.