2103:08:11:11:30:01

  “Achronal displacement, huh,” the woman behind the desk – Anne – made conversation while ticking away at her keyboard. She looked fairly typical for a government worker: middle-aged with hair tied back, sporting glasses and wearing an outfit I’d been told by the woman herself was ‘business casual’, overworked yet still strangely peppy.

  Not that I’d met many bureaucrats. After being brought to the city of Charm by my rescuers Mark and Evelyn, most of my immediate interactions was with doctors, nurses and other medical personnel. They ran me through the whole gamut of standardized tests – blood, physical, nerve, cranial – all of which came back positive, in the sense that there was nothing wrong with me. I’d had a brief moment of panic as to whether the doctors could tell I was an android, but so far they hadn’t. Perhaps my creator had thought of that. Was that why he made my body so fleshy?

  Either way, after the more general examinations, they began focusing exclusively on my head. They scanned my brain for all kinds of damage, made me fill out questionnaire after questionnaire, tests composed of simple calculations, figuring out which option made the given shape, and had me talk to someone to look for any kind of mental condition that could explain my highly selective amnesia.

  It was during those tests that I learned what Mark and Evelyn had been talking about back on the helicopter, about the cause of the earthquake: a temporal cascade. It happened rarely whenever a ‘chronologically displaced person’ returned from their temporal exile. Aside from the person themselves returning, random spaces spanning an area of a hundred or two square kilometers get swapped around as well, which sometimes resulted in a swath of land either disappearing, or being crammed with more earth than it could hold, thus causing many smaller earthquakes. This in turn often triggered a larger earthquake, which was what Mark and Evelyn thought had happened.

  I felt bad for the other person, the real chronologically displaced person, but not enough to not claim the excuse for my own. Since my Heroic Impulse hadn’t started berating me yet, I figured I was in the moral clear.

  Without turning her eyes from her screen, she smiled. “Not the first time I had to deal with a case like this, but the first time I have a returnee! Those are very rare, you know? You’re very lucky.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Lucky.” I was indeed very lucky that such a thing existed. It provided me with a near-perfect cover. While most return from it in the same state and place they’d left – just at a different time – there were other, much rarer cases where that didn’t happen. Those that didn’t are the ‘achronally displaced’, which meant their disappearance had messed with their personal timeline on a larger scale than the normal chronologically displaced. They returned with either very different or outright contradictory memories of past events, or a complete blank slate like I was pretending to be.

  In short, a great cover for a refuge-seeking android like me.

  Anne winced at my words and stopped typing, turning her head to look at me with an expression full of regret. “Sorry, I shouldn’t be prodding an open wound like that,” the woman apologized. “It’s just… well, it’s so rare. First time I have seen one,” she said, reiterating a statement she made seconds ago.

  I blinked, confused by the turn of events. Somehow, she’d taken my sincerity for some kind of rebuke. “Okay,” I replied, then looked off to the side. I learned in the helicopter and later the hospital that doing that quickly put a stop to most conversations.

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  After a few seconds of staring hesitantly at me, biting her lip, Anne began typing again. This time without saying a word.

  Not for too long, though. It was about five minutes later that Anne, after pressing the enter key with an exaggerated flourish, began speaking again.

  “Alright, that’s done. Now for the next part,” she said, then swiveled her chair around. Her hand went down to the middle drawer of the wooden cabinet behind her, opened it and retrieved a tablet. She swiveled back and fiddled with it for a second before handing it over to me.

  On the screen was a digital form asking me for my information, despite me having answered all of them a dozen times over these past few days. Couldn’t they’ve just filled it in for me?

  The question must’ve shown on my face, because Anne gave me a commiserating look. “It’s annoying, I know, but it’s illegal for someone not one’s legal guardian to fill in another’s personal information. Especially when it comes to minors.”

  Sensible, but very annoying.

  “Don’t worry about filling in every little thing. It’s already marked as a blank slate-type of achronal displaced internally, so just fill in whatever you can.”

  Anne then stood up from behind her office. “Now, I legally can’t be in the same room as you while you fill that because of… well, legal reasons is the long and short of it,” she said evasively, then moved toward the door. “When you’re done, just press ‘complete’ and it’ll let me know we can move on to the next part.” She opened the door, went through it, then closed it behind her.

  I turned my attention to the tablet and started filling them in. Last name, Pearsson. First name, Samantha. My background data didn’t say, but the doctors had referred to me as ‘female’, so I checked the corresponding box.

  Then came a question I could not answer: my date of birth. The doctors had estimated me to be around age fourteen or fifteen on appearance alone, but my android body made dating my age difficult. The same was apparently true for achronal displacement, which made me wonder if the whole achronal displacement thing would’ve been part of my backstory regardless of how things turned out.

  Or it could just be a funny coincidence.

  I didn’t know why my creator chose to make me a teenaged body when being an adult hero would’ve been much more useful, but it did make this whole process easier. From as far as I understood it, the procedure for adult-aged achronically displaced was much more complicated, mostly due to criminals pretending to be one so they could get a clean slate, or due to people stealing the identities of actual victims.

  Maybe all of this really had been part of my creator’s plans? It seemed uncharacteristic of him, but then again, how well did I know the guy, really?

  Well, whatever.

  I left my date of birth blank, along with my place of birth, filled in my height at 160 centimeters, then left the rest of the spaces, like the name of my parents and/or guardians, citizen identification number, place of residence and so on, blank.

  I pressed complete. The screen emptied and turned a clean white slate for a second, before flashing a green checkmark.

  Ten seconds later, the door opened and Anne returned. I offered the tablet back to her, which she accepted. “That was quick, nicely done,” she said. She stored away the tablet back in the drawer, then sat behind her desk once again.

  “Then again, not that much for you to fill-” she turned to me with a smile, then winced when her eyes met mine. “Well, never mind that. Anyway, let’s just send this off aaaaaaand… Done!” She finished it again with a flourish, then turned back to me.

  “That should be the end of the registration part of this whole ordeal,” she told me, gesturing towards her computer. “The system will look for any matching information among known chronically displaced persons and the general missing persons database. Since it’s unlikely to get a hit, it should take about fifteen minutes for it to finish, so in the meantime, let’s-”

  We both started as a loud ding! came from the computer. Anne turned to look at it first in annoyance, likely expecting some kind of error to have popped up. She tapped away at her keyboard, her eyes visibly scanning each line of text, before exclaiming, “Oh!” in surprise.

  Oh?

  Anne turned to me with a broad smile reflected in her eyes, looking genuinely happy. “It seems the system’s already done, and guess what? We got a hit!” She all but jumped in glee as she said it.

  What?

  “Really?” I said, not having to feign my surprise.

  Anne grabbed her screen and turned it toward me, and indeed, there was a picture of someone that looked exactly like me on the screen. Same long black hair, same scattershot freckles on my nose and cheeks, same rounded face and green eyes. The only thing off was the smile, but then again, I hadn’t seen myself smile yet.

  Had my creator been far more elaborate in creating a backstory than I’d thought? But there was no way. If he’d gone so far as to actually plan things out in advance to this extent, my libraries wouldn’t have been this empty. Unless they were damaged in the earthquake somehow? But considering I was mostly unharmed by the event, and how he’d gone and rushed me to a functional state before he died, there was no way for him to have prepared this long beforehand, right?

  “But that’s not all,” Anne continued gleefully. “You have a family! I even have your mother’s contacts right here! Oh, isn’t this exciting!”

  What.