For my science fiction course I took last semester, I wrote a short story in the style of an author or filmmaker in the course materials. I chose to write a time travel story in similar vein to The Time Machine by H. G. Wells.
I've always had this concept in my head, but I never fully explored it in a story before. I chose to write a short story to force myself to conceptualize these ideas. While it's not a complete execution of my ideas, I'm pleased that I've completed something about the idea that's been mulling in my head for a while.
The Chrono-Investigator
The Chrono-Investigator – as he insisted upon being called – was heading a private conference for a select group of individuals deemed worthy to be privy of secret government advancements. I was the first guest there, and was privileged to have my choice in seating: the chair closest to the fireplace, atop which a hunting rifle was mounted.
The conference room was much too large, or perhaps the wooden table that served as a centrepiece in the otherwise sparse room was dwarfed by the austere atmosphere. There was a clear temperature differential in the room and I quickly discovered that no cushions were provided on the wooden chairs. The only decoration, if it could be called that, were the dark curtains that blocked sunlight and prying eyes from the windows.
I had been invited as a reporter, and among my colleagues were a diverse range of professions: a scientist, a reporter of a rival newspaper, the chief inspector of the London Police Department, and a priest of all things.
After a few minutes of dry conversation during which more business cards were exchanged than pleasantries, our enigmatic host arrived at last. A servant carrying a teapot and several stacked teacups atop a tray trailed behind him, with another servant behind her with another tray of assorted pastries, as if to apologize for his tardiness. We were simply grateful for the warm cups.
‘Gentlemen,’ the Chrono-Investigator announced as soon as he took his seat at the head of the table. 'I am here on behalf of the Crown to divulge a matter that shall change the landscape of justice as we know it.’
He smiled widely, showing teeth, meeting four pairs of skeptical eyes. All of us had already helped ourselves to his offerings of sweet goods and tea, and he waited patiently before one of us broke the silence. When none of us did, he continued.
‘Let me ask the Inspector something. How would criminal investigation change if you knew precisely how the crime occurred?’
The Inspector, clearly not following, frowned. Unconsciously, he tugged at the edge of his well-oiled mustache in his introspective state. ‘Our jobs would be a lot shorter; there would be no need for investigation if we simply testified in court.’
‘You would have proof “beyond reasonable doubt,”’ the Chrono-Investigator said.
The Inspector’s frown deepened. ‘What are you suggesting…?’
‘What if there was a way to watch as the crime occurred?’
‘Impossible,’ the scientist muttered under his breath.
The Chrono-Investigator continued.‘The Prosecution represents Her Majesty, who represents God, so that we may dispense justice.’
At the invocation of our Lord, the Priest looked up from his teacup, knitting his brows. The other reporter, seemingly not interested in participating himself, scribbled hastily on his notepad. I supposed I should be taking notes, too.
‘Are we not acting as God when determining innocence or guilt?’ the Chrono-Investigator asked, his eyes meeting everyone at the table. I averted my gaze. ‘Does it not stand, then, that Law demands perfection of a godly sort?’
‘But we cannot provide it,’ the Scientist offered, his apathetic tone suggesting it more of a performance rather than a true rebuttal.
‘We are mortal,’ the Priest added, his face suddenly fuming. I wondered at what he was still doing here.
As if the Priest had provided some answer to a question, the Investigator’s eyes shone, reflecting the twinkling flames of the hearth. ‘That we are’.
‘Science is far too humble. Scientists never claim the arrival at the truth, only its pursuit. The Law, like science, works with hypotheses, but the Law–’
‘Demands the truth,’ I finished, unconsciously having been drawn in. The others too were leaning in, save the Scientist.
The Chrono-investigator nodded. ‘The Crown represents God’s will and wields the truth to enact justice – For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. How can we, with our imperfect methods, determine we have the truth?’
The Scientist stood from his seat suddenly, his utensils and plate clattering to the ground with a sharp clang! The plate survived its fall, remaining in one piece as crumbs spread across the floor. The servants didn’t dare to move closer to clean up.
‘Are you divulging that the Crown has been blaspheming God in the name of science?!’ he argued, his tone raising an octave. ‘That the truth cannot be derived by inductive reasoning, as developed by Bacon?’
I thought of remarking with Popper’s idea of falsifiability, another valid form of achieving the truth through logic.
‘The Church works closely with scientists for this reason,’ the Priest said, nodding in agreement. with a more tranquil fury. ‘We cannot defile God.’
‘I argue we did not,’ the Chrono-Investigator responded, unperturbed, his eyes gleaming. ‘You see, we have also applied inductivism in our methods and developed the process of observing events long past.’
The Scientist slowly sat down again, although he was still gripping the edge of the wooden table like it was supporting his weight. ‘Is this some advanced archaeological method?’ he asked, the curious part of his mind clearly taking over.
‘Not quite. We studied Newton and Leibniz and discovered that time itself is a dimension that can also be traversed, as another aspect of Space.’
‘Sacrilege,’ the Priest muttered, not unlike a broken gramophone. ‘Blasphemy, sacrilege, blasphemy.’
‘However,’ the Investigator continued, speaking over him, ‘rather than travelling with our physical bodies, we discovered travelling with our souls. Our consciousness. We conducted trials in secret and discovered that a person can use our machine to transport their consciousness to temporarily observe a previous time period. The period can last anywhere between minutes to several hours, and the “time traveler” as it were, has some degree of control over when to travel and when they can choose to return to the present.’
The Priest pursed his lips and took out his pocket Bible, flipping through passages loudly. He seemingly did not find any of them satisfying as a rebuttal, but he continued to thumb through the pages. The Reporter was still silent, simply having been jotting notes the whole time. I pretended to scribble something on my notepad.
‘It’s against reason,’ was all the Scientist could say.
‘What reason?’ said the Investigator. ‘We have simply developed methods to observe a time period separate from the one we currently find ourselves in.’
‘“Observe?”’ the Inspector asked. ‘So not “prevent”?’
‘Precisely,’ the Investigator said, his grin stretching even farther across his face. ‘We cannot interact meaningfully in space, but we still retain our sense of sight, hearing, and even smell. It’s as if we are corporeal, and we–’
'“We?”' the Priest asked, interrupting the Investigator and his own reverie. ‘So you’ve done this too, have you?’
‘Of course. I would not testify to the miracles of this technology if I could not provide experimental verification.’
‘How were these experiments done?’ the Inspector asked.
‘We conducted trials in secret,’ he answered. ‘I cannot give exact locations and times, but we would sequester ourselves in separate rooms and write down specific phrases we had not divulged to one another. Then we all travelled through time and observed the different rooms for fifteen minutes. Upon returning to the present, we each revealed the secret phrase of the room we were assigned to observe.’
The Scientist narrowed his eyes. ‘We’re supposed to take you at your word?’
‘Of course not.’ The Investigator’s tone was as giddy as a schoolchild. ‘You will be your own witnesses!’
The Reporter finally spoke. ‘However do you mean?’
‘I have brought the machine with me. Earlier today, I went into my study and wrote something in secret. Using the machine, you will travel through time and read what I’ve written.’
‘Surely this is some sleight-of-hand trick or other,’ the Scientist automatically rebutted, but it fell on deaf ears. My companions all looked at each other with mixed expressions of alarm and excitement.
The door to the conference room was opened by several more servants. Two of them were guiding a box-shaped device about two metres tall covered under a large white linen cloth on a wheeled platform about ten centimetres off the ground. Other servants walked behind them as they wheeled in the machine.
‘For all of this fanfare, I had assumed the device would have been much larger,’ the Scientist scoffed.
The Investigator walked up to the platformed device and took hold of a corner of the linen covering. With a dramatic flourish, he pulled it off and dropped it to the ground, revealing a strange contraption that buzzed and whirred upon its uncovering. The Reporter was already setting up his Bellows camera, aiming directly at the machine and Investigator to document every second of this reveal.
The machine was a large box made of a red-gray metal, likely copper. The box was not entirely solid – at about a third-way down, there was a large glass-covered opening on one side so that the inside of the machine could be reached, with a crank to open the covering. Inside the machine itself were numerous brass gears of different sizes. Nearby this panel was another platform with a series of buttons labelled with numbers and letters. Other than that, the machine was altogether unfathomable and adorned with numerous levers and buttons in seemingly random places in which I could not even begin to identify their purpose.
‘This is what we call the Temporal Observation Machine.’
On the other side of the machine, there were several thick cables attached, which were terminated by brass headbands that hung side-by-side on hooks. Each headband was fashioned to go up from the wearer’s temples and across the cranium.
The Investigator took one of each of these headbands from the machine, dragging the cable attachment across the floor, and handed it to each individual in the room.
‘This is what the time traveller wears,’ the Investigator explained. ‘I will configure the machine to travel one hour before now, and the travel period will also last one hour. You will automatically return to your bodies after the time period has passed. However, if you wish to come back earlier, you can return to this machine. It will be in the locked room to the door immediately to your left when you entered the building. As consciousness, you can enter the room and “touch” your headband to return to the present. You will only return when you touch yours.’
As I fitted the headband machine over my head and adjusted it to be comfortable, my colleagues carefully inspected the headbands and walked up to the machine to verify which one was connected.
The Priest, glaring at the machine and then at us, left the room in a huff, and it went unacknowledged. That would be the last I saw of him.
‘I assure you, this is perfectly safe,’ the Investigator said, watching everyone adjust to the headbands on their head and assuaging exactly none of their concerns. ‘The electrical current that runs is no more dangerous than–’
‘You say we’re to look in your study for something you’ve written?’ the Scientist interrupted. ‘Where is that? Wherein should we expect to find this secret phrase?’
‘When you walked into this building, there was a room you would have walked past on your way here. Find me in that room. I have written words for you to see, and then burned the document. Tell me what I wrote when you return.’ He explained all this as if he were describing errands for us to run.
‘How does consciousness travel through space?’ the Reporter asked, still hesitating to put on his headband.
‘It’s as I described, my dear! The feeling is as if you were weightless in air, like a hot air balloon. If you imagine yourself moving in a direction in space, your consciousness will move in that direction.’
The Reporter fixed the headband upon his head, but the Scientist shook his head, still grasping his headband.
‘I would feel more comfortable if I could inspect this myself.’
‘You will,’ the Investigator responded. ‘After this demonstration, the Royal Society of Victoria will have an open invitation for all scientists to have free reign to inspect the machine and read all of our papers before they are published.’
‘The Royal Society,’ he mused, already captivated by the Investigator’s words. Without another word, he put his headband on.
‘Is everyone ready?’ the Investigator asked.
We nodded.
He walked up to the temporal observation machine, and pulled the lever. With a flash of white light, our consciousness was no longer in the present.
The pungent smell of rust permeated the air more than anything else, overpowering even the thick miasma of the London streets. Snow blanketed downtown London, with no building or street spared its mercy. The dense London fog was thicker than usual, but even with limited vision I could have made it to the crime scene with my eyes closed, guided like a predator following the scent of spilt blood.
The bobby that was on the beat last night greeted me with a curt nod, only his eyes visible beneath his large hat and scarf. He had likely stayed up all night during questioning, and he was already briefing me on the details before I could ask my own questions. It saved us both time.
“I found the body last night. One knife wound in the abdomen, and one in the chest.”
“The chest being the killing blow?”
“I can only assume. The coroner will conf–”
Without waiting for him to finish, I made my way to the body, unimpeded by the crowd of police and obnoxious bystanders that were buzzing persistently around the scene. Just as I pictured, the victim was lying prone, although the amount of blood that had pooled around his body was smaller than what the knife wounds would have suggested.
I flagged down a nearby inspector – the Chief Inspector of the London Police Department, who has been leading the investigation regarding the mysterious serial killings that have been happening all over London.
‘Where is the murder weapon?’
‘Nowhere to be found, as with all of these killings,’ he sighed. He produced a wooden pipe from his pocket and brazenly lit it, puffs of smoke escaping to blend in with the surrounding haze.
‘So the killing was done elsewhere.’ The Chief Inspector nodded, his eyes fixated on the body in front of us.
‘Has the victim been identified?’
‘No,’ the Chief stated. ‘As with all victims of Spectral Killings.’
The Spectral Killings were named as such because of the mysterious circumstances surrounding the victim’s death. Their bodies would be found, either shot or stabbed, but seemingly having been moved from the original scene of the crime, as there was no other evidence at the corpse’s location to indicate a murder had even happened. Furthermore, the victims could not be identified.
The curious part was that Chrono-Investigators could not witness the crime itself; the victims’ bodies would simply apparate at their location shortly before being discovered. With no other evidence to draw upon, Scotland Yard was left completely befuddled.
There were no connections between the victims – man or woman, young or old, rich or poor, the Spectral Killer did not discriminate in his tastes. Public trust in Chrono-Investigators declined sharply since the beginning of these killings and was continuing to plummet. The Police were desperate to reaffirm their credibility, particularly since they had been reliant on Chrono-Investigation since it was first integrated as part of standard crime scene investigation protocol twenty years ago.
I took a deep breath. ‘I have an idea: I’m going to use the TOMmy.’
This caught the Chief’s attention. He widened his eyes as I pulled the compact Temporal Observation Machine from my coat and fastened it to my head. The Temporal Observation Machine (TOM) that was currently on my head, affectionately referred to as ‘TOMmy’, was connected to the portable version of the Temporal Observation Machine that was used by the London Police department.
‘We’ve already sent Chrono-investigators,’ he protested. ‘You can’t possibly solve this murder.’
I carefully adjusted the dial on the TOMmy, a small metal machine that was about the size of a box of matches that was attached to a headband. A crystalline display showed small brass gears turning inside the machine, and I turned the dial until the notches I made on both gears were visible. Chrono-investigators rarely changed the position of dials on their own TOMmies; the physicists would calculate the duration necessary and configure it for them.
‘Watch my body, would you kindly,’ was the last thing I said before pressing the enter sequence on my TOMmy faster than the Chief could react.
In an instant, I was transported to thirty minutes before the body was reported.
Traversing through time-space without a physical body was an unusual sensation one could never get used to. In one moment, I was standing with the Chrono-investigator, the Reporter, the Chief Inspector, and the Scientist in the dark conference room. The room grew faint in my vision until I only saw white. I had a dim awareness of leaving my body, and just as the Chrono-investigator had described earlier, I felt as if I were floating. What he neglected to describe was the throbbing pain thumping at the back of my skull.
The Chrono-investigator had also failed to describe a crucial aspect that I imagine my compatriots were all experiencing as well: we could not sense each others’ consciousness or otherwise communicate with one another. I could not know if I was the only one whose consciousness travelled here, or if every single person came with me.
Eventually, the surrounding white gradually faded into the kind of darkness one sees behind their eyelids. However, I had no eyes to speak of. I had no need to blink. The throbbing in my head slowly faded. At that moment, I knew that my consciousness had been transported an hour before we had tried on those headbands of the temporal observation machine. I was standing in the same position as I was in the room, which was now (previously?) empty with the fireplace gone out – or rather, has yet to be lit.
‘Moving’ through space felt natural. Being accustomed to a body, it was easy to assign phantom sensations of turning one’s head or walking across a room. Although consciousness travel was not impeded by the physical realm, I still found myself trying to reach for the doorknob to turn it before colliding into the wall. Of course, there was no actual collision – I was able to travel outside the door as if the door did not exist.
I followed my investigative instincts as I backtracked through the building. The conference room was situated in a building that was donated by a rich benefactor to the Royal Victorian Society. It had once been his mansion that had since been cleaned out.
Even if I lacked a body, I still had a way of detecting physical sensations. I could feel heat and cold, and I could feel the movement of air, such as a breeze, or from others. I walked through the corridors until I found a door that was slightly ajar and ‘warm’. Every other door felt ‘cold’, as if they hadn’t been occupied for a long time. The slight warmth of this room signalled to me a human presence.
I ‘walked into’ the room to find my hunch was correct: the Investigator was there, an hour earlier as he described, hunched over a desk at the far side of the room with a parchment and pen. He appeared to be staring intently at the document, and moving closer I can see what he wrote in large print, clearly meant for our eyes. I looked around the room – it was a general study room with bookshelves lining either side of the wall. The room’s only window was in front of the desk, and the dusty curtains were cast aside to let the sparse sunlight through. Looking at the books yielded nothing of interest – they were encyclopedias and financial records. The desk drawers too were equally fruitless, only containing a hunting cap. Evidently, the Royal Society had yet to move their materials into this room.
Only ten minutes had passed, so I could return to the present the way the Investigator described by ‘touching’ the headband I had used. I walked out of the study and continued down the hall.
Thirty minutes before the body was discovered placed me in the deep night. I looked around, adjusting to the darkness, which spilled across the road like ink, only intermittently interrupted by the streetlamps that were still burning. The houses on the road were still sleeping, ignorant of the tragedy that was going to happen. Distantly, I heard the footsteps of the bobby on the beat, but they grew fainter until I thought I had only imagined the sound.
I did not have to wait long. I heard footsteps again, less measured, and I saw the victim walking by himself down the street, carrying a load of books in his arms. My enhanced senses could hear fainter footsteps from far behind him – he was unknowingly being followed.
By the way he staggered, he was drunk. He must have come from a pub at the far end of the street. I reasoned his pursuer followed him from there. The victim, along with other students, often frequented The Angel because of its proximity to the bookstore and – more importantly – they boasted much more affordable prices for lackluster spirits.
Wasting no time, I moved through time-space with an increased speed. I didn’t mind the trade-off of travelling time to get to the murderer faster – a few lost minutes at most meant nothing compared to the generous time that was allotted. I only needed the identity of the killer.
As soon as I saw the killer, I slowed time to half-speed, studying the scene. I still studied his face as he pulled out the knife from his back pants pocket, too shocked to return time to normal speed. The student had turned around once the killer had started sprinting, and with a crazed fury plunged his knife in his abdomen. The victim put up a futile resistance as he pushed against his killer, too drunk and weak from blood loss to even make a sound, let alone properly retaliate. Once more, the monster stabbed him in the chest. The victim stumbled forward and fell. Blood pooled around the victim, overflowing the cracks in the surrounding road.
The killer, breathing heavily, dropped his knife. It clattered against the road. I could hear stirring in houses in reaction to the sound, and sprinting from the direction of the bobby’s patrol.
Snapping to attention at the people slowly making their way to the scene, the killer dropped to his knees. He took off the TOMmy he had been wearing and held one side of the headband against the victim’s temple.
In a blink, the victim vanished.
As the Investigator stated, the room directly to the left in the entrance hall contained the temporal observation machine. The room was small and barely able to contain the large machine, which had not been covered by the white sheet as we saw it earlier – rather, will see later. I peered into the glass-covered opening and observed the positions of the gears inside.
I did not have any limbs or any other extensions to speak of, but I imagined myself ‘touching’ the headband that I had used to travel back to the past. Like before, a white light filled my sight, and the room faded.
The sensation of returning to my body was also quite jarring. The main feeling was the heaviness. Every movement was a fight against gravity that was trivial for everyone else. With great effort, I sat up from the floor. As I looked at the unconscious bodies around me, I realized I was the first one back.
‘Well!’ the Investigator greeted animatedly. He was sitting in one of the chairs alone, sipping tea. ‘How did it feel?’
I stared at him, unmoving.
‘Still dazed, are you? That was each of our experiences the first time ‘round. But do try to remember what you have witnessed me writing. We will wait until the others arrive and then you will all reveal what you saw.’
Placing my palms flat against the floor, I pushed my body upward with all of my might.
‘Don’t push yourself, man.’
I did not register the Investigator’s words as I moved upward. Eventually, I won against gravity and I stood upright. I was impatient and could not accustom myself to feeling my weight fast enough. I staggered my way to the fireplace.
‘Have a seat! I will have my servants bring more tea.’ His voice was slightly shaky, struggling to remain casually jovial in the face of my silence.
I stood in front of the hearth. It had recently been tended to, and the flames flickered and danced wildly behind the iron gate. I reached toward the top of the fireplace, where the rifle was mounted, and pulled it off the wall.
The Investigator stood up from his seat.
‘Good God, man!’ he exclaimed. ‘What are you going to do with that?’
I was not a hunter, but I had been trained in the use of firearms. I aimed at the Investigator square at his chest and fired.
‘What–!’
His exclamation was cut off by his pained scream. It is a surprising thing, how fast bodies fall to the floor, once killed. In an instant, he was dead. Blood pooled from his body and from his mouth, overpowering the tea that had spilled from his teacup. His eyes were still open, wide with shock. I staggered backward from the shock of the recoil, nearly succumbing to the bitterness of my actions that came over my soul.
The note the Investigator had written said, ‘THE SHOTGUN IS LOADED’.
‘Why? Why did you do it?’
The Chrono-investigator in his detention cell opened his mouth, then closed it again. He was sitting on the bench at the end of the cell with his arms crossed. The inspector who was interrogating him left the block in exasperation. As he passed by me, he turned away from me, grumbling about how much Chrono-Investigators have troubled the London police force ever since they joined.
I approached his cell and he immediately brightened at my appearance. He stood up and walked closer to the bars of the cell to approach me – a closeness I found odd for greeting the man who arrested him.
I had avoided seeing him since, not that he was left wanting of coppers who visited him. They all had the same story – he clammed up and refused to explain anything once it came to motive. I could not face the arrest of a fellow Chrono-Investigator, but my duty and curiosity superseded my own morals.
‘How were you able to do it?’ I finally asked. My breath shook, and I swallowed to compose myself.
‘How?’ He blinked. ‘With a knife.’
Gritting my teeth, I grasped at a cell bar in front of him with my free hand. He pulled away at my sudden action.
‘“With a knife?!”’ I echoed. ‘You used a TOMmy! You used a TOMmy on the victim! Why… How could…’
With a creeping awareness of my actions, I slowly loosened my grip on the bar. I averted my gaze.
‘The dimensions of time,’ he hurriedly explained. ‘There’s multiple dimensions of time.’
I looked at the item I was holding in my left hand – the Chrono-Investigator’s TOMmy. While I was leading the case, I was still disobeying higher orders to keep the Temporal Observation Machine away from the Chrono-Investigator. I looked at the spattering of blood that was still on it. I rotated the headband, trying to remember which side was pressed against the victim.
‘Each dimension, representing possibilities, all parallel to one another. Minute decisions, governed by probability, spanning infinite parallel dimensions… Chrono-Investigators don’t travel along a single dimension; we can go across many. … But I think you figured it out.’
I nodded. I have, a long time ago.
‘I knew from adjusting the dial,’ I stated. ‘My TOMmy was configured wrong, and from repeated experiments in fixing it, I knew there were multiple time paths.’
‘Precisely. I used those to travel along parallel time paths, and transport the bodies into timelines that are only accessible to the current Chrono-Investigators. Physical travel is possible along parallel lines of time.’’
‘But how?’ I was growing impatient. ‘Only a consciousness can go back in time with the Temporal Observation Machine.’
‘You can enter your physical body during temporal observation,’ he explained. ‘When we enter your physical body of the past, we can temporarily take over the consciousness at that point, granting us a physical body in which to control. We can travel with multiple consciousness sharing the same TOMmy.’
Although I had guessed as much, I was still shocked. More than that, though, I was enraged. ‘“We!”’ I repeated in anger. I had had enough of hearing this monster speaking. ‘You keep saying “we”!’ So you’re one of us?! We’re not the same. A Chrono-Investigator would never–’
Infuriatingly, he only cocked his head at me. ‘I had to!’’ he interrupted.
That gave me pause; this was not a man who was gloating about his clever use of the TOMmy – he looked like he had genuine remorse. He was not unlike a cornered prey defending itself, rather than a sadistic killer.
‘The Spectral Killings were necessary?’ I asked, raising my eyebrow. ‘No reasonable man would resort to murder.’
‘Over the next thirty years,’ he elaborated, ‘there will be worse than The Spectral Killings. Mankind advances temporal observation technology to its limit, isolating consciousness itself to manipulate. There will be the Chrono Killings, a series of high profile cases across the country like the Spectral Killings, except the culprit takes over the minds of Chrono-Investigators.’
I shuddered at his description, and felt myself growing sick.
‘There was great corruption among us. Because Chrono-Investigation still relied on witness testimony, many of us took bribes to lie and cover actual culprits. It was decades before the corruption was finally exposed. Exoneration projects by independent Chrono-Investigators were started, but it could not undo the damage.’
‘But why did you have to kill?!’ I asked. He only looked at me with downcast eyes.
‘I headed the creation of Chrono-Investigation at the Royal Science Society,’ he admitted. ‘I created them, and now I must discredit them in the eyes of the public.’
At his admission, I realized I did recognize his face, if only very vaguely. He was a prominent member of the scientists who first introduced Chrono-Investigation to the police. At the time, I had still been in training, so I never interacted with him directly, but his photo was displayed in the Chrono-Investigation Division’s room at the police department.
I leaned against the wall in silence over the Investigator’s words. No sound passed in the cell block aside from our breathing. His words were compelling, but I could not resonate with them. My mind kept replaying the moment he stabbed the student in front of me.
Without further delay, I made haste and left the detention center. I could not bear to look at him. Indeed, I did not see him next until I had to take the stand and testify.
His trial was conducted in secret and took over a year. Since then, he did not reveal the true nature of his actions, and I claimed that he evaded detection through other, non-Chrono-Investigation related trickery. I felt sick at myself for distorting the truth. The general public had guessed collusion, but they were fed the same false story and their outcry eventually died.
Once he was imprisoned, I made up my mind. I visited him in his cell, and he was visibly surprised to see me. His appearance had been worn down over the past year and a half.
I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out his TOMmy – the very one used to commit the Spectral Killings. ‘I believe you,’ I started. ‘Everything I testified to in the trial was a farce.’
‘Then why did you seek to convict me?’ He spoke with a weariness of a man who had seen the most of his life. Thinking back to his story, he probably had.
‘I spent a long while planning,’ I said. ‘Chrono-Investigation must be stopped, but discrediting it is not enough. Tell me when Chrono-Investigation was first introduced to the public, and I will destroy it.’
He gasped, unconsciously leaning forward toward the window of the door to his cell.
‘You will have to kill me,’ he said gravely. ‘I first spoke about it in a private conference.’
I faltered slightly, but nodded. He went on.
‘I will invite you as a reporter…’