The Time Traveller's Recruitment

This is Book 4 of a series. You can read the previous instalments here

Closing yet another file, Pietro, also known as Lincon only when he absolutely couldn’t avoid it, leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.

He pinched the bridge of his nose and, when that failed to dispel the tension headache, switched to rubbing his temples. The situation was precarious, and getting worse, and Pietro had been thinking in circles all week, to very little effect. Unless you counted the elevated stress currently stabbing pins behind Pietro’s eyeballs, which he didn’t.

Nearby, there was the faint noise of a rolling chair, and an ever-so-slightly automated voice. “I have a freezer pack in my lunch-bag, if that will help.”

Pietro opened one eye, and looked into the concerned face of Abidoyin, who tapped out another message on his text-to-speech app. “Addy has Panadol somewhere, too.”

Hiring the twins had been one of Pietro's best choices as head of Recruitment. The accommodations had been a minor adjustment, but more than worth it. Abidoyin had originally applied for the receptionist position, after Irena in IT set the standard for minimising bothersome Agents. The necessity of prompt communication, particularly when it came to telephone calls, had disqualified him from reception, but his eye for detail and hyperfocus tendencies had seen him added to the office proper, while his sister Adetokunbo had taken on dealing with people who came to bother the recruitment departmetn with things that should have been someone else's problem.

Voices drifted in from outside, one growing louder in irritation, and Pietro made a note that Addy might be due a raise at the next performance review. Pietro sighed again, glaring at his email, where the unread notification refused to go away.

Beatrice, their numbers person, looked up from the latest spreadsheet, pushing back her noise-cancelling headphones. “I’ve nearly got the algorithm up and running; I just need to run the bug checks. Did Timelord say why we need another round of recruits so soon after the last one?”

Pietro shook his head. “Not in so many words, but it wasn’t hard to work out. Mostly to do with the end of the 21st Century’s second decade, and the start of its third.”

The entire department made understanding and sympathetic noises. The late twenty-teens and early twenties had been a whole new level of shit-show. Add in the ability to time travel, and things got exponentially worse.

Jamal ran a hand through his thick, dark hair. “Riad mentioned that IT was trying to set up some kind of interdict so that anyone trying to jump around that time period gets caught in a trap and re-directed to the holding cells.”

That sounded like an excellent solution, which meant there had to be a reason it wasn’t already in practice. “What’s the hold-up?”

Jamal shrugged, “About what you’d expect. Sheer numbers overwhelming the system, and the inability to filter between the ones who were and weren't supposed to be there. Apparently, the trial run caught a bunch of Agents who were floating around the time stream while waiting for an available portal, too, and they complained to HR.”

Pietro rarely had much sympathy for Agents, since their problems tended to be of their own making, but the majority of time-travellers were an obnoxious bunch, and he pitied anyone stuck with multitudes of them until someone did a daily check of the containment cells.

The main problem that the Agents currently faced, and the main cause behind their depleted numbers, was a logistical one. Under the protocols developed for missions involving any point in history with a plague outbreak, both the agent and the would-be time traveller had to undergo quarantine for two weeks. No one wanted the Black Death or Spanish Flu to make a comeback. Yes, it was possible for the quarantine to take place in a closed time loop, thereby avoiding contact with anyone or anything outside of basic enrichment materials, but that still took an Agent out of circulation for the duration of the isolation period, and with the uptick in missions, the Time Agency was nearing the point of being under-staffed.

Addy wandered through on her way to the office mini-fridge, signalling time for a lunch break. “I just got a ping on the receptionist group chat. Has Timelord made any noises about measures other than a recruiting drive?”

Led by Irena from IT, the Receptionist Group Chat did a better job of keeping the Support Departments informed than the daily email bulletins did. Pietro frowned, “Not that I’ve heard of. I know they were throwing ideas around, but I didn’t hear anything confirmed as an actual plan.”

Addy looked oddly relieved, signing at her brother too rapidly for Pietro to keep up. “That’s good. I’ll let the Chat know and ask what they’ve heard, before half the Agency descends on our heads.”

Pietro resisted the urge to bang his head against something solid. “Please do. Everyone, lunch hour, save whatever you’re doing and put it aside. I need you all healthy and focussed.”

By the time lunch was over, Pietro was feeling much better after several chapters of Jane Austen, and some decent soup. Pietro wasn’t sure where his Partner got the idea to mix whole roasted garlic kernels in with the blended pumpkin and sweet potato, but it tasted amazing. He said none of that out loud, of course.

Telling his department would mean having to share.

The twins were washing up - the entire department took turns, rather than fighting over the very limited sink space in the office kitchenette - and Pietro took the opportunity to catch Addy’s attention. “Have you heard anything further about what’s happening with the Powers That Be?”

Abe dried a final plate as Addy yanked out the plug and dried her hands. “One of the ideas they floated was shuffling support personnel around and using the more active ones to temporarily fill the Agent ranks. No action on that front yet, but of course that was the rumour that someone caught and spread around.”

This was why Pietro hated office gossip. Gossip and Lies could circle the world twice before the Truth even had it’s metaphorical boots on. “I doubt it will go anywhere. At the very least, they won’t have any volunteers among the Support Staff.”

Relations between Generally-trained Agents and the more Specialised Support Staff were a kind of simmering Cold War at the best of times. They tolerated each other enough to get the job done, but it was very well understood that each side should stay out of the other’s business. Especially where the Costuming Department was involved.

No, Management might have an annoying habit of skimming off some of the recruits to bolster Agent ranks, but they wouldn’t go so far as to poach from the Departments directly.

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