2025-04-07 “Silas Wetherford” for Paul (born 1910)

Paul Charm walked out of Tom Jenkins’s American Heritage apartments, umbrella deployed and aimed his steps at the coffee shop. Monday had arrived in the wake of the latest Translocation mission.

Paul was starting to catch on to Hannah’s uneasy attitude about The Agency. Friday morning, he woke up with mission orders that left him nearly no time to complete them. He had to find a Library of Congress map of Memphis, Tennessee for the year 1860. By noon.

Short notice, but Jacob Brown happened to be visiting the apartments that morning to do a site visit with Merritt. Jacob had a map pulled up from the Internet faster than Paul could have put his fedora on properly.

A printed copy of the map in hand, he sat back and waited for his body to be Translocated to an Off-line Instant in 1985, where he could give it to the mission team. 

“How’d you get this?” Merritt asked. “Looks like you made it on a copier.”

“It was a printer,” Paul replied. “Jacob Brown helped. I guess you’ll get the memories about my morning from the 2025 gang in a few days.”

Paul went on to explain to Merritt, Hannah, Emma, and Kent what he understood about printers in the future. 

The mission had gone on from Friday night to Saturday night; just over a day. During the mission, the Time Travelers who were Focused into it didn’t have direct connection to the experiences, but there was something of an awareness with regard to mood and feelings.

Mostly, they had felt bored and sluggish, but for a short period just before it ended, there had been what Kent called an adrenaline rush.

On Sunday, there had been some napping in 2025. Seemingly, there had been some napping among the 1985 Off-line Moment, too, because before dinner time, the memories had synced up. (The best explanation for the merging of memories was that sleeping pushed the memories into the merge and then sleeping later would pull them out—depending on the timing, it could take up to 2 days, or as little as a few hours.)

Once Merritt, Emma, Hannah, and Kent told everyone WHAT had happened, the speculations regarding WHY it happened began. Anika, David, and everyone else hit their MacBooks so fast, Paul wondered if they would break the Internet. Or at least cash their WiFi—which he had accepted as some form of 2025 magic. 

(He was reminded of how his grandpa had acted with regard to radio.)

Once again, it had been Jacob Brown, whose skill with computers was essentially his life, who found the most likely answer.

“Hey,” he said after everyone else had begun to give up, “look at this obituary…”

No one had actually looked, but they all listened as he read it.

“From 1892… ‘Passing on Wednesday, Silas Wetherford leaves his wife, Hazel’… I’ll skip ahead… ‘Silas was best known for his somewhat open work as an Abolitionist. A former slave catcher, Silas once said his mind had been changed one night in 1860 when he encountered a group of Abolitionists north of Memphis helping a family of slaves flee to the north. Silas’s most recognized work was a series of newspaper editorials decrying the idea that Blacks were property.’” Jacob looked up. “I don’t know about you guys, but I think we just found out what happened when the butterfly flapped its wings.”

“Butterfly effect…” Merritt smiled. “This time, you might have found out what happened!”

“I like the stone in the pond metaphor,” Emma replied. “This time we see where the ripples hit the shore.”