Projects > Story-of-the-Day > travel

A large crash downstairs wakes me up. I quickly glance at the clock. 2:43AM. I grab the gun out of my safe, load it, and start walking out of my room. "Hello. I'm armed. I suggest leaving now while you still can." There's no response at all.

I carefully make my way downstairs, and sweep the house room by room. I get into the kitchen when I see a person down on the ground. There's something metallic in his hand. I point the gun, "I see you! Get up! The police are already on their way." Dang, I probably should have called first.

The man doesn't respond. It doesn't take too long to figure out that the man face-down on my floor isn't alive anymore. I check the rest of the house and call the non-emergency number as soon a I'm sure I'm safe. All my doors and windows are locked closed, I wonder how he got in.

"Non-emergency police. This is Julie speaking. How can I direct your call?"

"Hi Julie, this is Cheryl from the Examiners office. You're never going to believe what I just found."

"Hi Cheryl. Let me guess. Dead person popped up out of nowhere?"

It takes a few moments while I process this, then I respond, "Uhh, yeah. That's exactly it. How did you know?"

"You're going to be in for a long day. I'll get somebody to go over to your house and do a pickup. You might want to come in now though."

I get a pot of coffee brewing and get dressed as quickly as I can. On the drive in, I flip on my radio and hear multiple reports of people showing up dead all over the world. Apparently my guest wasn't unique at all. It's a complete circus when I finally get into the office.

"Cheryl, there you are. We're way over capacity here. There's bodies just streaming in. We're fingerprinting and sampling them, but the computer is disconnected or something. We can't find matches. Do you want to take that?"

I'm already walking towards the computer, "Sure, got it." I log on and see that there have been 128 fingerprints taken in from corpses in the last hour. 128! I pull up #1 and run a matching analysis. Nothing. I call up IT and they confirm everything is connected and functioning. I try #2. No match. #3, #4, #5: No match. Hmm. I pull up a case from yesterday and it still matches correctly. These people are just not in the system, but who are they?

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"Hey, Darren. I don't think we should be doing this. It doesn't seem right."

"Just keep processing people through. We're selling time travel and that's what they're getting."

"But we know nobody is making it through alive. It's just not right to take their money like this."

"Watch the ad. We never say anything about surviving the trip. Their bodies travel through time to somewhere in early 2017. Nobody every complains. We're gold!"