Rewind Specialist, Third Class

Nobody tells you temporal manipulation is mostly paperwork. They talk about the power, the responsibility, the weight of holding causality in your hands—and then they hand you a laminated card explaining your allotted monthly minutes.

Ninety. I get ninety minutes of pause per month. Rewind is more expensive—that's limited to thirty minutes. More expensive temporally. More expensive bureaucratically. More expensive in the migraines that feel like someone's running my consciousness through a cheese grater, the ones that last for hours after I watch time unspool backward. Fast-forward is "currently under regulatory review," which means some contractor in 2019 skipped ahead to see the stock market and now none of us can use it until the oversight committee finishes their investigation.

The oversight committee has been "finishing their investigation" for four years.

Four years. I manifested this ability in six hours—one afternoon on a highway median when I was fourteen, one car accident frozen in place while I sat there having what my therapist would later call "a formative dissociative episode." The government found me in three weeks. The NDA took twenty minutes to sign. The security clearance took eleven months because someone in the FBI's background check division kept spelling my name wrong.

And then they handed me a laminated card explaining my monthly time allocation. Ninety minutes of pause, thirty of rewind. Like I'd just joined a gym with unusual membership terms.

I still have it. It's in my desk drawer, under a stress ball shaped like a clock that someone in HR thought was funny.

***

I work out of a building in Arlington that used to be a Bed Bath & Beyond. You can still see the outline where the logo was, if you know where to look. (I know where to look. I know where to look for everything. Occupational hazard.) My office is in what I'm pretty sure was the "Beyond" section—there's a persistent smell of synthetic lavender from the discontinued aromatherapy display that maintenance has been "addressing" since before I transferred here—and my desk faces a window that overlooks the parking lot of a Chipotle.

I watch people get burritos. It's meditative.

"Ramirez." My supervisor, Gerald, appears in my doorway. Gerald has the energy of a man who peaked as a hall monitor and has been chasing that high ever since. He's holding a manila folder like it contains state secrets. It contains a request form. I know this because Gerald only does the state-secrets grip when he's about to ask me to do something tedious. "We've got a situation."

"We always have a situation."

"This one's time-sensitive."

I wait for him to realize what he's said. He doesn't realize. Gerald never realizes.

The "situation" is a fourteen-car pileup on I-395. Three confirmed fatalities, more likely once they finish counting. Someone in the Deputy Director's office wants it unwound because one of the vehicles belongs to a diplomat's kid who was texting and driving. They don't say this part. The request form just says "potential optimization of emergency response outcomes." I've been doing this for six years. I can read between the redactions.

"This'll cost me all my rewind allocation," I say, looking at the timestamp on the incident report. Forty-three minutes since impact. I have thirty minutes to work with—that's the hard cap—which means I can get them back to the thirteen-minute mark at best. Still leaves the early part of the pileup, but the fatalities don't happen until minute eighteen. Add the re-stabilization buffer and the cognitive load surcharge HR added last year when someone in the Denver office had a stroke mid-rewind and they needed to cover the liability, and I'll burn through all thirty minutes. "I'll have nothing left for the rest of January."

"February," Gerald says.

"What?"

"It's February. February third."

I look at my calendar. He's right. I'd rewound eleven minutes on January twenty-ninth to prevent a thing I'm not allowed to talk about, and apparently lost track of the month during the mandatory recovery period. Forty-eight hours in a dim room with an IV drip and a white noise machine. It's supposed to be restful. Mostly it's boring in a way that makes you aware of your own heartbeat, which makes you aware of your mortality, which makes you think about all the times you've paused someone else's heartbeat without their knowledge or consent, which makes the white noise seem less like relaxation and more like the sound of your own complicity at a frequency designed to help you sleep through it.

"Fine." I sign the form. "February."

***

Rewinding requires you to watch. No closing your eyes, no letting it wash over you, no skipping to the good part where everyone's alive and the diplomat's kid learns a valuable lesson about distracted driving. The diplomat's kid will not learn a valuable lesson. The diplomat's kid will have their memory of the incident fogged per Protocol 7-C and will probably do the same thing again in six months, and I will probably be asked to fix it again, and I will probably say yes, because that's what a Rewind Specialist, Third Class does. We say yes. We watch.

So I watch the pileup happen in reverse. I watch bodies un-crumple. I watch glass un-shatter in sprays that look almost beautiful if you don't think about what they mean—and I always think about what they mean, that's the problem, I can't stop thinking about what things mean—and I watch the diplomat's kid's Range Rover un-swerve out of the lane of a Honda Civic driven by a woman who was, according to the file, bringing cupcakes to her daughter's school.

The cupcakes un-scatter across the asphalt. Red velvet. I can see the little flag picks, the ones with the foil fringe. Someone put effort into these cupcakes.

When I let time resume—carefully, carefully, with the diplomat's kid's phone mysteriously dead and their Bluetooth disconnected for reasons that will be attributed to "solar interference" in the incident report that will never be filed—the woman in the Honda Civic continues to her daughter's school. The three people who died are now three people who didn't die. The diplomat's kid never swerves. The pileup that was already forming in those first thirteen minutes, the one I couldn't reach, stays a seven-car fender-bender. Normal Friday on I-395. No fatalities.

I sit in the Bed Bath & Beyond building for a while. The lavender smell seems stronger today.

Gerald emails me to confirm successful resolution. He uses a smiley face emoji. I do not know what to do with the smiley face emoji.

***

I haven't told anyone this—not Gerald, not the bi-weekly therapist, not the guy I've been sort-of-dating who thinks I work in "government consulting"—but I've started pausing time just to breathe.

Not for work. Not for sanctioned reasons. Just—I'll be in line at the grocery store, and someone behind me will sigh, one of those pointed sighs that means you're taking too long, and I'll pause. Just for thirty seconds. Just long enough to exist in silence, in stillness, in a world where no one is waiting for me to move faster.

It's against regulations. It's a waste of allocation. It's probably symptomatic of something I should tell the therapist about, except telling her would mean admitting that the job is wearing grooves into my brain, and admitting that would mean being pulled from active duty for "evaluation," and being pulled from active duty would mean someone else doing the rewinds, and I've met the other Rewind Specialists, and—

Martinez drinks. Cho has that flat look behind the eyes, the one I recognize from the mirror. Patterson is twenty-three and still thinks this job means something, which is its own kind of tragedy.

So I keep pausing time at the grocery store. Thirty seconds here, forty-five there. Small thefts of stillness that no one will ever audit because who's going to notice a minute missing from a Friday afternoon?

I notice. I notice everything.

The cashier's nametag is crooked. The fluorescent light above register six has been flickering at 0.3-second intervals for at least two weeks. The woman behind me—the one who sighed—has a medical bracelet that she keeps touching, the way you touch something when you're worried, when you're waiting for results, when time feels like it's moving too fast and also not fast enough.

I finish paying. I don't pause again.

She probably needs those seconds more than I do.