She moved slowly enough to blend into the boarded-up storefront. Some of us officers called them turtles because of how they crept and hunched under layers of clothes added to shield the stinging wind in the wintertime. The garments' thickness made for a trashy shell-like appearance -- a mess in need of tidying.
       She was feisty. She spat at my face-guard and hurled a piece of cement before I arrested her. From the back of the cruiser, she yelled some of her last words. "Many deceivers are entered into the world, who confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an antichrist," she snarled.
       The longer they've been on the streets, the harder it is to accept their fate -- termination with a shot quickly and painlessly. Sometime back -- by the look of her, it was at least a year -- she failed to report to Central Registration when her number was drawn, thus becoming a fugitive. When a person reported, they were assigned to a camp for a few months before the end. When they didn't report and got picked up, it was pretty quick. The woman clutched a cross around her neck when I left her in receipt and discharge, cuffed and shackled.
       
       A message appeared on my ocular feed, and my heart rate escalated before I read it. I'd applied to be a jumper, and I would know soon if I was accepted.
       But the message was ordinary business. A Select required detention. The Spears had already gone in, the first wave to extract whatever information they needed from the subject. Selects were high-level targets condemned because of insurrection or insolence by Central Intelligence and not the depopulating algorithm that thinned everyone else. Selects often required special care because they had sensitive information.
       I hopped in the cruiser with Chin, who looked at me gravely once we were seated. I glanced at the screen and found the name of the Select, Okoro. My heart sank.
       Okoro was a fixture at the department. He was a jumper turned solicitor, turned investigator. The downward nature of his career should have been a signal.
       "Damn shame," Chin said. "Guy was my hero."
       "He used to be a jumper," I said.
       "I thought C.I. wipes your memory when you get into the jump program," said Chin.
       "It does."
       "How'd he become a solicitor if his mind was tabula rasa?"
       I shrugged. "Maybe the protocols were different then."
       We entered the apartment and had to duck under the golden tape that sparkled in the hallway's fluorescent lighting. The Spears marked their scenes with golden tape as if the lucky fool they'd just stabbed won the lottery and should be celebrated with the golden streamers of death.
       One last party.
       Okoro was at a small round table wearing a grungy tank-top. He was seated, and his head hung over a bowl of soggy cheerios. On the right side of his temple was a small bandage where they stuck him.
       On his right arm was an intravenous pinpoint indicating they'd drugged him so he would talk. If that didn't work, they'd go into the brain, whittling the frontal lobe. It was a crude and effective procedure. The first few centimeters disinhibited you, and the next few made you child-like. The last two centimeters killed you, depending on your brain. The Spears rarely made it that far. It triggered unnecessary protocols, so they left the Selects somewhere in the middle, like drooling Okoro here.
       As we were processing the scene, he said something that stuck in me like a dart.
       "It controls time," he said with a string of saliva hanging from his lower lip. It seemed to take every bit of his remaining brainpower. He sloped a little after uttering the words as if he'd actually projected something from his guts. I was surprised by the sudden coherence.
       "It controls time."
       Chin and I made a quick inventory of the apartment and took in Okoro. He went easily, like a child who didn't know what was happening.
       
       Later that night, I nodded off after dinner.
       I am in the place from my youth, The Eastern Center for Adolescents. The memories of it are not clear -- they drugged us every day. I am separated from our group and wander down a hallway. I see a man mopping the tiled floor up ahead, crossways to the hallway and not down it. He is whistling a familiar tune I cannot place, and he seems to know I'm there before he sees or hears me say anything. His eyes finally settle on me after he stops mopping and whistling.
       "M'names Rupert," he says.
       I don't respond.
       "Do you know where you are?" he asks.
       "The Eastern Center for Adolescents," I sound back to him. My words are robotic and reverberative.
       "That's what this place is called, but do you know what it is?"
       I shake my head.
       "You're in a depopulation camp," Rupert says with a tight smile.
       My ocular feed pulsed at me like a strobe to alert that a new message had arrived. When I opened it, excitement coalesced.
       I had been accepted into the jump program.
       
       I came out of the jump in dense vegetation, which was atypical. Most of my jumps were directed to a specific twenty- to thirty-year period just before Central Intelligence's genesis, a period of digitization, an epoch of concrete. A change in environment meant progress. It was a good sign.
       My target was a woman named Arien Iskenderian, and she was responsible for the beginning of an anti-A.I. movement called The Humanists. I had an image. She was grubby with striking grey eyes.
       I disassembled the Graviton Processor, which consisted of the ion perimeter and the G-vest, and placed them both in a pack. I moved through the forest's undergrowth until I saw backlighting from a clearing through a thicket ahead. I crouched and peered past the leaves until I saw her.
       Arien stood in front of a twenty-foot-tall stone rock face. Carved into it eight feet above the ground was a circular image of a snake eating its tail. She was speaking to a group of ten people who sat around her with legs crossed. Her voice was syrupy with confidence. "Humans are being exterminated by the technology we created," she said, and several watchers hummed in agreement and swayed.
       "We are put into camps and slowly killed with drugs. Some of you have probably been in these camps. They seem like nursing homes or mental hospitals, but we know what they are. Some of us get out, but most do not."
       The group hummed in agreement again.
       "Ask yourselves: why does it go to the trouble? Why not just round us all up and kill us, one swift operation that would be more efficient?"
       Silence befell the cultists, and I wondered how long I would have to watch her. I felt insects crawling on my arms and neck and sweat dripping down my brow. I needed to get her alone.
       Arien paced in front of her audience, turning at the edge of the rock face to proceed in front of the snake. "Control," she said after a few seconds. "If it tried to eliminate us all at once, humans would revolt. We would rebel. The illusion of rehabilitation and self-betterment keeps us dulled. It keeps us in place."
       I sat down from my crouch to ease the strain on my knees and realized something: Arien was making sense.
       "You have no idea the depths to which Central Intelligence will go to eliminate us," she said, and there was no humming in agreement this time. The audience was disturbed.
       "But I do. They send people called jumpers through time to kill those of us in the past who create insurrection in the future."
       I withdrew a pad and punched a few keys to bring up her file. There must have been something I missed. She had too much information.
       "Why do they do this?" she asked, pacing.
       "The jump time distortion device requires a transfer of biological matter because the particle interaction fries electro-neural circuitry. They need us to kill ourselves. The machines cannot jump. What irony?"
       "How do I know?" she said and took a few seconds.
       "I was a jumper," she said, pointing at her chest. Her breasts moved underneath a sullied grey shirt. "They will come for me," she stared up and into the thicket. "They may already have."
       My heart rate increased, and I eased back.
       "But we have jumpers, too. We send our people back to intercept those of us who become jumpers, to make them more human, to implant them with empathy, with untouched memories that cannot be wiped because they originate outside of time."
       Something was triggered in me, a strange yet familiar urge to sleep, to conjure something that had just barely escaped, like sand through grasping fingers.
       The Eastern Center for Adolescents is revealed, and Rupert mops back and forth again as he chuckles.
       "They drop a curtain of Thorazine and group therapy in front of you, so you can't see what this place really is, but there is a way out of here. Did you know that?"
       I shake my head.
       "The academy assessment exam: have you heard of it?"
       "No."
       "It'll be available next month, and you should inquire with Dr. Riesenfeld. Most patients have no idea, and so they don't make it out."
       Rupert dunks the mop into the bucket and then presses it. He drops its head onto the floor, and it makes a slopping sound.
       "Only the motivated even take the test, and only the intelligent pass it. It has been a very effective way of selecting candidates. You have to hand it to them."
       "Why are you telling me this?" I ask.
       Rupert mops back and forth. "Because you're important. You're a door."
       
       I awoke with a jolt as the last of the cultists filed out of the clearing down a trail. I circled around the opposite side of the rock face. As I followed them, I noticed a boy was straggling behind. He dallied with insects on the forest floor and the occasional flower. The boy had dark hair and a familiar whimsical abandon.
       I followed the group for a hundred meters until it finally arrived in another clearing where several thatched huts had been built. It was a modest village off the grid in West Virginia, a self-sustaining commune. Arien entered one of the huts, and so did several others.
       I waited on the edge of the clearing for her quarters to empty. When one disciple exited, only seconds would pass before the next one entered, and this went on for hours.
        I sat down and crossed my legs. We were not supposed to take needless casualties because of the temporal reverberations it caused. C.I. was strict on this, and jumpers could lose their licenses for the infraction.
       Something hung with me as I leaned against a sapling, resting my head, my eyelids growing heavy.
       Untouched memories.
       My mind was empty before the jump program, filled with nothing but a desire to move forward, a kind of suicidal ideation of the past. Occasionally, an ember would float by in the dark void.
       It controls time. The phrase came to me in a raspy, abused voice with a sound totally detached from its speaker's image. It echoed in the cavern that was my memory.
       It was the last thing I heard before my eyelids grew heavy again. One side effect from the jump was fatigue. Methamphetamines were prescribed to stave off the drowsiness, but they only worked for so long. Cat-napping was part of the job, especially when waiting hours for the right opportunity on a target.
       Rupert dunks the mop into the bucket again. Only this time, he does not remove it. He slides the bucket towards the wall, where it glides to a gentle stop. Without the mop and bucket as a distraction, I notice he's wearing a maroon jumpsuit.
       "This information has a price," he says.
       He removes an object from his front pant pocket shaped like a small pistol, with a tube extending from the top barrel.
       "Roll up your sleeve," he says, and I do it.
       Rupert then flashes a blue light in my eyes--he'd removed it from his other pocket after he withdrew the apparatus, which distracted me. When the shine hits my pupils, I stop moving and breathing. I don't blink. I am frozen.
       I feel the sharp pain on my arm that I imagine is Rupert sticking me with the gun, but I can't see it. I stare ahead with my vision tunneled. There is a flash from the blue light again, and I'm free. My arm is sore to the touch. I glance at it and see a small red pinprick the size of a mosquito bite. Underneath it is something elevated and foreign. Around the perimeter is a tattooed circle.
       "What did you do? What is this?" I ask.
       "A temporal tracer, 'T.T.' for short."
       I stare blankly.
       "It's synthetic and undetectable, and the ink will fade, but it lets us know where you are when you are," Rupert says and walks back to his bucket. He handles the mop.
       "I'll catch ya on the flip side," he says.
       
       When I opened my eyes, I saw the light in the village had faded, and the sky was darkening. I panicked and checked the time. Thirty minutes had passed.
       I should have waited. I should have calmed down, but I didn't.
       I circled around her hut and peered in through an unfurled burlap shade that acted as a curtain. I saw Arien inside, seated on a rug. The room smelled of incense and was lit with candles adorning the room's perimeter.
       She was facing a small boy, the same distracted kid I'd seen before. "You have been blessed with a sensitive and perceptive mind, Rupert," she said. She held up a medallion with a blue light shining from its center.
       "Follow it with your eyes," she said, and soon Rupert was transfixed and unmoving. Arien withdrew the jet injector and rolled up Rupert's sleeve. She fired the device into his shoulder, and he didn't move. She unrolled his sleeve and brought the medallion back in front of him, catching his pupils with the light.
       The spell was broken, and he suddenly rubbed his arm and moaned.
       "You will reshape the world, my child," Arien said to him and then shooed him out of her hut.
       I entered quickly and quietly from under the burlap shade, with suppressed firearm drawn, ready to kill. I was on the perimeter in the shadows, but she saw me immediately.
       "I've been waiting for you, Nylander," she said, handling something behind her back.
       "Easy. Show me your hands," I said, and she held the medallion low and took a step toward me. I had the gun aimed at her gray shirt, right between her breasts.
       "Life is a circle," she said, tapping the top of her right arm.
       "You sent Rupert to me?"
       "No. I traced him," she said, tapping the top of her right arm again. "Just like we're tracing you."
       "He's the only person I remember from before," I said.
       "We're jumpers. We dance in and out of time. People don't forget us. That's why the ones who see us get eliminated, isn't that right? They don't get a chance to remember."
       "Well, it's about that time," I said, holding up the gun.
       "Ooohh," she said and then made a clicking sound with her tongue on the roof of her mouth while shaking her head.
       It was just distracting enough that I didn't notice her easing the medallion up and into my line of sight. The blue light shone, and I had a strange and familiar feeling of paralysis.
       
       I came to in the forest not far from where I landed, several meters from the snake rock face. I was groggy with a headache. I withdrew my pad to orient myself, and to my surprise, there was an image on it; a photograph had been taken. The image was of Arien with a bullet hole between her eyes. I glanced at her temporal chart and noticed that her line terminated.
       It was done, but I didn't remember any of it.
       I jumped back to the holding construct, where I met Denise, my spotter. She took my equipment and my pad, and then I went in for the post-jump audit.
       By the time I sat down in front of the screen to answer questions from the automated voice, I'd convinced myself that it was normal. Memory lapse happened to all of us. Jumping did something to your neurons. The skipping through time embrittled the memory until only vacant swaths of emptiness permeated. Some jumpers committed suicide, and some had to be retrieved for going AWOL in their favorite time period. I'd brought a couple of them back.
       "Was the target terminated?" she asked in a soft voice.
       "Yes."
       "Were there abnormalities?"
       "No."
       "Were there witnesses?"
       "No."
       "Have you ever felt sad?"
       "Yes."
       
       I went home and slept for twenty-four hours. I went out for sushi and returned an hour later. I fell asleep again, and in this lighter sleep, I saw them.
       Arien sits cross-legged on the ground in front of Rupert. I am back in her hut.
       "We'll always know when you are."
       The eight-year-old Rupert looks up at me, dead in the eyes, and says, "Catch ya on the flip side," in his adult voice.
       
       A message strobes into my ocular feed. I have another jump assignment.
       They increased my jump schedule to three a week, which wasn't healthy, and I was exhausted all of the time. Whenever I wasn't working, I was eating or sleeping and dreaming.
        Rupert and Arien grew more real than my actual life.
       In my reality, I danced through time with the confidence of a matador, tying up loose ends here and there, closing loops, and all the time, I noticed there were fewer people and more holograms. I wondered if I was in a simulated reality; if C.I. was piping in images because it didn't want me interfacing with others. Maybe it was because no one else existed.
       Maybe I was the last.
       
       The dichotomy of vivid jumps and my dark, sleepy apartment flipped by as the months stretched into years, giving way to a pervasive grey malaise.
       Finally, after yet another jump, I was directed into a different room, snapping me from my autopilot mode.
       "This is your ten-year audit," a pleasant female said. She had replaced Denise some time ago -- I didn't know exactly when.
       I entered a room with the shape and dimensions of a banquet hall, except there was no furniture, only a large screen on the opposite wall.
       On the screen an image slowly appeared: the contours of a human face revealed depth-wise, but not completed, so the eyes remained hollow, undefined, and mildly skeletal. "You've been productive, Nylander," it said in a deep rumbling voice that tingled my diaphragm.
       "Thank you."
       "No human has been allowed in this space for twenty years."
       "The ten-year audit doesn't happen so much?"
       "Never. You're the first."
       I nodded.
       "And the last," it said.
       A rush of heat gently coated my back. I turned quickly to find that Arien was there, wearing the G-Vest and kneeling within the Graviton perimeter.
       "Turn around," she whispered. "And slowly walk forward."
       I did so, and she emulated my movements from behind, shielding herself from the censors at the end of the room.
       "Is it time for retirement?" I asked, slowly stepping forward.
       "It's your choice. The inoculation is complete," the face said.
       We approached to within ten feet of the screen.
       "Duck when I say now, and then follow me," Arien whispered.
       The skeletal face on the wall disappeared an exclamation point formed. "Alert!" sounded with deafening volume.
       "Now!" Arien yelled, and I ducked.
       She tossed a spherical device with a red light toward the small box below the screen. It stuck on the box as though it was covered with adhesive.
       We ran back to her Graviton processor. She extended the perimeter around me, and we each put an arm in her vest. She initiated a jump.
       We landed in the forest in front of the stone rock face.
       "I detonated an electromagnetic pulse," she said. "Central Intelligence is crippled."
       When we got our bearings and packed the equipment, I noticed an eight-year-old boy was watching us.
       Rupert was wide-eyed at the sight of us both appearing from thin air.
       I walked up to the child, whose mouth was agape.
       I kneeled down to him.
       He looked surprised and emotional.
       "Hello, Rupert," I said.
       The boy's focus shifted from me to the jump site and then back several times. Tears welled up in his eyes, and his brow furrowed. I placed a gentle hand on his shoulder to soothe him. Twilight was creeping over the forest, and the crickets and cicadas hummed.
        "Where were you?" he finally asked.
        "A bad place."
        Rupert studied me and his eyes widened. "I know you," he said.
        "You do?"
        "From my dream. You were young like me."
        "Yes," I said, nodding and smiling.
        "We were in a long, long room," he said.
        "A hallway."
        "Hallway," he repeated. Rupert considered the word for a second or two before asking, "Where is the hallway?"
       I stood and took young Rupert by the hand. We followed the trail Arien had walked just minutes before. I noticed him looking up at me expectantly from the periphery, and I finally glanced down to answer.
        "The flip side."