Prompt #3: Time Travel Episode 1

Drake Maliac wouldn’t say that he hates his job. No, being a Zoner is not the worst occupation to have by far. He gets to visit different decades and see with his own eyes more of the past and future in a week than most other humans. It’s a pretty cushy gig compared to say, deep sea mining like his father had done for twenty years.

So, Drake is appreciative of his job. It’s just, he feels that the general public romanticizes the adventures of Time-Zoners, thinking that it’s all one big game, that they have control over destiny or something. That is completely untrue. For his year, 2216, exactly one-hundred and ten zoners are chosen from all over the world. It is a competitive occupation, many people vying for the spot every year, each with an outrageous number of credentials. Then once chosen, these 110 people take classes upon classes of physics and biochemistry and calculus just so that they know how it all works. Then there is the mandatory reading of at least eleven guidebooks. Then there’s a low-level desk job. And another, slightly higher level desk job. And a final, intermediate level desk job. And, if you make it through all of that, you get to become a Zoner and learn what the job is all about: being a glorified mail courier.

Most people don’t mind the tediousness of the bureaucracy and ladder-climbing. After-all, isn’t it worth it in the end to have the privilege of time-travel? Twelve years ago, Drake would have said, “Of course it is.” The feeling of standing in the Zone for one year and then slowly feeling every cell of your body separate and somehow travel together all at once before, after what feels like virtually no time, appearing in the Zone of another time? Drake though it was the best thing in the world when he first started.

Now though, now he’s almost bored of it. First of all, for every day he he gets to Zone, there are a hundred times as many when he’s signing paperwork and researching and then signing paperwork again.

Don't get him wrong, he understands why there are so many rules. Each time-Zone is its own jurisdiction, each Zone worker has to be an expert at avoiding paradoxes or meeting their past self. It's just that there is so much tedium. And then, when he actually does get to Zone-jump, it's to pass a message to the sister of the secretary of the President of Ireland in 2335 or retrieve an otherwise meaningless bauble from 2152, and then zoom it's back to his own time to report to his higher-ups.

As he stands in line in the zoning office, twelve people in front of him, to receive his warrant and the necessary papers for his next ambiguous mission, he’s sure this mission will be just as tedious as all the others.