After Hwang freed me, I tried standing up. My arms and legs felt weak and I nearly fell over. Hwang seemed prepared for this.

"Easy now, Captain," he said as he caught me, "This isn't your body. It's going to take a moment to feel out the controls."

I nodded my understanding and eased myself back into the chair. A sense of vertigo washed over me for a moment as I felt as if things didn't quite fit. Like the arms and legs were the wrong size and my head was in the wrong location. It seemed to pass and with each moment I felt more and more "at home" in this skin.

"187 Minute War," I prompted, "What is it?"

"Eh," Hwang said, "Kind of complicated. You'll remember more, but - in short - about sixty years from now a bunch of countries that have been stockpiling nukes, chemical weapons, and high speed kinetic weapons all grow really frustrated because they have all these expensive toys and aren't allowed to play with them. So, within about six months, they all go from arguing about trade policy with sternly worded speeches to just hurling the scary stuff at each other. Two different factions form amid all these chaos and they decide the best way to bring the madness to a stop is to send the other guys back to the stone age. Just over two hours later approximately half the planet is left uninhabitable."

I think I said something. A profanity perhaps? He didn't seem to notice, he just kept talking.

"I forget the official tally," he said, "But something like six billion people died in that first week or so. Another two in the next few months as food shortages and disease took them out. Within a year the human race had been reduced from a population over 12 billion to something like 900 million scattered over a few dozen countries where it was still safe to walk outside without a full hazmat suit. Or, at least, it was. Some climate shift took place. I don't understand it. Something about the carbon released or maybe the ash? I don't know. The rains started bringing stuff from the badlands into the good lands and something vital way down in the food chain went extinct. Things started collapsing pretty fast after that. It took about ten years for them to go past the tipping point, but after that the population was doomed."

"But . . . you said we were from 250 years in the future. That sounds like we go extinct in less than a century."

He shrugged.

"Not quite," he said, "Just because of random chance alone some parts of Africa and South America manage to escape the worst of this. Australia probably would have been okay too if they hadn't been right in the worst of the arguing from the start. Survivors flocked to those areas and things died slower. We think the first Null Spindle was created."

"The what?" I asked.

"Sir," he said, "I'm not a techie. They just told us something about a device inside the building is responsible for detangling us from the normal flow of time. Apparently this allows us to project ourselves into the past in the first place but also means that what we do here doesn't affect us personally. At least not usually. There is a theory that AlphaCat is working under they call The Causality Whip."

Either my memory was coming back or I was losing my mind because the more he talked, the more familiar this sounded. AlphaCat, for instance. That was a computer and it wasn't Alpha Cat as in "meow" it was Alpha, the Greek letter, and Quantum Amplitude Temporalizer. Alpha QAT. It was a machine that calculated which events would cause the greatest impact on the future while causing the least immediate disruption. There was a theory that the smart guys in the white coats had. Something they called temporal inertia where time keeps trying to stay on the same course it has been following. The closer to the event you are trying to avoid the more of a jolt you need to dislodge it. But, the more energy you put in the larger the ripples and-

"Felix Fisker," I muttered.

"Good, sir!" Hwang said, "Your memory is coming back."

"No it isn't," I said, "I don't know who that is. It just seems important."

"Well, it was important at one time," Hwang said, "Now he's a forgotten nobody. The entanglement projector only works so far back. After that the energy demands get to be astronomical. We're around the theoretical limit right now so while we can project ourselves to time lines closer to the war we can't go much further back than right now. Well, about 100 years ago we think a group discovered the method and created the spindle and they tried to stop a cataclysm that they said was the first step in the coming events. They thought the rise to power of a power hungry German solider was what caused events to play out the way they did. So, going at the theoretical limit of their technology, they went back and arranged for him to die in a traffic accident before he rose to power."

"And what happened?"

"And . . . a failed artist took his place and events mostly unfolded the way they did originally," Hwang said, "It was too close to the event and even doing something drastic like that wasn't enough to fully deflect the course of things to come."

"So, nothing changed?"

"Didn't say that," Hwang corrected me, "I said mostly the same. Turns out the artist guy wasn't as gifted with tactics and was also more obsessed with occult matters. So, unlike Fisker, he wasted time and resources doing stupid things and allowed racist policies to chase away brilliant scientists who took up in the west with their findings. As such, the Germans lost the race to develop the atom bomb in this time line and Great Britain still remained as a major player in the world of politics. So in the original timeline, the war that ends everything happened a few decades sooner and was called the Ten Day Armageddon. Which means, yeah, it worked. It delayed things and the fallout was less overall. But the downside is that they managed to also uninvent some of the technology they were dependent upon. They turned off the spindle and stuff started to unwind around them as the timeline tried to reassert itself upon them. They managed to cobbled together enough notes that our guys could reconstruct some of it, but now we're that much closer to the event we must change. We lost a lot of ground there."

The Whip. I remembered it now. Cause too big of a change all at once and the ripples just grew in magnitude and the shock at the end could annihilate all of us. AlphaCat gave us probabilities of how likely each little change we made had in resulting in catastrophe. Erasing ourselves from existence in exchange for avoiding the war was considered "acceptable fallout."

I worked for psychopaths. Worse I was one of them. No, worse yet, it actually was starting to make sense. Without thinking, I scratched at my elbow. The location where I had recently had an IV placed. Would have. Didn't have. Not this body. That was the body in the future locked in a medical bay with probes attached to its skull.

"What are we doing here?" I asked Hwang as I stood up. This time I kept my balance.

"There is a school about six blocks from here," he said, "I am going to go there and give the principal of the school a flat tire."

"That's it?" I asked, "We're just giving someone a flat tire?"

He shook his head.

"Deadline is too close," he explained, "That's what I am doing. I need to delay him so he doesn't get home too early. Before you have time to do your job."

Hwang looked away from me as he reached behind his back and pulled a pistol out of his belt. He flipped it around and held it out to me, butt first.

"Sir," he said, "I know how this looks. But, when your memory comes back to you, you'll remember that we did draw straws for this job."

I took the gun from him without further comment.