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“This doesn’t really help me,” I murmured.
“That’s nothing to do with me,” replied Aornis. “You wanted intel, and I gave it to you.”
“If I find out you’ve lied,” I said, getting ready to leave, “I’ll be back to take away the twenty minutes I gave you.”
“If you’ve seen Felix8, how could you think otherwise?” pointed out Aornis with impeccable logic.
“Stranger things have happened.”
I stepped out of the loop cell and was back in the bluey greenness of T.J. Maxx among the time-frozen customers, with Friday at my side.
“Think she’s telling the truth?” he asked.
“If she is, it makes no sense at all, which is a point in her favor. If she’d told me what I wanted to hear, I’d have been more suspicious. Did she say anything else to me she might have made me forget?”
Aornis, with her power of memory distortion and erasure, was wholly untrustworthy—she could tell you everything, only to make you forget it a few seconds later. At her trial the judge and jury were merely actors—the real judge and jury watched it all on CCTV. To this day the actors in the courtroom still have no idea why that “frightfully pleasant girl” was in the dock at all. Friday ran over what he had witnessed her saying, and we managed to find an exchange that she’d erased from my recollection: that she was going to bust out of T.J. Maxx with the help of someone “on the outside.”
“Any idea who that might be?” I asked. “And why did she shield it from me?”
“No idea—and it’s probably just her being manipulative; my guess is the recollection will be on time release—it’ll pop into your head in a few hours.”
I nodded. She’d done something similar to me before.
“But I wouldn’t worry,” added Friday. “Temporal Enloopment has a hundred percent past-present-future escape-free record; she’d have to bend the Standard History Eventline to get out.”
I left Aornis to her never-ending wait at the checkout, and Friday powered down the visitors’ interface. The manager popped back into life as time started up again.
“Did you get all you need?” she asked pleasantly.
“I hope so,” I replied, and followed Friday from the store. “Thanks,” I said, giving him a motherly hug and a kiss.
“Mum,” he said in a serious tone.
“What?”
“There’s something I need to suggest to you, and you’re going to have to think really carefully before you reply.”
“What is it?”
“It’s Friday. The other Friday. We’ve got two and a half days to the End of Time. Does it seriously look like he’s going to join the ChronoGuard?”
“It’s possible.”
“Mum—truthfully?”
“No.”
“We’re running out of options fast. My director-general older self is still absent at the End of Time, so I had a word with Bendix, and he suggested we try…replacement.”
“What do you mean?”
“That your Friday is removed and I take his place.”
“Define ‘removed.’”
Friday scratched his head.
“We’ve run several timestream models, and it looks good. I’m precisely the same age as him, and I’m what he would be like if he hadn’t gone down the bone-idle route. If ‘replacement’ isn’t a good word for you, why not think of it as just rectifying a small error in the Standard History Eventline.”
