If a bird lands in the lap of a hungry man, does he not eat it?

   - Proverbs of the poor

I woke with a start. Where am I? The room was unfamiliar, my mouth tasted like an old penny. There was a glass of water on a small table by the bed and I drink half.  I began to remember as the fuzzy sensation cleared from between my ears.

That's right, this is 2013, 200 years before I was born. This is the opportunity of a lifetime, and I am supposed to act normal.

Time Investments LLC has a good system.  They have a very careful selection process, intense screening, a network of aliases, supervisors in the past, and kept 25% of your earnings.  You would sign a hefty contact, be transported to a time and place of their choosing, assume one of their aliases (recently vacated by another client), take the job they give you, and collect the paycheck for however many months you agreed to. Since none of the other banks or investment houses of the future are available in your work time, you have to deposit your money in the brokerage house acquired by Time Investments LLC for this purpose.  They invest it, as directed by their future self, to grow it all at a slow pace.  They do not want analysts in the past to pay attention to their manipulations.  Half of the economic issues of 2008 were because of Time Investments LLC clients removing money from circulation.  That is when TI© added 4 pages to the contact and instituted Time Wardens. These are people who go into an extended term of the past and watch over the clients.  They often fill the roles of boss or supervisor to the positions the clients are filling.  Because of the psychological stresses involved in this position, TI© only keeps 10% of the wardens paychecks.  Once a stable bank opens, some 70 years before his departure time, his money will be moved a little at a time to an account.  There it will collect compound interest until he gets back and withdraws it, at which point he will be able to afford the future he wants instead of the future he had.  Our that is the sales pitch they give you.  Why they couldn't just make Time Investments Bank instead, he did not know.

I checked my watch, remembered it had been taken before transport, and looked for a clock in the dark, unfamiliar room.  If I had cybernetics I would already know the time, but then I also would not be eligible for this opportunity.  Some crudely formed red numbers on the small table next to the water caught my eye.  I recognized the retro digital clock font available on some interfaces, and realized that was the time. And that wasn't retro in this day and age. 6:42  Only for hours since my arrival; that is why I could still taste pennies.  

Transportation was rough.  The rumors on the streets had vastly differed on the details, but they all had that one right.  Some thought that time travel would always be impossible and the claims of TI© where just a cover for black market organ sales.  There was plenty of that in the dark corners already, no need to start a large, shiny company to cover more.  Another line of thought went If time travel was real, why hadn't someone gone back and fixed this mess of a world so that every one had decent food and a dry cot.  The answer to that one was obvious now; because the people who had time travel didn't care about who's backs they were standing on.  And now I am one of them.

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Part of what they don't tell you before you agree is how it works.  They give you something that looks like a pear sculpted out of a heat sink, its grooves filled with glitter.  That is for your mouth, and that glitter (synthetic cobalt hemoglobin) holds enough oxygen to keep you alive for 3 hours.   You have to climb into a pod, morbidly shaped like a coffin, and calmly suck on your metal pear as the pod fills with electrolyk gel.  Then you are electrocuted.  To be fair, it is not electricity they pump you with but a different form of energy, the end result being an enormous jump in your potential energy measurement; but it feels the same. The pod holds some piece of you in your time, a bio signature, so that nature knows where to put you when it realizes that you are out of place.  That usually happens in about a week, as your synthetic potential dissipates.  So if you sign for a 3 month contract you just volunteered for 12 electrocutions give or take your personal resilience.  The scientists discovered it when trying to simulate a black hole.  Since gravitational pull provides massive potential energy, they looked for a way to do the same without destroying the lab and found this instead.

Time travel is like throwing yourself up a cliff, it takes a lot of energy and is against the normal way of things.  Also, the top of the cliff where you now find yourself is shrinking, eventually becoming too small for you to stay and you fall off again.  An odd side thought; what does it mean that the past has more "potential energy" than the present?  Entropy is king and we are all headed towards chaos.  At least the big heads who think of all this promise us we are eons away from that.  

That doesn't matter to me though.  I am here to reject the rotten start I got in life, and take whatever I can to better my own life.  Time travel means I can snub fate and destiny, and write my own rules!  Well, as much as TI© will let me.  I have to get up in an hour to get ready for my orientation ....  Even with time travel, I still can't sleep in.