A short story inspired by transactional rollbacks in a world with time travel, specifically this line in a piece by Ashef Tishad:
“Compensation is a semantic undo, not time travel: the statement shows a charge and a refund.”
But what if it was time travel?
Jason waited for the light turbulence in his astroboat to settle and then sipped his late-night brew.
“Shit,” he murmured in the yellow glow of the monitors in the bridge of his floating houseboat. “Not again.”
On the screen was the shaggy countenance of one of Chrono co’s higher paid customers. Dress suit, slacks, tie loose.
“Well maybe if you didn’t flirt with every guy you walked past then I would feel a little more secure in our relationship,” the man said to his young fiancee.
The footage from camera six showed her turned towards the mirror in the downstairs bathroom of their Chelsea penthouse. She shifted for a moment, and the dark tear tracts of eyeliner became clear.
“It was just a smile,” she said, so quietly the microphone almost didn’t pick it up at all.
Jason raised the gain, played it back. There was a brief pause in between words, the cadence almost musical. “It was just…a smile.” Slight tremble of her upper lip after ‘just’. A tug on on her left zygmomaticus major, followed by a flash of the right procerus. Put crudely, the flash of a small proceeded by the stab of a frown. Jason was a bit of an anatomy buff. He’d been an illustrator before this. Maybe it was a part of why he’d taken the job, even. To try to understand what it looked like when these types of events passed through people’s bodies.
“What was that?” he shouted?
“I said, it was just - nevermind.”
“Whatever,” came the soundbite from chester’s voice, a slight artifact obscuring part of the word. Only his back could be seen from feed 6 and Jason did feel an urge to reposition it.
In feed 4, the woman’s fingers were busy struggling to remove a second earring while the first sat impatiently on the lip of the sink below her.
Jason sighed. He was 2300 miles away, cruising about the coast of Seattle. He could almost remember when he liked this job.
“What happened to you, Chester,” he muttered. The Yerba Mate warmed his palms, working it’s magic. He watched them for a few moments longer. The man pacing in the living room, maybe looking for something, the woman struggling with the earring still. He remembered when Chester had first signed up, on freemium. He’d rewound to do acts of kindness. Not to scrub out his mistakes.
Jason’s fingers spread to life on the keys, jumping to the important time codes, writing the compliance reports.
Chester finally found his phone in his jacket. Even after seeing it so many times it was still surreal to see him open the Chrono Co app to send in the request, which had arrived fifteen minutes ago.
Not all customers allowed for releasing “after footage” but Chester either didn’t care or he believed Chrono Co’s light recommendation that monitoring for a few moments after the target time window helped them maintain chronological consistency. In reality it just helped them get analytics on customer satisfaction depending on how quick services were rendered. In any case, Jason often indulged, jumping ahead to the “head” of the timeline, wanting to understand the entirety of the story.
As was often the case with Chester, he had shut down now that he know this timeline would be revoked. He was getting baked out of his mind in the bedroom. The woman was crying softly on the balcony by this point. At one point she let out a chuckle, then a laugh, and then started crying harder. Jason couldn’t know, of course, what was going on in her head, but it seemed like a very formative moment for her. Something precious.
Jason carefully selected the window of local spacetime to be redacted, and neutralized inconsistencies with neighboring spacetime. There was a small one of a pigeon that flew overhead, but the system returned a .003% butterfly effect possibility so Jason let it slide. He entered his password and hit he redact button.
Initiate 26:18 duration time redaction start 2026-07-28T05:18:00Z
Jason’s index finger hovered over the enter key. The time displayed creeped up. 26:19, 26:20, 26:21. The monitor still showed both feeds, Chester now passed out. The woman had stopped crying. She was just looking out off into the distance. Jason switched feeds, with the dialogue box still up, obscuring some of the probabilistic matter displays - not they weren’t cameras.
They were reproductions of a timeline. A different one than the one he was currently in, in fact. It took fewer bytes to send timecodes and reproduce a view of reality on a local machine than having two machines send video streams across different dimensions. In other words, sending bytes across different realities was expensive. This was the cost differentiator Chrono Co had arbitraged to take a lead in a the industry, “employing ten thousand of the best time technicians across eight timelines”. Not including the shadow timelines.
Jason switched to a feed of the city. The moon was up, emerging from a cloud. The woman smiled. Zygomaticus minor, and risorius engaged. He committed it to memory. Then he pressed “commit”.
Rewind. Confirm. You can imagine some sort of rewind graphic here, or maybe a pixelation as the video feed reconstitutes, but it was all very anticlamactic. The feeds now just showed a different situation, as if the director had decided to change her instructions and then yelled “action!” for a new take.
“Come here baby,” Chester said, reaching out for the woman’s hand. She looked hesitant. “Sorry I was an asshole.”
“It’s okay,” she murmured. “Come here.”
Their bodies intertwined, space between their faces closed.
“I’m so done being on call,” Jason said.
Ending A He switched off the monitors and got up. On the wall behind him was sketch after drawing, taped on the wall, of people. Lost in reveries, in unbearable pain, and others in euphoria. Some were clients, some were “casualties” as they call them in the time editing industry. About fourty minutes later, a new one went up, and then Jason went to bed.
Ending B Jason was so tired he forgot to turn off the monitors. On them, the couple embraced. The woman’s face changed once Chester couldn’t see it. A tug on on her left zygmomaticus major, followed by a flash of the right procerus. Then the feed cut.
The confirmation preview window had ended.