Dr. Alice Forth was confused. It was monday morning, she had just sat down in her office, and already she had been presented with a long brown letter sent to her by herself.
As head of the Department of Temporal Anomalies (or when that failed, liaison for the Temporal Anomalies Department), receiving letters from herself was nothing new. She kept in regular correspondence with other timelines, and messages dated ten, twenty, even a hundred years in the future barely qualified as unusual. What was particularly strange about this particular envelope was that it was dated in the past. Her past, too, from her own, well-worn timeline, as familiar to any time traveller as their own skin. A full thirty years prior — 1992, not long after she started her career. Obviously she didn't remember sending it. That would have been far too easy.
Standing up and leaning over her desk, she carefully ran her letter-opener along the edge of the offending oblong, and peeled back the paper: inside, a short stack of A4 sheets sat pressed between numerous glass plates, clamped in place to prevent any folds or creases from interfering. Forth recognised it instantly, from the series of black dots located inconspicuously along the edge (clever) to the slight tear in the third sheet's upper left corner (less so).
AO-T-0014. Several pages of documents regarding itself, moving backwards through time. Her first ever assignment, and currently supposed to be lying in an item locker some 200 miles away. A cryptic crossword clue of a message.
[…]
Lunchtime. A dull, quiet affair at Site-54, where Agents and Researchers alike ate their meals in tense, sullen silence. As the Foundation's primary containment zone for multiple semi- or un-containable Keter-class anomalies, the Site's staff had a tendency to be heavily armed and permanently on edge — no wonder, when a six foot tall humanoid could appear at any moment and fill your bones with cardboard. 3663 had been more docile lately, but it was always worth staying on one's guard.
Forth ate alone in her office, tupperware box of leftover chicken casserole placed carefully next to the letter, which had stubbornly refused to disappear. She loathed the Site, with its daily alarms and constant, knife-edge security, its inhabitants who seemed more like ghosts than people. It had a way of grinding people down, and she took some solace now in the fact that her transfer period would be up the following month.
Back to the matter at hand. The morning's cursory analysis had revealed it was marked with T/5 Clearance which (to her knowledge) only nine people in the world possessed. The first seven were all Overseers, those who could be trusted to understand the nuances of temporal anomalies. The eighth was herself as head of the DoTA, and the ninth, as of her most recent loop-closing scheme, didn't exist.
She froze mid-reverie. There's a thought. She could always talk to Xyank about it. Say what you like about the man, he knew his way around a tachyon, and was probably the only person in existence who might understand her problem. But no, talking with him would require sending a formal actualisation request to the T.A.D., and she'd vowed never to do that again. Too many loose ends, as they say in the business.
It was up to her, then, to puzzle it out. That's fine. She was good at puzzles.
[…]
Miss Alice Forth, Level-2 Junior Researcher, still fresh-faced and eager, stood stiffly to attention. In front of her, […]