Borrowed Time by Jack Campbell Page B

Interventionists, Tom and Pam, are back. Literally. They’re back in 1775. There was a shot fired that year in Massachusetts that started the American war of Independence. We still don’t know who fired it, but we may be about to find out. And Tom has to decide whether he is willing to move “up” or lose his chance at changing his own history. This story was inspired by helping my youngest son with his homework on the American Revolution. Those old weapons put out a lot of smoke when they fired. Why didn’t anyone see where the shot came from that day on the field at Lexington?

These Are the Times
    Like different people, some places and times in the past attract a lot more attention than others. Sometimes a particular there and then only needs a few Temporal Interventionists dropping by before every question is pretty much answered. Lady Godiva, for example, who really did do her bare-back ride, but no one who saw her picture in action once wanted to see it again. They probably forgave the taxes just so she’d put her clothes back on.
    Other places get a fairly constant stream of TIs either trying to change things for their clients or trying to collect information from the past. It’s hard to visit Washington, DC anytime during the first three centuries of the United States, for example, without tripping over fellow TIs.
    Then there’s very specific there and thens, places and times where something special happened, a turning point, and everyone wants to be there.
    Like Boston, Massachusetts, in April, 1775 CE.
    I’d landed what should have been a nice, simple job. No Interventions this time by someone wanting to ensure Great-Great-Great-etc.-Uncle Ned made it to Lexington Green so they’d have a hero in the family instead of an ancestor who’d stayed in bed with a hangover that morning, or someone wanting to murder Paul Revere or poison his horse. That stuff could get hazardous, especially with so many TIs from different centuries clustered in this here and now all trying to either carry out their own Interventions or stop someone else from achieving their Intervention.
    There wasn’t anything dangerous in my job description. I was supposed to jump back uptime before sunset on the 18 th , well before serious shooting started, and any travel by me near decision points or critical individuals would be finished well before then. No, all I had to worry about was being caught in the crossfire between TIs fighting before that time to either create or block Interventions. Unfortunately, this here and now had a lot of crossfire, and as a TI myself I looked entirely too much like one of the combatants, so I stayed as alert as anyone else who knew a secret war was underway around them. That’s aside from the fact that I was trying to blend in with the locals, who were also ready and willing to commit potentially homicidal actions against each other.
    I’d been sent back by the Virtual City project, whose latest plan was to record everything said and done in Boston and the nearby surrounding area on 18 and 19 April 1775. Important places, like where the Sons of Liberty had met, had long since been bugged so you could get detailed transcripts of everything said by anyone of any importance in the city on those days. But the Virtual City project aimed to create a visual and auditory record of the entire place and time. Once all of the data from the thousands of bugs was integrated, individuals several centuries from 1775 would be able to “walk” down the streets of this here and now, go into just about any building, and hear and see what had actually happened to anyone, not just the famous people.
    Historians loved it, people who enjoyed soap operas loved it, privacy advocates screamed bloody murder and pointed out that people farther uptime could be doing the same thing to us. But the law said no such project could include any living person, so not enough people who were alive objected to it. And like every other TI, my