Assistant
by Mari NessResume
Sidney Smith
Personal assistant
OBJECTIVE:
A position where I can help an ambitious tyrant seize control of the majority of or entirety of the planet before organizing a mission to conquer all nearby associated sentient worlds. Willing to relocate, torture enemies, bring the universe to the brink of destruction, and make coffee. Able to operate multiple restricted and highly illegal technologies and a gourmet espresso machine.
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE:
2145-ongoing Administrative assistant, Tithon Welding Corporation.
Typed. Answered phones. Booked appointments. Used an illegal Rollins-Detrich Time Warper to torment the mind of Ms. Lathen, general supervisor of the customer service team, and also to keep everyone in the office provided with top quality donuts.
You must get me out of here.
2144-2145 Personal assistant, Targon Associates LLC.Assisted in the arrangement, organization and planning of the assassinations of government and private interests on the behalf of clients, often at 20% under budget. List of regrettable removals provided upon request. Helped create a new PR campaign. Designed a new 3-D company newsletter. Mastered espresso making. Dreamed about the past.
2132-timewarped-2144 Assistant time shifter, Andeler Militia.The timing on this job is a bit tricky, since the Rollins-Detrich Time Warper Machine was finally perfected a year after I started the job. The machine was almost immediately taken under custody by the Andeler Militia. Forget the media reports you may have read. This was a protective measure. I used the machine. Trust me.
As General McCray's personal assistant, I was immediately given full access to the Time Warp Machine and, less fortunately, to General McCray's demands. He went nuts. You would not believe the luxuries that he demanded from various time zones and periods, and the bizarre souvenirs that he told us to find. He wanted Imhotep's autograph on ancient papyrus. You know. First builder of the pyramids Imhotep. That guy. Far more difficult than you can imagine. It wasn't just that I didn't speak the lingo, or that my Korean features didn't exactly blend in with the local population, or that this whim hit before the Dydrex translation machines had been perfected - to be truthful, I don't even trust them now. It was the clothes. I'm telling you, you haven't suffered until you've tried to put on scratchy linen shifts, cleared your throat, and tried to go up to Imhotep - the Imhotep - and ask him, in excruciatingly bad Egyptian, if he'd sign a document or two, knowing if you failed, McCray would have you executed the instant you returned, or even earlier, while wondering, the whole time, if that linen shift was going to fall off. Ancient Egyptians may have been innovators in their own way, but their clothing sucked. To this day I barely know how I did it - I retold some story or other I remembered from Bible class as a kid, something about Hebrew wanderings and plagues, and that must have either impressed him enough or convinced him that I was harmless, one or the other. But I got the autograph. I'm the assistant. I get everything I need to. Even the signature of Eva Braun on April 30, 1945. I'm that good.
Honestly, though, the time souvenirs were the least of our problems - annoying, certainly, exhausting, time-consuming in the fullest sense of that word. And confusing. When McCray wanted a chocolate cup from Montezuma's own collection - he was a bit of celebrity hound, if you haven't gathered - and then sent us back a second and yet a third time because the cups were never the right color, my own time sense was so damaged that I found myself apologizing to my significant other for cheating on her one week before I'd actually done so. Which meant another emergency use of the R-D. But I digress.
Because that wasn't, as I've noted, the worst.
The worst - what led to the media attention, the scandals, the screams, the sudden disappearance of the entire peanut crop and later, the peanut family - was McCray's obsession with what he called DNA manipulation and the rest of us called just plain killing, even if it was the sort of killing that you had to use an R-D to accomplish. He was convinced he could rule the world if he could just eliminate every ancestor of every one of his enemies - but far enough in the past so that no one would guess about the time sliding so that he couldn't be prosecuted. And - for his own security - he ensured that he kept a TimeSensor on him along with at least two separate webcams watching and analyzing his movements so that if it came down to it, he could prove that he hadn't been there - back in the past, that was, that he'd lived his whole life forward. But that didn't change the obsession, the tracing of genetics, the list of ancestors that he kept on the wall, the gleam he'd get when he'd tell us to go back.
We read him science fiction stories galore showing him the problems with this. Showed him a couple of Star Trek episodes here and there - you know, the classic ones, the ones where Kirk and Spock or Picard or whoever head back in time. When that failed, we ran statistical analyses. We pointed out that when you remove one enemy by removing one ancestor, another enemy with only different ancestors would appear. Or perhaps you'd have almost the same enemy, with only one ancestor changed, enough to change the eye color, perhaps, but no more. We pointed out the multiple, multiple blood lines that would have to be eliminated, the uncertainty of our ancestor analysis; the very real fear that ancestors could be cross-linked, that I could try to eliminate an ultimate great grandmother of Prime Minister Rakesh only to have that great grandmother turn out to be mine: paradox, paradox, paradox. He ignored us, his eyes gleaming. "We can shift to the past and murder a few," he said. "Or set off some nukes now and murder many."
"Or we could just get everyone's ancestors to just happen to be in Hiroshima on a particular day," someone muttered.
If McCray heard that, he didn't answer. "It's your choice," he said. "Any other choice leads to doom."
And really, it wasn't a choice at all, it seemed. Because, leaving doom out of it, truth was, timesliding was fun. Outrageous. Entertaining. We could slide back to Elizabethan England and find out the truth about the staging of "The Winter's Tale" - and yes, they really did drag a bear on stage. Horrible acting from the guy playing the girl, by the way. We could sneak into the White House and listen to Clinton murmur soft things to Monica, -although we never actually did that one. We could play any role we wanted, and any role we had to.
But we had to kill.
Or try to.
And, of course, collect souvenirs.
Naturally, most of my activities at this position are protected by non-disclosure agreements. And even in cases where they aren't, they aren't protected because thanks to the R-D that activity never existed in the first place, and I don't precisely remember it. That is, I do remember it, but only in the hazy half-remembering way that you remember past things that are no longer in the past. You either know what I'm talking about, or you aren't sure, or you are one of my ex-girlfriends, none of whom has ever grasped this in the slightest.
(Important note to potential employers: no woman alive will believe you when you say that you once slept with someone in the past, but that's no longer true and it currently never really happened. Trust me on this.)
But even with the cases protected by non-disclosure agreements, as your potential assistant, I will tell you this:
It doesn't work.
Oh, sure, anyone can step back in time and grab a souvenir here and there - anyone holding an R-D and armed with a Dydrex translation machine, that is. (Seriously. Don't go without one. You never know what language people are going to be speaking. But I digress.) The point is, if you're trying to kill off ancestors of your enemies, the timeline simply won't let you. Either the ancestors will end up marrying with - or sleeping with - other ancestors, leaving their descendants healthy and alive and murdering innocent civilians, or the timeline literally won't let you pull the trigger or drop the dose of poison, as it were; you will try, and suddenly time will shift and slide and you will not be where you thought you were, and when you return, even from the most successful of assassinations, you will find that nothing has changed, that you can only solve the present in the present. I lost track of the attempted murders, the released plagues, the wars, the battles we started, only to return to find that while a host of little things had or hadn't changed, our enemies remained alive and well, still grinning at us, if with slightly altered names or eye colors and I still had to draft orders for bombs to fall for my boss to edit and sign.
That's not to say I didn't accomplish things that I can list here on the resume. This is what I did do: I assisted. I made plans. I scheduled things. Made phone calls. Made things happen. Advised McCray. Flattered him. Spent odd seconds playing 3-D Spider Solitaire. Learned to wear clothes of any time period and place. And most importantly, learned to dream of universal conquest and domination - starting with this world: continuing with this galaxy. If I could have gone to the future to solve things, I would have. But that's another problem, and another story.
2129-2132 Recruit, Andeler MilitiaI killed someone. That's all you need to know. Shortly after that, I became McCray's assistant.
He seemed to like my background.
2122-2129 Odd jobber, assistant, multiple corporations.I should list these, I suppose, every single one. But quite frankly, looking back now, it's difficult to remember all of them. They usually lasted just a few weeks, sometimes a month. In all of them, in each and every all of them, I assisted. Sometimes I assisted with graphic arts; sometimes with research; sometimes with wrestling pigs. I was, I remember, the assistant to a martial arts teacher: my job there was to hand over weapons, one by one, the right weapon at the right moment. When I left, the teacher was almost near tears. No one else had ever handed her the weapons so promptly, so correctly. I was the perfect assistant, she said. I knew. I bowed. That job I remember. But the others? They have become nothing more than brief flashbacks, half-remembered dreams.
And with some it's just confusing: did I really work that job in this time, or in one of my time jumping periods? That job at the pig farm, where I was asked to handle the farmer's cousin, some executive with political aspirations, coming in for a visit? This time, or another? It's all unclear. I try to sort it out by costume, by language, by place, but quite frankly, once you've time traveled as much as I have, one time starts blending into another. I used to be able to distinguish Victorians from Renaissance nobles; now I'd have to look up their costumes to be sure.
I know this: I was always the assistant, never the boss. I stood by people's sides, ready and anxious to help, or in the desk just outside their offices, a little less ready and anxious to help. Always, always, I assisted. Sometimes I typed. Or made coffee. I hadn't yet managed the perfect cup of coffee yet, but I was getting close.
EDUCATION:
None, really.
But look at the rest of the resume.
REFERENCES:Most references are moldering in their graves. Attempts to reconstitute DNA memories or reanimate the dead for an explanation or outline of their experiences with me can be arranged.
Serious enquiries only, please. I'll bring the espresso machine.
©Mari Ness
Mari Ness lives in South Florida, a slave to the dictates of two cats she was foolish enough to allow through the door. Her previous work has appeared in Reflection's Edge, Antipodean SF, Susurrus Magazine, Clean Sheets, Ibodi, and various anthologies. She keeps a blog at livejournal.