He looked at his watch.

3:45 PM.

He couldn't believe he was doing this.  The woman entered the office as if she had been waiting outside, which she probably was.  She seemed to be in her thirties with a latte-toned skin and coffee dark hair.

Even now, Drew could feel the regret border on anxiety.  This woman came into his morning office hours ranting and begging him to listen to an admittedly unbelievable tale she had.  She wanted him to listen to her talk about some weird delusion of hers.  She wasn't a student but she seemed to know an abnormal amount about Drew.  He considered calling campus police until she offered him three hundred dollars out of her purse.  

Payment for his ear.

At thirty-five Drew still wasn't any closer to tenure, had suffered through two divorces, a DUI, and is still paying off his student loans.  He finally had to bite the bullet and work on the family farm during summer breaks.  

Getting three hundred bucks to listen to a somewhat eye-catching woman wasn't the worst thing that could happen to him.  Hell, he used to do it for free at the pub all the time.  

The woman took a seat.  

"So you’re a future lady."

"Technically you’re a historical figure, but essentially that's correct from your perspective."

"I see,” Drew sneered a bit.  Nothing like starting off the conversation all condescending.  “And you’re here… to warn me?"

"No, not really.  I'm hoping you can help me break a glitch I'm trapped in."

"A glitch?"

The woman smiled.  Smiled as though she were talking to a child learning about the birds and the bees for the first time.

“It's akin to the film Ground Hog Day.  Scratch that.  It is exactly the film Ground Hog Day.   That's one of the things I love about this period, by the way.  The visual story-making is really an event.  The TV forces you to sit and pay attention.  Addicting I guess, but a great way to absorb the culture.”

The woman saw that she was losing Drew’s attention.
“Anyways, like in the movie, I wake up in my bed, go about the day however I wish—

maybe I sit in a Starbucks all day reading trashy novels, maybe I rob a gas station and spend my loot at the Riverboat before getting arrested, but no matter what, no matter what I do, whether I'm living or dead, at 4:03 PM I suddenly wake up the previous day at 3:34 AM in my bed at the Holiday Inn Express, room 301.  By my estimates, I've been in this temporal loop for three years, seven months.”

Drew decided to just stare blankly.  Unimpressed.

“I think it’s been three years.  It’s hard keeping track, I have nothing to record the passage of time with that suddenly won't be erased the next day.”

“That’s a pretty… Murray predicament,” Drew said.

The woman looked at him with contempt before choosing to ignore the snark. 

"Yeah.  I've heard of cases like mine before.  They call them period glitches.  For some reason, a malfunction occurs in the temporal virus we're injected with and instead of maintaining a continuity in the general time era, I loop back to my point of arrival.  I'm just lucky the hotel clerk never gave out my particular room today.  For a while it seemed like an early retirement.  Warm bed at a hotel serving free breakfast.  Things like that were hard to come by growing up.”

“Which was where, exactly?”

“Some shanties in Arkansas, along the Gulf coast.”  

“The Gulf coast?” Drew said, visualizing his pretty keen knowledge of US geography.

“Oh yeah, sorry.  The Mississippi Delta pretty much floods and expands the Gulf of

Mexico northward up to Arkansas and Tennessee.  Louisiana pretty much doesn't exist anymore.  Other places too.  Huge areas in China, India, Europe.  Florida is gone.  Hah!  One day I took a trip to Disney World just to say I went to that ruin.  Had to rob three people to find one that wouldn’t get me arrested.  Took seven days to plan out how to get the cash for the plane and ticket.  By the time I got in I was too exhausted to give a damn.”

“I see, and when is this flooding supposed to occur?” Drew asked.  Feeling as though he might as well indulge the fantasy.  See if there were any holes to poke.

“Well, it happens gradually over two centuries.”

“Which is where you’re from?”

“When.  A little further but yeah.”

“And what year is that?”

“Between 2254 and 2257.”

“Between those years?  That doesn’t make much sense,” he said with a slight sneer.

“2254 was my departure date but if my virus was suddenly disengaged I would be teleported back into real-time given the length of my absence, so it would be around 2257 or 58.”

“Interesting... So you don't just go in and come back in the same breath.”

“No, temporal mechanics doesn’t really work like that.  Real-time is still occurring in my absence, however long I'm here will be the same length of time from my departure date.”  

“I see, and why don't you just disengage this… virus?”

“I can't do it alone.  Someone has retrieve me with antibodies stored in their organic pouch.”

“Uh huh… and you don't have one of these pouches?”  

“I do, but the antibodies I have are designed for my retriever’s virus as his are designed for mine.  The strains are different for us both so that the antibodies don't hinder the temporal departure.  Or the continuity.”

                “So… I’m confused.  Why doesn’t your… time send somebody to retrieve you?  To give you these anti-bodies?”

            “That’s the paradox of this nightmare.  Real-time is still occurring for me, and it’s occurring in the present, or by your standards the future, but they’re still treating it as if the continuity still exists.  Right now, they’re just waiting for my mission to complete and for me to arrive at the proper coordinates.  As soon as the retriever gets there, he’ll be stuck without my antibodies.  They’ll send another retriever, but that’s going to take some time and meanwhile they’ll have to investigate my disappearance.  First they’ll check the historical records for any traces of me.  They won’t find it due to the glitch.  Then they’ll send a team to hunt for me, trace the records of this era.  When they don’t find me they’ll head back and they’ll start calculating the odds that I’m in a glitch, gone AWOL, or dead.  Once they decide I’m in a glitch, they’ll have to guess what specific time period I’m stuck in.  My mission was supposed to be about four years long.  That’s one-thousand, four-hundred, and sixty days to sift through.  Some people have been in glitches for decades.”

            “That’s shitty.”

            “You’re telling me!”

            “So why are you telling me all this?  Why hand an agro-professor a roll of cash to tell me your story?”

            She gives him a look of somber defeat, “I don’t really know.  Partly out of desperation, today was particular nerve-wrecking.  You have no idea what it’s like to constantly know that you are going to achieve nothing.  That whatever you do, no matter how you try to get out of something, or no matter how good you might get at your job, your hobby, or anything, that the next day it won’t be there.  But, then again it’s not really the next day.  I don’t know, I’m hoping for some miraculous chance that your brain will not be a part of this glitch and will continue on through the years as I glitch back.  It’s a fool’s last effort, I suppose.”

“I don’t get it.  What on earth do you think I can do?”

“Well, your name is vaguely familiar in the twenty-third century.  I seem to remember reading a couple of a novels you wrote.  About the future.  Not my future.  We aren’t in a predetermined temporal-loop, so don’t worry about that.  But you did write some science fiction novels about the degradation of the world’s food supply.  Scientifically inaccurate, but the results you were talking about kind of happen.  And of course, the technology you describe is ridiculous.  Nobody mines the asteroid belt,” she says with a grin.  “But that’s neither here nor there.  I was basically hoping you might write my story, and thus your literature would one-day warn me about the glitch.”

            “I’m sorry Ms. Fernandez, I’m no novelist.”

            “Not yet.  You had a white beard in the author section.  You were probably in your seventies when you wrote those books.”

            “Interesting.  So what was your mission here anyways?  Don’t tell me you’re going to assassinate Trump.”

            “Who?”

            “The president.  Sorry.  I guess not.” 

            “Oh, hah.  No.  Changing the past in any significant way would probably change things for the worse.  If I do anything that creates a sliver of a historical alteration, things could be changed so significantly that my mother probably would have made relations with some other juvi in the skee.

            “Skee?  Huh?”

“Sorry, that’s twenty-third century speak.”

“I see.  So what did you come back here for?”

            “Soil sampling mostly.”

            “Soil sampling?”

            “That’s right.  They sent me to take some tests of various soil locales and create time-capsules in known, undisturbed areas.  Need a more accurate control and historical data to figure out what we can do.  I already did most of the work, but have no clue if those capsules still exist.  They haven’t sent me a retriever, so I don’t think they got my messages.  But yeah, the original mission was soil sampling.”

            “Why soil sampling?” 

            “There’s a pretty huge famine going on.  Worse than the typical famine.  Fertilizers, greenhouses, agro-towers, they all seem to be yielding half as many crops as they used to and its dwindling every season.  All of what you call livestock has been completely consumed, wildlife is nonexistent, and even the precious beetles we get most protein from are declining in numbers.  Cannibalism is pretty popular again, but that doesn’t lead to a very nutritious diet.  So we need historical-data to figure out what the hell happened.  In the present, the ph levels, the fertilizer, the global temperatures, generally all accounted for.  Even when most major cities are flooded, and desert expansion is twice as large as it is now, it has always been accounted for by the greatest minds and we still can’t figure out why it’s not enough anymore.  Not for eighteen billion mouths.  A billion of which will have supposedly perished by time of my return date.” 

            “Wow.”

            “It’s not the reason time travel was invented.  But it sure as hell a good reason to keep using it.”

            “I’d say,” Drew said with an air of gloom.  “So why was time travel invented?”

            “Not sure.  It was a secret at first.  Most of the department heads think it was for a last-option military super-weapon.  Like if nuclear war broke out and they could erase it.  Some more conspiracy driven people think it was designed for population control, limit the effects of the climate fall.  Orchestrate catastrophic events in the past to limit the size of the twenty-third century population.  World War Two comes to mind.  The 1918 flu pandemic.  Mao Zedong’s reign.  It’s all rather childish speculation and doesn’t matter much.  Besides, change things on that kind of a scale and its doubtful time-travel is ever invented.”

            “Yeah, weird.”

            “Anyways, just thought I’d try something new.  No telling whether this will work or not,” Fernandez said with a sigh.  She started getting up from her seat.

            “Yeah, um… Good luck I guess.  Oh, one more question?”

            “Yeah.”

            “What happens if nobody gets your samples?”

            The woman looked at her watch.

            3:34 AM.