In the Garden of the Earth, where he himself had received his commission seventy-eight subjective years ago, Jared watched Anne receive her temporary commission and her initial orders.

He, of course, knew what was printed on her orders. He had written them. She began looking through the crowded garden for him.

He sipped his green tea and waited. She would find him.

She walked up, her commission in one hand and her orders rolled up in the other.

"Jared! Hello again, my rescuing angel."

Jared couldn’t keep a warm smile from his face. His trepidation fell away, "Hello, Anne. I see you have done well. Fourth in a class of very talented people."

She held out the orders, "Your doing?"

Jared shook his head, "Not my idea, but a pleasure nonetheless."

"So, where do we start, Kohei?"

"We begin by finishing something I started awhile ago. In the twentieth century covert zone there is paradox that I, along with a previous Sempai, set up to resolve itself out. We will jump to the downstream end and ensure that it does not restore itself."

Anne’s eyebrows lifted, "Interesting. What is its antecedent?"

Jared shrugged, "I don’t have a clue. It appears to be unique to stream 700 and doesn’t exist in any other known universe. Whatever caused it is covered up by the loop. Perhaps we shall discover it at the bottom end. It takes the form of a series of shortcuts, with a burst of two openings at each end of a seventeen-year loop. The paradox centers around a man named Mike Stafford and his family."

MJ lived in the desert, in that too small of a town, out on one of the desert’s many empty lakebeds. It was all he knew, and he loved the desert. His father often told him it was a place of magic and beauty, and he agreed.

It was night in the wide Searles valley. The star field overhead wheeled its silent constellations in bright witness. MJ traveled the road he had always traveled across this valley. He couldn’t wait to get home and show his parents what he had bought. He was not thinking about the road at all.

He had just spent his last dime on an old Ford, a restored Mustang with new paint, trading in his faithful old truck for next to nothing. He knew it was not all that great of a car, but it was just like the one in the old pictures of his parents. The one his dad had sold when they bought the white knight. He couldn’t help but grinning stupidly as he anticipated the look on his dad’s face when he saw the car.

He gunned the engine, just for the hell of it. It’s old six-cylinder engine sounded ‘trucky’, in spite of fairly new glass pack mufflers. The only non-restored equipment on his shiny yellow car was a CD player built into a cheap new Kenwood radio. The previous owner had made a cut in the dash to mount the oversized unit, but it looked at home where it was, in the place of its original pushbutton radio with its two large knobs. Mike was glad to have his music to listen to out here in the emptiness, after all.

"Ventura highway, in the summer sun -" he sang the words to the CD as he cruised down his highway, half dreaming of some never seen California coastal town. The sun was an hour past setting. He grinned again as he thought how surprised his mom would be when she saw this car he bought.