Free Time Is Broken by Samuel Clark Page A

and conditions, and all this before he'd even agreed to take the job. The job that didn't exist, the five job interviews that never happened, the IQ tests and aptitude tests he didn't take. “If you take this job, you will no longer exist, you will have no country, no nationality, no friends, no acquaintances, there is no job, there is no you.” Officially he had died in a plane crash- British Airways flight- BAW2673, from Nice to London Gatwick. They never referred to him by his name. He was told not to make new friends, cut off all contact with old friends and if possible, not to even speak with any one. He had his groceries delivered and anything else he needed he would have to request in writing, and post to a post office box. This was the toughest part of the job, the loneliness, the isolation. He had found it surprisingly easy to forget his own name, the longer he spent not using it, not seeing it written down in any form, the more it disappeared from his memory. Once he dared to go out for coffee on the south-bank, the B.F.I. Southbank bar, the only person he spoke to was the waiter who served him and even then it was just short monosyllabic sentences and 'thank-yous'. The morning after that he was given a warning, a threat against his life, but written in implied terms and phrases.
    This wasn't a job he could just quit, they told him that from the outset. At first he thought it was M.I.5 or M.I.6. a secret service appointment, or ministry of defence, it wasn't until later, until he'd said 'yes' and had gone through the day to day tasks that he realised this was beyond all that, this, was something else. Even now, he still wasn't sure of the big picture.
    His assignment was three fold- Find a girl called Emilie Du Chatalet, find a mathematician called Thomas Abbt. Manipulate the situation to our advantage.
    An easy task on the face of it, it was just a matter of searching voter registration lists, pulling up tax records, medical records, type in the name and let the computer search the database and he would be done. They would send out field agents to her address and that was it, onto the next assignment. It wasn't until he actually did it that he came to realise the job was infinity more complicated. The phone numbers kept changing, the addresses kept changing. One day, Emilie was located in Paris, he'd put the call out to the field agents only for them to report back- failure to locate target. An old woman was living in the apartment he had specified. The next day she was located in Berlin, another day and she was living in the Swiss Alps, the next week she was living in Venice. He'd put the call out again, and again they would report back- failure to locate target. Just those four words.  
    The same went for Thomas Abbt, a mathematician studying at Paris Dauphine University. The next day, he was a Ph.D in physics, lecturing at the same university while researching The Theory Of Everything . He was 23 years of age then 43, then 33, then there was no record of him at all. There had been no trace of Abbt at all in the following months. He was never born, there were no records at the university, nothing. Had he disappeared off the planet? Had he died? Did he even exist? Had they just made him up? Nothing about these two targets remained stable or consistent and he began to think he might be going mad, that none of this was real, that it was brought on by the strict rules surrounding his life outside of the job. He made requests via the P.O. Box address. If he could just get a better handle on the context, he might be able to do the job better, he might find these two people more easily. Just one meeting with- whoever was in charge. He received no reply. He was on his own.
    He'd given up trying to find out why these two people were so important. You can only hit so many brick walls, ask so many questions, make investigations that lead nowhere, before you give up. His tolerance level for dead-ends had peaked and he had