Account of the Time Raider

The thing about a non-descript book is the fact that it's easily overlooked. For a temporal leverage agent, that can mean that a lot of people don't notice it and therefore it's easy to steal because people don't even realise that it's gone; on the other hand, it's hard to ask people if they've seen it because it might have been in plain view and people just didn't give it a second glance. 

Most non-descript books fit the description because they just aren't very interesting. A single sappy romance novel from a publisher that produces a dozen similar sappy books every month. Number eleven in a series of mathematics textbooks, where the interesting topics have already been covered, while this one is the third book of revision notes. One of the many self-published books of poetry by an author who couldn't get the notice of any publishers (but who believed in the quality of their work, and sank their life savings into a run of books that only sold a dozen copies to family and friends who were being polite). 

Some non-descript books are a bit different. Those are the types of books a temporal leverage agent is often hired to translocate. Remove them from places where they shouldn't be, drop them into other places, or just drop them into places where they'll hopefully never be found again. That's what was meant to happen with the unnamed book with the teal cover and the embossed cover with the dragonfly. One of the Aeons had charged our team with dealing with the twice book before. The first time seemed easy enough, he tracked it to an occult library in the northern suburbs of Brisbane, early 24th century. Eddie couldn't get in, but he was told that it was of paramount importance that the book be destroyed, so he burned the whole building down. A couple of years later it showed up again in the Ritman Library in Amsterdam. On another occasion wew were asked to tear a specific page out of the book, but otherwise leave it intact. The whole thing didn't make sense, it's only a book. Even if it is a book claimed to have been fallen from outside time and space, and even if it does have the handwriting of creatures considered gods, demons, archangels and aeons, it's just a book. How much damage could it do? Most people don't even notice it.

I had a chat once to another temporal leverage agent in the Paradox Bar over on 34th street. She'd been asked by an Aeon to shift it from an Parisian estate sale in the 22nd century to the Rosicrusian Research Library in San Jose in 1917. She'd also heard of other agents handling the book, boucing it across time and space. Apparently, it had travelled through hundreds of sets of hands, existing where it needed to be, and when it needed to be there. No one knows it's whole story. 

It was Hoshi's idea to identify a few key descriptors for the book, and to charge some drone-sprites to monitor the Eternal Archives of the Celestial Bureaucracy. Regradless of when or where aspects of the book might be identified in the timeline, a drone-sprite sends a ping to our database.

One of the bigger ones hit in 1963, in a book by Malaclypse the Younger and Lord Omar Kayyam Ravenhurst, entire pages of the diary were copied verbatim. But the Discordians who followed that book were constantly debating the integrity of the work, or whether to consider it as allegorical, metaphorical, or something else entirely. By the time we managed to track down the specific xerox machine on which the work was first printed, the original diary had moved on. It didn't seem to have much impact on the wider maelstrom of time-space, so we let that ping slide. 

A series of sketches from the book was published in "The Kallisti Protocol", a manifesto circulated on a few errant timelines in the late 25th century. That manifesto had been copied a number of times, often in secretive hidden rooms of exclusive clubs where society's elite considered it a subversive distraction. In most of those timelines, revolutions quickly consumed the members of those societies, and where we managed to trace back the earliest copies of the protocol, they seemed to be copied from a text with plastic 3D printed covers depicting the familiar dragonfly sigil. The leather-bound original was never able to be tracked down. 

It seems to be a piece in a complex game between aeons, and the more a person knows about the book, the harder it is to find.

The biggest ping came from the early 21st century. Someone scanned and uploaded the whole thing to the cloud. We had a specific time, a specific place. I still didn't know how dangerous the book was, but knew that there would be people who'd make powerful trades to get their hands on it, as long as the details weren't publically available to the entire world. That'd destroy the value of the book entirely. So, a two point plan, get the book and disrupt the upload before it spreads too far. 

We started by cutting the power, then breached the house where the upload was happening. Thermo-optics made everything clear, but there were glitches in the tech. Other temporal leverage agents were probably in the vicinity, probably charged by other Aeons to claim it. The timelines were converging here. All over this book? 

I got away with it, but now that I'm looking at the book it's another 3D printed cover, with half the pages torn out, and a few extra pages of the Principia Discordia added in. Someone who hadn't seen the original might be fooled by this, it was a reasonable facsimile... but not the original journal. We scanned the pages and uploaded them to the drone-sprites, we'll find it again.