oh, my job at the time travel agency? well. it's not that interesting. not one of the glamorous ones, you know? I'm in risk assessment. the term in the business is "grief actuary," not yet anyone outside the agency calls it that. I mean, what does that even mean, right? yeah, so, it's like... you know the "would you kill baby Hitler" dilemma? comes up all the time. and the thing is, sure, it's real easy to kill a newborn. like, extremely easy. extremely difficult to overstate how simple it is to put the kibosh on a baby and make it look like natural causes at basically any point in human history. sorry, that's grim. anyway, sure, then you've stopped the one person from doing their one thing. history changed, or it doesn't. sometimes there's another guy who'll do it instead. that's a whole other department is risk assessment. we call 'em the suck squad, you know, because they deal with historical vacuums? sorry, not funny. we don't actually call them that very much. I mean, it's the name of their company kickball team, but—whatever. so you have to look at instances of the timeline immediately filling in the gaps with some other guy, sure, but you also need to look for big, unwanted changes. the ripples. the thing is, clean as it is to just kill a baby—sorry, you asked—there's still, you know, the surviving family. the parents and all that. losing a child, it does things to people. so you have to run the numbers and figure out, okay, maybe we assassinate Baby So and So, but then what happens to their parents? maybe their dad still had a patent to file, or their mom still had a poem to write. and now they don't, because they're catatonic with grief. they're drunk. they killed themself. and that doesn't seem as important as the big thing that Baby So and So was going to do, but it adds up. maybe that patent led to the airplane. maybe the poem inspired the writer who inspired the writer who inspired the writer who wrote something else. so it's tricky. important work, though. and I get to feel good about what I do, because sometimes I go home and I get to say, man, those 15th century merchants would be thrilled to know that I signed a report today that says killing their son isn't worth it. sure, yeah, sometimes it goes the other way, but most of what I do is saying no. I'd say it's a solid 20:80 ratio, in favor of dismissing the baby homicide proposals. so most people are lucky. and the ones who aren't, well, that's the cost of preserving the timeline, baby. the ethics wonks can complain about it all they want, but a job's a job. and I'd take this over patrolling all those idiot time tourists trying to get their asses on the Titanic any day.
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