Thousand+ Words for Nov. 29, 2025

The Park Looked Perfectly Normal for a Thursday Afternoon. There were Mothers Sitting....

The park looked perfectly normal for a Thursday afternoon. There were mothers sitting on benches watching their children play; there were old men feeding the pigeons and squirrels; there was a young couple sitting on a blanket spread on the grass. Birds sang, the sun shined, clouds devoid of the threat of rain drifted by. No one noticed the man sitting on a bench in the shade of a tree behind large, dark sunglasses.

He had an earpiece in one ear–passersby no doubt imagined that he was simply listening to music, perhaps on his lunch break from work. It was about the right time–the banks and lawyers’ offices broke for lunch around this time, and the man looked as if he could be a banker or a lawyer.

He had studied this time period carefully for many years, and had practiced wearing the clothes and adopting the mannerisms of these people, and he was good at it. Still, no need to take chances–thus the glasses and the tendency not to talk to strangers, although he regretted not being able to do so freely. It would have been such a wonderful opportunity to learn about the people and events of this time.

But that would be somebody else’s job.

He checked his watch and studied the people around him from behind the glasses. It was still fifteen or so minutes from the identified intersection, but these things were never perfectly precise, and it could take place as much as three or four minutes one way or the other.

He watched as people passed by: two teenaged girls dressed in the same sports uniform, a mother pushing a child in a stroller, and then a woman walking a large black dog. As the woman with the dog approached, the dog’s gaze locked on him and he sniffed, then froze. The woman walking him was talking on her phone animatedly and didn’t notice that the dog wasn’t coming along until the leash got to the end of its reach. The woman turned around and considered the dog with a puzzled look. “Hold on a minute, Louise," she said into the phone. And then to the dog: "Hey, come on."

The dog stood his ground, staring at the man sitting on the bench and the bench. A low whine was starting from the dog’s throat. “I'll call you back, there’s something wrong with Pablo,” she said into her phone. Then she slipped the phone in her pants pocket and stepped back to where the dog was standing.

The whine was increasing now as the dog took a single step toward the bench. “Pablo!” the woman said sharply. “What’s the matter with you, boy?”

She put her hand on the dog’s neck, and he pulled away from her. This disturbed the woman a little bit. “I’m so sorry,” she said to the man. “He never does this.”

“That’s all right,” the man said.

At the sound of the man’s voice, the dog gave a single deep bark, and the woman became even more disturbed. “Pablo!” She gripped the leash and took him the other direction, back down the sidewalk from where they had approached. “I’m sorry,” she repeated over her shoulder as she led the dog away.

This time, the man remained still, and in a few moments, they were gone.

Dogs had been a special topic of discussion in the training that the man had undergone as preparation for this mission and others like it. There were no dogs in the man’s world–a virus manufactured in a South African laboratory designed to attack and kill rabbits had mutated to attack dogs instead, and the resulting epidemic had killed every dog on the planet. The last one had died in 2440, the same year the man had been born. He was uncomfortable with dogs; he didn’t understand the appeal of these large, strong, aggressive, territorial animals, and he much preferred cats, especially his own cat, which was engineered to do a variety of household tasks in addition to being devoted to him to the exclusion of all other animals. Cats had lost even the instinct to mate or to care for their own young. These instincts had been bred out of them, and when a cat did kitten after the artificial insemination that was necessary to bring a cat to this condition, the tiny offspring had to be machine-reared. He liked cats.

But dogs and the appeal of them was incomprehensible to him.

He looked at his watch again, and the indication there told him that he was now in the zone for the operation.

He stood up and looked around him, listening to the musical tones playing in his ear. It wasn’t a song; it was a signal, a complicated, overlapping pattern of sounds that was only a click or two away from being a language until itself. He had spent a good deal of time studying and learning this language, and he interpreted it without difficulty.

Then he saw Target A: a teenage male wearing a button-down shirt with the tail out and some sort of odd chain that dangled from his belt in the front and went into his left back pocket. The boy was coming down the same sidewalk that the woman with the dog had come down, but unlike the dog and despite the fact that the man was now standing, the boy seemed not to notice him at all.

With his peripheral vision, the man maintained an awareness of the other side of the sidewalk. Target B would be coming along any moment now. The man’s mission for today was to prevent an interaction between A and B which otherwise would take place on this sidewalk. As a result of the interaction, a chain of events would begin which would end in the destruction of a major American city by a stolen nuclear weapon in the year 2028–twenty-one years from the present date.

This chain of events had many links and could be interfered with by cutting any of them, but it was thought that this would be the point at which the least amount of collateral damage would be done, and so the man had spent a substantial portion of the last three years preparing for the momentary activity he was about to engage in.

It looked simple, but there were many dangers.

Then Target B came into view, and the man looked back and forth at them, each approaching from his own end of the sidewalk. This was the critical moment, and the man acted. He took off his sunglasses and pretended to drop his arm as he threw them on the grass immediately next to where Target A’s next step would place and bring him into near proximity of them.

The man had practiced the throw dozens of times in the simulator. He had tried it this way and that, and had decided that this was the best placement and location for a technique that he wasn’t overly convinced would work. But that wasn’t his department.

Target A watched him throw the glasses and stopped. The man believed that the boy saw right through his Oops I dropped my glasses routine, but he stuck to the story.

Target B was coming up behind him. “Excuse me,” the man said to Target A. He nodded toward the glasses. “Would you mind?”

The boy moved to pick up the glasses, which now were only inches away from his foot. As he did so, Target B stepped on the grass on the other side and passed them both, continuing on her way.

The boy handed the glasses to the man, and he put them on. “Thanks,” he said and he stepped off in the same direction that Target B had gone, a few yards behind her. He let a beat go by, and then he glanced around to confirm that the boy had continued on his own journey down the sidewalk and into a future that now would not include meeting and eventually impregnating Target B, resulting in a line of descendants that would in due course create the circumstances leading to disaster.

His mission complete, the man turned around and walked back to the bench he had started out on. He reached up and pressed the earpiece in his left ear. He said a single word: Prêt. And then man disappeared.