4th Class Officer

I thought the hard part would be the moral issue, but I got over that the moment I actually got selected by the Tempus Project to be the one to kill baby Hitler. Much harder than that was recognizing it's a one-way trip since there will be no recognizable future to return to. But hardest of all was the waiting. You psych yourself up to do something that is evil in deontological terms but will have immense utilitarian upshot and you kind of want to get it over with. But realistically you have to train. I expected that would include learning German and how to use the time machine, but they also, for good reason, make you learn stuff like the street layout for Branau am Inn and how to cross the Austrian/Bavarian border. But then even once you have that down cold, they make you wait. Some of it is waiting as the forecast boys double check whether killing baby Hitler still give us WW2 and the Holocaust but this time with a Nazi who was harder to beat because he was sane enough to retreat from Stalingrad in October of 1942 or maybe killing baby Hitler means no WW2 but that also means global communism with a death toll that makes the Great Leap Forward look like a slightly worse than average flu season. But ultimately the forecast boys concluded that in 99.7% of their simulations, killing baby Hitler prevents WW2 (at least in Europe) and generally results in a much happier world so my mission was a green light. But the problem was that so did other missions. It was hard to take at a personal level, but I understood and ultimately appreciated it when the guy tasked with killing baby Bogdan Radić got priority over me. I was OK with that because you kill that guy and not only does Hitler stay in art school but no Bolshevik revolution, no trenches and poison gas, and civilization is generally 32.7% better in the median forecast. But turns out that without Radić, Serbian intelligence just recruited some guy named Gavrilo Princip instead. So that didn't work, but it was worth a try, arguably more worth a try than any other human effort ever. But I didn't take it as well when I saw Michael Tracey studying in the Tempus Project library. I asked him when they were sending him and he told me can't tell you, classified, but I saw him studying a Thomas Brothers street atlas for Santa Barbara county. This sent me down a rabbit hole as what happened then and there that was so worth preventing. I was thinking maybe you stop the Isla Vista mass shooting and you prevent copycat incel shootings but I mean, come on, that's rounding error compared to WW2 and the Holocaust. And then I realized the Thomas Guide was from 2005, which was much too early, and also, why would you send Tracey of all people. Finally, I couldn't take it. I pushed my way past his administrative assistant and asked the reclusive billionaire who funded and leads the Tempus Project, what the fuck is so important in Santa Barbara in 2005 that it justifies taking resources away from my mission? And he said, we just thought it would be really funny for Tracey to cover the Michael Jackson molestation trial.