The Ministry of Time: A Novel

CHAPTER ONE

The interviewer said my name, which made my thoughts clip. I don’t say my name, not even in my head. She’d said it correctly, which people generally don’t.

“I’m Adela,” she said. She had an eye patch and blond hair the same color and texture as hay. “I’m the Vice Secretary.”

“Of…?”

“Have a seat.”

This was my sixth round of interviews. The job I was interviewing for was an internal posting. It had been marked SECURITY CLEARANCE REQUIRED because it was gauche to use the TOP SECRET stamps on paperwork with salary bands. I’d never been cleared to this security level, hence why no one would tell me what the job was. As it paid almost triple my current salary, I was happy to taste ignorance. I’d had to produce squeaky-clean grades in first aid, Safeguarding Vulnerable People, and the Home Office’s Life in the UK test to get this far. I knew that I would be working closely with refugees of high-interest status and particular needs, but I didn’t know from whence they were fleeing. I’d assumed politically important defectors from Russia or China.

Adela, Vice Secretary of God knows what, tucked a blond strand behind her ear with an audible crunch.

“Your mother was a refugee, wasn’t she?” she said, which is a demented way to begin a job interview.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Cambodia,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

I’d been asked this question a couple of times over the course of the interview process. Usually people asked it with an upward lilt, expecting me to correct them, because no one’s from Cambodia. You don’t look Cambodian, one early clown had said to me, then glowed like a pilot light because the interview was being recorded for staff monitoring and training purposes. He’d get a warning for that one. People say this to me a lot, and what they mean is: you look like one of the late-entering forms of white—Spanish maybe—and also like you’re not dragging a genocide around, which is good because that sort of thing makes people uncomfortable.

There was no genocide-adjacent follow-up: Any family still there [understanding moue]? Do you ever visit [sympathetic smile]? Beautiful country [darkening with tears]; when I visited [visible on lower lid] they were so friendly.…

Adela just nodded. I wondered if she’d go for the rare fourth option and pronounce the country dirty.

“She would never refer to herself as a refugee, or even a former refugee,” I added. “It’s been quite weird to hear people say that.”

“The people you will be working with are also unlikely to use the term. We prefer ‘expat.’ In answer to your question, I’m the Vice Secretary of Expatriation.”

“And they are expats from…?”

“History.”

“Sorry?”

Adela shrugged. “We have time-travel,” she said, like someone describing the coffee machine. “Welcome to the Ministry.”

Anyone who has ever watched a film with time-travel, or read a book with time-travel, or dissociated on a delayed public transport vehicle by considering the concept of time-travel, will know that the moment you start to think about the physics of it, you are in a crock of shit. How does it work? How can it work? I exist at the beginning and end of this account simultaneously, which is a kind of time-travel, and I’m here to tell you: don’t worry about it. All you need to know is that in your near future, the British government developed the means to travel through time but had not yet experimented with doing it.

In order to avoid the chaos inherent in changing the course of history—if “history” could be considered a cohesive and singular chronological narrative, another crock of shit—it was agreed that it would be necessary to extract people from historical war zones, natural disasters, and epidemics. These expatriates to the twenty-first century would have died in their own timelines anyway. Removing them from the past ought not to impact the future.

No one had any idea what traveling through time might do to the human body. So the second reason that it was important to pick people who would have died in their own timelines is that they might well die in ours, like deep-sea fish brought up to the beach. Perhaps there were only so many epochs the human nervous system could stand. If they got the temporal equivalent of the bends and sluiced into gray-and-pink jelly in a Ministry laboratory, at least it wouldn’t be, statistically speaking, murder.

Assuming that the “expats” survived, that meant they would be people, which is a complicating factor. When dealing with refugees, especially en masse, it’s better not to think of them as people. It messes with the paperwork. Nevertheless, when the expats were considered from a human rights perspective, they fit the Home Office criteria for asylum seekers. It would be ethically sparse to assess nothing but the physiological effects of time-travel. To know whether they had truly adjusted to the future, the expats needed to live in it, monitored by a full-time companion, which was, it transpired, the job I’d successfully interviewed for. They called us bridges, I think because “assistant” was below our pay grades.

Language has gone on a long walk from the nineteenth century. “Sensible” used to mean “sensitive.” “Gay” used to mean “jolly.” “Lunatic asylum” and “asylum seeker” both use the same basic meaning of “asylum”: an inviolable place of refuge and safety.

We were told we were bringing the expats to safety. We refused to see the blood and hair on the floor of the madhouse.

I was thrilled to get the job. I’d plateaued where I was, in the Languages department of the Ministry of Defence. I worked as a translator-consultant specializing in Southeast Asia, specifically Cambodia. I’d learned the languages I translated from at university. Despite my mother speaking Khmer to us at home, I hadn’t retained it through my formative years. I came to my heritage as a foreigner.

I liked my Languages job well enough, but I’d wanted to become a field agent, and after failing the field exams twice I was at a bit of a loss for career trajectory. It wasn’t what my parents had had in mind for me. When I was a very small child, my mother made her ambitions known. She wanted me to be prime minister. As prime minister, I would “do something” about British foreign policy and I would also take my parents to fancy governmental dinners. I would have a chauffeur. (My mother never learned to drive; the chauffeur was important.) Regrettably she also drilled the karmic repercussions of gossip and lying into me—the fourth Buddhist precept is unambiguous on this—and thus at the age of eight my political career was over before it began.

My younger sister was a far more skilled dissembler. I was dutiful with language, and she was evasive, pugnacious with it. This is why I became a translator and she became a writer—or at least she tried to become a writer and became a copy editor. I was paid considerably more than her, and my parents understood what my job was, so I would say that karma worked in my favor. My sister would say something along the lines of: Go fuck yourself. But I know she means it in a friendly way, probably.