He woke up. 4:46 AM, the numbers on the old LCD display slowly came into focus. The hospital room smelled as clean as it always had. White sheets, white curtains, and a neatly made white bed.

“I need to get out of here” he thought, jumping up and changing out of his gown.

James Brighton, 34 years, 180cm, 75kg, black hair, green eyes, and an abundance of more relevant medical information was listed on the chart at the end of his bed. Squinting at it in the pre-dawn hours, James threw it down the trash chute, packed his bag, and made the bed with neat hospital corners.

“At least I’m getting better at something,” he said to an empty room. He walked over to the curtains, moved them aside and opened the window.

The door opened, and a tall woman in a long dark coat walked in.

“I can never figure out if you’re wearing anything under that,” James remarked from the open window, curtains billowing around him.

She stared back at him from behind her thick framed red glasses, wordlessly.

“You probably aren’t, right? Tell me you aren’t, come on, it’d be fun.”

But she didn’t, instead she slowly raised a gun towards James, shot him, and watched him fall 20 meters to the pavement.

The car smashed into the water so hard the river might as well have been a parking lot. The windshield shattered, sending glass shards into the white leather seats. Two men in suits stood on the bridge watching it slowly sink to the bottom of the river, until the only thing that was visible was the reflection of the sunrise, and a duck.

“I don’t think that duck was there any of the other times we did this.”

“Does it matter James? The car still goes into the water, from the bridge, I don’t see the problem here.” The two men picked up their bags and started walking.

“I still don’t understand why you go through the trouble of wiping the bloodstain off my seat if we’re just going to do this anyway.”

“James, it’s the principle of the thing, the principle. I want you to respect my belongings, James, and if I don’t wipe it every time, you’ll think you can do whatever you want with my car since we’re just going to drive it off a bridge.”

“Why do we even ditch your car there every time? Seems like a nice enough car.”

Arthur stopped. He turned to look at James. “What do you mean, this was your idea, right? Wasn’t this your idea?”

“Was it? I don’t remember saying anything about it. You were always the one driving and you just always did it.”

“Well I guess that explains it then, you just haven’t figured out why we need to do that yet.” They kept walking.

“Have you tried not ditching your car in the river?”

“Not that I know of, I’m fairly certain we have always left the car there and walked.”

“So how do you know that’s what we’re supposed to do?”

“You seemed to have a good reason for it, but you wouldn’t tell me.”

James thought for a minute, “Well, no use arguing with myself I guess.”

“James, if you like, I won’t drive my car off the bridge for my next iteration. Waiting for you to come to my house, driving to the hospital to pick you up, getting murdered in your room, the assault helicopter dicing me to pieces, whether or not I place my 19th century chaise lounge behind the refrigerator for you to land on comfortably, all of these temporal variations are acceptable because we do not know what path we are to take. I simply don’t know which one I should choose. Do you James?”

“Arthur, I think the only thing we’ve established here is that your acceptance for temporal variation makes you quite similar to your mother.”

“But which one should I choose James?”

“Given your relationship to the latter, I’d go with one of the temporal variations.”

“Buffoon.”

He woke up. 4:46 AM, the numbers glowed in the moonless night. White hospital room, clean, disgustingly sterile, and empty. James jumped out of bed, stumbled over to the dresser, and threw on his suit. He made his bed, packed his bag, and stood over by the door.

Footsteps echoed in the hallway.

“And I thought visiting hours were over,” he laughed at his own joke.

He ran back to the bed, threw his chart in the bag, glanced at the clock, promptly flung his bag across the room, and bolted after it.

The door opened, and a tall woman in a long dark coat fell to the floor. James was already there, picking his bag off the floor and pieces of red plastic out of the leather strap. This woman wasn’t as pretty with a broken nose making that kind of a mess all over the floor.

“I really need to learn how to pack lighter,” James mused as he gingerly stepped around her through the door. He glanced back: slacks.

“Guess that answers that question.”

The hallways in the hospital were well lit, even at this time. The rooms mostly empty, save for a handful of patients, according to the decaying plaques by each door. The blue tiled floor responded excitedly to each movement of James’ Oxfords.

“I still can’t believe they kept us in such a shitty place,” James spat on the floor and walked into the empty reception area.

The old beige chairs of the lobby stared back at him and the rack of old periodicals on the wall behind him. Strolling into the room, James waved at the security camera in the corner and vaulted over the reception desk and the sleeping receptionist. He looked at the desk: old plastic flowers, a picture of someone’s dog in a frame, an old CRT monitor with post-it notes all over it, and a set of files under a florescent desk lamp. He opened the top drawer of the desk, reached in, and grabbed the keys.

The receptionist stirred, a man in his late twenties, obviously not doing his job correctly.

“Man I would hate to have your job, 5AM working as a receptionist in a hospital that never gets any visitors? This job really sucks.”

“What?” The man woke, confused.

“That said, I’m not going to make today any easier for you,” James stated as the heel of his shoe broke the young man’s nose.

“I guess that’s two for two, although it’s not like the odds aren’t in my favor.” The receptionist slumped to the floor as James reached over and removed a file from the middle of the rack.

“And here he is.” The photo stapled to the file showed a man in his mid-thirties, clearly ill, sitting in an old beige chair and smiling. James slipped the file into his bag.

He walked out the side door and stole the young man’s motorcycle.

Dawn broke in Sutton on the morning of March 15th, but Arthur Miles was already awake.

“Expecting a visitor, a cautious man, a cautious man.” He paced back and forth in his study.

A visitor here was nothing new for Arthur, although nothing was new for Arthur. However, in addition to the grey suit, bowler, Swiss watch, and moustache, Arthur Miles wore a look of terror on his bespectacled face.

He walked over to his desk and looked at the pictures in the frames that resided there. Happy smiling faces in every one, a tall man and a large black dog, a graduate, four little girls in tutus, an old woman in a rocking chair.

“WHY AREN’T YOU AFRAID?” Arthur yelled at the happy strangers.

Arthur glanced at the old grandfather clock, 6:15AM, the clock whirred and chimed. Miles left the room as the windows exploded, sending glass shards flying into priceless literature.

The helicopter roared over his immaculate lawn and began aimlessly leveling the old British manor as Arthur struggled to push the 19th century chaise lounge into the garage behind the overturned refrigerator. He threw his briefcase into the open top of his 1973 Aston Martin before walking around to the drivers side and getting in.

“Where is he? Where is he?” Arthur chanted into the steering wheel over the sounds of crumbling stone, the helicopter, gunfire, and the occasional explosion. He checked his mirrors and opened the garage door.

A motorcycle roared into the garage and smashed into the fridge while the chaise lounge broke loudly under the force of the well dressed man flying into it.

“You’re LATE” Arthur roared from behind the wheel of his car honking madly at James.

“We haven’t even met yet, you crazy bastard.” James said brushing the dust off his suit. “Where’s my bag?”

“It’s in the freezer. I hate you.”

“Geez, geez, yeah I get it already,” James dutifully pulled his bag out of the broken appliance and hopped into the car.

“Why do you always insist on stepping over the door and onto the seat? Do you have any idea how many times I had clean that bloodstain off the leather?”

“Why do you keep the stock photos in those piece of shit picture frames you collect?” James shot back. “Whatever man, lets just get out of here.”

“You know, James, I never did like you: you’re too careless, we should have been done by now. You know we should have been done by now.” Arthur crashed through his topiaries and roared out onto the street.

“You know, you really haven’t gotten any better at driving.” James complained, pulling shrubbery out of his hair. “Maybe if you didn’t have to know everything beforehand we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

“The bureau’s going to be upset, James.”

“Why the fuck should I care about those guys? They don’t even care about themselves. Do you know what my last payment from the bureau was? A bullet and a long fall onto cold pavement.”

“I don’t believe you, James, as far as I know the bureau doesn’t pay anyone.” The car sped through the early morning traffic weaving through the cars at breakneck speeds.

James sighed, “Well I assume by now you know what they want us to do, right?”

“Of course, I always know what I’m doing, James.”

The car plunged through the barricade and flew off the bridge.

James woke with a pounding headache and tried to look around the room. White sheets, white walls, blue tiled floor, white curtains, disturbing scent. A clock reads 4:46AM on the bedside table.

“Where am I? Is this a hospital?” The florescent light in the hallway illuminated a small rectangle in the middle of the floor, which began to spin. The pain in his head answered his questions with a swift return to unconsciousness.

James woke again at daybreak, the pain was still there, he looked at the clock: 6:25AM.

“Finally up? Although I guess this is the time we’ll always meet.”

James looked around for the source of the voice.

“Over here.”

A tall, blonde, mustachioed man stood in the corner looking at him.

“Who are you?” James asked.

The man walked over to James. He was well dressed, a sharp grey suit with an expensive looking watch poking out, small circular glasses, and a bowler hat. He leaned over and James looked into his deep green eyes, “My name is Arthur, James, and I’m going to be your partner for the mission the bureau has assigned us.”

“Mission? Bureau? Partner? How do you know my name?”

Arthur looked at him, bemused, “If you’re going to question every noun in my statement, there’s really no point to me stating it, now is there? As for your name, it’s written here at the foot of your bed: James Brighton. It also says you have a terrible head injury that you’ll never wake up from, among more irrelevant information.”

James looked at him confused.

“However that’s not the only reason I know your name: I’ve actually met you many times, although you’ve never met me. Starting an hour and a half ago, both of us became agents for the bureau and we are now expected to carry out a mission.”

“Ok, what’s the mission?”

“I know many things, James, but I do not know that. All I know is, or rather, all I know about the bureau is, or rather: Concerning our current predicament all that can be said is, no wait-“

“Holy shit man, just fucking tell me.”

“You and I were assigned a mission and are expected to complete it. The time limit is undefined. Every time we fail, we will return to 4:46AM today. The mission is currently unknown and, probably, incomplete.”

“Why would they assign us a mission without telling us what it is?”

“James, does it matter? Our commanding officers are obviously masters of time and space; we will have ample opportunity to discover what our task is. As your partner in this mission, you and I will meet countless times, and we will remember everything about every previous attempt we made, but we won’t be making every attempt together with the same amount of temporal displacement, i.e. this is my 13,734th attempt at this mission, while this seems to be your first. In fact, by the time the mission is completed, it is not even certain if we will have attempted it the same number of times. The philosophy of the bureau is that with infinite possibility and chance, .”

James blinked, “I’m sorry, how many times did you say you’ve done this?”

“13,734 times”

“13,734 out of… countless, seems like we’ve been making good progress.” James let out a groan, “Ok, well then, I’ll bite, what are we usually doing at around this time, good buddy?”

“We’re usually speeding out of Sutton in my car at this time.”

“And why aren’t we doing that now, then?”

“I’ve already accepted this iteration as a failure, so I decided I might as well fill you in on the details, in fact, our failure should be evident right about now.”

The door opened, and a tall woman in a long dark coat walked in.

“And who are you? Are you from the bureau, too? Finally gonna tell Arthur what the fuck you want him to do? Are you even wearing clothes under that?”

She looked at them coldly from behind her thick plastic frames and outstretched M1911, then pulled the trigger twice.

8AM, London, the streets are crowded with the most useful portion of the populace. The sun has been up, but the hazy fog over the city doesn’t dare let any light through to the depressing Monday morning occurring below it so that there is no chance a literal brightening of the day could brighten the day of these people.

A fine man in a fine suit sits at a fine table drinking rather fine tea, he looks over to his partner, “James, do you ever question the sentience of clouds?”

His partner, also clad in a grey suit, looks at him with an exasperated expression, “What the fuck are you talking about Arthur? And why are we here, of all places?”

“Have we been here before, James?”

“No, Arthur, we haven’t, so I really have no idea what we’re doing here.”

“James, have you considered that because we have an infinite number of possibilities laid before us that we should, obviously, take them? Then you should question me when I take you somewhere we have been, not when we are somewhere new.”

James pondered this over his coffee as he looked about. The street was busy and bustling as well as every business on it. The shop they were at had taken much too long to prepare just two drinks, but the two men hardly noticed, they were on a different plane altogether from the impatient mass of people crowding the shop and spilling out onto the street.

“Hey, do you know who that lady is? The exhibitionist who always shows up in my room today.”

“James, I thought you already established that she was wearing slacks.”

“Hey, don’t ruin my fantasy, ok, it’s fine for me to imagine the hot blonde who visits me when I snap out of my coma is only wearing red glasses, stilettos, and a trench coat.”

“Ok then, James, what if I told you that the hot blonde exhibitionist who visits you every today is my sister, Caroline? And that I invited her to this shop to hear her reason for attacking us so consistently?”

“If you told me that I’d have no choice but to ask you for her number” replied James.

“You really are a buffoon, James,” Arthur said, burying his forehead into his palm. Arthur sighed and then looked up, “Ah, here she is now.”

Caroline sat down at the table, and squinted at them from a heavily bandaged face. “Hey Arthur, do you know where my glasses are? I lost them earlier this morning to some douchebag.”

James pulled a handful of red plastic shards out of his pocket and placed them on the table, “You know, this might be a bad time, but can I get your phone number?”

11:15AM, Paris, France. The mid day sun shines down on the luxurious courtyard as tourists mull about trying to figure out how they can take pictures of themselves holding up the glass pyramid. The laughter of children and the distant lilt of accordion buskers fill the air with a pleasant atmosphere. James just hoped the two sounds were unrelated.

“God, I’m tired, why the hell did we drive to the fucking Louvre? I absolutely hate road trips, and your little classic car does not feel good on my ass for five hours. Where did you even learn how to drive? India?” The exhausted James slumped back onto the bench.

“Come on, lets go, why would you complain about sitting for hours and then just want to sit around some more? We’re wasting this excellent opportunity.” Arthur Miles stared at James in disbelief. “This is what happens when I grant your request, I told you last time we wouldn’t take the car off the bridge, so, since we have a car, we might as well go to a destination much farther than one we’ve been to before.”

“I told you already, I haven’t said anything to you about your stupid car, you used to drive it off a bridge immediately, but now you took me on this long-ass trip to bloody France. I’m thinking about having you wreck your stupid car just so I don’t have to sit through that again.” James got up and dusted off his suit. “So, What are we going to do here? Steal the Mona Lisa? Because I can’t think of anything else important enough to require the bureau to come out here.”

The two men in suits walked slowly towards the main entrance. Two 180cm tall men, two grey suits, one briefcase, one leather satchel, one bowler hat, one moustache, and four Oxfords made up the only known branch of The Infinity Bureau.

6:30AM

“And thus marks the end of my 13,734th attempt to complete the mission, and your first attempt to complete the mission.” Arthur explained to a screaming James as the blood crept across the blue tile floor.

The tall woman left the room.

“GOD FUCKING DAMMIT, JESUS, SHE FUCKING SHOT US,” James screamed in agony writhing around on the floor. The nurse, that’s it, he had to push the button to send for a nurse. This was a hospital after all, surely no one dies of gunshot wounds in hospitals.

He looked towards the bed frantically and spotted the red button behind the bedframe. “HOLY FUCKING CHRIST” he continued to exclaim as he dragged himself across the floor towards the opposite wall. All he had to do was make it that last few feet to the attendant button, which looked like it had a reassuring light within the button, as if the button itself would become his red beacon of hope once he had pushed it.

Arthur looked across the room at the messy trail and writhing man on the other side of the room. His last breath was once again a sigh.

“FUCK, ARTHUR, ARE YOU DEAD? WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON.” James frantically struggled to the button, hand outstretched, and pushed it. The light never came on, no one had checked to make certain the long term coma patient’s attendant call button was working. James died in agony at 6:35AM.

4:46 AM, He woke up: the numbers on the old LCD display slowly came into focus. The hospital room smelled as clean as it always had. White sheets, white curtains, and a neatly made white bed. Trembling, he sat up and ran his hand across his face, opened his patient’s gown and felt his chest.

“I need to get out of here” he thought, jumping up and changing out of his gown.

Arthur Miles had been a well-known politician, perhaps better known for his eccentricity than any actual work on policy. The man was only 35, even with his reputation; surely there was nothing he would have been able to accomplish by such an age. He was a man who took on his work at his own pace and came and went as he pleased. Often, the only place you can find Arthur Miles is in his elaborate study. In fact, he had moved his bed into the study, as he found it much more comfortable than falling asleep in his chair. However, even with as good a memory as Arthur Miles’ he could barely remember the last time he slept, which was last night, March 14th. Even the last time he managed to make it to nightfall, tonight seemed an eternity ago.

Perhaps the only thing that kept him going was his best friend, James Brighton, whom he had met just this morning, not one hour ago. The two men were currently walking halfway across a bridge in silence.

“Hey, Arthur,” James broke the silence, he always does that, the bastard, there’s nothing new to talk about yet. “Have you figured out what we’re supposed to do yet?”

“No, James, if I did I wouldn’t have to spend all of eternity with you today. Currently our only leads are today, this morning, and the existence of infinite possibility.” Arthur looked at James, “In fact, it might be useful to say that before we find out what we must do, we must first investigate everything. It would be a shame to squander an opportunity to do just that, wouldn’t it? That’s why the bureau doesn’t tell you what to do.”

“So, what, we’re just going to wander around and go to every place we can at the same time in an effort to find anything at all?” James threw up his hands in exasperation. “How are we even supposed to know what kind of hints we’re looking for?”

“We don’t James, that’s why we have to investigate everything.”

“Everything huh? I guess it would be a waste to squander this opportunity.” James slowed his pace and steered his friend towards a closed door.

“What is this place? Some kind of club?”

“Yeah, for gentlemen, obviously, just look at the sign there. We’re British and in suits, I think that means we qualify. Maybe we can ask other esteemed gentlemen here about… uhhh… everything.” James ushered his friend past the bouncer and into the smoky cabaret.