I followed Jason back through to the office, which was slightly less uninhabited than previously. A old man was rifling through a filing cabinet, whistling vaguely to himself.
"There you are, William." Jason said, causing the man to look up from his rifling and turn around. "You still looking for the Matclock files?"
"If I find out someone took them without signing them out, I will be particularly unhappy with that person." The man said, peering over a pair of round, wire-framed spectacles and glaring beadily at Jason. Then he turned his gaze onto me and, surprisingly, smiled.
"Welcome to the Office, m'dear." He said in a fatherly way. "How are you finding it?"
"Confusing."
"You get used to it."
"William, can you open the door to the Russkoye oil field, please?"
"It's already open."
"Right. Thank you." Jason gestured to me, and led me towards the third and final door out of the office. I nodded amicably at the old man before following.
"We're going to an oil field?"
"Yes. This transmission event went hot last night, and it's top priority. That means our most experienced field staff are out here."
We paused next to the door, and Jason took two white lab coats from a hook on the wall.
"Here." He said, passing one over. "It'll be pretty warm through there, so you might want to leave your jacket here. You can hang your bag up here too - William will keep an eye on it."
I slid out of my jacket and shrugged the lab coat on. After hanging my jacket and bag on a spare hook, Jason pulled the door open and led me through to a room that appeared to have been carved into rock. Inside, the air was heavy and hot, and pressed on my ears uncomfortably.
"You'll get used to the pressure in a moment." Jason said, pinching his nose and trying to breath out. He winced as his ears popped.
"I thought we were going to an oil field?" I asked, copying him.
"We are. We're just haven't arrived on the surface."
"We're underground?" I asked, suddenly worried.
"About 900 meters. There's nothing to worry about - these tunnels are completely safe."
"How are there tunnels down here?"
"We dug them out so we could get to the event."
"Didn't you say you only found out about it last night?"
"We dig tunnels quickly." Still speaking, Jason led me away from the door into the sparsely lit, rock-hewn tunnel. "The event we're dealing with is a particularly tricky one called a paradox loop. At 11:40 last night, a window opened up in the rock which, unfortunately, intersected with the oil field. This window has a partner window which has formed at some point in the future. If it had been entirely within solid rock, it wouldn't have been so much of a problem, since rock doesn't tend to move about much. However, opening up onto the oil field means that oil is passing through to us from the future. Clearly, that presents a problem."
"Wouldn't it just mean that the oil field runs out sooner?" I asked. "I mean, that's a problem in itself, but is doesn't sound paradoxical."
"The paradox is that we don't know how far in the future the partner window is. It could just be a couple of days, in which case there probably won't be much blowback from it. If it's further in the future, however..."
"What would happen?" I asked, as Jason fell silent.
"It's complicated. The future isn't certain, and so these windows open onto a future which it assumes is the same as the present. After all, in the natural progression of the planet, the oil would stay where it was for hundreds of thousands of years. But with human interaction, there may not be any oil around the window by the time we reach the point in time that the partner window is open. That means that the people high above us will have extracted... well, imaginary oil. We've never had a paradox loop blowback on us before, so I don't know what damage that would cause, but I don't fancy finding out."
As Jason finished speaking, we reached a large, cave-like room filled with people and equipment. The room was almost silent, filled with intense thought and the occasional quiet comment. A woman working at a machine with a metronome-like stick on the front looked up, frowned, and hurried over.
"Don't worry Elizabeth." Jason held his hands up placatingly before the woman could speak. "I'm not interrupting. I'm just showing a potential what we do."
The woman, Elizabeth, nodded briskly.
"Alright. Don't disturb anyone, though."
"I wouldn't dream of it."
"And don't go down the access tunnel." She added, nodding towards an opening at the far side of the room. "There's fumes."
"Got it."
Elizabeth hurried back to work, and I watched everything with interest for a while, wondering if I was allowed to ask questions.
"I can't explain many of the machines." Jason told me eventually. "I was a field agent for a while, but paradox events have special equipment, and I never understood it well enough to be part of the paradox team. I do know that, essentially, they are monitoring the amount of oil that's coming through the window, and trying to siphon it off into a contained area so it isn't drawn up by the rigs. Eventually they'll return it through the window, once they manage to reverse the direction, and seal it off."
"What about the window in the future?" I asked.
"All we can do it wait for it to appear. The area will be monitored constantly until it forms. Once we've closed this end, the other end should be easy enough to deal with, but we have to close it down at the right time, because the thing we don't want to happen, other than people mining imaginary oil, is a paradox loop with only one end. Oil would go into it and have nowhere to go. As far as our theories can predict, it would simply disappear from the universe, and that is another situation I don't want to find out about."
"It all seems very dangerous." I said, frowning.
"It's a little dangerous. That's one of the reasons I moved to Continuity. Not that I didn't enjoy working in the field, but I've found tidying up after this lot suits my fussy nature a lot better. And Continuity is safe as houses. We don't move in until the field team has sent out the all clear."
"So, what exactly is it you want to hire me for?"
"There's just two of us in continuity at the moment, and we've been holding the department together just fine, but then again we haven't exactly been pushed hard. The last year or so has been pretty quiet on the events front, and it dawned on me a while ago that, if anything serious happened, we wouldn't be able to cope. We need an extra pair of hands, and I'd rather get someone in now, while things are still quiet, and train them up."
"So you'd train me to... what, cover things up?"
"Yes."
"Why can't you let people know?"
"Because of the chaos it would cause. The world is in enough trouble at the moment, what with the political situation and climate change and bankers with their hands in everyone else's pockets. And if people knew there was this unexploited source of energy out there, how long do you think it would be before someone invented a way to tap into it."
"That would be a bad thing?"
"An overabundance of Normal energy causes unusual things to happen. Unusual by our standards. This paradox loop has been caused by too much energy being supplied to a very localised spot. If people were able to direct it as they pleased..." Jason shuddered. "I'd hate to think what would happen."
"That makes a lot of sense."
"Besides, the main goal of the Office is to determine what damage has been done to the energy source, and fix it. Once that happens, we won't need to worry about events anymore."
"You'll be out of a job."
"I'll live. I don't love my work so much that I'd put keeping my job over the safety of the planet."
There was a sudden movement from two sides of the room. Elizabeth, and a young man focused on a similar machine to Elizabeth, turned simultaneously, drawing the attention of everyone in the room without uttering a word.
"We've detected the frequency," Elizabeth said clearly. "But it's alternating, so we don't have much time. I need stabilizers set up around the window, and access to the containment area."
Two people with hazard suits open to the waist hurried over to the far tunnel, pulling the suits on properly as they went. A third person turned back to her computer and began typing frantically. The rest of the room remained still, attention shifting from Elizabeth to the man who had stood up with her.
"Has the beacon been set?" The man asked. There was a positive reply from someone at the back of the room. "Good. Get it over to containment and prepare to send it through. I want final checks confirmed with me in ten minutes."
The room surged as everyone began to move at the same time. The intense silence was gone now, replaced with industrious efficiency and chatter. I took a step back, awed and feeling superfluous.
"Looks like they're close to wrapping this one up." Jason told me. "Do you want to stick around for the end, or leave now? This won't have an impressive ending, not with the window hidden inside the bedrock."
"I guess we can head back." I said. "I've got more questions, and I don't want to get in the way here."
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