I knew I was in trouble the moment he flashed his ID. Mitch Butler, T.E.A. Temporal Enforcement Authority. The Time Cops.

 

“How can I help you?” I asked as innocently as I could manage.

 

Butler looked like a typical Fed, the bulldog-in-a-suit variety. He acted like one too. He’d barged into my office, pulled up a chair and sat down in front of my desk without so much as a tap on the door. Now he barked: “You’re Caleb Jenkins, CEO of Precision Weather Predictions?”

 

“That’s me.”

 

“Your company claims to be able to produce a guaranteed, 100%-accurate forecast for any specific place, at any specific time in the future.”

 

“That’s correct. You name the place and time, we can tell you what the weather will be — weeks, months, even years in advance if you’re willing to pay for it.”

 

“And how do you manage that?”

 

“You must realize that’s proprietary information,” I said, mentally crossing my fingers. “We’ve developed revolutionary new forecast algorithms. We can get it absolutely right. The downside is, our techniques require vast amounts of computation. That’s why we don’t offer generalized, widespread forecasts like our competitors. There’s not enough computing power in the world to run our algorithms on that scale. But we’ve found a niche market: focused, hyper-local forecasts for people who really need to know what the weather will be at a certain place and time.”

 

“Like who?”

 

This was safer ground. Our client list was no big secret; in fact we advertised it. Maybe I’d dodged the bullet.

 

“A lot of Federal agencies, for starters,” I told him. “Do you know how much money NASA loses when bad weather makes them postpone a launch? Neither do I — but I know they’re willing to pay quite a lot to make sure that doesn’t happen. That’s our client base: people making long-range plans for expensive, weather-sensitive activities. Major League Baseball. Film companies trying to schedule outdoor shoots. The Armed Forces, for reasons I don’t want to know about. You get the idea. People who have a critical need for an accurate, long-range forecast.”

 

Butler stood up, placed both fists on my desk and leaned forward, looming over me. “And how exactly do you provide that?”

 

Uh-oh. Mister T.E.A. wasn’t stupid. At least not stupid enough. “I told you, our algorithms—”

 

“Bullshit. No algorithm can do what you’re doing. Weather is chaotic. The Uncertainty Principle, the Butterfly Effect, all that crap. I don’t believe you’re predicting the future. You’re getting information from the future.”

 

Cross-time communication became possible in 2045 CE, when someone discovered tachyon entanglement. Don’t ask me how it works. I’m a humble meteorologist.

 

Of course, the moment the technology became viable it was outlawed. It’s unclear what kinds of problems might be caused by passing information across the time stream, but the government isn’t taking any chances.

 

Thus the T.E.A.: an agency whose sole function is to detect and shut down illegal chromunications. Luckily, they tend to focus on the most obvious applications. Anyone trying to pull down stock quotes or election results or technology patents from the future gets nabbed almost immediately. I went for something a little more subtle, and so far I’d gotten away with it.

 

“That’s an interesting theory, Agent Butler,” I said, trying to brazen it out.

 

“Interesting enough to trigger an investigation. I’m gonna get a warrant, bring in a team and pull your systems apart. If you’re engaged in chromunication — and we both know you are — your operation is toast and you don’t even want to think about the fines you’re facing.”

 

The clouds on my metaphorical horizon were growing darker by the second, but I could still see one ray of hope. I know my company exists in the future. That’s how we get our information. We send our clients’ requests upstream, PWP field teams go out and record the data, and PWP systems download it to the present. Obviously, none of this would work if the company wasn’t there.

 

Which meant (I hoped!) that Butler wasn’t going to close us down. There was a way out. I just had to find it.

 

“Agent Butler,” I said in my most ingratiating tone, “is there any other way we might be able to handle this situation?”

 

Butler looked around as if making sure no one else was within earshot. He vented an explosive sigh and sat down.

 

“Look,” he said, “my daughter is getting married next spring. She insists on having it outdoors, and I am not gonna shell out thousands of bucks for a wedding that might get rained out! You know?”

 

I knew. Suddenly the forecast looked brighter.