Edgar P. Tumblewhit, by many galactic standards, was considered to be utterly unremarkable.

For a start off, he lacked tentacles, had never won an award for the best breakfast cereal slogan, didn’t glow, levitate, nor carry any significant baggage from his earlier years. He was not interested in anything other than his immediate concerns and likely couldn’t point to anywhere that might appear on a starmap, even if the celestial body in question were clearly labeled and enthusiastically announcing its name in five hundred languages.

So, when Edgar awoke at 3:17 a.m. to a buzzing noise in his ear, he, somewhat surprisingly for a city dweller, assumed it was a bee.

It wasn’t. That would be too simple.

“Bzzzt! Hello! Can you hear me?” the buzzing thing earlier suspected to be a bee exclaimed.

Edgar, understandably alarmed by having a bee in his ear, he sat bolt upright in bed, slapped his ear with the force of a man suddenly realising his lack of choices in dealing with ears all of apoidea. It hurt.

“Stop that!” the so-called bee interrupted. “This is a secure channel.”

Edgar blinked in surprise. “What are you on with?” He cried, “you trying to tell me you’re some sort of spy bee?”

“Of course not,” the bee replied indignantly. “Don’t be so bloody daft. I’m a Temporal Displacement Management Unit. TD-4127, if you must know. And it seems I’ve accidentally been uploaded into your auditory canal due to a minor clerical error by some incompetent imbecile who was clearly not paying attention.”

“A… what?” Edgar stammered, desperately trying to dislodge the part of his ear that had apparently become some sort of intergalactic call centre.

“Temporal Displacement Management Unit,” the voice repeated. “Consider me your personal assistant for sudden, violent intrusions into alternative realities and/or the manipulation of linear time.”

“Right. Of course. I mean. Obviously right? That old chestnut, the jolly old temporal displacement malarkey,” Edgar muttered, more than a little sarcastically. “So, why are you in my ear?”

“Oh, you’ve been chosen!” TD-4127 exclaimed. “Out of an astonishing 58.4 trillion potential candidates. Reduced to 58.3 after that regrettable accident on Splorg Prime, obviously, but even so, you’ve been randomly selected to save the galaxy from a catastrophic event known as chronological inversion!”

“Yea. Back up a little there a mo would you, my old ear-worm? I mean… Me? Chosen from a cast of trillions. Chronological inversion. Sounds like bollocks to me. You sure your not some sort of joke thingy?,” Edgar muttered, frantically searching for his trousers.

“It is indeed a dire situation, and, having now met youI can see how you’d be surprised to be picked. I know I am.” TD-4127 confirmed. “But the thing is, if left unchecked, time might unravel like an enraged soufflé. Imagine brushing your teeth before realising you’ve already consumed a sandwich you were unaware of having eaten yesterday that you were planning for lunch tomorrow.”

Edgar grimaced and did up his fly zip.

“So, if we’re all good? OK. Now, please remain still. I’m initiating Displacement Transport Protocol.”

“Hang on a minute…” But before Edgar could express his objections, not that it would have made any difference, the room underwent a sudden inversion, its structure rearranged and rearranged within itself. Satisfied with itself, the room politely expelled Edgar.

He found himself floating, still minus a sock and without his shirt tucked in properly, in a translucent cube that appeared to be hanging in space in the vicinity of a space station that resembled a screaming clown.

“Welcome to the Bureau of Misplaced Outcomes,” TD-4127 greeted him. “Headquarters of the Time Regulation and Emergency Administration Department, or TREAD, because every organisation needs a crap acronym to be taken seriously these days.”

The cube, was filled with floating desks, each manned by an entity that appeared to be not very dissimilar to a very hamster-like chimp.

One of these beings floated over, a clipboard clutched in one hand and a lunchbox in the other.

“Mr. Tumblewhit?” it asked, its tone suggesting a long-lost hope for success. “We’re deeply sorry about all the buzzing and so on. Bit of a mishap in Sector Zed-Four, I’m afraid. Field agent irrevocably merged with the background, and we urgently needed a replacement. That’s you. Occupational hazard, but there it is.”

“But I have no idea what you’re all talking about” Edgar protested.

“Precisely why you’re the perfect candidate,” replied the hamster-primate thing. “You can’t break rules you don’t comprehend. Now, take this temporal displacer. Avoid touching the red part, and for goodness sake, don’t think about weird stuff.”

“Weird stuff? I’m floating inside a cube in space that is orbiting a screaming clown space station and being instructed by a hamster-cum-gibbon not to think of weird stuff?”

“Exactly. Keep it normal. Don’t think of… I don’t know… pandas or Old English Spangles…”

Suddenly, there was a pop, a dull but stomach-flapping whump.

He found himself in an entirely different place, sucking an old English Spangle - pear drop flavoured.

The place was a library.

Or, more accurately, the Library of Forbidden Futures, which, the sign said, was the galactic repository of books about timelines too absurd, perilous, or dramatic to exist. The first book Edgar saw bore the title Edgar Tumblewhit and the Accidental Invention of Disco Gravity.

TD-4127 shimmered into view. “According to the last readable entry in the Log of Things We Regret Approving, this is where the inversion commenced. An apprentice librarian, with only a passing understanding of the Dewy-Decimal system, uploaded the entirety of the universe’s knowledge onto a single page, and the font size automatically reset to accommodate all the text, but in doing so inadvertently text so dense it created a black hole of ignorance.”

“What am I supposed to do about it?” Edgar asked, his hands outstretched in a desperate attempt to bargain his way out of madness.

“Begin a rewind,” TD-4127 instructed. “You need to contact an elder stoat.”

“I think I’ve probably had enough of this rubbish.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“I want to go back to sleep.”

“We can’t always get what we want.”

⸻

Edgar sighed and dropped into a padded chair that appeared beside him. The Library of Forbidden Futures rustled softly around him, the air thick with the scent of budget printer ink.

“Contact an elder stoat,” he repeated, glaring suspiciously at TD-4127. “And what, pray, is that supposed to mean? What, in the wide, wide world of sport, is ‘an elder stoat?”

TD-4127 shimmered again, now in the form of a disapproving coat rack. “Well… it’s an actual stoat, obviously. And quite old. Elder Stoat Lorgamax the Fifth, Keeper of Temporal Narratives. He maintains the footnotes of the universe.”

The library folded and morphed around Edgar in a whirl of shelving and book spines until a shelf, devoid of books but upon which perched an unusually serious-looking stoat in pince-nez spectacles, stopped in front of him.

The stoat turned slowly, his whiskers quivering with ancient knowledge or possibly indigestion. “Ah. Edgar.”

“You know me?” Edgar asked.

“I’ve read your timeline,” the stoat replied grimly. “You once microwaved a croissant. You’re probably capable of almost anything.”

“Lorgamax,” TD-4127 said, nodding in deference. “We have an Unravelling.”

“Well?” said Lorgamax, “Obviously the Font Collapse Event can be reversed. Edgar just needs to read the book.”

“The… whole book?” Edgar asked, pointing at the volume which was now, alarmingly, pulsating gently on a pedestal across the room. The book was large. Dangerously so. Reading it looked like the sort of activity that could take years, or at the very least ruin an otherwise tolerable travel holiday.

“Not aloud,” Lorgamax said, recoiling. “Obviously, no. Just skim the metaphysical index and acknowledge the preface. That should be enough to initiate a soft reboot.”

“And what happens then?”

“Reality reorders itself into the last known stable version.”

“Which is…?”

The stoat blinked. “Wednesday.”

“I shall need tea,” said Edgar, now utterly beyond protest. He walked over to the book, opened the cover, and with the air of a man accepting a train delay with stoic resignation, read. For a long time. It was a five cups of tea and packet of bourbon biscuits job.

But eventually, Edgar had done what Lorgamax suggested. He closed the book and stepped away. There was a sound like a custard tart being dropped in a cathedral. Time folded gently in on itself, and the library whispered away into nonexistence.

When Edgar opened his eyes again, it was 3:16 a.m.

His ear was quiet. No Buzzing. The room was exactly as it had always been: a right mess of a man cave.

He lay still, then slowly turned to look at the clock.

3:17 a.m.

Nothing buzzed.

No screaming clown space station. No library. No stoat.

He sat up, checked for sock count (still one short), and cautiously prodded his ear.

Nothing.

Had he dreamed it?

He got up, went to the loo. It was urgent - too much tea. He wandered to the kitchen, and poured himself a glass of milk in the hope it might somehow help him sleep. On the way back to bed, he noticed a strange item on the bedside table. It was a bookmark.

Plain, a bit frayed at the edges. One side bore the words:

This Page Intentionally Left Unread

And on the back, in tiny, earnest print:

TD-4127 has been reassigned. If symptoms of reality drift persist, please avoid thinking about spangles.

Thank you for your service.

– TREAD (Time Regulation and Emergency Administration Department)

Edgar stared at it for a long moment, then slid it into the back of a drawer, under some old batteries and a novelty biro shaped like a haddock.

Then he got back into bed, pulled the covers up, and muttered:

“…ffs.”