Everywhere Morley Griffith looked, he saw ghosts. Hundreds of them. Walking quickly to work, they didn't seem to notice that it was raining or that it was 3:20 AM. He watched them move about, their glimmering outlines glowing like electric fire against the void of night. Here and there they went, heedless of each other and in total ignorance of Morley's intrusion. They swarmed across the street at times, walking directly through him. They weren't cold, they weren't warm. He felt absolutely nothing.
Morley drowsily pulled the Seer goggles off his face and rubbed the sweat from his nose. He glanced around the street once again and saw that he was still alone. The rain was glowing around a lit street lamp a block away, offering some company. Everything else was a dull, wet black.
He gripped the goggles in both hands and bent the lenses back for a tighter fit. Pitiful. In the two years since the development of Seer, no useful improvements had been made to the original design and the technology had never been fully realized. Perhaps its creators were still too terrified of the universe they were unleashing. They had blown the hinges off time itself.
The theory had been made over a century ago that three-dimensional objects mark out paths in a fourth dimension, displacing space and time as they go. Until Seer, it had remained just that: a theory.
Morley strapped the goggles back into place and wound the renderer back a couple of minutes. Seer worked like a playback machine. It could follow the distortion path of an object traveling through time and trace it back to specific moments. In effect, it allowed people to re-play the past like an old movie.
The imager kicked in quickly and Morley watched again as the haunting vapors moved purposefully through complete darkness. No sound but the splatter of rain.
Morley was a detective by nature. His talent and passion was unmatched, but Seer had turned criminal investigation inside out and Morley's particular abilities became obsolete overnight. It seemed that virtually any criminal case could be unraveled easily by following lines into the past and observing things first-hand. Seer made child's play of detective work. For nearly a year, the world chugged along, charmed by its own efficiency. It almost lasted a year.
The host of figures moved more slowly now. Morley paid each one close attention. He stood from his spot on the curb and walked into the street, slowing the goggles' renderer every so often to get a better look at individuals. Temporal ripple posts had detected a walker in the area less than 24 hours ago. It could be any one of them.
Seer's investigative value went undisputed while case after case was cracked. The speed of progress was blinding, but it was temporary. It wasn't long before people began noticing timelines that ended abruptly. A suspect would simply disappear and drop out of existence. Other times, a line would appear where one hadn't been before. These strange occurrences led to chaos in the legal circles. Endless weeks passed before any explanation tested out, but the new discovery was worse than the ignorance it replaced.
The new reality was that there were people living in the world who didn't follow linear timelines. They could walk into and out of time as easily as an ordinary person could climb a flight of stairs. Though most of them could only move by a matter of seconds into the past or future, some had the ability to displace several minutes at a stretch. These "chrono walkers," as the press named them, became a sort of cosmic threat to nature and humanity.
And still, not everything Seer had to show had been seen.
Morley backed away from the crowd and scanned the scene peripherally. There wasn't much more to look at. It was the right time. It had to be here. Blurred patches of light danced in Morley's vision. The effect was mesmerizing for a second or two before he saw a flash to the left. A person who hadn't been there earlier appeared and casually walked away, unnoticed by the other ghosts. Morley grinned and reached for his signature recorder. He had this one.
The rain had ended suddenly and Morley pulled back his hood, refreshed. The goggles hung loosely around his neck as he made the uplink to Seer. He'd have an identification within the hour.
