“Who are you?” 

“I’m no one. I’m just a stranger.” 

With those words, time traveler Richard Daniels got into what should have been the best-secured place in history – North Field, where the Enola Gay was parked. He and a historian got on, and watched, as the bottom dropped out and Little Boy destroyed Hiroshima. 

When he returned to the Temporal Integrity Commission, he was damaged, but not by radiation. He was stunned by the massive destruction and more than a little depressed. His boss, Admiral Carmen Calavicci, remarked, “I can ground you if you like, but there’s still plenty to do. If you, let’s just say, enjoy yourself while on a mission, but you accomplish your task, and it’s not a large historical change, I shan’t report it.” 

The next trip was to 1699 Penn’s Woods, and he and the historian were disguised as surveyors. William Penn’s next-door neighbor spotted them after a day. She had freckles and a ready smile, her face hidden a little by a sun bonnet. 

Penn then introduced them to the widow Crossman. The historian stayed on target and got his observations. Daniels got something else entirely. The young redheaded mother was merry, sweet, kind, and willing. “Lucretia?” Daniels asked one day, as they lay in bed together.

“Yes?” 

“I really appreciate this.” They kissed. “But why?” 

“I will never see thee again, yes? We shall go our separate ways. Thou will survey elsewhere, I am certain. There is much on this great continent. I shall remain behind and care for my son, and may wed Squire Allgood. Prithee, tell me, who art thou, Daniels?” 

“I’m no one. I’m just a stranger.”

The next trip was to the Enterprise-E; there was a temporal alteration that needed fixing. 

Captain Picard’s First Officer, Martin Madden, had been a bit skeptical, but it was the Tactical Officer, MacKenzie, who welcomed Rick aboard. She shadowed him as he worked to determine how the prime timeline had gotten off track. 

This included a trip in a modified shuttle. “See,” Rick explained, “I strongly suspect the Mirror Universe is involved. All three other times, there was a connection.” 

“Three other times?” Dana asked. The brunette was piloting; they were the only people in the shuttle. 

“Damn, I put my foot in it. Dana, I’ve tried this before – and failed.” 

“So this is the fourth time.”

“It is.” He checked an instrument. “Prepare to jump to the Mirror.” He fired a shot that opened up a portal to a darker place. Space shifted, and the predominant colors of a nearby planet in a familiar system went from a buff shade to a dusky brown. Everything felt downbeat. “Bad mojo,” he muttered. 

Once they had passed over, the Klingon-Cardassian Alliance opened fire. “We’re hit!” she yelled. 

“We’d better evacuate.” 

With the shuttle in flames, they evacuated into the one escape pod. It was cramped, and they ended up pressed against each other. “Oh,” Dana commented. “Y’know, Daniels, this isn’t the time for hanky panky, no matter what your body might be saying.” 

“Are you saying other times would be better?” He grinned and they kissed. 

“Maybe. I’m free, y’know.” 

“Yep.” He kissed her again. “Fun and feisty in any iteration.” 

Then an alarm went off. He checked. “The pod’s venting atmosphere. I can beam out and you’ll survive, and I’ll try again. Give me your badge; if you’re captured, disavow, well, everything. The people here,” he checked a PADD quickly, “are friendly, so long as you disavow the Terran Empire.” 

“Terran Empire! Christ, they’ll kill me!” 

“Only one timeline to a customer, Dana. I can fix this and it’ll never happen.” 

“Wait! What happens?” 

“In the original history, you and Madden end up together; and you’re not on the Enterprise-E at all.” 

“What? Dammit, Daniels, who the hell are you? Don’t leave me!” 

“I’m just a stranger, Dana.” He beamed out as the pod fell to the surface of the Mirror Universe version of Lafa II.

The trip was a mistake. They were supposed to be in 1616 Padua, but ended up earlier, in Castile, as the old time ship, the Audrey Niffenegger, was out of service and the time portals were unreliable for a trip of over 1500 years. It was the historian’s fault; he should have waited for the ship to be repaired. 

That wasn’t so bad when Rick saw Irene performing in a play, a pastiche revue where there was singing and puppetry and some slapstick comedy. Her troupe camped out near their stage, and lived on the charity of their audience, mainly. She plucked an underfed pullet and cooked it over their campfire; they ate their donated dinner with their fingers. From the look of Irene, it would not be the first time she had ever gone to bed hungry. That was probably true of everyone in the small troupe. 

Despite her poverty, she still had the desire to share her body with him, in a clearing near the encampment. The stars were spectacular, the visibility off the charts. Rick could clearly see Megrez, in the Big Dipper, where the handle met the pan. It was the star for the Xyrillian home world. 

She pulled her shabby skirt back down. “Ricardo,” Irene asked, “what brings you here? Surely you are not a follower of our work.” 

“We’re day laborers.” 

“No, you are not. I’m not stupid. You have all of your teeth, as if you were in your late teens, maybe. But you make love – despite your teeth – as if you were older. Why is that?” 

He didn’t have the heart to specify that he was really in his late thirties and that her perspective was off because most people his real age were dead or close to it, worn out by disease and heavy labor. He didn’t have the heart, either, to tell her that she, too, would likely be dead within the decade. “You got me. I’m older, Irene.” 

“Then you’re wealthy. To live well past age twenty! That is rare. What sort of magic made you older and still healthy? Ricardo, quién eres tu?" 

“No soy nadie. Soy un extraño.”

The rich get richer and the poor get children. 
In the meantime, 
In between time, 
Ain't we got fun!

This time, the mission was to Manhattan, for the stock market crash. Rick and a historian posed as brokers and joined the Tyler Brokerage, out of Hoboken. Rick had been writing down paper orders and calling clients on a clunky wall phone for two days when, one afternoon, a flapper strolled in.  It was every bit of flapper style he’d ever heard of. She was keeping up with the up-to-the-minute trends of the time. 

One of his fellow brokers whistled a little. That was squelched quickly by a senior broker, who scolded, “You will not bother Miss Betty. She doesn’t have time for the likes of you.” 

The catcalling fellow looked down, but still commented, “The quality just improved.” 

She was a short girl, with a short dress, long fake pearls, a headband with a feather, and clunky strappy sandals. As had happened so many times before, she gave him the eye, and tossed her bobbed brown hair at him. “I like to break in the new, heh, brokers,” she grinned, looking him up and down. “’Course you’ll never tell Daddy.” She inclined her head in the direction of a portrait of the rather stern founder of the company. 

“Mr. Tyler and I have a deal. He doesn’t tell me where to get an apartment and I don’t tell him who I take there.” The catcalling guy glared, as did the senior broker and Rick’s historian companion, but Rick didn’t even so much as look back, as he clocked out and left with her. 

He missed a few days of work. Betty was as lively as Irene had been. When the morning of the 28th dawned, Rick realized it was the day. The stock market would crash and trigger the Great Depression. “We’ve gotta head to the office, or at least I have to. Uh, see you tonight?” 

“Sure.” She batted her artificially-extended lashes at him. “Now, you’ll come back after work, right?” 

“Not to worry.” He kissed her and departed. 

But once Rick and the historian had witnessed the crash and its aftermath – including Tyler jumping out of his office window – they beamed back to their time ship and out of there. Rick stood Betty up. 

They returned to the 31st century. “We’ve got a time change,” Carmen announced. “Some girl named Betty Tyler wasn’t supposed to die. She was an ancestor of the woman who raised the Q, Amanda Rogers. It’s too big a change; you’ve got to fix it.” 

“What?” Rick read the altered newspaper on his PADD, a historical record of the change. Betty had joined her father out that window. “All because I stood her up? There’s more. But that was the last straw, I’ll bet.” He swallowed a small lump in his throat. “That’s got to be it.” 

Rick had to go back, keep his hands off her, and thereby undo her suicide.

He put it out of his mind for his next mission. Denial, denial, and denial – it was a formula that worked, Rick had learned. It was all he had; he was overworked and there was no time – heh – for treatments. Carmen needed to hire more temporal agents but, in the meantime; he still had to go out there. He had a photographic memory. Forgetting was not an option. So denial it was. 

This time, the historian he was escorting was a Suliban. “I want to understand why my ancestor Silik was so taken with the 28th century.” 

“Yes, the Temporal Cold War. We’ve traced the transmissions from the person we’ve been calling ‘Future Guy’ to a certain time period and ship.” Rick still had a human look to him as there was no need to alter his appearance and make him look like a Suliban or any other species for this particular mission. 

They beamed off the Audrey and onto a Klingon ship, the IKS PIq. A brunette greeted them. “I’m Phillipa. You’ll start with the targeting array. I want it recalibrated, and I want it perfect.” The unspoken last two words of that sentence were likely, Rick realized – or else. 

“Of course,” replied the Suliban, pretending to get down to work, as this was their pretext for being there. 

Rick instead talked to Phillipa. He boldly asked, “How’d the array get offline in the first place? Were you using it for a purpose for which it wasn’t intended?” 

“Of course we were,” she replied, “as my esteemed ancestor, the great Colonel Phillip Green, used to say, ‘Limits are for everyone else.’” 

“That may be so, but your targeting array doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo. Now, tell me, Phillipa, how often are you transmitting, and where to?” 

“You don’t need to know that. Jim Horan and I are doing as we please.” She gestured in the general direction of a stern-looking guy. “Just fix it.” 

“And then what?” 

“Maybe some recreation,” she purred, glancing back at Horan for a split second. “Silik’s busy with Archer. I’ll have some time.” 

He was not a good-looking guy. He was okay, decent, nothing more. But the last several missions had given him a kind of attractive swaggery confidence that was unshakable, even in the face of Betty’s suicide attempt. 

Rick got acquainted with Horan, too, – although nowhere near as intimately – and saw both of them transmitting in time once the array was recalibrated. The whole thing was barely jerry-rigged together, to communicate in time, but it worked. And so he learned that Future Guy was really two people. 

Impressed with his repair work, Phillipa asked, “Who the hell are you, that you know how to do this?” 

“I’m no one. I’m just a stranger.”

“This is so dreadfully dull,” complained a matron in a diaphanous gown as she reclined. A rumbling of the ground interrupted her. “Nothing ever happens around here.” 

“Why not visit your sister in Herculaneum?” suggested her husband, in a tone implying lassitude. A pair of silk merchants was in the villa, standing in front of his couch with their wares – Rick and a historian. “Perhaps the beige. Do you like it?” 

The matron wrinkled her nose. “No; I’d prefer a green for Octavia’s new gown. Segundus! Quintus!” she called and two young men arrived. “Get Sextus and Septimius and Octavia. It’s almost supper time.” After they’d left, she turned to Rick, “Nothing substandard. I know silk; that material is too rough.” 

“This is authentic silk,” Rick said and then his jaw dropped as the young men returned with, apparently, Octavia and her brothers, one of whom had a large stain on the front of his tunic. But otherwise Rick was not paying attention to the young men, who were probably in their twenties. “There are natural imperfections in the material,” he explained hastily. Cocky, he approached Octavia. “I’ve got white with a pink stripe. It’ll look good on you. But then, anything will.” 

She was maybe eighteen or so, he figured. She tossed her hair at him; it was honey blonde and done up in an elaborate, twisty style. She checked the fabric. “Oh, I do like it! It’s like a confection.” 

There was another quick tremor. She put a hand on his arm to steady herself. She smiled at him. “Stay for the needlework and you’ll be able to see me in the gown.” 

And hopefully out of it, Rick thought but didn’t vocalize. “Of course.” 

“We’ll have the slaves make it fast,” said Octavia’s mother. 

Four days later, the gown was done. Octavia was wearing it when Vesuvius erupted. 

“Just as predicted,” Rick shouted to the historian, as they ran through stone streets that were rapidly becoming lava fields. He thought no one could overhear, or at least they weren’t paying attention as they fought to save their own skins. 

But she had been following, stumbling along behind them and she was beginning to falter. “Who are you; that you knew of this?” She coughed as the smoke thickened and the area really began to reek of burning flesh and molten metal. There were screams all around them as people met their fates or saw others meet theirs. 

She would die soon, and become a fossil. They all would. But saving any of them would mess with the timeline too much. He could not save her. 

Rick cringed, his eyes tearing in the searing heat, and maybe from something else. He remembered Carmen’s requirement that he not wreak too much havoc on the timeline. “I’m no one; I’m just a stranger.”

“Can you fix it?” The Empress hovered nearby as Rick, flat on his back, repaired conduits leading to and from the warp core on her advanced ship, the Defiant. The historian he was with was … somewhere. 

“I think so. Just a sec, ah, there it is.” Rick got up, a little dirty. “It was a bit of dirt and that was moving the coils out of alignment. Nothing a little cleaning can’t fix if it ever happens again.” 

“Got it. Can you fix the replicators?” 

“That I can’t do, sorry.” He didn’t tell her that that wasn’t permitted under the terms of his mission. 

She looked at him slyly. “That’s okay for now, Ritchie. Look, the royal treasury is, let’s just say, a little unreliable right now.” 

“Well, you just got into power. That makes sense.” He checked her out; she was a hot little number with sloe eyes and glossy, black hair. Hoshi was wearing a midriff-baring uniform that was tight in all the right places, with captain and admiral insignia fighting for attention on the skimpy material. The conflicting rank symbols didn’t matter; she had been an ensign when she’d seized power and her promotions had come from within – she’d declared herself captain and admiral and anything else she wanted. No ranks mattered, for an Empress. She was the most powerful person in the Mirror Universe – by far. “Maybe you can pay me in some other way.” 

“I see.” She ran a finger down the front of his uniform and did not stop. “That could work.” 

It took hours before he emerged from her Ready Room, and he could barely walk. 

He returned to find another temporal change. Carmen announced, “The Empress Hoshi Sato has a child now; Jun. The new undisputed heir to the bloody Terran Empire is listed as ‘father unknown’. Do you know anything about this?” She was livid. 

“I, um, oh, God.” 

“I trusted you! What were you thinking? You’ve gone too far this time!” she screamed at him. “Who the bloody hell do you think you are?” 

“I’m no one! Christ, Carmen, I’m, I’m nobody!” As he yelled, his jaw trembled; he could scarcely get the words out. Nonpersons don’t have feelings, he thought to himself, even as tears sprang from his eyes, seemingly of their own accord. 

“Not anymore, you aren’t, Mister Daniels! The Mirror government will be even angrier with you than I am. You’ll have to go back and undo this. They’ll require it, and I can’t say as I’d blame them. The timeline is in shreds. At least you haven’t been deflowering virgins.” 

That brought Rick up short. “You’re right; I’m not no one, not anymore. I’m, I’m Jun Sato’s father. And I won’t undo his life, even for the sake of the timeline.” Unlike Octavia or Irene, or even Dana, he knew he would have to save Jun, no matter the cost. He finally loved someone, but it was not who or what he’d been expecting.