*An Apple A Day

Intro: I just read a story about a time machine. I wrote this story while thinking about that one.

The time lapse made Benjamin vomit, just like it did every time. Going to the future was worse, it made his body feel heavy, the weight of the years pressing down on him. The past was opposite, but still uncomfortable. It felt like he wasn't truly attached to the planet anymore. The worst was the constant headaches from being lightheaded.

He rinsed his mouth with the water bottle he always carried. The headache was especially strong this time but he wasn't surprised. Two thousand years tended to be rough on anybody. He looked around at his surroundings taking in the trees and the sounds of the birds. The air smelled of grass. It was worth the headache.

Spending time outside of the predestined time stream wasn't recommend by any physician. There hadn't been any known repercussions on history by people time traveling, but it was the mental distress. People worried and nothing made people worry more than the idea that something they did in the past would erase themselves in the future. Some people argued that if changes were made, when people went back to their own time they wouldn't know if they had changed anything unless it related to them directly. The law prohibited anyone going back less than 100 years into their past trying to reduce the possibility of that happening.

Benjamin moved through the trees, focusing on his mission. He worked for the government and this mission was of the utmost importance. Three other people had already tried but each time they were unsuccessful. He wasn't the normal type of agent. Instead of focusing on the criminology aspect, time travelers often wanted to take mementos from the past, he was on the cultural side of things. He spent a day with Michelangelo and King Solomon. Now he was on another mission. The breeze picked up and he sneezed. Never before had he been plagued by hay fever before. It was an enlightening experience. No wonder people wrote odes to the tortuous effects. But, that meant he was exactly where he was suppose to be.

Though he had more experience in this than the other time agents, he wasn't the perfect person for the job either. He stared at the apple buds intermixed with the blossoms. The anthro-agriculturist had explained the whole process. But he had explained the whole process to every other agent before him. Every time the agent came back it was a failure. His tweezers hovered between the various buds. If he screwed this up they wouldn't try any more.

He stuffed the tweezers back into his pocket. The knife at his back was another tool he always carried. The serrated blade cut threw the whole branch in roughly a minute. He sheathed the knife and activated the return feature on his device.

He handed the branch off as soon as he arrived and just made it to the garbage. This was his third and last mission of the day. He walked out of the office and stared at the buildings. It was a sad day when the government had to make the choice between living space and trees. Now that the colony on the moon alleviated some of the pressure the government was bringing farms back. That, and maybe with fresh food the birth rate would be positive again. If the scientists couldn't figure out how to grow apples from an entire branch, then the humans didn't deserve to have them.