My head pounded for a few seconds as I looked around the shabby hotel room. The cot squeaked as I sat up, a crucifix adorned the wall above me. They'd sent me to an orphanage. That was usually the strategy, though. Put you in a body that won't attract attention, in a place no one bothers to look. This shabby London orphanage was about as bland and non-descript as I could imagine; the sort that Voldemort was raised in, incarnate.

I sprang to my feet as the door opened, and a plump, stern-looking woman looked at the unmade bed disapprovingly before handing me a brown paper parcel. She looked me over once more before giving a small "Hmph" and leaving again.

I opened the parcel, like I'd opened a hundred others. Kill this person, or we kill your ancestors, blah blah. Stupid bureaucratic turds, they'd never get through the red tape even if they wanted to. No, any timepro worth their omnitracker did enough homework before a mission to know who to threaten in return. Time travel was certainly simpler a decade ago, when we were simple observers of history. No, now we were getting sent back to kill the same dictators, over and over.

Changing the past is one thing; making it stick is another. Everything's connected. You can kill Hitler in the past, but it always corrects. Like cutting the head off a snake, history always finds a way to correct itself. But there are ways; the right kills, at the right time, causes a chain reaction. The experimental trifecta this time was Trotsky, Stalin, and of course, Hitler.

I sat at the small desk and rubbed my eyes. Always Hitler. We had killed the man a million times already. We trained youth for decades with video games and simulations. The other two always changed...Beethoven and Walt Disney, Mao Tse Tong and Kim Kardashian...combinations that the supercomp thought would stick. But always Hitler. What if...what if we're going about this wrong, I thought?

Pulling out my omnitracker, I pushed a few buttons, and the new targets just made perfect sense. I proceeded to take out the new targets, and when I returned back here, to discover that I had been successful. Hitler was never more than an average citizen.

The bailiff finished reading, and the judge asked me to stand.

"Is this account, written by you, accurate as it's just been described here?" he asked.

"Yes, your honor," I said. "And frankly, I accomplished my mission. I don't understand what the problem is."

"Young man," the judge replied, "You went back in time and killed Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob."