In the TCB’s fifty-some year history, the longest an agent had been marooned prior to Kin’s case was thirteen months—and that incident was decades old, prior to the subcutaneous beacon. They offered theories about why he went undetected for so long—a combination of causality from the beacon’s activation in the garage and the incremental accumulation of his life leaving micro-traces of temporal footprints, not the detectable shock wave produced by jumping in and changing history in bursts. Doctors poked and prodded him, marveling at how his brain managed to not implode given the duration of his
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