He looked out over the gathering. No one moved. “I’ll start,” said Friday, standing up to face the group. “I would have been the sixth director general of the ChronoGuard. My first major feat was in the Armageddon Avoidance division, where I ensured our survival of HR-6984, but I have no idea how. After a long and apparently eventful career, I retire at eighty-two the most decorated ChronoGuard operative ever. Now it’s a bit different. I spend thirty-seven years in prison for murder. Three days after release, on the third of February, 2041, I’m beaten to death by persons unknown with a baseball bat up in the Old Town.”

There was a pause, and everyone clapped. Presumably not because they liked what they’d heard but for his honesty. I was just relieved he hadn’t mentioned that Gavin was his victim.

“My name’s Sharon deWitt,” said Shazza. “I would have had a dazzling career in the timestream. I’d be pioneering transPaleozoic jumps by age thirty and a full colonel by forty-two. I’d have retired third in command at the ChronoGuard with four citations for bravery and be Flux magazine’s Woman for all Time, then comfortably retired in fourteenth-century Florence at age eighty. The way things stand at the moment, I’m a receptionist for twenty years, marry a guy I don’t much like, have two kids who turn out so-so and then get hit by a Vauxhall KP-13 at age fifty-five, late one rainy night near the library. They never find the driver.”

There was more applause, and she sat down. There was a longer pause, so Jimmy-G stood up again.

“My name is Jimmy-G, and I would have worked alongside both Shazza and Friday. I would have been time-engine policy director from 2014 until 2032, when a gravity surge in the auxiliary Time Room dumped me in the forty-fifth century. I was stuck there for sixteen years and upon my return ran the enloopment facilities. These days I work in retail and have a happy if unexciting life with a good wife and a fine son. I don’t see him graduate, though, since I die in mysterious circumstances in 2040.”