7th of April 2256, Decontamination Room 4, New Torsheim, Northern American Union.

One day passed in a fairly calm manner after Sven Torre had visited Sarah in quarantine. Then things got more exciting. On the evening of the ninth day in lockdown, Sarah had another visitor. A woman from the IT department came into her cell, dressed just like Sven had been in a hazmat suit. Sarah believed she recognized the woman's voice from earlier medical operations, though it was hard to compare a real voice filtered through protective clothing to the digitised version that could be transferred directly into her brain thanks to the most basic of Sarah's implants.

"Don't worry, we won't have to upgrade your hardware today," the woman was saying. "I'm just supposed to run some checks on all your implants and make sure you have the newest updates for all of their software. You know, language packages dating further back in time, that type of thing."

Sarah nodded, unable to stop wondering whether the woman had mentioned her name. The hazmat suit didn't feature any sort of identification.

"Alright, please take off your shirt, I'll start by measuring the strength of your TMH-button."

"TMH?" Sarah asked while obediently undressing.

"Take Me Home-button" a smirk crossed the woman's face behind her glass helmet. "I guess it's not the professional term, but we all call it that, I thought you guys did, too."

"Oh, well, I actually didn't have a proper name for it. TMH, I like that."

Sarah turned a little and lifted her right arm out of the way so the woman could more easily reach the button set between her ribs at the side of her chest. The cold touch of a metal sensor on her skin made Sarah shiver.

"Alright, I'll activate the button remotely now, but nothing should happen, unless you're secretly on a trip right now, then of course you'd disappear into thin air."

Nothing happened.

"Well, seems like you truly belong here." Sarah couldn't shake the feeling that the woman was trying to comfort her for some reason. In an attempt to signalize that she was fine, she smiled. 

"Well then, your file says you have a total of twelve implants, is that correct?"

"Yes"

"And that's the basic 8-pack, one TMH-button, one speech-alternating chip, one auditory-input-translator and a writing-deciphering-bot?" Sarah nodded. "Alright, then we will have to schedule you for your thirteenth. I'll have to talk to the medical centre and to your boss about how we can do that without violating your quarantine-"

"Sorry, maybe I missed something, but what implant is it that I'll get?"

"Oh, you lack the writing-deciphering-bot's output equivalent. It's called a writing-motor-reattributer. Don't ask me who's coming up with these names. Basically, it does the same as your speech-alternating chip. It intercepts your brainwaves going out to your muscles, translating the signal so that the result of your movements makes sense in the contemporary language. I'm afraid the writing-motor-reattributer is still early in its development so your handwriting will look awfully perfect no matter what font you're going with. My husband Mike is actually working on a program that will add in more variants for each letter to make the writing look more realistic." While talking, Mike's wife was holding her sensor up to different implants all over Sarah's body. "Funny thing, isn't it, that his job is to make things less perfect? Though it is his specialty judging by how our kitchen looks." She gave Sarah a wink and finally put the sensor back into a bag standing by the door. "Well, that's it for today. At least from me, I guess you have a couple more visitors lined up. Poor soul, you already look exhausted. Guess I'm talking all too much." Another wink and she disappeared back out of the cell.

With a sigh, Sarah dropped into her chair. It was true, she was exhausted, though not because of the talking. She didn't feel ready for her promotion. Sure, it sounded awesome, staying in the past for weeks at a time without having to report back or sit in quarantine all the time. Sarah had spent all night dreaming up adventures and imagining the people she'd be meeting. For once, she would be able to get to know them properly. Upon waking up, however, she had been overcome with fear. Spending weeks in the past all on her own was an awful lot of responsibility. So much could go wrong.

Back in university, they had had to take a course on the dangers of messing with time. There were still many unanswered questions about how the world would be affected if one were to change historical events. While the butterfly-effect had been disproven by the mere fact that numerous researchers had been to the past and came back into the same world they had left, nobody truly knew how much interaction was too much. While early time travellers had done their best to stay unnoticed observers, there had been a phase - jokingly referred to by some students as the teenage years - of testing the boundaries. Time travellers would go up to people who were about to suffer from some terrible event and warn them about it in the hopes of getting them to save themselves. For example, a man in 2080 was warned that his house would burn down the next morning because of an unobserved candle. However, nothing changed. The man lit the candle anyway and his house burnt down. This and many other experiments going the same way lead to various theories on how time works.

Sarah had barely passed that exam, but she did remember a theory by a formerly respected professor suggesting time was much like a living organism, having its own internal mechanism dealing with disturbances, basically healing itself. While it sounded insane, it had not yet been contradicted by evidence. Another professor in the same field was so maddened by this that she suggested trying to inflict a temporal wound big enough to not be fixed before we could measure its effects on our own time. Their conflict became personal and after several failed attempts at changing crucial historical events, the Independent Organisation for Ethical Concerns in Time Travel was founded by representatives from all around the world. It was granted the highest authority on all things time travel and had to be consulted before every project. Thus research on the concept of time was abruptly cut down and with fewer projects being authorised, private investors like John Seagle became vitally important for all time travel departments.

Seagle's project was simple enough and had no interest in changing history. The man just wanted to pat himself on the back for his genetic inheritance, no matter how far he had to dig. However, just because Sarah didn't intend to change history didn't mean she couldn't still do so, intentionally or otherwise. Not knowing where the limits were suddenly terrified her more than anything. Now she was once again tapping her foot nervously. Once she was aware of it, she stopped. It only made her more nervous. When a knock on the door interrupted her thoughts, she was more than grateful. She spent the rest of the day being visited by various hazmat-suited colleagues, mostly from the Medial Research team. Sarah felt a hint of jealousy for them. She had intended to become one of them once, spending her days reading and researching history, not treading in it. Their job didn't seem as scary, though Sarah had to admit to herself that, in their shoes, she would probably still be terrified. She couldn't bear the thought of being the one who poorly interpreted a journal entry, leading a Field Researcher to the wrong day or something. She tried to think of them as her safety net, a group of people there to help her do her job right. It helped for almost five minutes. The rest of her quarantine was a mix of medical treatment, writing exercises to get used to her new implant, and history lessons. Sarah had to brush up her knowledge on the 19th century with a focus on the small kingdom of Hannover.