Porlock Solutions, Ltd – Google Docs
Porlock Solutions, Ltd.
This particular company is difficult to hire, mostly because the services it offers — the removal of irritating people from one’s personal history — are equally difficult to bill for. Let’s say that somebody employs Porlock Solutions to ensure that a crusading district attorney about to get a conviction against the client’s company is not assigned to try the case. Porlock Solutions arranges the switch. How does Porlock actually get paid for that? After all, from the client’s point of view the case was now always being handled by a fumble-fingered idiot.
There are several ways to get around that, actually — the best one involving the client handing over blackmail material to Porlock before it does the job, then using said material afterwards to, well, blackmail the client into paying up. That works about 75% of the time. The rest of the time the changes to the timeline are sufficient to make the blackmail irrelevant, or redundant, or switching things around also eliminated the client somehow. Time travel is like that, at least when it comes to whatever method it is that Porlock Solutions uses. Said method is a closely guarded secret, and apparently has serious limitations on how much temporal interference is permitted before the whole thing collapses. As a general rule of thumb, successful Porlock missions will not change the history books, but can change the daily newspaper headlines.
As the above might suggest, the people running Porlock Solutions are not really very nice. They’re not exceptionally violent, if only because violence very often dooms Porlock missions. But there are plenty of ways to mess with a person’s life or career without physically hurting them, and Porlock knows them all. And they feel absolutely no compunction about going after people before they become famous or rich, because it’s easier to ruin people’s day when they’re young, poor, and/or powerless. The company is also rather good at taking advantage of time travel operations to build their stock portfolio; in fact, the few people who know what Porlock Solution does often wonder whether the only reason why they go back in time to make people miserable is because the time travel method they use actually runs on either human suffering, or else flat-out evil.
Odder means of temporal travel have been known to exist.