“Paycheck” June 1953

In the future, the U.S. is a police state. Jennings has taken a job as a mechanic with Rethink Corporation. After his two-year contract is up, his memories of the time are erased. He’s two years older with no knowledge of the time period, but he’s due a sizable payment. For some reason, he has agreed to an alternate clause, accepting goods instead of money. For his two years, he receives a cloth bag containing a code key, a ticket stub, a parcel receipt, some wire, half a poker chip, a strip of green cloth, and a bus token. As soon as he enters the street with this dubious treasure, he is picked up by the police. They want to know where the Rethink plant is and what Jennings did for them. Of course he cannot answer these questions, but the police are not about to believe that. The situation looks grim, and Jennings decides to escape the police cruiser using the wire to short circuit the lock. He races to the nearest bus and uses the bus token that was in his cloth bag. He is beginning to suspect why he took the cloth bag full of trinkets rather than money. He examines the ticket stub and determines based on the information there that the Rethink plant is in Stuartsville, Iowa. He takes the train there and finds the plant. He suspects Rethink has been operating an illegal time scoop, thus the police interest. He plans, with the help of Kelly from Rethink, to go into the plant and get evidence to blackmail Rethink into providing him protection from the police. Using the green cloth, he poses as a worker and gets into the plant. He manages to evade capture and get the evidence out to Kelly, who takes it back to New York. They meet with Rethink to discuss it. Rethink is ultimately unwilling to take Jennings on as an equal partner. It is a family business and Kelly is the daughter of the head of Rethink. And some day, Rethink will lead the revolution that will overthrow the police state. She has the compromising pictures and schematics in a safe place and will return them to her father. Just then the time scoop appears and snatches the parcel receipt from her hand. It is the one already in Jennings possession. So he has them after all, but he implies that he will join the family and keep alive the Rethink vision of freedom from the police state.