Flying Mermaid Murder

 

The Flying Mermaid was a replica pirate ship that docked at various tourist ports around the Gulf of Mexico. It wasn’t particularly seaworthy at three quarter sized, but it sailed well enough if the conditions were pleasant. It was popular with the college crowds as a kind of destination-party location. A group of students in Tampa, Florida had booked the ship for the first weekend in June.

 

Usually the parties were all night affairs, so the captain was surprised that the kids had asked about sleeping quarters on the ship. Outside of the party season, the ship doubled as a floating hotel, with enough notice, it could be configured back to sleep about two dozen people if a few of them didn’t mind sharing rooms. A number of decorations, cannon balls and blade heavy cutlasses, were put back on the walls, though not as securely as they would be for a full hotel season. The students only expected about fifteen people attending, so most of them would have their own room.

They had their own security for the event and payed a large extra deposit to have the vessel mostly to themselves. Normally the crew doubled as chaperones and bouncers though they were just as happy to have the time off. A few stayed on board to look after any miscellaneous problems that came up.

The captain had stayed on board the first night just to see how things went and despite his initial misgivings, it seemed to be going smoother and quieter than normal. The group in question were a bunch of engineering graduates celebrating their last time together before going off in different directions in the world.

Satisfied that the students were well behaved, the captain spent the next night on shore. He even left his room to the guests when they said they had a few latecomers to the event. Despite being a reasonably authentic pirate ship the doors and locks were decidedly modern and motion detectors guarded the hallways after everyone was locked in their rooms.

During the night, a few rooms were wakened by a loud thud, a clang of metal and a scream from one of the quarters. Unfortunately the door was locked from the inside and it took precious moments for someone to find an extra keycard and get the door open. By then it was too late.

The student staying in the room had bled to death, the cutlass lying next to him in bed, evidently having cut his throat. The initial thought was suicide, but the smart watch they had on registered a deep sleep right up until the sound of the thud. There wasn’t enough time, or presence of mind, to use the sword, get back into bed and tuck himself in.

The motion detectors hadn’t registered anyone outside of the rooms until everyone had come out almost at once, meaning if was murder, they should still have been at the scene of the crime, but it was empty, minus the victim.

The thoughts of the investigators turned to the thud heard shortly before the scream. Nothing else in the room seemed damaged or out of place, even the other half of the pair of cutlasses was still on the wall. In a flash of insight they checked the next room over and noted a large spherical dent on the wall, at the exact height as the sword mount in the adjoining space. There were two people in that room and no quick way to tell who was awake at the time.

The captain arrived on scene, noticed the size of the dent, and mentioned it looked like one of the cannon balls. He said that many of them had been rescued from a room that contained a lot of loose gunpowder. A quick check of the two suspects hands found a telltale residue on one set that had almost been washed off completely.

Emergency Dial

 

Jack had very particular habits. He was paranoid that someone was trying to kill him. As such he tried to take precautions that would keep him safe. He travelled around the United States for a while, not spending too much time in any one place. He thought someone might be tracking his movements, which was a little difficult in the years before cell phones became ubiquitous. He only stayed at hotels that were quiet and out of the way, so mostly frequented by locals. Ones where he could pick the room number himself and order his own food from different restaurants every day, under an assumed name.

He recently felt like the killer was getting too close and had just flown into the UK to find a new place to stay.

This week it was a hotel in the Cardiff area. There had been some work done earlier in the day, a number of things in each of the suites had been replaced – TVs, radios, remotes, coffee machines, microwaves, phones, lamps and such. The hotel had been closed for a number of weeks and that was the final bit of refurbishing before reopening.

In Jack’s mind that seemed perfect.

The rooms in the hotel would be identical. There was no way for the killer to know which room he, the lone American, would be in. Or so he thought.

Unfortunately for Jack, the killer was real and he was a step ahead of him.

He had heard a disturbance in the hallway as the local police were coming to a room near his to check on something. The first time he ignored it. When it happened again, a half hour later, he popped his head out and was told to go back to his room.

He turned on the TV. The picture was black for a few seconds then played an ominous message. “I know you’re in room 245,” which was indeed his room “and I’m coming to get you.”

He was about to dial the police, but remembered they were already there.

He left his room and tracked them down. The local authorities checked a few more rooms and found the all the TVs loaded with the same dark message, but customized to say their own number. They took Jack’s information down and were surprised to find he was American.

“You must be the target of the killer” the detective said plainly. “The phones have been tampered with, and you would have been the only one who would have likely set them off.”

“You were about to dial 911 right? It’s 999 here in the UK.”

Antarctic Base

 

The cold wind howled as it snaked around the modular Antarctic research base. Fortunately the structure was made for the inclement weather and only a slight creaking in the joiner segments hinted at the weather outside. It was a small thing, but it could eat away at your sanity if you were the only one around. Which Jeff was. He turned up the music, blasting it away in all the adjoining rooms to drown out the sounds of the shuddering complex.

He was alone, but only for another month. Various other programs had been cancelled or relocated and he was there to keep the lights on. Not literally of course, the building’s automation could handle most of the basic tasks, but if anything broke it was easier to fix in person. There were a few telepresence robots looking after most of the experiments. They were great at doing exactly what they were built to do, and nothing outside of that.  Their construction was fairly simple - a tablet for a head and a few cameras mounted on a thin body, with two spindly arms meant for light tasks only.  

A week ago one of the north facing labs broke a window and snow had blown in. The bots in the area could hardly manage driving through the indoor drifts, let alone repairing damage as large as the glass. Apart from that though, everything managed to run itself.

That left a lot of time to fill and Jeff was running out of ideas. He had inventoried the supplies at least three times that week and that was only because he didn’t trust the autonomous robots to properly calculate their incidental maintenance item use. The third time through he finally relented that last years programming error had been fixed and he was just being paranoid.

Without anyone present to talk him down from any particular notion he was going off on odd jaunts like that more and more often. Nothing worth a call back to the mainland and nothing harmful, yet, but there was still a month to go.

Or was it longer? He looked at the calendar again. He had skipped ahead, counting from the next shipment of goods rather than the current date. It was difficult to know what day he was really on. He was convinced that the telepresence robots were trying to prank him. Why else would they drive around with the date on screen instead of the face?

Then he remembered that he had asked for that. The blank faces were taunting him. He had been through a dozen variations. Live people looked too flat on the screen. AI faces were too smooth. 3D faces were too impersonal. Animals and cartoons weren’t serious enough. Blank faces would be better. Something that suggested people but more like a mannequin. No. He had tried that.

Or was it a dream? He asked for the blank faces while muttering ‘again?’ under his breath. The main team had been getting used to his half whispered words and didn’t think much of it. They switched remote bots to blank faces.

That was quick, he thought to himself. They must have done it before. No. That’s the default setting. It felt familiar. Then he remembered why he wanted that setting. It was what the robots looked like when the base was being built and everyone was still around. The team was too busy setting up the experiments to bother loading their images onto the display screens. Besides, they were here to converse with, so what would the robots show anyway?

With the robots on the default faces he could pretend the rest of the research team was just in the next module, ready to surprise him around the next corner. He even went so far as to put one of the rooms playback devices at head height behind him and que up a colleague’s lesser known video files. He looked at the setup and tried to improve it by rigging up a spare robot to carry around the speaker and drive around randomly. After a few minutes of the unedited playback, it almost felt like someone was in the room with him and he instinctively turned around so as not to seem rude. As soon as did so, the illusion was shattered.

Robot Clue

 

The storm lashed against the house like a kind of angsty teen on a moody day, persistent and noisy but more sound than fury. Still, with the murder, it was enough to set people on edge. Everyone had seen the maid do it, so arresting the suspect seemed like a trivial formality at this point. The head of the house tried to explain that it was a little more difficult than that.

The detective assembled the staff. To her surprise, they were all robots. The maid fully admitted to the murder, as was expected. As a robot, though, ‘she’ had no motive to do anything outside of ‘her’ programming. Not knowing what to, the detective phoned an AI expert in to help ‘interrogate’ the maid.

The AI specialist arrived within the hour, carrying a pile of diagnostic tools that tried to sort through the rat’s nest of goal objectives of the killler robot. It seemed like no-one in the house actually knew any true coding languages and had controlled the robots through third party apps once the original company stopped supporting their first generation cleaning AIs. Each person in the house had their own way of inputting new tasks.

Some would demonstrate the task and set how often they wanted it repeated. Others would zone different areas of their room with individual objectives or problem descriptions like dust or clutter. One could also download AI pattern recognition that would allow the robot to clean on it’s own as long as the room was close enough to the sample rooms it was trained in. Any of those methods would be valid on it’s own, but with piecemeal programming, and conflicting instructions on what to do on communal areas, it meant the robots were getting bogged down.

The family tried to fix the problem by upgrading the base AI in an effort to sort between more and more competing cleaning solutions. That improved things for a while, till the robots hard drive and ram became full as well.

The detective was feeling like they were loosing the forest for the trees. She asked the robot to duplicate the actions that lead to the murder. It did so. She asked if the motion was demonstrated in Copy Task mode. It was not. She asked if it was a Zone command. It was not. A few more questions and it was determined that it wasn’t any direct or indirect instruction that lead to that kind of movement.

But what did it leave? The detective asked the AI specialist to speculate on what effect a different base AI would have. The answer was unclear, at least to the layman, but the detective zeroed in on the phrase adaptive learning.

She asked the family again what the last major problem with the robots were. They said there was a number of problems, but most of them could be traced back to system resources being full. She asked the family about any specific language they used to try and solve the issue. They mentioned words like “Delete” and “Purge” but complained that the robots didn’t seem to understand the context.

The detective asked to see the streaming records for the entertainment centre. Sure enough, in the middle of the night, the robots had signed into the house’s TV login and downloaded their own instructions on how to “Delete and Purge” from old sci-fi shows. The adaptive AI had sought to fill in the gaps on the subject without proper context. With it’s own safeties deleted by accident, committed the murder to satisfy it’s own programming.

Blackness of Space

 

The space station was pitch black. Power was out. Backup power was out. What remained was just a residual crackle of electricity that barely lit up a few LEDs on the various panels on the walls. Still if you knew the place as well as this crew did, it was enough to navigate by.

They floated down the quiet corridors listening to the metal ping and pop as the sun heated the outside of the giant tin can they were in. Something had happened to the various wires in the main electrical sections, forcing the station into automatic lock-down. That closed all the windows shades with reinforced slats that protected against micrometeorites. While that seemed to be the safest option in the event of a power outage, it wasn’t the most practical.

Finding the nearest spacesuits they methodically put them on in the disorienting darkness. As another power saving measure, the built in lights on the suits wouldn’t turn on till someone was in them. As the first person finished clicking the last piece in place the room was suddenly flooded with highest intensity light. The automatic calibration of the light was directly proportional to the lack of other illumination in the room and while that might be appropriate mid-mission, it was painfully bright in the small reflective alcove that they were currently in.

After a bit of fumbling around with manual overrides the headlamp was set to soft glow and the ambient omnidirectional suit panels were set to chemically fluoresce. It was decided then and there that everyone would get into their suits, to set the brightness to lowest and then uncouple the last internal connection so the whole power-pack would still be in standby mode.

That would leave them the most total work time as one suits brightness was sufficient for the whole team since they would be sticking together. They could use the magnets in the boots to walk to their destination, but it would be faster to keep floating. Now there was enough light to do more than just navigate, they could launch themselves faster down each corridor.

That was almost a mistake. Half way down the third straightaway a clear gooey substance floated menacingly in the dancing lights of the lead crew-member. A quick reaction stopped them from crashing through it and they all stopped to get a better look at the situation.

Suits came off standby and the area was flooded with light. A hundred clear spheres of gel made the flashlights paint dancing patterns on the walls. The goo reacted to the new stimuli as black specks in the stuff all moved around to the sides that were facing the humans. Sinister lines grew from the pea sized spots that the black flecks had coalesced into. As the web of lines joined a force pulled the various blobs together into a single basketball sized shape.

In the center the clearness suddenly shifted to an opaque pink that twitched as though it was reacting to a hundred tiny shocks.

Game Day

 

Saturday 5:00am. Time to get out of bed and get ready. The usual flurry of activity and an uneventful trip in the early winter. He looked at his watch in the cramped confines of his mom’s truck -- 6:30 am.

He stepped out of the vehicle, shuffling along with a transport comfortable version of his hockey gear on. There was time to go from street clothes to hockey ready in the locker room, but it meant being on the road that much earlier and sometimes there wasn’t always a spare room in the middle of a tournament. Sometimes hockey meant getting the last of your gear on at the bench, five minutes before game time.

It wasn’t like that today, though the thought wasn’t unfamiliar to him. The coach said the usual things, up-building platitudes about playing and having fun, with the not so subtle hint that winning by pulling together felt really good too. There was a feeling in the locker room that today things would work out this weekend. Not just a vibe, or a streak of wins, but a familiarity that things were already in the bag.

It didn’t take long to figure out why. On his first breakaway he just knew the goalie would dive left, so he shot to the right. Goal.

He could see in his minds’ eye that the number 43 would punish an early goal with a barely legal check. So at the last second he looked up, saw him coming and dodged away toward the center of the ice. 43 barrelled forward, with nothing to cushion the crash, into the boards and went down heavily, substituting out.

43’s replacement was faster and more focused on the game, but closing his eyes for a moment he could see 23’s skating pattern on the ice. Neon streaks left a kind of weird afterimage of where his opponent would be and he nudged his skating pattern accordingly. 23 got the puck in a flurry of quick passes, but he was already there to stop him.

The rest the tournament played out in much the same way. Having a strong sense of where the puck would go off the last faceoff, he skated over to the empty space.

The game froze. With three minutes left in the third period of the final game, and up 5-1, he figured the contest would pretty much be over. He threw off his helmet and reached for a spot above his left eyebrow and pulled off a small box.

The rink vanished and he was back in bed holding a slick plastic cube with a slightly stinging patch on the side of his forehead.

The iHockey was never meant to be that powerful. It was supposed to simulate games for people that were injured, tricking parts of the brain into playing a kind of mental strategy match-up against itself. It would keep the mind active while the body healed.

He was already healthy though, and already played tournaments in his head. But that wasn’t all. He imagined it all in his mind, the drive to the arena, getting dressed in the change room, the coaches’ pep talks. And one more thing.

He looked at his watch -- Sunday 11:46am. He panicked for an instant, but it was still dark and he wasn’t physically tired. He set his watch back to the proper time, the iHockey blinked as linked device adjusted to the new time and date. It was the fourth time this week he had set his watch ahead while wearing the iHockey. He looked at his watch again, wondering if anyone else would figure it out. Saturday 4:43am. Game day.

Encounter in a Storm

 

The waves crashed against the side of the wooden frigate, making walking difficult for most of the crew. Captain Horne had seen worse weather, and trusted his men to get their jobs done. He stubbornly refused to turn the vessel into the oncoming waves to lessen their effect despite the complains from the less experienced. It was important to get proper sea-legs and this was nearly the ideal situation.

They were a few minutes from shore and were unlikely to get lost or turned around in the storm. Pirate attacks were down at that time of year as the taxes from the far off colonies were already paid and it was in between harvests of the more valuable crops. The only boats still sailing were balancing out local supplies and ferrying the richer residents around. The HMS Barnacle had just dropped off their last delivery of both of those things and was headed home to San Derocas.

The storm had come up suddenly, but Captain Horne had warned his men just over a half our before. He kept some fairly expensive meteorological equipment on board, and made a habit of checking it fastidiously.

---

The pirate crew plowed bow first into the waves, tacking up the coast and into the worst of the storm. Captain Heele was a greenhorn and the conditions made him feel uneasy and slightly nauseous. He felt brave crashing through the walls of water, despite it being the safest way to get through the storm. The only thing less brave was going into port at the first sign of wind. That was something he wanted to do, but he was too inexperienced to navigate in the chaos of the squall.

The shore was close, almost too close for comfort and his men didn’t know if there were any reefs in the area. Pickings were slim and they were too new to the area to know why. Captain Heele had heard tales of ships laden with gold coins to pay the Kings and Queens of the Old World, but had arrived too late to meet them. Chatter along the coast talked about exotic crops of rare plants, but raids failed to find anything but the small remains of last year’s harvest.

In the crows nest they spotted a ship up ahead that seemed to be floundering in the storm. They headed toward it in reckless abandon, raising the black flag that was the universal symbol for pirates.

---

Captain Horne laughed when he heard the news. A ship of thieving scoundrels was headed directly for them, intent on some nefarious plan he thought. Quickly he checked his instruments and the prevailing winds. Just as quickly he suddenly doubted there was a plan to this undertaking. Only greed and overconfidence would drive anyone to attack during a storm from that direction and angle. He calmly went to the wheel of the ship and instructed half of his crew to prepare the starboard cannons, but to leave the doors closed till the last moment. The other half of the crew was to put on a show of being unprepared for the storm and to stumble around on deck.

---

Captain Heele looked through the spyglass and smiled an evil smile. He was going to capture the ship, which he recognized as the HMS Barnacle from the figurehead, without a fight. He continued to think that right until the ship in question opened up the starboard cannon doors and broadsided them. All eight cannons hit squarely on his ship’s bow, the blast ripping it apart. As the next wave hit the pirate ship it filled their hold with seawater and sank it like a stone.

Bandits

 

On the outskirts of the city the bandits roamed the streets, basically unchallenged, at least formally. Anyone with means had long since joined one of the collectives or towers in the middle of the capital leaving only the poor to risk life in the suburbs. Ironically the street thugs weren’t as violent or as ruthless as the more sheltered people feared. If they acted too strongly there would be repercussions and even a handful of neighbourhoods joining together could quickly rout a troublesome gang. In this, the line between predator and prey shifted quickly and an uneasy truce kept all but isolated travellers safe most of the time. The criminals of the area had their own illegal economy that most people refused to participate in and outside of seeing each other in the same area, generally stayed separate.

Mick Greenstone was a courier and did his best to keep the pockets of society that were left, running. Fortunately for him, his employer only shipped the most obscure of items. Nothing that would interest anyone but a handful of clients and none of whom would buy the goods from anyone else. As such he kept his routes and hours as public as possible without seeming suspicious.

Occasionally other couriers would team up with him, pretending to be shipping more of the same unpopular goods. As long as the final convoy size seemed reasonable and no particular vehicle stood out, it usually worked too. Too often someone with a high security rig would try the same thing and the bandits saw through the ruse almost instantly. Even then, Mike was still safe, by reason of never lying about his cargo manifest.

Other jobs would pay higher, because of the danger, but for his long term survival prospects, being known as “Mick Junk” was priceless. In fact though, his cargo was quite precious, part of a very unique compound that played an irreplaceable role in high tech parts. There were a very small number of groups that knew that, but they also knew that any interruption in deliveries would mean the other parts of the compound would stop shipping till the missing materials were found. Any groups that acted on this knowledge would also find themselves part of a high end media attack that would almost always find the group torn out by the roots by the end of the week.

The weak link in the chain was Mick himself, but again, the long term consequences of being anything but reliable were daunting.

The Day the Tableware Came to Life

 

Midnight clocked over on what started out as a normal day in North America. The rest of the night plodded away the darkness of the mid November skies. It wasn’t until the sun was slowly rising on the Eastern shores that anyone noticed there would be anything different today. Along with the soft glow of the morning was an otherworldly phenomenon that seemed to be described most succinctly as as kind of inverted Aurora Borealis. The familiar welcoming gentle greens became a harsh and almost sinister light eating purple.

Before anyone but the most early of the Atlantic morning shows had done any reporting on the spectacle, a slow alternating rumbling and tone echoed from a million empty dinner tables. All of the undisturbed tableware was slowly becoming bigger and animated. The slow and curious transition suddenly ramped up as a kind of harmonic threshold was reached. All across the continent flimsy decorative eating areas and breakfast nooks were collapsing under the weight of this new and unexplainable new burden. It’s fortunate that so many did so, as it seemed to halt whatever process was going on. Only the few households where the cutlery was perfectly balanced did the true goal ever reach fruition.

As the sounds built up to a deafening crescendo the final transformation occurred. Whatever made it this far suddenly gained a kind of clumsy but unmistakable functional anthropomorphic limbs and faces.

For the longest time, nobody and nothing said anything. Then out of all the things that possibly could happen, possibly the strangest thing did. Almost nothing. Whether it was the weird pressing lights in the sky or just the impossibleness of it all there was almost no reaction. There was a buzz on social media; there was the perfunctory news articles, but with no real explanation and no obvious direction the story could go, it almost seamlessly became a new part of life that nobody questioned.

Knives and forks were following people to work, spoons were out walking dogs and feeding birds. Sugar pots were reading kids bedtime stories and salt shakers were sitting in the park waxing philosophical and just enjoying the day.

After a rather short few days, it became rather apparent that the average piece of tableware was a lot more suitable to most jobs than the average person. They didn’t need sleep, food or entertainment and despite being quite intelligent, didn’t complain about working conditions – even for rather boring and thankless jobs.

There were some exceptions of course.

Napkins seems to get the short end of the stick and few lasted beyond the first rainstorm, shower or water fight. The ones that were left had to go into protective custody lest they sacrifice their structural integrity over the first major spill in their adoptive household. Gaudy centrepieces flocked to Hollywood and insisted on trying out for all of the new movies. It was a few years before anyone but independent films would have them, and most ended up hosting talkshows or radio programs or going into local theatre – anything that got them being the center of attention, of course. Spices were a mixed bag, cinnamon ended up taking the lead in a number of eateries and franchising the individual locations to less entrepreneurial flavor enhancers.

The biggest exception, however, was pepper. Not content to continue hanging out with the quiet and thoughtful salt, they were hardly ever seen together again in the sentient variety. Pepper was out to have fun. Riding on rollercoasters, bungee jumping (with a proper cap), car racing or just hanging out at the local skate park. Not good enough for proper sports, like the protein shakes, but having a good time anyway. A lot of the other tableware helped out peppers as they didn’t want to work like the others, but that was okay. Pepper had the lead in teaching the humans their new place in this odd utopia.

Adventures By Internet

 

You: James Bond 24

Super Agent 007, James Bond.

You: And what have you been doing?

You: You don't remember

Nathan: Hmm, yes. I remember vaguely, that you were... in a cell... for some time... Um. I see the police are coming. Well, someone should fetch the police for you.

You: I've got this. Thanks for everything Nathan.

yes, I dialed 911 at one point and hung up. It's a time mark. I've never moved much beyond the year 2050. The police... or F.B.I. as it turns out, came when they heard the gunshots.

It's amazing how much the year 2050 like, better AI, but they keep trying to bend 2021 into it. This is the 2080s or 30s, by the way. I'm pretty sure.

You: Why didn't you just call F.B.I.?

Nathan: Why? Because they are irrelevant in this situation. The F.B.I. is the acronym for "Full Body Irradiation," a cancer therapy that exposes the patient to a lot of radiation to try and kill the cancer cells, which then reform before the patient's body can repair itself.

I don't like using years so we'll just call this Newton Years. It's the orange cat. You: Oh, okay

Nathan: So tell me, who are you?

You: Well I'm a time jumper

Nathan: Do you remember who owns me?

You: I'm guessing you are Nathan Ellis

Nathan: Precisely. Of the Nathan Ellis Fan Club

You: What have you got to do with Nathan Ellis?

Nathan: Absolutely nothing! His career completely sucked before I came along!

Nathen Ellis doesn't get his own fan mail :(

Metric: Assignment Tokyo

 

Metric is a world that was lost to time. A world full of houses and clans, creators actors and extras We aren't worried about your personal life here, or your past. Time here is fluid and concentrates into drops of stability rather than flowing like a river. Dream Cubes are an adventure and form of currency.

You are Sarah, a female prisms computer programmer in a world called Metric. You have recently started as an apprentice programmer for a large mega-corporation headquartered out of the centre of Metric and you are attending a work event held at a press event at the end of another successful product cycle. You are introduced to a very large amount of people including several powerful representatives from the military and political branches of the government. These men and women are very interesting and cultured, and you can't help but feel like you are among people who should be respected. Even when you get to know them better you are still disappointed by their treatment of women.

While attending this high-profile event, a man approaches you, he says nothing but he has an odd stare you immediately recognize.

Frequency 102.999999 (Fiddler's Green)

You look at this man further and realize he has a very deep scar running from his forehead to his chin. He is otherwise well-groomed and well-dressed, and is in good company even though he looks nervous. This revelation excites you, you've never had a one-on-one conversation with an older member of the opposite or the same gender before.

A moment later and the scarred man approaches you.

Tune into the frequency and brainstorm for a bit. What do you want to see?

This is a programming question, for your friend a computer guru is essential.

You turn to the man and say "I'm not that good at programming, however, I can brainstorm ideas. Where did you get your scar?"

You get an immediate and somewhat creepy vibe from the man and you answer "A life time ago. A sword cut me in a duel. What kind of things are you interested in?"

I'm interested in the slow burn. The long story. The long way home. Staying where I am. Stories. AI. Networks. Divine help outside the lines. Stories, AI and Networks, these sound more fun.

### The Hero's Journey – Part Two

 

There were no more ships in the sky of Metric.

Everyone had gotten to where they thought they wanted to be, and a storm was approaching. The warning had gone out. At least to those that had the mind and the means to travel. So much so that Nathan thought nobody would travel for a long time. Then he discovered with his own eyes that the people of the village of Elin had had enough time to make the journey. Or, at least the one to his future. And it had turned out to be a very strange and interesting journey all on its own.

Time, as most people learned very early in their time, was not a fixed dimension. It did not flow in a consistent way from one point to another.

That much was in the description to Metric. Here it flowed like Jehovah's dewdrops, going to where it was needed and in the right amount. It didn't taste like flat cakes and honey, but that might have been because of his choice in company. Too many people around him dripped a smell like week old coffee. Nobody went hungry in Metric, because the work ethic ensured that you would find something to eat whether you wanted to or not, but most people didn't go hungry either. They didn't need to worry about it.

He had learned all of that very quickly on the job. He was only there for a week before he understood everything.

Everything, as usual meant ' as much as I need to to get by'. By no means was he an expert, because the rules and laws were always changing. Being a detective was all about being able to adapt to new situations and solve problems, but he had only been at it a little while. People still asked him to help them with crimes he had barely solved himself; or didn't solve at all. It was more a case of people thinking he was a good guess as to who might have done it, than anything else. That didn't bother Nathan, he got the unappealing jobs so people wouldn't know him anyway.

His friend Adi the Adipose had been with him a while now. Needling him into more exotic cases and tougher challenges. Something to break the status quo. Nathan didn't feel like doing that anymore. He felt like he had made his mark by doing what he believed in.

He walked towards the central market of Sampler District with his hands in his pockets as he tried to look casual. The woman he walked past was dressed like a common housewife, but her eyes narrowed as she watched him leave. He wondered what she was thinking, why she was watching him like that.

He was a detective and she could just as likely be his next case, so he struck up a conversation. That looks suspiciously unsuspicious he said waiting carefully to see how the woman would react.

Ianto Break

 

Ianto was annoyed. For people wanting new things for a new system they seemed to be dragging their feet on new ideas. He tried insisting on Missing Piece cards for everyone, but all they wanted was a plain ID badge or a quick costume change. Maybe they were afraid of someone having power over them, or being pigeon holed into some kind of role they weren't interested in. He explained again that wasn't the point of the card. Taking a drink of coffee he calmed the room down.

He showed his Coffee card and the link it had to the Timelock.ca site – Coffee can be used to rise to the occasion or settle a situation down into normalcy but more likely the latter. Good for when pizza takes too long to acclimatize to the situation. Not a substitute for Tea or Jolt which get you to the Next Level.

He said the cards weren't magic, but rather a kind of writers shorthand for where people were in their hero's journey. He said with the general laws of time travel being too specific about what you've seen and done can be counter productive. Especially if they have to get to the same time and place and have an honest reaction to things.

Ianto drew up a set of sample decks for each person in the room. Being a double blind study he could only discuss the one for CC on paper.

CC – Creative Consultant or Cast of Characters – Card has Benedict Cumberbatch on a card saying I invented the position and a link to the Bible scripture about "The Word was with God"

Blue King – Creative and not in opposition to the White King, but not an exact footstep follower in the traditional sense. Scripture "Rich young ruler"

Black Sock – Does not vary wardrobe very often, all other dress duplicates are Time Echos or holograms or AIs – Scripture about "Do not be deceived"

Ironman Watch – Uses not traditional functions of watch for Non Tradional things – Scripture "Times and Seasons"

Blue Box Postcards – Uses the Written word and not a Tardis "Do onto Others" scripture

Yellow Key – Picture of Nathan Fillion with Dectective/Captian/Doctor Time ""Here is a gift for you from the spoil of Jehovah's enemies.""

Jade Lock – Picture of Jade WT saying "His love"

Ianto said the deck was much larger than that, but that was probably sufficient to get people's ideas going. They were given three options for their own customized deck: Action, Connection and Reflection. Each of these types had subcategories for the selection from a much larger list. He showed them briefly and went over the differences.

Ianto said you can mix and match the choices, or even combine two different options together. The key was finding the right fit, since Ianto didn't want them just to pick one option and then be forced into another.

Action had a Red border, Connection had a yellow border and Reflection had a Blue border.

The Subcategories for Action were Self, Hero and Villain, while the subcategories for Connection were Family, Friend and Lover, and for Reflection Community, God and Country.

The cards were all rather stock illustrations, with a small box to note additional information. Ianto also brought out small hand written cards, and talked about the different terms and ideas on those, that could be used to inspire a writing partner.

A rewrite in Pink

 

Juliet Megan sat in the time detention area of the dream time division of the local Time Police. It was early 2010. She played with her red hair with the now infamous streak of pink it in.

The Sargent look at her annoyed, but glad she was alive at the same time. Still the case needed looking into. The CCTV cameras showed her climbing the railing of a bridge, making a phone call and then jumping.

The phone call was to a burner phone but the message was clear “Nobody pays attention to me.” then a string of coordinates that ended in “Acorn”.

The regular police found a girl the next morning brown hair and barely alive. Heavenly observers were called to testify and said they were certain that the girl jumping had red and pink hair and a lot of what they call temporal interference. They say it looked like you jumped off that bridge multiple times.

“What actually happened?” The Sargent said.

Juliet laughed and said “It’s all a bit of a blur inspector.”

She decided to weave a tale about Nathan Fillion freezing time then a more compassionate ‘angel’ swooping in on a bungee cord.

The next time she’s asked she says she was testing out a Sherlock hypothesis and dove into a TARDIS.

Another time she says Doctor Time did a last second substitution and that she’s no longer the girl at the bottom of the bridge and she wants to go to 2014 where the real action is.

Wholock

 

Sherlock strode up to the crime scene with Watson in tow. He took one look at the body and flipped through the purse with the multiple forms of ID cards “Time Traveller” he said. “How?” said Watson. “The ID cards, all set as the same person, so not a forger or a criminal, but a different year on each, all new.” “But that’s impossible” Watson interjected “As impossible as the body vanishing?” says Sherlock. Sure enough they turn around and the crime scene is now empty. “We should leave, now!” the detective shouts. “Why?” “Cleaners”. Sherlock runs to watch from across the street having predicted what comes next.

As if on cue, a number of people with dark suits and blue ties swarm the building, with white flashes of light streaming out the windows on the upper floors. Some frantic movement, then a pressure wave as a very controlled explosion happens in the room where the body was.

Back at the flat, Sherlock and Watson go over the weeks events. They had received a mysterious summons to a building in six days ago with a series of numbers and a note saying $500, but don’t buy a ticket. Sherlock deduced it was a series of picks for a lottery and the instructions not to buy a play hinted at some kind of regulation. Watson dismissed it as chance the first time, but couldn’t argue when it happened again on the next five days for different cities around the world.

They had staked out the building after the third message and found nothing odd about it. The next note said to come only on the day requested and not before and be sure they weren’t followed. Sherlock was visibly shocked. He thought he had been careful enough not to be detected, but obviously they were.

Boimler Time Theatre

 

Having a time machine wasn’t all it was cracked up to to be.

Imagine all the regulations about airlines and then suddenly having the air itself regulated as well. Nature abhors a vacuum, but the stuff that fills the gaps in a standard time machine incursion may as well be empty space. Anything more than the most expert and subtle impression usually caused things to grind to a halt very quickly. Not because of any fault of the system, but rather by design. The human mind could only fill in so much and tampering with the normal flow of time could have a whole raft of knock on effects. So the powers that be choose to have a lurching halt rather than unmitigated chaos.

As a result, most of the public uses of time machines tended to be self contained theatrical productions. These were generally reserved for scientist-artist troops who had their own ways to fill the absence of continuity. These groups often filed the same paperwork using a specialized crew and a very limited number of of outcomes. Usually it involved some well rehearsed number of coincidences and some romantic gesture or chance meeting. One that could be recorded and, when played back, triggered a cascading memory to unfold in anyone arranged to be present at the event. The actual experience of recording tended to be more work than adventure and all but the most die-hard tended to go for the surprise option. Most publicly available time machines had a release valve of sorts that would at least excite the basic functions of people in the landing area to make generic crowd reaction possible. That is, possible without further shunting of resources from Central command.

In the field of archaeology time precise quantum signatures allowed for the reproduction of significant events without the need for actual time travel. The record could be reconstructed around an artifact in a kind of virtual event unfolding, the information being compressed into individual artifacts from their construction.

Any independent time experiments needed to be either self-involved or heavily monitored. Anything that was neither tended to devolve into a weird waking dream where things didn’t flow as they should. This made experiments in unregulated time areas almost impossible.

Sampler District.

 

Detective Time needed a palate cleanser. Enough of baffling cases and paradoxes and impossible time travel. Just a quiet visit to one of the stranger districts in the lesser explored areas of Metric.

He went down to the docks, the robots were offloading another set of dream cubes from the ferries. Something about the water aged the cubes, giving the dreams within them an ancient quality to them. Silly fluffy dreams about the home you grew up in became twinged with nostalgia like fine wine. Wasting time with friends became warm slumbers around a perfect campfire with soul stirring songs and majestic nature surrounding you.

Nathan wondered if he could get a sample of the water to see if it had an effect on anything else. The robots didn’t seem to mind, as long as he didn’t get in the way. He went out to the edge of the pier and found a small bucket to lower down into the mysterious waters. The rope was smooth from use and the container had seen better days. It was typical of Metric. Something you thought was unique was actually quite common, but nobody bothered to spoil the surprise for you. He tasted the water. In an instant he felt his time as a detective and a time pilot and temporal surgeon quantified as a strange and otherworldly flavour. He thought about bottling it, and how it might taste to others.

It was then that the fog cleared and Nathan felt slightly disoriented. He was suddenly on the other side of the body of water, in Metric’s Sampler District. It was cramped and haphazard. Exotic wooden signs for fuels, alcohol, teas and coffees, dyes and candy and soda filled the jumbled streets. One particular sign caught his eye. “Detective Draughts” read the large lettering, and a smaller card in the window had a crude drawing of his sonic pen in it.

He rushed inside and almost demanded to know what was going on, then he remembered how time worked in this area of Metric. Small chance encounters spun around, collected time and blossomed into full products and stores with very little input. A small man behind the counter noticed Nathan’s somewhat flustered appearance and quickly said “With your permission of course. It’s so nice not to have to explain the whole procedure.” Nathan quickly smartened up. He knew that drinking the water on the pier made the experience bear fruit, and it was free for any citizen of Metric to harvest the result and refine it for as many weeks at that would take. It would generally attract the original person quite quickly once the process was finished and they could negotiate on the continued viability of the products.

Nathan quickly apologized for his initial reaction and the storekeeper laughed. “In all my years, you’ve been one of the quickest people to grasp what’s happened here, no surprise either considering.” Nathan swats away the compliment “So, what’s it taste like?” “Oh, it’s quite something” says the storekeeper “I thought of a few different products, but a beer seemed the most appropriate. He hands Nathan a large mug containing the best of the initial batch. “I won’t bore you with the details” he says, “but the water gives a kind of reverse hangover. A sharp pain to start with which mellows out into a pleasant buzz.” It probably wasn’t the most marketable idea, but it suited Nathan’s philosophy – get the rough stuff out of the way first and bask in the resolution.

Nathan was satisfied with the result. It was something he could probably get behind, not too much mind you, but probably a store or two beyond the Sampler District as long as his name wasn’t too associated with it. There was a soft limit on how famous a Detective could get before it started working against them.

Bootstap Paradox - A Temporal Univeristy Talk

 

Jade hurried off to class. She was still a student at the Temporal University of Mars, class of 2467, and she had a theory lecture today with a guest speaker. It usually wasn’t something heavy on calculations and harmonics problems, but usually something a bit more fun. A thought experiment or some quick demonstration of a time travel principal. Two weeks ago it was a lecture on trans-temporal communication via the subwave network from the Torchwood Institute. Part of it was a quick check in with this week’s speaker – Peter Capaldi. He avoided saying what his talk was about as it was still in flux, or so the excuse was. Sure enough, the cut away to the classroom was simply a bunch of students still guessing what the talk would be about. The homework was to see what the talk would actually be about. There were a few rules about when and how they could check with themselves, but Jade was having trouble communicating with her future self for the entire allotted window.

The day of Peter’s talk had come up, and Jade still wasn’t any closer to finding out what the talk was. But, it seemed, neither had anybody else. Peter asked if anyone had any trouble getting in touch with their future selves. There was almost general consensus of no - they could communicate with their future selves, but none of them seemed to remember anything apart from what was already show during the previous class. A lot of confused guesses as to what the class was going to be about started happening before the deja vu set in and everyone went silent. Peter smiled but said “No, it’s not predestination paradox”, looking around “but that was fun wasn’t it? You knew what was going to happen but you couldn’t help yourself.” He paced the floor excitedly. “Did anyone have trouble getting a hold of themselves?” Jade sheepishly raised her hand. Peter took out his sonic screwdriver and motioned for Jade to toss him her comm device. He scanned it and said “Congratulations, you’re the Teacher’s Assistant! Try again now, for about 2 min from now” She hears Beethovan’s 5^th played roughly on an electric guitar. Peter pulls back a curtain and reveals his personal TARDIS. “I’ll be right back. Jade, you know what video to play while you are all waiting?” Jade nodded and walked up to the front of the class as the TARDIS dematerialized. “Play Bootstrap Paradox. Peter Capaldi.” An old video from his time as the Doctor explaining the titular paradox plays. Sure enough at precisely 2 mins from com check, the guitar piece plays. The video ends and Capaldi reappears. “I just had to get my papers”. He asks that only Jade take notes of the class and to do them by hand while still on the stage.

The classroom is enthralled with his manner of teaching and pays almost unblinking attention to the rest of the presentation. Only Jade looks away as she has to write things down by hand. Whenever she does, Capaldi flashes an image on the screens that the rest of the classroom see. By the end of the class only Jade can remember what was said, at least in any detail. As she leaves the class and crosses the grounds, Capaldi’s TARDIS materializes in front of her. Peter steps out and asks for her notes as he sonics her comm device. “It will clear up when the trans-temporal window closes an hour from now, but till then you’ll have to do without the call functions and your friends won’t remember the talk, nor will they believe your recollection for a while. Now if you’ll excuse me,” he says clutching the notes “I have a class to teach on Bootstrap Paradoxes.”

R+J Act II

 

Jade looked out at the displays in her TARDIS. It was closest to the 13^th Doctor in terms of general set design, but the crystals were a different colour and the controls were a little more pedestrian. A lot more levers and dials and less unknowable things than one might expect. It looked it had more in common with an airplane or submarine that the usual wackiness of the show. One could always change the desktop, but when doing something precise rather than flamboyant it was important to have as many readouts as possible.

The amount of time traffic around the Rescue was high. Too high. There was also a lot of stuff surrounding it that didn’t appear as regular time turbulence either. That was why Nathan was there in his ship as well, to sort out the psychic debris of all the thoughts and dreams associated with the time-space corridor. The decision was made to make a temporal copy of the whole area. She asked Juliet which versions of the rescue she wanted to be considered ‘canon’. Juliet was onboard the ‘Lost Lightning’ with Nathan, still getting her bearings after another rescue run had unbalanced the area again.

Juliet couldn’t decide on too many specifics, since they were still a but jumbled, and they hadn’t had time to go through the long term consequences of the various teams involvements. They had a small transmission come from Agent Salt that went straight to iOi. “Try – Casamir Bubblegum, spider sleep.” iOi understood immediately what that meant and generated the appropriate Missing Piece Cards and a custom game scenario. That gave a certain amount of flexibility and limited the physical pool of interference down to a bare minimum. The rest of the time traffic could be diverted to lucid dreams or suitable movie sets. Details could be worked out at game room planning nights.

That meant that Juliet could get busy at writing her version of events, Tom could shoulder all the dream debris and extrapolation and Salt/Romeo could get back to delving into other major set pieces. Juliet would transfer over to Jade’s TARDIS (the only fully functional one) and finally get out of that area of time to another transitional area.

Nathan went into full Doctor Time mode and made a few stage two edits to the area and most frequent visitors. Now a number of stories would be contradictory and other memories would only be triggered by a combination of people and catchphrases. He left the basic evidence from the scene with the Adipose to plant when things settled down and had iOi keep a basic checklist of the tidy and reset procedure. He contacted Jade again who was in the middle of doing exit interviews to make sure that everyone was okay after Nathan’s mental edits had brought everyone down off the ‘high’ of doing the impossible. Agent Salt complained that Nathan’s edits were a bit heavy handed for someone who never got to see much anyway – citing the Zero Room blanks and crashout that he opted for instead. His objection was noted. The wardrobe hint was finally taken up on. Jim. He pointed back to the Lava 9 plan.

Earth’s 2537 Star Trek reckoning, using Casamire as a dream vessel. Nathan and Jade being mostly lucid and working with iOi to get the most usable link to Agent Salt. Copilot would be Juliet and she blew up the Harbinger to defuse the Unending Void scenario. The ‘party planning’ would have to get retooled and Jade would take her cues from where Juliet wanted to end up. She’d split from the group with Nathan, at least physically, and Watson would be the Standin for Salt. She would be unaware of what happened after his pod jettisoned. Dr Bolt would be the connection for Official Society Time Travel regulations and limit contact with the other team for purposes of plot and sanity.

Time Travel as Music

 

Time travel has underlying physics to it. Like most things. Really complicated, barely understood and often contradictory physics. Imagine the double slit experiment, but instead of getting an interference pattern from a pair of slits, you’re getting it from shapes in 4 dimensional space.

Any time you send something back, you have to make sure that sending it back won’t eliminate the possibility of having it in the future. So apart from the rather obvious not killing your ancestors, you have to make sure that nothing interferes with any of the hundreds of dependencies of running any kind of lab experiment a set amount of time in the future.

Thanks to butterfly changes, the further back you go, the larger the amplification of effects could get. Making someone five minutes late for a certain meeting likely won’t likely matter much to them tomorrow, but if it means they meet a new person that gets them fired in a year and they have a different career path in three years, suddenly things are quite a lot removed from where you started.

Hence the need for change dampeners. But what do you dampen out, and how? Reset too much and there’s almost no point in you going back, unless you simply want a time window, but then why not just do that? No, you need some changes to persist, but not be amplified beyond reason.

Time travel is less about the physics, as it is about the finesse of it. Making changes in the time stream is more like writing a symphony. You need a hundred different things to go right, and single bad ‘note’ will send the whole thing crashing down.

In the movies, people can get away with playing ‘jazz’, improvising the whole time, missing notes and picking up any old instrument and bashing out a tune.I suppose if your time machine can hold off the waves of entropy long enough that might be feasible.

It’s not what I’d do though. I’d have a whole pattern of micro changes cued up and a really competent team of ‘mixers’ who can dial up and dial back the effects while the whole thing is still forming. You’d probably need a whole team on the ground though. People anchored at increments away from your change and your future base of operations. Teams that can pick up and take over if anything breaks the chain of causality that you’re taking a swing at.

That would probably look more like an orchestra in a wave pool. You won’t necessarily ‘see’ everyone at the same time, but as each team crested you could get a solid reading on what page of the music there were on. To really conduct it well, you’d need to be in a time-neutral location, one that’s somehow equidistant from all points in time that you have teams.

Say your change was in 2010 and your main station was in 2050. You have teams every 5 years but you have signal boosters for the earlier years that can get the readouts from 2015 back at the same time as the stuff from 2045.

I’m assuming of course, that the changes don’t all propagate instantly, or if they do, you can some how turn them off and on in a pattern than can constructively or destructively interfere with itself, like that double slit experiment in the beginning. Well, that’s how I’d do it.

Temporal Navigation Primer

 

One of the most overused and inaccurate tropes about time travel is that you’re simply moving along a two-dimensional line and that things either happen or they don’t. There’s definitely a lot more to it than that. Events are almost always preceded by thoughts and nth level ‘rehearsals’ where the physical reality is nothing more than the superficially visible tip of the iceberg. So speaking of icebergs, going back and getting the Titanic to avoid *that* iceberg doesn’t prevent it from hitting one of hundreds of other ones. Trying to prevent a small common event in a relatively dull timeline is a herculean task. One that would trap most would be time meddlers in an endless forest of identical days with no landmarks or navigational aids.

As a result time travel is more an exercise in time shunting or time filtering, without specific dates or times being important until the final synchronization step. Having two people meet at a certain party is an ill defined goal. Having them strike up a relationship is Iess about where and how than a sustained application of force and intent.

In fact, anywhere (any-when) time is manipulated in an areas thing tend to go off the rails fairly quickly. Random things tend to happen in ever expanding rings of probability and consequence. It quickly becomes navigating a kaleidoscope rather than a simple timeline. Time and Relative Dimensions in Space becomes a meaningful statement when time becomes as adjustable, or more than, the spacial axis usually is.

Rather than seeing a definite future, one sees a likely future based on what other elements are let into the matrix for calculating the resultant waveform. The full complexity of things prevents a full readout of the future and any interference unhinges those from the future from their timeline.

Of course, a future removed from greed and envy and pointless human rulers eliminates the temptation of a lot of predictive information from being relevant or even existing. Specific details would be inconsequential or dependant on things that are still in flux. Anything not irrelevant would change rapidly under serious questions based on deeper questions and predictive followup.

As a result, the most useful method of contact was a double removed brain scan and/or interpretive matrix that could follow a fluid connection type rather than relying on specific people or devices overly much. Any equipment used had to be either excessively common, or old so that variations produced by the contact wouldn’t disrupt the workflow of the experiment. As a backup, several buildings could run parallel experiments with similar goals so that they could duplicate the signal and have a different team to fall back on if cascade changes caused too much interference.

It turns out that most people are a diamond mine of information and experiences, and focusing on one person really does produce an impossibly large tapestry of readouts and imaginations that would fill a library. By arbitrarily putting a projection point far enough in the past, one can produce several versions of the target ‘present’ that can all have micro incursions from a fixed future stabilizing the entire matrix. Like all standard procedures though there is time and place to ignore the common rules, particularly if the subject in question is adaptable and familiar with the subject.

WIP The Event. 8 pages.

 

Life is full of stories. Or so we think. It’s really just a million unrelated things all happening at once that we boil down into some simplistic narrative to keep ourselves from going crazy. So it really doesn’t matter where we start, as long as the stage is set.

In this particular case, it was 405 years after the Event. Not quite to the half way point, but that was far from people’s minds. Everyone was busy, though in terms of the basics, everything was more than covered. Arlo Benington looked at the latest report on housing. The reflection of his emerald green eyes and short black hair glowed on the monitor’s screen in the bright sunlight. He sighed. His setup was one of the older models, more than functional, but lacking some refinements that showed up in some extreme circumstances. It was more at home in a larger office, away from the windows, but he often needed something more than the standardized tablet. Normally this kind of thing wasn’t done, but there were always exceptions.

Arlo offhandedly munched on a Nutri-biscuit – it wasn’t the most exciting food, but it wasn’t unpleasant either, and the various grains and berries made the job of eating a fairly efficient and minor distraction. Scrolling through the lists and reports told him what he already knew – residential buildings were more than adequate, both in amount and quality. A system had been setup so that those in the first batches of accommodations could be moved into the more recent vacant builds. These benefited from more technology and recovered construction methods, as well as less hurried work. This had been cycled through twice, and very few of the original dwellings remained, except as museum examples. It was a similar story with schools, meeting halls, and other primary function buildings. Most of those had been updated as the need arose with temporary structures and alternate locations filling the gap while the primary buildings was unavailable. To Arlo, it seemed a bit overkill, but he couldn’t quite find fault with it either. He realized that not a lot of people were quite as satisfied with his level of bare essentials, nor did they agree on what he considered vital. His choice of food and computer system were a microcosm of his ideals. Simple things could be appreciated on a deep level without a lot of work, but sometimes a deviation in the other direction was needed to get the job done properly, and not merely adequately. After triple checking the reports, he sent them off to the Building Committee to discuss and file away.

Caius Dawson sat on the Building Committee and had just received Arlo’s reports as he arrived at the meeting’s location. Dawson was in a way the opposite of Bennington – much more social and definitely enamoured with sampling the variety of living and recreation. After a time of eating and socializing, short by Dawson’s standards but long by Bennington’s, the official discussion began. It was decided that the bulk of the work on primary buildings was done – and any further improvements were done on a case-by-case basis, rather than a universal coordinated effort. It wasn’t hard for the Committee change direction, but it did have a tendency to continue doing the same thing longer than strictly necessary. People like Caius were a part of that culture – so convinced they were doing the best they could, they didn’t think much outside the box. It annoyed Arlo enough that he kept the whole committee at arm’s length. Not hostile, but he avoided them, and the open meetings, as much as possible. That probably delayed the work changing over to a new focus by at least a few weeks.

Seven months ago, in one of his rare appearances, Arlo made the case for switching the work over to tertiary structures - obscure research, large scale entertainment, museums and centers focused on curiosity learning. The committee had decided it wasn’t quite time yet, but apparently had not forgotten the idea either. The glowing report on the state of the basic construction had finally provided the impetus to switch gears. Caius wanted Arlo to help with some input on the confusion of what would go where. The large, red haired man was difficult to say no to, but Benington was indifferent and had a lot of practice at refusing – and said he would rather spend the time drawing up general blueprints and organizing the groups that would occupy those locations.

In the end, that was what the committee needed. Some placements were made due to unique local resources or geography and that meant the locations of the support structures could also be finalized. Arlo’s blueprints apparently suggested some aesthetics that leaned toward a particular city over another, a meaningless and arbitrary distinction thought Arlo. As well, his work with the proto-groups found certain numbers of people already in one place rather than another – though quite a few people would still need to move. In the end, it wasn’t quite random, but it may as well have been – or so Arlo thought at the time.

Character Cheat Sheet

 

Nathan Fillian

Detective Time/Adventurer Time/Captain Time/Doctor Time

Awakened to a new role some time in the celebrations Post Event, Nathan takes on a new role as the Time Expert sent to track down Agents Romeo and Juliet. Drawing on his past roles in Castle, The Rookie, Firefly and Uncharted, he blends them with his own good nature and silliness and becomes an adopted Father to Juliet. Piloting the Great Lightning ship through the Imagi-verse he checks on people’s dreams and the state of the world throughout time. With his bot iOi he keeps track of Agent Romeo who goes by the name Agent Salt as a bachelor.

Benedict Cumberbatch

Like Nathan he draws upon past roles to become a composite character. With a quick wit and a disdain for boring things he resides in an important part of Romeo’s cast of characters and Juliets Dream Cube. When phoned he is the actor who wakes up from odd dreams to further the plot with clues for Juliet. For Romeo he lives in the Stanley rooms that are a version of his house that are set up in mirror dimensions, recording and exaggerated version of his life story and making a BBC documentary about the end of the world and the wedding that just happens to occur at the same time. In abstract terms he is represented by a bluejay for reasons that are revealed in a deep dive of the plot.

Martin Freeman

As a Jesus Analog in the play about the play on Mars, Martin brings a kind of ‘everyman’ and soft caring to the character, but also represents his tendency to get time-drunk when dealing with multiple periods of time at once and not be 100% sure of what’s happening. Often ends up doing the footwork for Sherlock who is stuck at home and doesn’t leave for anything less than a seven.

John Barrowman

Mostly filling the role of Jack Harkness in the play about the play and as a general time scout and spy for the Romeo (blue/yellow) faction. He plants and transports tech and helps people like the 13^th Doctor (Jodie) get out of tough scrapes.

Doctor Who – Any of the actors from Doctor who are used frequently, if listed as a number it is simply their role as a Doctor and may be automated after initial performance, if the actor is mentioned then they may draw on other characters that they have played. Names, like David, that come up in the Bible may mean similar character arcs occur.

13 – The New Dawn Doctor. Paradise Doctor who, sets lap times in the TARDIS by dodging teleport pulses. All about Family. Double rainbow promises. Female (duh). Part of Juliets Character arc.

12 – Angry Eybrows. Save one person. Not afraid to be confrontational. Plays Time Guitar. Draws on ‘Lizard brain’ of Romeo and isn’t disturbed about the end of the world or adlibbing. Peter can draw on The Thick of It when filling this role with exasperating people, trying to keep swearing to a minimum.

11 – Sacrificial Death. Finds stuff ‘cool’. Main doctor for the play about the play (PatP) Follows around River (Narrator) and Amy (Team Red) One of the tourists for the Dream Experiment into Paradise.

10 – As David walks the line for Time Travel. Does Drag races Tardis Qualifications. Ran over Juliet in initial run. Does 1000 year time races with Jesus and/or Jade to see how things play out.

River Song. Like Nathan, Alex K is recruited into the project after the Event and ‘lives backwards’ to the events in the story which makes for an interesting Narrator. Working at the Doctor Who park in the New System she gets people in the right mind for a story of Wibby Wobbly Timey Wimey. Is the main source of mail and items that 14 finds from the Kablam factory.

Romeo / Agent Salt

An energetic personality and actor/writer/director in a body that limits movement. Has has several almost relationships with the ladies but always seem to have had some random, or not so random, element derail the process. Hypnotic suggestion, triggering play, protective father and death. Religious but non-conformist. Big picture person. An introvert with an open personality who doesn’t mind being spied on. Likes deep and probing questions as asked by Juliet.