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He was wound up tighter than a clock. No pun intended. The answer was right there, but nobody wanted to spring it open. He had been over the calculations so many times he wasn’t sure what the problem was. There was no way to tell what would happen, but everything would be up in the air for a bit then it would settle down.
It was about two weeks since his hyper-time and null time training. He tried to review it with the AI but it tended to drive the thing to megalomania. That, he supposed, was an argument for some organic element to time machines. Artificial life tended to react badly to unlimited parameters. Minds could at least shut down and filter out the excess – computers build specifically to handle an insane number of calculations tended to break down when the infinities increased exponentially. Still, a machine was a good way to keeps the standard level of paradoxes at arms length.
Everyone else was busy tidying away the digital and physical debris from the exercise. A programmer was looking for any digital footprint that suggested anything was out of the ordinary – like free food for no good reason. Gifts from other time travellers converted into spam requests. Back dating changes to the system to prevent suspicion. Previously helpful internet contacts being routed to similar people who were no longer useful. Physical teams replacing objects borrowed by other teams in the opportunity window, overwriting memories of extreme events with a more benign ones. Having Normality broadcasters on low output to smooth over any remaining wrinkles.
Not something he enjoyed, but everyone needed to keep up their skill sets. It always seemed like the ‘cleaners’ won, but they couldn’t erase everything. His notes seemed crazy again, outside of the context needed to make sense of them – a kind of time lucidity that made impossible connections seem reasonable. So this time he thought he’d write a kind of post crash interpretation and summary of them. He put the main lessons in square brackets [Pay attention to your surroundings] [Note /Random things like playlists and radio tunes] [Make sure of physical constants (to ensure you’re not dreaming)] [Test range of motion – again for dreams check and side effects] [No time to plan if time is in Flux] [Slow and Sad – Normality may appear without warning]
For some reason his feed was featuring things on University. That was another time he had an out of time experience. Not as pleasant and not as productive. Always feeling like it’s on the cusp of something but never actually getting anywhere. It wasn’t a state of mind that he needed to reach, but honestly getting things done.
Time passed. Things fell apart. It felt like she was rescuing copies of him. Taking slices of time and stretching them out and having reactions fill up the gaps. It wasn’t ideal, for either party, but it was good help for the larger project, which was to get everybody else 99% projected into the future. The sooner she tried that, the better. He was stubborn enough to not push for any other eventuality. He could dream-phase into some of the later time periods and leverage a further experiment – based on the illusion that he was safe. Things could leapfrog further and snap back with only a small number being aware of the progress made and fewer still who was pushing for it.
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