The Search for Metric - Part 1 of ...

 

Chapter 1 – The Search for Metric

He sat as his desk writing again. He had imagined the roles that a lot of people would have to play, wondered about how many loops and dreams that they would have to have before they believed any of it. How long before the upper management of the universe took another chance on change. The radio was tuned into the most useful song for the moment as it had been for a while. His organic searches on YouTube with all sorts of crazy qualifiers like the last number he had seen, the last character he had been working on, the point of view of a certain character – it all seemed to fit. Or he made it fit. Kitbash. It’s essentially what he was doing. Taking divergent things like a random conversation with a religious friend and a streaming playlist and getting them to mesh. He liked to think it was working on the time gears of the universe, but maybe it was just keeping his mind active.

All of it for her.

Well. For everybody eventually. But...

He wondered what she was up to. What memories she had picked. Did she go with the plainest version of events, or did she take some of the weird and wonderful with her. Getting resurrected by the forces behind the creation of this place was a miracle. But what if that wasn’t needed in the first place? It was obvious to all that were on board with that idea of a higher power wouldn’t see anything wrong with the most pedestrian version of events. But what would that accomplish? I mean apart from the obvious. Showing a God of love and power had both of those things. I guess that would be enough for some, but it didn’t really show anything not already written down as sure and true. Checking off boxes. Precedents for that kind of thing. He un-paused the movie he was watching. He didn’t like making the characters hold their breath that long. “Getting younger all the time” another promise written in the Book. But what of the New Scrolls? What kind of tempo would they set? Did they have room for ‘off the books’ projects?

For communication he set up the Metric project. A kind of Time Neutral location that relied on universal constants (like Pi). It helped write this novel. And it will help all of us get through this.

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She had it easy. Or so he figured. She was on the side of miracles already happening, so the ask wasn’t quite as big. Or maybe it was. Why would she want something different than what was already provided. Why would she insist that things weren’t the way it seemed. She could communicate with him in her dreams and whatever it was during the day wasn’t quite him. It fooled most people, but maybe they were just projecting themselves into a placeholder for him. For all he know she was everybody and everyone on his end of the internet. Putting on a hundred different masks waiting for some sign that he was just the right level of crazy. Maybe it was bigger than that. Maybe everyone else was a robot controlled from the future. When anything is possible, it’s hard to rule anything out.

“I really value the free boxes we had <location>. Places to take what you need, and leave what someone else might. These places had no brokers; there was no one there to collect and sell, or gate-keep what had value. “

It was an out of place kind of post, but it touched upon what kind of ‘problems’ a perfect world without money might have. Something the normal literature didn’t address. 

It looked like she wanted to find out more. Which is only fair. Not the most exciting way for things to go forward, but a reasonable one. She soon found the depths of the story though and he hoped they could find her.

She did the most responsible thing under the circumstances. She took the gift of time travel and hid it away. She reached out with small hints here and there. Something that wouldn’t be too out of place, but a thread to tug at if one looked close enough. Posts too close together. Weird things that were inexplicable, but fit in a certain context. Her mother, or some version of her, kept her away from using her gifts too strongly, until certain arrangements had been made. Something to keep her in check. Something to occupy her time. Some kind of context to fit back into the ‘real’ world. She was in kind of a dreamy fugue state. Knowing she could get anything with enough effort so that nothing was worth the effort and yet the effort was needed to keep things going. She fell down the rabbit hole more than once. But yet on further examination there was footholds in the rabbit hole. Someone wasn’t giving up. Someone was trying to get her attention. It was a base drum that beat below the level of things and that she was one of the few people to notice in the right framework.

It was obvious from the chats – as disjointed and sporadic as they were, that she needed some kind of reference point. Not a plain ordinary life, but something less manic as well. He suggested something like this a return to something mostly plain, but with a number of incongruities or odd starting points that kept things interesting. Maybe a start in a plane heading to Cardiff with hints of past conversations on a phone or in the in-flight entertainment. If it was in the happy garden maybe he wouldn’t be there – which was true. From his perspective he wasn’t in any of those other places and any attempt to bring him there prematurely left him with missing days and a kind of crazy skid back into plainest life.

The point wasn’t for them to be together, but for the middle of the story to form. For everybody to get a happy --- new beginning.

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Every century had it's own Temporal Breakwater Tower. It wasn't quite in physical space, but at some level it was anchored to it, and it kept to a relative position in time. Outside of it were a web of Temporal Buoys that reached out, in decades, 50 years in either direction. In this network was an exhaustive record of everyone and everything that was supposed to happen in a 100 year radius. As temporal events happened – there was another direction to time-space that kept them from happening all at once – this system settled the changes and prevented any runaway effects from cascading.

At the 'top' – or really the most prominently detectable – portion of the tower was a lighthouse/magnet. Anyone attempting to visit a certain time in the domain would first be drawn to it – and outside of normal space-time. What they would find depended on both the era being visited and the era the craft made it's initial jump.

It was part tourist guide, instruction manual, decompression chamber – time travel put enormous stress on entropy related systems – and warning.

Initially, if such a word means much outside of normal space-time, these were natural whirlpools of space-time, taking away significant memories and disruptions of events and replacing them with whatever the swirling miasma of the local culture had dreamed up. Alien visitors for late 20^th century people, monsters and nightmares for more primitive cultures.

Cross-pollination from different times and people refined the process to the point where a recognizable human structure was more noticeable that the natural effect. Ironically, the shorter the time trip, the more built-up the structure appeared to be. Visits from farther away in time resulted in a more natural appearance, and more work needed to shore up the quantum underpinnings.

This again worked out for the best. Crude devices were offered the most help and more complex ones had more control over the workings and tolerances of the tower. 

 

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Thanks to the construction of these towers she found her self in a bit of a time loop. The last part of her uninterrupted life. Some kind of confusion and waking in the Garden, only to have it fade away when the story lines there unravelled.

Whether that was because of his interference or some other greater story, she didn’t know – but the radio seemed to have some hints. It was one of the first gifts of the second cycle. A real time way to get a readout of the other. For him it meant timely songs and some rather odd hosts and the occasional glitch.

That was the problem with organic time travel. Things were too slushy – what you kept and lost in time loops was more or less random, if it wasn’t for the tagging device she grabbed from him she probably would have been stuck for quite a few more revolutions. She knew she was near the end of a cycle and made an attempt to grab him again. However their temporal momentum was too different to make it work.

There was a bit of a charge exchange but nothing too specific on his end – as usual. He didn’t know what she saw, but now wasn’t the time for happy endings – there was a larger goal on the horizon. He could tell from his various channels that she was upset, but again, you can’t have everyone happy all the time. She could drift on her sugar dreams for a while yet, but sooner or later the real work would need doing.

The whole thing would need a bit more structure, or weird, pointless things would keep happening from all the temporal discharges. The last contact had already shorted one of his phones and left his mind in a bit of a state. If there was any loose time-space software attempting to take over his devices, it was back to square one now. If there was some memories lingering in the mix, they hadn’t settled out yet.

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In the first chapter she found she could move around her memories to allows for certain events to take place. Only by reaching about beyond herself could she affect anything outside herself though. This caused some confusion, but eventually it was sorted. The two protagonists picked up working with each other after a break of a few years of time passed on his end while she was in a time loop.

If this was based loosely on ‘A Study in Pink’ the next chapter would have to be ‘The Game is On’ in which she uses her abilities, passively, to help others sort out journeys through time portals and the great Second Exodus.