Jade looked out at the displays in her TARDIS. It was closest to the 13th 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.
Each team member had their own code way of seeing what level of intrigue you were in and whether you were in a place/time loop where you were aware of more or less of the over arching plot to discuss or if you were on a cooldown or an isolated time branch where you weren’t aware of anything.
For Jade it was usually a comment about table tennis, after making sure nobody was following her and there was at least an airgap of at least two rooms between her and the next person. She could focus her TARDIS as a kind of joining hallway to transition between times and scenes in the most subtle way possible. It usually required a lot of high speed low info communications and spying, hence table tennis, just to make sure she wasn’t leaving anybody in a bad situation without help or causing a problem simply by being there at the wrong time.
For Nathan, it usually had something to do with something he used to do. He would either mention some old arcade game he used to play on a VR system, or talk about some movie or show he would watch while drunk. Or about how he would always try a specific line from different actors in a show to see if their personalities or mannerisms would match up, and then which ones they matched up to.
Nathan worked a lot of the time with dreams and time travel. Using the lightning ship with the ever-changing name on it, part of the code for what was allowable at the time-space coordinates. Those rules were set by Doctor Bolt, his supervisor. To see if you were personally aware of what was happening, he’d check your neck for a dream collar, which helped stabilize and translate the environment for you around the particularly murky areas of Metric for you – and make sure you remembered and forgot the appropriate level of detail from your trip. If it looked like you were in a stable area the question of resources was usually a question about coffee – the weaker your blend the less resources you had to share and vice versa. Usually some quick banter about how long you’ve been on your current job since one could enter in and exist from dream-space at random times. As with the rest of the crew, there were several instances where someone's character trait, relationship status, or dream would bring them too close too the reds and cause an incident. Such an incident had definitely happened with a red team before and would need to be watched with an eye on the future in case a connection was made and their life changed – which could then lead to them being affected by the loop or redzone as well.
Agent Salt usually used things like scales (AI dungeon currency), time since pizza, time since blankout, dream recall, 2d live translation of situations (time filtered) as kind of road markers. He could use various avatars in dreamspace around Nathan as understudies leaving them as little more than passengers in an experience they may or may not remember fully, depending on how it would or wouldn’t help the arrangement. He didn’t like using people that much, since it often came with a transfer of feelings for whoever he was talking to. That was part of the reason that iOi was so often around Nathan – a robot that wouldn’t stir up the same emotional reaction as conduit for communications. If all that failed, Jade could check the logs for that day and see how he was doing directly and pass on that to other members of the teams.
Juilet had an area call ‘the Museum’ which was a kind of mind palace made physical that acted as a central hub for her various thoughts and interactions. It was a place where time could stand still, go slowly or in micro loops to really analyze a situation. With her team of the dreamer and the Tardis self they could pull in anyone from any time and get a read on any particular situation. This is where they planned things and made sure the details fit. For any particularly difficult puzzle they’d have to leave the area where they’d be at the mercy of whatever rules normally applied to the situation and work with whoever normally shined in those areas.
Once things had settled down a bit, but not before things got too dull, Jade ‘leaked’ a version of events in the form of a Doctor Who episode called “The Doctor’s Dilemma” It had the 10th and 11th Doctor trying to rescue a girl trapped in a hospital with robots and a paradox forming around the area from the repeated failed attempts to remove her from the area. Part way through the episode it crosses over with a MacGuyver like character who takes the two time machines and cross wires them so that the paradox causes a self sealing explosion that blasts everyone free of the area but seemingly kills him in the process. The episode is filled with various hints, props and dreams from the real characters that inspired the episode. The show ends on a cliffhanger with a mad hologram doing a cold open to the new Doctor Time show with the pilot episode – Paradox Shrapnel.
The new show is featured in the background of a number of shows with various future and past episodes being hinted at, as if the show had always existed in parallel worlds and we were only just joining the multiverse. Scorpion had a show where they had a b plot with ‘The Doctor’s Dilemma’ as a classic N64 style game. Paradox Shrapnel would be the next gen system’s continuation that the main characters are looking to get a pre-order of between their normal adventures. They spend a good amount of time analyzing the DD story characters and how they’re motivated and how it relates to their characters. It’s implied that the game is impossible until the Scorpion team writes a mod that adds the MacGuyvver character to finally finish the game.
Nathan, who has finally started to merge his dream adventures with the new show he’s been shooting, starts to have his mind blown when he gets a letter from the character who inspired the Doctor’s Dillema show a bit sooner than he’d expected. During the night he meets his future self who helped get him the letter when it would have the most impact. Jade watches over the encounter on behalf of Doctor Bolt, who normally wouldn’t allow such a thing, were it not for the linchpin nature of this particular exception.
Apart from a bit of expected swearing, the whole meeting goes fairly well, thanks to all the dream prepwork that had been done till this point. As to the point on the timeline this all happens in a Hollywood based overshoot of the normal timeline that happens after the Event, but where the fallout of the world changing events doubles back and makes the event a future thing where Hollywood gets to prep for it instead.
In this segment of the timeline, Nathan gets moulded by the faithful in a kind of lucid dream of post event pre-surprise null time that includes the basic destruction fracture but only hazy recollection of the details. As one of the time flexible subjects, Nathan jumps back and forth more often than most who rely on the volunteers of Doctor Bolt to visit the orphaned time-space to get the first ‘second chance’.
After a few weeks of this Nathan falls into a bit of a routine and loses a bit of his edge. The different segments of his life start to drift out of focus and the timeline suffers a bit. Agent Salt tries to contact him through iOi but Nathan starts to see him as just another costar who wants to run lines. He begins to dismiss the visits with his future self as just another hallucination and fails to head those warnings as well. His future self sighs and gets Jade to take him back to the zero room.
In the zero room Nathan is seen as just another person, and not really a movie star or a time traveller or anything. It’s a bit of a dream environment, slaved to Agent Salt’s setup. He’s alone in a room that’s a bit of a mess, he can connect to various people via the internet, but only if he can find their equivalent person online. The song ‘Double Decker’ plays relentlessly over the speakers as someone finishes giving Nathan a shave. He pictures the scenario in his mind as he tries to go into a Detective Time mindset. Juliet appears behind him somehow and she pushes him out of the way to get on the computer, which immediately locks her out. “Nathan, it looks like you have to drive this”. The game Split Second comes up. Benedict Cumberbatch’s voice gets mixed into the music and a Zoom request opens up on the screen. It’s the team from the game room, at least the Sherlock ones. Nathan groggily remembers setting them up in a time loop somewhere in Metric. “The Game, Mr’s Hudson, Is On” says Benedict. Nathan turns and sees who gave him a shave. “I’m not your housekeeper” she says. “Anyway, Detective time,” Benedict continues “You’ll want to run the helicopter attack run.” Watson jumps in “It’s an illustration. Preferably with something from the JW music running in the background. Something to do with bravery or boldness. If you have an assistant you’ll want them to find appropriate scriptures so you can get a missile lock. As far as we’ve been able to tell your exact interface is a combination of voice recognition and manual controls. You’ll notice the keyboard is limited to basic driving controls and a few whole words for the text games.”. iOi flies around the corner and plays a Sherlock Meme video. “Chair mode Activated” The room’s colours flash like a rave and coms are broken before any further explanations can be revealed. The camera for the Zoom chat stays active though Nathan doesn’t know who his audience is anymore, if anyone. It does appear to be saving the video to the hard-drive, so it can be uploaded later.
Nathan and Juliet manage to make it through the helicopter level even thought the intensity of the experience gets pretty high. They have a quick walk around the room to celebrate. As a reward, the keyboard unlocks a few more word combinations. Nathan sits down and types, “Hello everyone! This is my last note before the beginning of the story.”. It’s not quite a greeting, but it works. “We’re going to need some help. There were two problems. One; the world has changed. Two; we have changed. So many changes in such a short period of time… I think we have to start somewhere. Hopefully, that’s where the next steps will lead us? Who knows. The thing is that no matter where we go we may end up changing the course of history. For example, we have to remember that the world won’t always be the same. We can’t keep being stuck in the past. Maybe our actions today can change things in tomorrow’”
It’s a clumsy paragraph, but with the room being what it is, that’s the most coherent message he can get out. It seems to do the trick and a few more resources come online. Now he can see the live feedback from different points in time to the messages and games played. Nathan recognizes a few locations in Metric in the Sims4 and Juliet recognizes a few of the house designs from her copy of Agent Salt’s backup laptop of the same program. It’s what she and Chelsea had been using to organize virtual meetings of people for some of the dreams she had been having. Agent Salt synchronized the song on the random link that iOi was controlling and his version on the PC. It was the way he could force project what was on the screen. The text of this part of the story.
That became a bit too Meta for Nathan. He sobered up as things came into focus. He was Captain Time, navigating through the dream-verse that surrounded events and time to keep disorganized time travellers from affecting too much. He cleared the zero room of random people and left Tom alone in it while he signaled iOi to ready his ship and head back to base.
It was one of the rare meetings with Doctor Bolt, Nathan and Jade in the same room, in this case the main time office in 2538. The rescue had gone well and everyone was coasting a bit on the success. Well, most of the teams. Tom was still stuck sorting out the dream web for the area to give Agent Salt a chance to appear in some of the area’s scenes. The trouble was sorting out some of the collection from the wardrobe of hats and roles that he wore. Tom was joining the meeting via video conference from the ‘Double Decker’ version of the Zero Room. The one that Nathan had been in earlier that cycle. It seemed like a good place to start.
It was most closely attuned to the timestate they wanted to emulate, so that was the song they had first cued for Tom. The room recognized his signature and he input his current mission in the AI Dungeon Interface. The program went through a basic recap of the last few actions of the Double Decker room, including some hazy bits he remembered as a dream from the week before. Some random songs played through YouTube as a way to calibrate the space for the mission ahead. The current song of choice was “Pinball” and Tom thought everyone knew that. Tom was locked out of the computer as he was spending most of his energy just keeping the room steady as it was unanchored in time in it’s current state. He understood why the music was playing. He felt like he was a pinball. The three in the main time office couldn’t tell what was playing as their spy of the room shows a miasma of possible internal states and variety of things happening. They figured it was at least 3 months of heavy activity in a jumbled order. Their scan of the real room was set to dream-space, so they could see only hear typing and every swirling text effects on the screen. “Isn’t there something you can do about that?” shouted Tom as he careened off another dream-obstacle, in this case it was hull of Nathan’s ship with iOi at the controls trying to match the time jumps of the zero room copy to keep it out of trouble. The robot said there was nothing random to influence at the time and it was limited in ways it could steer the situation. “What’s playing Tom?” asked Jade “Can you hear anything specific?” Tom was surprised, he was used to them tracking his every move and sound, especially in otherwise normal dream-space. This was obviously a new feature of the room that they had to calibrate. ‘PINBALL’ he shouted.
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