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.
___
The Event
If you’re thinking things are going entirely too well, and why there’s so much focus on construction, it’s because you don’t know what the Event is. For anyone currently living at this time, that’s pretty much impossible. Either you were part of the small handful of people alive when it happened, or it was explained as one of the first things for the inevitable questions when you suddenly arrived in the After. For the sake of completeness, and in case this story somehow falls out of time, the Event was the sudden and thorough end of the large and disagreeable masses of humanity, and all the trappings and infrastructure that went along with it. For the purpose of this shard of the narrative, no one was quite sure how it happened or why the ones that survived did. Or why people who died before it happened suddenly showed up again. It was, without exception, the largest reset of society in modern history. One of the side effects of the Event was that everyone alive was steadily improving in health. It was as if the human genetic code was tweaked to fix all it’s own errors and settle out into a, till then, theoretical perfection – an eternally self-renewing organism.
For most people, the memories of the first little while were a bit too traumatic. For Arlo it was a release. Too many unthinking, selfish people recklessly careening through life – alternating between jaunts on destructive bandwagons and apathetic, wasteful droning over-consumption. And then nothing. The loss of life was jarring at first, but upon reflection something worse was going to happen sooner or later anyway, and with far more casualties and much more suffering. At least this way collateral damage, at least in terms of lives, was minimized. It was inconvenient that most of the structures disappeared as well, but logically, necessary as well. It wasn’t anything that could be maintained, and nothing that was all that suitable for those left anyway.
The first few years after the Event were a bit rough. Starting from a blank slate was never easy, but it was surprising what skills and knowledge kicked in when it was needed. Raw resources were everywhere in the rubble. It took a little while for dependencies to get built back up again – making tools to make tools to make an intermediate part – but this time around some steps could be skipped, and people wanted a lot less junk. If there was a need, things were made – if not, you could make it yourself. There was a certain amount of interchangeable components made that could be put toward any project.
Arlo had a hand in one of the first catalogues of what was available, and had pushed for the main Council to endorse it. In the end it was allocated a reasonable amount of resources and the occasional nod which ended up being only slightly short of what he reasonably hoped. It was as though they saw the value of it, but didn’t quite have the understanding to incorporate it into anything they were doing.
This is where the timelines diverge, or at least where the perception of events becomes dramatically more inconsistent. Imagine everything happening at once, but still in a semblance of chronological order. Yet more than once a line of events topple like dominoes only to loop back on themselves still standing. It’s only when you see the chain of events as an unbreakable whole that everything starts to, hopefully, make sense. What follows is a filtering out of experiences, things that are true and happened, but only from a certain perspective while events are still in flux.
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423 Years after the Event – Gamma
It was definitely a boon to have scientists from throughout history to all work on a project at once. There was a bit of lag getting some of the earlier ones up to speed, but their approach wasn’t clouded by years of tradition either. Their work was hampered by a lack of some very specialized equipment. No-one had worked closely enough with the devices enough to be able to reverse engineer them from memory. There was some talk of some odd buildings that might contain some equipment. The strange things was, initial surveys of the area didn’t find anything, but checking back in the records, the site was completely mapped, but somehow not forwarded to anyone.
---
43 Years after the Event – Alpha
There was an expedition to the less accessible areas of the back country. A few people had relatives that didn’t make it through the Event who were supposedly working in the area. It was mapped out in great detail, but nothing of significance was found. The survey of the areas were sent to the central repository, but weren’t looked at for nearly another 400 years. The land was only mildly interesting and terrain made anything more than solitary structures impractical.
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46 Years after the Event – Beta
There was an extended expedition to the back country that was only now wrapping up. A few people had relatives in the area that didn’t make it through the Event who were working in the area. It was mapped out in great detail and some very interesting laboratories were found. During the final walk-through of the area someone accidentally flipped a switch and brought the experiment back to life. Everyone in the area vanished along with the buildings.
---
46 Years after the Event – Alpha
In a less accessible area of the back country a number of laboratories suddenly appeared. Along with the physical structures, a few memories were shifted, and some records changed. Yet only changed as far as an omniscient perspective would see. For almost anyone else, it was as if things were always so.
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46 Years after the Event - Delta
There is an area out in the back country. A few people surveyed the area, starting 3 years ago. Not much was found. But people reported visions of buildings, and odd memory loss. The location was generally avoided after that, especially after things started getting worse.
---
Shared Timeline – 425 Years after the Event
A
certain amount of research was done, following the odd occurrences
from 2 years ago. Stories were inconsistent and somewhat illogical.
Nobody doubted what was said, but the accounts didn’t quite add up.
As trivial information was set aside, it seemed the crux of the
disturbance was from the expedition nearly a half a century after the
Event (43-46 AE), the participants in it and small group of
scientists. As it happened, Caius was in the former group and Arlo
in the latter.
There was a kind of awkward silence
when they were paired up for followup interviews. The normally
talkative Caius was less forthcoming that usual. It was borne of an
embarrassment that he couldn’t quite define, of somehow not knowing
what happened even though he was there. He could answer the
questions readily enough, but from day to day, he seemed to change
his perspective. One day he could describe the buildings and some
vague outlines of the equipment, but the next, he’d swear he found
nothing of note in the area.
The contradictions bothered Arlo. He pushed the point and made an audio recording of Caius for when he’d inevitably change his story. When that happened, he reached for the device and played back yesterday’s answers. It was as if a switch was flipped, and the Caius of yesterday was again talking. But something more than just a superficial change. Usually Arlo missed the smaller details of someone’s appearance, but when it morphed in front of him, it was hard to ignore. The cut of Caius’ beard shifted, and his hair seemed to be styled differently – subtle enough to not notice from one day to the next, but obviously impossible in normal circumstances.
Arlo broke off the session for the day, much to Caius’ confusion. The scientists message groups caught fire with the news. A few days later, more interview pairs corroborated the effect, this time with video to analyze as well. It seemed like there were at least two versions of events. One in which there was nothing found at the location and another in which there was some kind of incident. The latter was obviously more fruitful to investigate further, but the existence of the other wasn’t to be ignored either.
It was decided that a trip out to the location would be the next logical step. A few in both groups had strange misgivings about that plan, but nothing they could explain. As they approached the site, some started experiencing nausea with half the group saying they saw buildings and the other half seeing nothing. For this reason, the main camp was a safe distance away from whatever caused this reaction but not so far away that it was inconvenient.
There wasn’t anyone that could make sense of what was happening. It seemed that there was a gap between the accounts of the lab, and what the current scientists could make from the descriptions. The impasse was nearly derailing the project, but a visitor to the site made a few jumps of logic that didn’t occur to the scientists.
She had them take what little equipment that they could manage to get working, and take it to the site and see if those that could see the lab could see any changes in the equipment and readouts. It worked. It was small at first and barely noticeable, but it gave them a foothold. Certain tools could make a predictable spike in the numbers of certain sensors set up around the lab. It also disrupted the clarity of those that could see the lab – as if the edges of a paradox were nipping at their heels.
Before long they could work out a crude language and send the messages back further to when the lab was just starting to be built up. Furthering the work, and making more details of the lab visible.
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23 Years Before the Event Delta
He gave up. There wasn’t anything to this line of work. They would have to invent the whole of temporal dynamics in one swoop with no outside help.
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23 Years Before the Event Beta
Success. He wasn’t sure how, but somehow a message from the future arrived. Well, it was a signal barely above the background noise, but it was something. They used it to refine the crude calculations and basic equipment that they had pinned their dreams on.
---
18 Years Before the Event Delta
One of the experiments in another timeline had brought a great deal of equipment to this location. Having no true origin point, or rather a paradoxical one, it struggled to exist anywhere. As self-contradictory as it was, it belonged somewhere and this was the place for it. At least some of the time.
The likelihood of anyone finding it was low, but someone did. At least remotely. A few signals going through the general area of the equipment were distorted. As such it made triangulation of the disturbance possible, both in space, and in time. A certain charge made it unseen to the equipment of the BE 23 workshop, even though they were almost in the same place. A kind of bubble had formed around the distortion and a temporal inversion was getting to be inevitable.
5 Years before they Event Alpha.
One of the bubbles surrounding the experiment inverted and make a landing of sorts at this spacetime location. It was enough to set up a network of rumours and background information but not actually enough to exist physically. As the day of the event approached it seemed various minds were working on the problem of the paradoxical nature of the situation. The energy levels of the various forces increased and had a domino effect on many different things.
3 Years before the Event Beta.
Things had gotten into a solid routine. The local scientists were inputting things into a local AI that attempted to map out the future based on various signals that it sent out. Of course, the obvserver effect came into play and by sending the signals out, it also had an impact on what was seen, as sending out a wave, though tiny in the present, created a larger splash in the future than initially intended.
Shared Timeline – 443 Years after the Event
The signals from before the event were getting stronger. It seemed the more information it grabbed from this point in time, the more unstable things where getting. Things started to phase between different states of the lab on a 12 hour rotation, then 4 hours then 2. Once that settled into a predictable pattern it broke down further and different segments of the lab in various levels of construction were mapped out. These changed on the hour in an anti clockwise loop around the outside walls and then in a row and clockwise, alternating till the center of the building pulsed and it started again. It was generally recommended that people exit the building while this was happening, at least 10 mins before the hour and for at least 5 minutes afterwards. This continued for another week until someone invariably got caught during a change.
70 Years after the Event – Gamma Someone finally figured out what brought everything back, or rather, how it could come back. The explanation was a bit technical and depended on what was meant when specific vocabulary was used, but in short there existed n doors to every parallel dimension. The theory was debated but eventually got nowhere as that particular timeline collapsed.
55 Years after the Event – Delta There were a few minor changes in a portion of the Eastern colony, namely in a dead town that had been erased from records two years previously. No new records of it ever appeared either, not even an erasure of all old records.
After the Event – Alpha
A major fork appeared in the timeline when someone got caught in the time refreshing of the lab in 443AE. They had bounced along the timeline making a small splash whenever they landed. The facilities, which based in what was formerly Canada based on the initial readouts were suddenly in Australia. To the inhabitants of the labs in other time periods it seemed both new and like it had always been so. During their next cycle away from the labs, they had to adjust to their new location which had left some wanting to go back to the lab and track down the changes.
After the Event – Beta
It was made increasingly obvious to the teams in Canada that a counter pulse was being generated from a point in the southern hemisphere. It was determined through much theorizing that this may be a bootstrap situation which already occurred in another timeline and was ‘destined’, for lack of a better word, to occur here. It was increasingly clear that any future research would have to be done at this other point, so there was little choice but to follow the signal where it appeared and set up the labs again somewhere below the equator. A small offshoot of scientists got a special grant to collect thirds of the higher quality equipment that appeared and ship it off to different locations.
Anything that was determined to be ‘repeater’ based was sent to the island formerly know as the UK and the unknown and complicated equipment to the area known before the Event as Japan. The remaining day to day and fairly understood tools were shipped to various places in the southern half of the globe – mostly the Great Sandy Desert in former Australia. The ‘Desert’ was blooming in an unprecedented way and it was a current inquiry as to whether or not the temporal energy of the Event was the cause of the growth.
Shared Timeline 834 Years After the Event
Arlo woke up again in a strange bed alone. It was usually at one of the labs but which one and which time always seemed to be random. He looked at his watch. He didn’t care about the time as much as the year. It was broadcast around each of the bases as a courtesy to those that were inside. The experiments had been getting more extreme with some looping around 3-5 year cycles and making different readings as things progressed outside. It was strictly observational and things usually happened too fast outside for anything to be visible. Today there was a large banner outside saying “We miss you Arlo!” in a big friendly font. The window display noted the readings it gave off were orange, meaning they had about a week to fix the aberration before it became part of the permanent record of events.
Mr. Benington was, of course, the one who had gotten caught in the change over 300 years ago now and the various time teams were working on a way to anchor him back into the standard time line, or at least keep his jaunts to withing a decade of the incident. There was usually a long procedure whenever he woke up. A long battery of questions about what he saw on the last jump, when was it, what dreams did he have and the joke question at the end – was the cafeteria still serving chicken fried rice on weekends. He realized though that it wasn’t that insignificant of a question even tiny things could spiral into larger changes and sometimes the littlest bit of consistency kept things on track.
He looked up at the design on the wall. All of the chevrons were lit up and blue, which meant this was a ‘shared’ timeline and that there were still contradictions rather than differences and that there was a break in the interrogation routine and just a simple brain scan to make sure he was okay. They had the records for the different timelines here, and being in the 800s surely they had sorted out something by now.
It turns out they hadn’t and Arlo’s visit was an anomaly. As a celebration, the lab had put Asian food on the cafeteria menu all week rather than just on the weekend. It was a tradition in the lab. Based on the old parable about the man being paid a single grain of rice doubled for every chess square. It meant that small details mattered and that exponential growth of a thing meant that anything could get out of control.
The lab did have records of the eventual fix used to anchor Arlo in the timeline permanently, but there were multiple conflicting events, and no real way to be sure which was correct, or if all of them were but for different timelines. It would depend on when and where Arlo ended up next and how quickly the various teams could propagate the solutions throughout the time network.
Combined timelines were already a communication nexus, but receiving rather than broadcasting. Once they sent anything out, they became an Alpha timeline, but the effect was random meaning there was no way to know if or when another timeline or lab received the information. That meant that Arlo was the main way the different groups communicated, at least until they could find machines that would both survive the same experiment and not cause more damage by doing so.
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