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.