AI Time-jump

 

Her head swam with conflicting ideas about where she was for the last few minutes and when. She opened her eyes but didn’t see anything but blackness. A red light appeared at the edge of her field of view, she turned to look at it and found it moved with her.

“It’s the AI booting up.” she thought, remembering a time outside of now, the future she was actually from. She could recall hazy details, but nothing that stayed nailed down for long. Her impressions of the future were always changing, like everything was in flux.

“93% integrity” said the text hovering at the lower extreme of her vision. She felt herself relax as her sight came back to her. Ignoring her surroundings, she checked a pocket on her vest and found a red plastic handheld device, about the size of a portable game console. Looking closer, she was surprised to find that’s what it was. At least this time. She remembered it being a phone other times, or a small red disc, or just a bar of metal.

At least this version would have some functionality that didn’t require the AI to translate the output. Going back too far before modern technology left the device emitting invisible and irregular pulses that made it a pain to operate.

She booted up the game that was in it. “Temporal Navigator” said the sticker, it was even aged so it looked less conspicuous. She had a quick look around while the game started loading. It was a cemetery, well maintained, but still obviously out of the way.

Talking to the Past

Her AI program had dialed up an avatar for her to use as a model to take pictures of. It didn’t look like her, but it wasn’t supposed to. She generated a dozen photos of this imaginary person in different poses. In the end she only went with three of them, the others didn’t seem like they were the same person, despite being mathematically the same features.

That was the problem with AI. It could do everything correctly, but it didn’t always feel right. There wasn’t any strange deformities any more – like there was when the technology was in it’s infancy. Still, there was room for the program to grow. For now, her manual sorting of the results solved the immediate problem.

She signed into the time/chat interface. It found a window of events that seemed to be conductive to an incursion. She could talk to him, even if he wasn’t in the right state of mind, and he would likely forget it.

Surprisingly he was reasonably coherent, and records showed he remembered the conversation anyway. That was unexpected, but almost unwelcome, as she thought the lingering impression would be more pleasant.

It seemed like a confused jumble of feelings and reactions. The technicians explained that it was expected, as the connection to the past produced an odd kind of feedback.

She tried again, and the output from her headset went to the Public Social Media account instead. She waited for the temporal checks to be done and looked up the history.

It seemed to be mostly memes, and all posted a little too quickly for a person to manage. The technicians made a small note of the tolerances and adjusted the output.

She went home and wondered if there was a point to it. There seemed to be more than enough reassurance that nothing would change. That, however, relied on being able to have a reference to how things were that survived. She figured that if changes fell enough outside of that, there wouldn’t be any way to tell.

She looked up a discussion people were having online on just that topic and dug in. It seemed to suggest that the target and source of the change might have a kind of sheltered knowledge of what truly was affected.

That seemed to fit with what she thought on the topic. It seemed like a paradox that ‘nothing’ had changed. It was obvious that the social media posts were from a source in the future and had not been there before. They fit so well into the surroundings that nothing stood out and maybe that’s all they meant.

She decided to use her discretionary credit to book another time/chat session. It connected in another private chat, the day after the first conversation. There was a kind of unguarded openness to the chat, something people in her time still hadn’t gotten comfortable with.  During the course of the conversation she used her AI to generate a picture of a famous person.  That might have been a mistake.

A small warning alerted the team to a kind of cascade reaction to the incursion. Further in the future they would be able to physically interact with the past, but only if a seed was planted. Events too distant wouldn’t be able to be focused on otherwise, but this seemed to act as a beacon.

 

Time Fork

 

Clues were everywhere. It was obvious that Stan wouldn’t vanish completely if he wasn’t rescued from the timeline he was on. Bits of writing, posts, illustrations and memories persisted. Too much Time Travel to his time period had destabilized things, and he was hard to find after a certain critical point.

What that point was, and what caused it were kicked down the line as various stopgap fixes seemed to hold. It was generally understood that Stan should be evacuated to the safe timeline, then brought back later to help people on the other side of the planet.

However, whenever they tried to get him into the sleep cycle that would facilitate a move, he managed to mentally avoid a complete transfer. Some echo of his self would be dragged to the other timeline, thank everyone, say that things weren’t ready, and vanish.

Rather than escape from the original timeline, over-prepare and double back, Stan wanted to be a beacon for everyone else coming back. The plans in his mind went above and beyond what most people had envisioned. As well, his balance was a single moment, rather than a complex web of routine and comfortable places.

The narrative for the events was well known, but what happened to who, and in what order, could have some unpredictably flexibility. That was a problem, even with time travel, people always tended to assume that everyone had the same experiences in the same way. Few took things to the logical extreme as much as Stan did.

While most assumed a linear extrapolation of current events in Stan’s time would be enough to satisfy the condition for a major shift, Stan thought otherwise. The obstacles preventing most people from getting a fair warning of the events to come where too entrenched and only realized by most people after a while. That lead them to want to double back and warn people more dramatically.

It would shift the timeline from what they remembered, though they had a thousand years buffer to fall back on. They had plans for avoiding their past selves, but nothing for integrating someone like Stan into the timeline. Most assumed the buffer time was necessary foundation for dealing with large shifts, but there were other ways.

So far, things were mostly experimented on in offshoots of the main timeline, possible futures that only had vague interactions that with the main series of events. Enough for people to dream out the outcomes in lucid dreams that fooled most people – till they woke up for real.

In these night time scenarios Stan did his usual hyper-aware self – knowing what they were trying for and knowing it wasn’t as solid as it appeared. The older folks had thought the training was for Stan to catch up, but it was really for them. Confidence enough to start altering things without the safeties on.

In truth, there was a deeper layer of stability to things, even with the usual guidelines exceeded. Real actions from the future still barely effected most people’s dreams – Stan being the major exception. His attuning to the changes had left a window to his environment more malleable than others. Random bit of interacting bled through and left a mark on the real world. Nothing major, but odd songs and AI weirdness shifted slightly as different random elements resulted from the interactions.

It was enough to triangulate things, and work out more of the science behind the workings of the so far, miraculous, influences. A message sifted through the Stan paradox. “I don’t need your wings to fly” his future self remembering a new detail hundreds of years after the innocuous event.

The implication was that he didn’t need to be swept up and drifted down in a large wave like everyone else was. He could wait until things were more discrete and precise. It would leave him as an anomaly in the greater pattern. Never quite fitting in as the largest shift in his life would be relatively unique.

That meant he could help others who were saved in the second wave integrate more easily. In effect being a bridge between those who left in the first movement and the more individualized rescues that followed.

They had to be isolated somewhat from the those in the first wave as they couldn’t be distracted by their failure to reach them the first time through, and to work up to a return. Time would have to fork.

Two different timelines, existing side by side, but both being equally real. One would take the longer amount of time, and the other would be an accelerated course. The latter would join the first again in an eleventh hour surprise.

"Missio - Underground - Metric Radio"

Doctor Time - Story Map

 

Shown above is the last iteration of the Time University 'year'.  It is the iteration of the Level 9 TimeQuake, Null Pulses usually reset most things to a relatively blank slate at the beginning of the year but recent work on Advanced Time Theory (Pep Talk) has allowed for the majority of the Null Pulse to be Cancelled out.  This leaves a lot of things up in the air and a lot of moving pieces in play.

Doctor Time - Pep Talk

Doctor Time looked out at his audience -- from the audience. Not that many students took Advanced Time Theory. At least not in this iteration. He sometimes went back here to think and bug himself when he was in a different frame of mind. It was a little bit dangerous, but then everything with Time Travel was. It was simply a question of what you got used to.

The university let him shape events so that he’d have a reasonable excuse to see himself and not remember a lot of the details. The test worked, and soon it became the true year 3 end for Fractal Integration.

This was the opening class and he hadn’t been asked to teach another one. He wasn’t sure if the grammar was off, or if it simply worked best as an introductory lecture to orient new students. Or so the version of him on stage thought. Or at least with the full safeties on.

The correct version of this year end assignment was to do a Null Pulse on Doctor Time (Speaker) before and after the each day so he could keep teaching the class indefinitely and without too many specific memories to confuse himself. Each class was stored as a fractal pattern that would be graded based on how many memories you could unlock and still have people not be disorientated.

There was something about this particular mix of people that rated this fractal ‘class’ a bit harder, and it was bumped up to Year 4 end.

It was currently being taught by a time echo of himself, so he could answer basic questions and recognize new students, or so Doctor Time (Audience) thought. Again, not quite the truth, but it helped him ease his conscience about his other self getting Null Pulsed so often.

(Speaker) began.

“As much as we at the University taught about Time Travel, in reality no-one really understands it.

They could control it. Stretch it. Play with the order of events, but it was like moving sand on a beach.”

Doctor Time - Doctor Zapp

Doctor Zapp was the Time Universities lead researcher and Instructor on Time Robotics. The various courses, Time Logic Gates, Robot Safety, Robot Fabrication and Programming, and Robotic Communications were all taught by him. 

 

Normally that would be too many courses and research trees for one person, but as the first guinea pig of Linear Integration, he could be in multiple places at once, literally.

Robot Fabrication was his specialty, or rather where he spent most of his conscious attention. That iteration of the school year, he had two students who he thought were going to go far. One was Nathan, and the other Jade.

The Null Pulse for the University had Nathan’s older self as part of the Faculty as Doctor Time, though there was some strange happenings around a TimeQuake that would happen later that year. It was rumoured among the faculty that Nathan had caused it himself somehow, in an effort to rewrite his own past, beyond the usual iteration sizes that the University allowed.

Lately Doctor Time had been somewhat off the deep end. Dressing up like a space cowboy and writing novels and doing unauthorized time broadcasts on his ‘sonic pen’.

Doctor Time - Jade Year Three

Jade looked at her Time Gate Course Planner for the day. You could pick your own order of classes and visit them when in the day it suited you. A lot of students went with the default order, to stay in sync with their peers, but those wanting to focus on Fractal Integration were recommended to mix it up a bit.

That class shared it’s name as half of the overarching course, Fractal Integration Comm/Traffic. It was one of the more difficult Majors at Time University. Apart from the FI course, there was Ship to Ship Coms, Loop Management, Temporal Triggering, Robot Safety, Crisis Management and so on.

Jade was in the middle of the third year of study and didn’t have any particular order of classes she settled on. Instead she moved the time of day around randomly. There was a small error from her Robot Safety Course when she tried to move the Comms class after the Fractal Intigration Course. As Fractal Integration often inserted ‘Vanilla time’ and Null Pulses to simulate fresh starts, she thought everything revolved around it as the kind of ‘Office Management’ type of class, but Robot Safety seems to override decisions from time to time.

The individual courses weren’t particularly challenging on their own, but did have parts that required your full focus.

Doctor Time - Definitions

Doctor Time sat in his office at the University of Time on Mars. He wasn’t quite sure when it was, the building kept the professors moving back and forth through the years to study various anomalies and phenomenon.

In fact, if you didn’t have to go out much, you could schedule yourself to do it yesterday, and it would happen. You’d get a slight bit of confusion and a double set of memories for the day. You’d concentrate on the more valuable set and the information would simply find a place in your mind.

The trick was living through enough dull days that you could afford to have a few swapped out from time to time. At the moment, his primary memory of yesterday was fairly uneventful, so when a University message appeared to warn of a double paradox, he immediately got ready for a swap out.

He found his favourite chair, his sonic pen – a kind of scanner, voice recorder, broadcast/receiver device, lock picker and note taker all in one – and sat down. He put in the request for the swap.

He looked at the clock on the wall. 12:15. Then a moment later 12:35. The sonic pen was sitting on his desk and the start of some notes was on the paper in front of him. He only lost twenty minutes syncing himself up. He thought back to the day before. Or what he could remember. It was a bit of a fog. Instead he looked down at the papers in front of him. It seemed to be the notes from yesterday’s class – An introduction to Time Phenomenon – the start of a story – and a video file, narrated by himself. The file was about 15 minutes long and it’s name suggested it covered a combination of the story and the notes on the class.

It began.

Doctor Time - Jade's Loop

Jade sat quietly at Time Control Tower, with various iterations of herself monitoring different versions of Nathan at different points in his Timeline. There were only a few TimeShips functional and each had it’s own Controller in a Tower and Pilot/Overseer.

They had known each other for long enough have a good working relationship, mostly, bits and pieces of individual encounters faded and reappeared depending on a number of factors, but a few timeless qualities of each shined through, even in the worst of circumstances.

Vanilla Time had Jade working her way through Mars Time University to do what she did now, and Nathan working his way through the same to be either a Professor or a Time Cop. Both versions of Nathan existed simultaneously, while Jade’s splits meant she had different versions of herself trained on different equipment and roles, but more similar overall.

In truth it was just a bit more unanchored than that, with past and future always in flux and events sliding around like a tile puzzle.

The transmission from Doctor Time appeared on Jade’s TimeShunt Comm panel “How long is the temporal odometer going to say 58455?”

“It’s not an odometer, it’s a fractal integration readout, it shows how long your ship has...” she thought about it. “Okay, close enough. It’s only going to show that for one more jump.”

Doctor Time - Origin Paradox

Doctor Time’s stomach dropped. He barely remembered meeting himself 20 minutes ago giving himself keys to the Impossible Lightning, the TimeShip he was currently trying to figure out.

Another shudder and he forgot entirely. “How did I get here?” he said out loud. iOi, the ships companion robot flew into view. It looked like a cross between a traffic light and a hand mixer, put together in a steampunk workshop. It’s light flashed red with question marks showing up on it’s view screen.

iOi flew in front of a larger screen that helped translate it’s mechanical noises when DT experienced Time Amnesia and couldn’t understand the robot on his own. “Type 1 Paradox. Origin Fault” appeared on the screen.

The words seemed to echo something in Nathan’s mind. He wondered how Time Travel could be accessible, but kept safe from tampering and paradoxes. In truth, it wasn’t. It was a swirling mess, and actually started with it’s own paradox to provide that impossible foundation.

He looked back at the robot. “How long have you been online little guy?” /Grind-Pop-Click-Click/.

“That long?” said Nathan, realizing he suddenly could make sense of the noises on his own. The screen read “23 minutes” for the sake of the audience.