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.