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.
Ship to Ship Comms was a perfect example. TimeShips were piloted by captains that could run into future and past versions of themselves. Left unchecked, the cause and effect chains and memories would lead pilots into Time Loops of them talking to themselves and second guessing their own responses. The solution was two parts. The ship board AI, often in robot form, would handle most ship to ship communications -- translated into a mechanical language that would remove the temporal context. It also sent the messages into a buffer that a Comms person would half translate and review for a quick sanity check.
Say a future pilot wanted to send a message to his past self to remember to get a certain bit of equipment. Sending the message back directly would fix the problem, meaning there would be no reason to send a message back and ... loop.
Instead the ship’s robot would send a message to the other robot about the missing part. It would be stuck in the loop and be aware of both possibilities. It would leave a particular signal at each message and response and all of that would go to the Tower Comms to sort out a resolution.
In this case Future ship would contact a Past ship, ask for the part, and the robot might be instructed to garble the name of the part or get the wrong one. A different version of the same robot would get the proper message, creating a new time filament. It would broadcast the response of the pilot and encoded in the transmission would be the coordinates of the filament to join to fix the problem. The robot would then send a message back to the first version of the ship to request the part again, eliminating the timeline where it didn’t get the part.
The comms person would get the whole conversation from all versions of the ships as a kind of static burst. The signals by the robots would help parse the conversation into different cause and effect trees. It would suggest a certain logical order for the various responses and the comms person would read them through, making sure the conversation doesn’t cause more time loops and unnecessary confusion.
That bit of comm traffic and ship to ship interaction would be approved or, the comms person might require a bit of other context to see where it fit in the bigger picture.
That was the bit that confused Jade. A lot of her professors had said similar things and when she pressed for an answer, she was referred to her other classes – like Loop Management or Temporal Triggering. She couldn’t figure out how you wouldn’t already know what the person at the next office was doing, or how a simple phone call wouldn’t solve the problem.
The problem was, as her next Fractal Integration class demonstrated, was that a whole team of people, even the best of each of her individual classes, all understood and experienced time travel differently. Jade was the top of her class here, and even she didn’t see the problem till it was demonstrated.
The internal chronometer of the class had fast forwarded them to the end of year three. A simple time tangent filled in a half a year of ‘Vanilla Time’ of regular course work and extra effort in their best class. For Jade, that was Fractal Integration, so once she oriented to the memories, she was in charge of the final exercise of the year.
Jade noticed a few people were out of sorts and went over some basic information to help people adjust.
The different courses were different stations on a Time Control Tower. Ship to ship coms got signals from TimeShips, but no specific context for then. Temporal Triggering sorted out the overall map for cause and effect and relative temporal locations of everyone. Loop management helped change things slightly when people got stuck doing the same things, or identical signals overwhelmed other stations. Robotic Safety watched for small aberrations that indicated loops, and stored patterns and info that would survive Null Pulses, so the team didn’t repeat themselves.
A Null Pulse at the beginning of class put people at an even playing field. Ship to Ship Coms at mid year was the last thing people remembered clearly and due to the schedule override everyone had already been there today.
The challenge was fairly simple, get a message similar to the Ship to Ship class to work on a full Time Control Tower simulation.
Jade set out the office diagram on who would communicate with whom and how often. It was up to her how many ‘actions’ each team member would get per iteration loop which was unfortunately a fixed number.
To begin with, Jade had Comms and Temporal Triggering at opposite ends of the work flow. That meant the other workstations could see and influence the info traffic between them.
Comms sorted out the original message and passed it on to Temporal Triggering. Loop Management and Robot Safety sorted out all the possible locations for ships to be. TT plotted out the course and it led back to the same message being sent. She didn’t account for the other ships filaments that would be created and erased. The comms traffic person kept getting stuck doing the same static loops when the Temporal Triggering person didn’t believe their check on internal message consistency.
The Loop Management person saw the repeating pattern and tried to take over, but they mainly spun off random variations on the conversations that clogged up the desk of Temporal Triggering.
Robot Safety gave a warning to Crisis Management that the number of Active Paradoxes was getting too high. They put in a Null Pulse to clear the board, but the bit that survived was the static loop of a message fragment.
The static loop appeared as a warning on Temporal Triggering as an initial cause, causing the whole iteration to loop as they didn’t trust the Comms traffic to get the job done. Robot Safety noticed a minor fluctuation on timing and made a notice to add it to the Null Pulse as an aberration point to watch.
Jade saw the iteration counter go up and saw a need to reorganize. Jade tried again with a closer relationship between Comms Traffic and Temporal Triggering. That left Loop management ironically out of the Loop. Without them dampening the noise of the dead-end loops, it became impossible for Temporal Triggering to close out the simulation as solved paradoxes kept creeping back in faster than they could be countered.
Jade tried a half a dozen more office configurations. Only an overriding message from Robot Safety recognized the same initial conditions, and Jade ended the simulation.
The team seemed disappointed. Even after three full years of training in all the different fields when it came down to crunch time, they couldn’t keep all the different jobs straight in their heads at the same time. Or, if they could, they didn’t follow the logic of the other person, or their perspective.
The normal rules of office relationships didn’t really work if time and actions were limited in an iteration. The Null Pulses made sure they didn’t carry any extra baggage between iterations, but that meant that you were essentially starting from day 1 every new day on the job. The only person you could really trust and know and understand that well – would be yourself.
That was the reason so many people thought about dropping out of Fractal Integration Comm/Traffic in year 3. They saw the end of the road and didn’t think the end result would be attainable. Most were cautioned that Time Travel isn’t what is seems to be and that Vanilla Time comes with some distortions.
In a weeks time, the memory and score of the failed test was offered to be removed from records and most did so. Keeping it though, was a bonus credit for Fractal Integration and Jade kept it.
In reality, the number of ‘actions’ allowed in a Time Control Tower were double that of the Vanilla Jump Year 3 End exercise. Single Paradoxes were resolved easily with more breathing room and those that stuck around soon found that out.
90% of the jobs, even in the Time Police were more than happy with that level of performance. When those that stayed put in the work, they found they could think clearer in the true test, and worked well as a team of separate individuals.
Jade was a one of handful of people that stayed on to year four, in which the courses for Crisis Management and Robotic Safety took on a larger part of the curriculum. New courses, like Robot Fabrication and Programming, Time Gate Maintenance and Non Linear Integration rounded out the workload.
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