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.”
Fractal Integration Comm/Traffic Design. That was her main job. Or rather, where she concentrated the most effort.
“That’s what I was afraid of” came the reply. “It’s time for my origin trip”.
Jade closed her eyes, and hit a button on her hand. Her awareness switched to an office downstairs.
Jade had been dreading this moment. She had been training with Nathan, trying to get him up to speed on various procedures for paradoxes and temporal incursions. She kept track of his overarching persona – Doctor Time, and his piloting self – Captain Time and him at his origin – just plain Nathan. The fractal readout showed how much his awareness was in each iteration. How many jumps they had all done, and where and when they were in relation to each other.
It was controlled from upstairs, and this part of herself never touched it. She had other things to concentrate on.
They were doing some routine Time Maintenance on some Proto-Paradoxes, half formed events that sprung up from the random traffic of Time Machine interactions. It always spit out something new, but usually just comms traffic and Loop Amnesia. At it’s worst, it could chain together and produce Universe Ending Paradox Blooms.
“Don’t go back to the origin point!” she said to Doctor Time, the most learned, but practically untrained version.
“Why not?”
“You’ll create a fixed point and keep looping back till something fragments. Or you can get another paradox to cancel it out.”
The line went dead. Of course he was going to do it anyway. In truth he probably knew just as much as she did, but from a different perspective. She didn’t have a Doctor/Captain split like Nathan did or would, but she was aware of her time echos in other loops more than he was.
Her workstation let her overlap and integrate them without the usual hassles that would cause. She noticed a counter flip over. 23. Something had shifted and Captain Time was working his way out of the time loop somehow.
A part of her had just finished jumping through a time gate to stabilize Nathan again.
“So that just happened right? I saw you again. But you kept saying the same thing. Something about how this bit is always set in stone.”
Jade shot back. “Of course this is set in stone, I’ve been there 23 times now!”
“What did you say?” said Captain Time, like he wasn’t quite recovered from time looping. She could let her mind drift and just ride along after reacting once. She didn’t learn much that way, without the stress on her timesense, but she had other skills. Her time was better spent looking for aberrations and connecting points. Jade focused on the echo of herself that was having the, now unique, conversation.
“23 times.”
“You never said that before.”
Jade laughed. “We need to find the micro filament that’s the fracture point.”
“And how does that help us?” came the response. He must be suffering from loop sickness. He doesn’t usually forget so much. Unless that’s the key. “How long have your loops been?”
“About a minute, you’ll have to ask iOi for the exact time.” Jade switches offices/awareness again.
Jade opens a private channel to the robot. She has it calculate the exact time it takes to go through 23 loops and send back a Null Pulse, to reset the board.
“You’ve been trying to do this too exactingly.” said Captain Time. “And it’s exactly why we keep looping” This was the shard of him that got things done, but so haphazardly it was hard to tell if it was deliberate or accidental, or a fortunate combination of both. He sounded tired, like his loops were taking the spontaneity out of him. “What would I do if I didn’t have the weight of the timestream on my head?”
“I don’t know, Nathan would probably just do something random and get himself out of this mess”
Captain Time laughed. He could remember easier times, playing Captain Time, dressing up like a space cowboy, having a tool-belt of weird gadgets to mess with, hoping one day to be part of the Time Police.
And in a while the imagination settled down, and he joined the Time Police and only used the name Captain Time privately with Jade.
He told Jade how he wanted to things to work out, but never got the jolt he needed.
“That wasn’t how it happened,” Jade leaned on the comms traffic buttons so a tired quiet Captain Time talked to a disoriented, wizened Doctor Time.
Jade laughed. “You re-wrote your own origin” she said. Doctor Time explained. “If I use the Null Pulse in Time Surgery Mode, I can blank out my own memory so I don’t have to try and live through a paradox.”
Captain Time stopped. “You mean all that academy training is a false memory?”
“Not yet it isn’t, but it can be” said Jade, looking over the calculations on her Time Flux chart.
“With Jade’s help I can probably shunt them between shards so I can pilot the ship after I give it to myself”
Jade sat back in her chair. It was crazy enough to work. It would probably take a few loops to work the bugs out. Jade would do things exactingly, to make sure the paths are stable, while Doctor Time would record his observations, and try and steer things in a kind of meta way. It would probably smooth out this area of Time Flux, or make it a million times worse.
Jade noticed a red light turn on. THE red light. The ‘the Universe ends in 3 seconds light.’
She fires a Null Pulse from the Time Control Tower to intercept all the offending TimeShips and reset them to a few minutes ago to avoid the erupting paradoxes.
Captain Time avoids the Pulse and leaves two paradoxes in his wake, contained but only barely.
The transmission from Doctor Time appeared on Jade’s TimeShunt Comm panel “How often is the temporal odometer going to say 58456?”
Jade’s head swims. “Don’t you mean 58455?”
“That was the last Time Domain. I’ve recorded out my observations and while some of them contradict, it should be enough pieces for a proper start.”
Jade reorients herself from what feels like a lifetime of loops. “Captain Time is the last holdout from that iteration.”
“Good. So that’s the ship I have to send back. I’ll just have to add a few bits of costume and scanning props to the wardrobe to allow for some random deviations.”
Jade plays with the Fractal Integration Comm/Traffic Design.
For as long as she could remember it had Captain Time and Nathan overlapping with Doctor Time in a separate loop section above, monitoring, but unable to influence events.
She takes the Shards for Doctor Time and Nathan and puts them with long matching edges. She takes the short edges and matches up a long edge of Captain Time -in the process half overlapping a null pulse and two proto paradoxes.
It’s a mostly a visualization thing, but it lets her alternate selves know how to route comm traffic, ship interactions and hopefully escape the loops that they had all been in.
iOi gets a coded message from a version of Jade and gets ready to power down, it doesn’t like raw paradoxes either and has been trying to coax the ship away from them.
Doctor Time finally manages to take the ship back to his origin point, and hands himself the keys. He shows himself the ‘Odometer’ at 58455, and plants the memory in his head about what that means. He watches himself take off and get swept up in a Paradox Filament that sends Jade scrambling.
“Doctor what did you just do?” she yells over the comms.
“The impossible. It worked. Monitor my ship for any strange signals and stabilize it then.”
“Ha, Nathan. Trying the Origin story again? Some of the events are set in stone, like me using a time gate to get on board, after your scans trigger an alert. But you have to do most of it yourself. It’s a right of passage.”
“Ah,” said Doctor Time, “so that’s already baked in.”
“Of course,” said Jade. “It’s already happened 23 times.”
“First time for me” says Doctor Time. “Unless that Null Pulse got me too.”
“You’re clear of the ship?” asks Jade “It doesn’t go after people.” A pause “So it is your first time.”
Doctor Time feels a bit woozy as half a lifetime of new memories catch up to him.
He instinctively reaches for his pocket and grabs a recording device.
“Doctor Time feels a bit woozy as half a lifetime of new memories catch up to him. Ah, my sonic pen. I can probably set it to broadcast my voice through the ship’s speakers and chat with myself”
He tunes the frequency to hear himself say “Audience?” to himself. “Oh right. This is where things get a bit odd. Well we’re recording this for posterity, so do something mysterious and showy”.
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