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.

“Audience?” he said to himself, when he realized he was narrating through the ship’s speakers. “Oh right. This is where things get a bit odd. Well we’re recording this for posterity, so do something mysterious and showy”. 

 

A panel opened up on the chair he was sitting in, and revealed a small decorative rod, with dials and lights filling the spaces on it. It was hard to hold without activating something, and that seemed to be intentional. “Your sonic pen” Nathan said to himself over the speakers. “I’ve recorded a few hours worth of instructions, but don’t listen to them all the way through, they’ll just contradict each other.”

/Pop-Tick-Tick-Spring/ said iOi, which Nathan translated roughly into “Use the Force, Newt”, the screen said something about analyzing Time Current Micro-Filaments, but the gist of it was the same.

Nathan tossed up the sonic into the air, and failed spectacularly at trying to catch it again. It squealed as five different scans started as the device rolled across the deck.

Jade appeared in the doorway. She didn’t look familiar to Nathan, but he knew her name anyway. She laughed at the ongoing narration. 

 

“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.”

iOi beeped quietly to himself. It’s memory had been reset now that they had gotten that far in the event chain. It flew up to Nathan when it ran into several exception errors in it’s temporal anticipation subroutine.

Jade smiled and quickly ran back through the doorway, shouting as she did so. “What you do from here is up to you, but only contact me again when you need things stabilized.” A flash in the hallway marked her exit.

iOi made the /Click-Pop/ noise that meant it was asking for a sonic scan. Nathan felt a little more like Doctor Time, like things were falling into place, but he was stuck in a backflow of events he never quite settled out.

The scan of iOi prompted a series of options on the monitors, how to handle various paradoxes, looping events and other anomalies. He felt like he had done them before, and needed something off the books to get himself unstuck.

“I’ve recorded a few hours worth of instructions” said the Narration voiceover more insistently. Nathan wasn’t sure if he was scanning his own mind, listening to something pre-recorded or something recorded at a future time and sent back somehow.

The awareness of the possibilities tugged at some thread in his mind.

He used his sonic to pick a random spot to begin on his instruction recording. He managed to find bits of Jade’s messages to him.

“..go back to the Origin Point.” SKIP “..Set in stone..” SKIP “...micro filaments..” SKIP “Do something mysterious and showy”

Nathan flopped back in the captain’s seat, his space cowboy outfit flopping over the controls and setting off a micro time jump.

He saw himself on the screen. Pacing the bridge, using the sonic to jump around the instructions.

“..go back to the Origin Point.” SKIP “..Set in stone..” SKIP “...micro filaments..” SKIP “Do something mysterious and showy”

“iOi can we contact past-me?” /Pop-Tick/ which roughly translates to “Yes, but time fractures..”

“Do it anyway.” iOi sends a small beep through the bridge of the past ship, making it’s captain miss sitting down and subsequently trigger the micro jump.

Space and Time fold out and collapse back, Doctor Time’s stomach drops again, having just made another paradox.

A voice behind him, not through the speakers, startles him into paying attention. “So you’re the filament that has been stuck in the Origin Loop.” It’s his own voice, but older and more sure of himself.

“I’ve forgotten what the trigger is, but I’m sure we figure it out soon enough. I’d call Jade again. She does well with double paradoxes.”

Nathan felt his awareness shift around. Being both the voice from behind himself, the narration and the bits of himself still stuck in the loops between paradoxes.

iOi seems to recognize the far away look and goes over to the zapper station. It sends a pulse through the various echoes of the Impossible Lightning and finds the version of events that are the most navigable, and most helpful to resolving the current predicament.

Doctor Time jumps slightly as he jolts back into the time and space where he’s just hit the chair.

“iOi, contain the microjump!” The robot flashes green and displays the temporal fracture on the screen.

Nathan fidgets with the sonic pen again, inadvertently, but unconsciously, deliberately summoning Jade’s presence again.

“I don’t know what to tell you Nathan,” she begins, then looks at the screen. “Oh, you’ve handled the Micro Jump Paradox. No, don’t tell me how, we all get our secrets. Mine is double paradoxes.”

“I know.” says Nathan. iOi interrupts. /Grind-Grind-Clunk/ - Topic at hand. Talk later.

The two humans look at each other wondering how they both got to that point, how they know each other from where, and when the narration will let them get back to the action.

“It’s Captain Time’s Time” he says to himself. He realizes he’s been trying to handle the problem in cerebral mode and should just let himself react.

He jumps into the chair and brings up the full display, showing both paradoxes.

Jade traces out a path between them, one that his Doctor self had been trying to contain and contradict at the same time.

“iOi, can you bring up the full, relevant instructions from my stuffy self?” Pages and pages of temporal codes and meta-theory flow across the screen. “And how many contradictions are in it?”

iOi calculates for a moment, and gives an answer that seems to fluctuate as the shape on the screen changes. “between 50 and 300?”

Jade smiles. “It’s to be expected. Your meta-awareness self can only understand and translate so much, and the rules seem to contradict based on what you’ve seen and where you are in the stream of events. Is there anything you remember that seems to stick out that you’d say might seem random but in context, isn’t?”

iOi floats over to it’s own isolated navigation station. It pilots them to an observation point that can’t interrupt the flow of events, but can show them on the viewscreen.

It’s Captain Time, pacing the bridge, flipping through the instructions randomly.

“..go back to the Origin Point.” SKIP “..Set in stone..” SKIP “...micro filaments..” SKIP “Do something mysterious and showy”

Jade pauses thoughtfully and ask iOi to bring up her transmissions.

“Don’t go back to the origin point!” “Of course this is set in stone, I’ve been here 23 times now!” “We need to find the micro filament that’s the fracture point” “I don’t know, Nathan would probably just do something random and get himself out of this mess”

Nathan sheepishly explains how his sitting down triggered the micro fracture and how he managed to stop it. Jade looks at him like he’s both the most annoying and most brilliantly random person in existence.

She says to iOi “Pulse point, Jade Iteration 23”

“The room seems to lose the strange shimmer it seemed to have, the voice is less in his mind and more direct. Oh you can hear me now?”

Nathan, as Captain Time, waits for himself as Doctor Time, to finish dialing in the settings.

Doctor Times voice rings clearly through the speakers. “Captain Time, finally finds his origin, and flies back to himself to give himself the ship in a horrible paradox that. Oh no!”

Nathan on the ship says “It’s okay, I don’t remember doing it. No paradox. Well it is, but it isn’t.”

The sound of a book closing echos through the ship’s speakers. “I was afraid of reading that episode. Knowing how much it upset Jade.”

“It’s okay,” says Jade, “The bits in stone are like dialogue in a play, just hit the marks and it all flows out, but it’s nice to know we’re finished this time.”

“She looks around waiting for TimeSpace to collapse, but it doesn’t. I’ve been piloting the ship so it doesn’t, I guess I have to add that to the script now. Get this sealed and verified..”

iOi does a small thing with confetti. CUT!