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.