AI Time-jump

 

Her head swam with conflicting ideas about where she was for the last few minutes and when. She opened her eyes but didn’t see anything but blackness. A red light appeared at the edge of her field of view, she turned to look at it and found it moved with her.

“It’s the AI booting up.” she thought, remembering a time outside of now, the future she was actually from. She could recall hazy details, but nothing that stayed nailed down for long. Her impressions of the future were always changing, like everything was in flux.

“93% integrity” said the text hovering at the lower extreme of her vision. She felt herself relax as her sight came back to her. Ignoring her surroundings, she checked a pocket on her vest and found a red plastic handheld device, about the size of a portable game console. Looking closer, she was surprised to find that’s what it was. At least this time. She remembered it being a phone other times, or a small red disc, or just a bar of metal.

At least this version would have some functionality that didn’t require the AI to translate the output. Going back too far before modern technology left the device emitting invisible and irregular pulses that made it a pain to operate.

She booted up the game that was in it. “Temporal Navigator” said the sticker, it was even aged so it looked less conspicuous. She had a quick look around while the game started loading. It was a cemetery, well maintained, but still obviously out of the way.

The game beeped helpfully and showed a simplified map of the area after hitting ‘Start’. One of the digital gravestones had a blue sparkly effect around it. She looked up in the direction of where it would be in real life, but nothing stood out. She went back to her screen and counted stones from landmarks in the cemetery. She was still a bit dizzy and lost track of where the rows translated to from the digital map to the real world.

She looked closely at the tombstones and noticed that they were wearing at a visible rate. She realized how much the AI was helping her, turning the rapid day/night cycle into a steady pattern of light. It was filtering out moving things and sending the data from scans into simple, smooth images and more complex info into her handheld device.

She make her way to the special tombstone and read it. It was hers.

She felt a shiver and wondered what to do. She looked down at her game console as it began beeping. ‘Photo Location’ it prompted. She stood back and got a good photo of her tombstone, zooming in on the lettering. ‘Photo too cropped, try again’ it said. She tilted the game machine sideways and zoomed out a bit, capturing the entire marker, and some area around it just in case.

The machine hummed and processed the new picture. It spat out a graph of visitors and indexed a number of other photos taken from the same place and settings. She scrolled through them, noting flowers and other gifts left in view. She was still travelling too quickly through time to notice the events herself, but that was what the scan was supposed to fix.

Scrolling through the dates she noticed a star on one of the photos, she clicked it and it went to her social media app. It was her Memorial page.

She sat down and scrolled through it. She didn’t know what she expected, but it was comforting to read at any rate. The traffic and comments slowed down after a while, a little disappointing, but then again, it wasn’t realistic to think people would mourn on her page forever either.

It didn’t seem like anything that earth-shattering, and she was starting to wonder why the time team had her sent back.

She kept flipping through the dates and entries till she got past a dozen years out. Another star went down to the bookmarks of the social media – “Personal account reactivated”.

She clicked on it. Nothing out of the ordinary. No. No sense going through old posts. See what the latest thing is. One message, after the page was reinstated.

“What timeline are you in?”

It seemed like an odd thing. Almost rude if you didn’t believe in time travel, and maybe a little imprecise if you were on the inside of it too. “Clue found” said her gaming device.

She went through the filter function of the Social Media site. Just the messages from the person that left the message. Mostly photos. Some she didn’t know were taken. Some from days she didn’t remember.

Wait. What?

She clicked one particular photo. “Time-jump opened” said her game. She looked at the time, date and place. The mission objectives were simple. Do something to delay her death by suicide by talking to the people in the building. Hit the marks for the photos as brackets for where she had to be at certain points. Don’t talk to the photographer.

She wanted to break the last objective, and tried to on the first try. Her AI warned of an integrity drop as soon as she started talking to him. He was her anchor at this junction, so his memory of the event had to be persevered. She felt dizzy, passed out, and woke up again at the cemetery.

The team sent her a message through the game console. “Are you okay? What did you do? Didn’t you listen to the AI?” It was too much. She wanted to yell at them, sending her back to see all this again and then have it so she couldn’t do what she wanted to anyway.

All the frustration put her in touch with her old feelings of the moment, so even through she was safe now, and very much alive, she could empathize with her past self.

She found the photo again, and did the Time-jump a second time. She vented at the people she could talk to and it felt good. She hit the marks for the photos and tried to keep that part of it identical.

Her game system beeps again “Success” and it brought up the photo of the tombstone. The date of death had shifted out about 72 hours. Not a lot, and she didn’t remember anything happening in the extra time, but it was something.

The wave of new memories washed over her. There was a shift, but not much. The people she talked to tried to help her, but were soon too far away too do much good.

She tried the time jump a third time and a forth. She explained herself again, less venting, more reasoning. She lot track of the tries. “It’s like no-one listens to me” she said in earshot of the photographer – she waited for the integrity drop, but instead it went the other way.

“Perfect Success” said the game console. She felt her memories shift again. She realized that her death was only partially because of her circumstances, and the remainder was just a chemical imbalance.

She remembered her death again. She didn’t want to die, but her mind was screaming the opposite of what she wanted. She could divorce all the reasons out of her head, but the impulse was too strong to fight.

“Temporal Window Opened” She looked at the display on her game screen and saw where the window opened on the timeline. She felt like she could visit herself at the crucial moment, and armed with the technology from the future, get enough of her imbalance fixed to get her past the worst of it.

She used the display to send a temporal ghost ahead of herself to try that timeline. She felt a wave of half realized memories bubble up. She could do it, and recover, but instead of living, she’d be conscripted into the time team. To go back and rescue herself and. Wait. Hadn’t that already happened?

She looked at her game again, backing out of the usual navigation menus and going to the character menu for herself. She was running a Game-plus. Her second run-through. She already already had the badge “Normal Life” in her collection.

She touched the badge and remembered a different life. One where she recovered from her suicide attempt, but lost the fire of her earlier convictions and coasted through life. It was her, but a quiet echo of what she could be.

She looked at the rest of the badge spots. One section had her goals and dreams on it, and the other sections were other people. She clicked the question mark at the top and it asked if she wanted to spend some clue points on it.

Having nothing else to do, she clicked yes. The posts from everyone on her memorial page filtered across to the bios of the people she knew. She could take that info to her leading a normal life and get her to join the time program.

The AI guessed that’s what she would do and set about making the connections. A small chat window opened, with another version of herself.

“So, you’re me?” the person in the window said. “Yup” she answered, a back and forth. “When are you from?” “It’s complicated. When are you from?” “Oh” –STATIC--

She realized she didn’t have a memory of the conversation because it wasn’t set at a specific time yet. She assumed it would be some time after the suicide scare, but she tried dragging it to before.

The AI and the handheld device seemed to go into a kind of machine conference with each other. After a few moments a consensus was reached. “Actions require disabling chemical re-balance”

That meant she would have to go through it again without help from medication. She clicked the confirm button and she was back in the hospital. It felt like her AI was gone, or at least offline.

She panicked at first, then realized she still had her handheld device. It was beeping with the noise it made for incoming calls. She turned the camera on, and saw it was herself from a few moments ago, in a different timeline. “So you’re me” she said, flowing into the conversation from before, but now on the other side of it.

It wasn’t much, but the chat managed to shift a few things in her mind. Seeing the Memorial pages seemed to help, and that was both good and bad news. Her future self explained it. “I tried fixing the situation remotely, and it worked, and you led a normal life, but this time I had to show you more – we’re locked into a different set of events now.”

“So I have to die anyway?” “No” her future self said “Well, sortof. They’ll find a body and assume it’s you, because, what else would they think? But it will only be a biodouble. You’ll join the Time-jumpers. At least till after the Event. Hang on, that kind of smoothed over the timeline, we’re going to integrate again”

She lost consciousness again and found herself back at the cemetery. The AI was always scanning likely probabilities and saving people the trouble of walking through the motions of doing every last thing to progress. It sped along their perception of time, and only stopped the process if some major decision tree popped up. The resultant memories drifted in, seeing the biodouble, changing clothes with it, vanishing, and the view from the other half of the preparations.

The game machine binged again, the badge noise. “Close Call” was awarded this time.

---

Time-jump HQ was going over the latest data. The missions with the Game Console type helper were doing the best job at integrating changes to the timeline. It seemed like distilling the rules and results down to a 16bit game equivalent were a good medium between having millions of options and impossibly restrictive objectives.

Time-Jumpers could see the overview of their missions, as well as getting limited scans and rudimentary chats without feeling shortchanged or breaking causality. Linking certain memories and events to badges or game modes made them accessible and gave context as well as a way to ignore them when that was more prudent.

They would have to refine the process a bit and allow for more seamless updates from HQ, but the most recent missions appeared stable and not as disorienting as before.