The Other Detective

 

Benedict looked at the Stanley Apartment room. It seemed plain enough. Not quite as generic as it started though. An odd memory flickered in his head. No, it was always like this. A wooden desk, a keyboard, blue this time. Wait. That was new.

He yelled on his phone. “Nathan. Big changes or small ones. Make up your mind.”

“Right,” said Nathan sheepishly over the phone. “I was just experimenting with the settings”

He wasn’t really irritated with Nathan, but the camera on the monitor was running, and the mood in the air – not his – was tense.

“That’s fine then.” said Benedict as he remembered he had to be polite and patient too.

“Are you any further in?” asked Nathan, now that he got the wink+camera emoji on the phone.

“Once the room stops spinning I’ll tell you.” said Benedict. He was on a drip feed of a few things that Nathan though might help the time sickness that everyone seemed to have.

“It’s just water” said the Narrator. “Water from Metric.” Added Nathan.

That meant something to the Time Detective, but not to everyone else. “Do you mind if I try something?” asked Benedict over the phone. “I’m going to my mind palace.” he said as he hung up.

Detective Time - Gamer Jade

 

Jade focused her awareness into the version of her that was entering the Game Room.

Arlo, always on the hunt for new players and new cards to add to Missing Piece, watches as the strange woman reorients herself to the surroundings and scans the area. He excuses himself from the game he’s playing and goes to meet her.

“Welcome to Red’s Gaming Room” he says, trying to get a hint of where and when she’s from.

“Hi, I’m Jade. And you must be *the* Arlo. I saw you were here on the...”

“...the crashed Timeship display?” finishes Arlo. “I know. The bot gave me a heads up. It says you’re still there though. I mean, it’s a Timeship and this is Metric, but it usually compensates for that.”

“Fractal Integration” said Jade. Arlo paused for the explanation, when it didn’t come, he spoke up “And that is... oh wait you, have a card on it. I see. Interesting. That would mean a new board style to really account for that.”

“It’s just a game though...” said Jade “I wouldn’t bother with that just for me.”

“It’s more than a game.” said Arlo, a little defensively. “I’m sorry, I mean. It is a game, but it can help you plan something that isn’t, and if the previews are any indication – you have a lot on your plate.”

“Well, when you put it that way.” said Jade, still feeling a bit flustered over the unsolicited help.

Detective Time - Stanley Apartments

Nathan heard the words of the Narrator as he approached the buildings.

“On the outside, the Stanley Apartments looked plain enough.”

That was almost meaningless in Metric. As with many other buildings, the Apartments were much more than they appeared. Inside they could simulate just about any interior – if given the plans. It wasn’t a hologram, but it wasn’t quite real either.

No, in this case the rooms were grown from programs that, given sufficient credits, could convert digital plans into solid ones. It was probably best described as an organic 3d printer. The process wasn’t particularly slow or fast, not that time meant much in Metric, but compared to the alternatives, it was easier.

“Normally a room was fairly basic. A bed, a chair, a desk and not much else.”

If you were checking in, you got a phone for the duration of your stay. It came with a number of programs added to it to help you navigate the possibilities of the room, and help make connections with the other guests.

“Most of the rooms had a Narrator,”

It was their job to help connect the room to the Story Hallways and the rest of the Narrative experience. The default was Kevan Brighting, which people had grown accustom to.

“It was difficult not to get a meta commentary.”

Anything about the way you dressed, the way you spoke or the way you opened the door were all fodder for the Narrator. It was clear that it recognized individuals.

“Despite this, I’m still going to call you Stanley” said the Narrator.

“Oh, you’re a special guest. You don’t get to leave here till you figure out the puzzle.”

Detective Time - Paradox Trail

 

Captain Time looked at the filaments coming off the time/space location where the robot body double was located. It seemed that whoever sent the Time Machine to rescue them didn’t have any reliable means of communicating with them either.

Or maybe it was meant to be a mystery. Outside of the culture of the Time University, the use of Time Machines could set up an unbalanced power dynamic.

There was still a connection between the two time machines, so they wouldn’t go too far into different branches of time. There had to be a difference between them though, the feedback between the two wasn’t symmetrical.

It seemed like the moving device would be easier to follow. Initial readings suggested time travel in this area of space time was buffered by a day/night kind of safety zone. Anything too unusual would be considered ‘night’ and easy to erase or dismiss as a dream. Anything still subtle enough or well planned could survive ‘day’ as long as it still made logical sense from a view limited to linear time.

For example, someone ‘dead’ could appear any time before their death, and temporarily displace themselves, but could only act through intermediaries afterwards. Fortunately the ‘Sudden Utopia’ had a way of reversing death, so they could appear again any time after that their linear ‘death’ had been undone.

It required a bit of a retooling of the Escaped Lightning to navigate this kind of Space-Time, but it made the mapping immensely easier.

Detective Time - Paradox Death

 

Detective Time looked at the body. It was a young girl, about fifteen, with dark brown hair that had hints of recently being dyed another colour. There wasn’t many marks on the body, but it clearly wasn’t meant to suggest natural causes.

More importantly though, it wasn’t a human body. Superficially maybe, but this stand-in was never alive. At least not in the sense it was ever conscious. It was also quite new. Not technically new, it had been aged to the right amount, not that anyone would at that time would be able to check. It was new to the time loop. That meant the investigation was less in the direction of what it looked like, than how it got there.

This area had seen a lot of loops. Like something had gone wrong and the area reset itself. Over and over again. Like the person hadn’t wanted to time travel, then did. Then, after seeing the results of the non-linear excursion, wanted to undo their decision and met themselves, finally making the opposite decision anyway. Or that’s how the temporal particle residue looked to iOi and Nathan on the bridge of the Escaped Lightning few minutes earlier.

To keep from anyone else stumbling into him and iOi, Nathan’s TimeShip had pulled the area into a Stasis loop. Endlessly echoing a few minutes of time, so everyone could only see and remember nothing happening. They would still be around, but never reacting to anyone from a different time.

Whatever had happened here was outside of that window. They could only look at the aftermath. He wondered what it was like for them.

There really wasn’t any going back to ‘before’ time travelling. Unfortunately, the first reaction is usually to second guess any major decision you’ve ever made. The primary and paradoxical question that hits first is ‘Do you Time Travel?’. Going back to talk yourself out of it is, on reflection, the last thing that is going to work, but often the most tried.

For better or worse, that usually makes an impression upon most people. The new memory of the past, the non-decision decision about finally time travelling and the ‘safety rails gone’ feeling that settles in.

Doctor Time - Epilogue 1

 

Doctor Time was in the middle of things.

 

He had just finished talking to himself as Professor Time. He realized that with enough random memories and life experience to act on, he could be very different people. He could go along with that route, becoming a noted academic, but that was already done. Or was it?

If he didn’t do it, would that version of him vanish, or would it continue on? He shifted his jacket's colour just to give some mental distance.

He felt in his pocket for his Sonic Pen. “Happy Imminent Retirement Doctor” it said, the sound muffled in the fabric. Who’s voice was it? The Universities safeties nipped at the edges of his mind.

Considering the small paradox associated with it, it couldn’t be Zapp. He remembered he had done the work on the Anti-Null Pulse between classes, but the antenna was University property.

He wondered who did the high level decisions at the University. Zapp and the robots seemed to have final say as to Safe or Not, but he had seen more and more exceptions lately.

Did he really want out of the University, or was there something left to do here?

His mind wandered on the various possible paths that could be taken, then he felt the stirring of an old memory.

He rushed back to his office, which seemed to be closed for an investigation of something. He wandered the halls till he saw a much younger version of himself duck into a room followed by the blue, fancy version of iOi that was normally limited to his office.

/Whir-Click-Tick-Thunk/ It said to him. “Yes. I think I can do this now.”

Doctor Time - Jade Decision Tree

 

Jade sat at her desk at the University. There were other deans, but they lacked her Fractal Integration. That was fine for standard years, but current iterations needed someone who could view things from many angles in quick succession. 

 

As it was a Time University, their decisions could reach outside their actual office domain, as long as the current holder could work in the plans.

Time slowly became more unachored, as Jade’s decisions reached back further in time, and she began to eclipse the others holding similar office.

While most seemed to be concerned with taking the University on a linear trajectory, Jade felt that it should be timeless. Various safeties put in place by Zapp and watched over by the robots kept people sane, despite the overly fluid nature of time within the University.

Knowing what to go ahead with, and what to leave on the back burner relied a lot on how everyone reacted to various changes and Time Shifts. While Zapp had good organizational skills and high regard for public safety, he wasn’t flexible enough to deal with more drastic changes.

Doctor Time, she referred to Nathan in his role that he had for the longest time, had been too unpredictable. Which, now that she thought about it, was rather unfair assessment. The Null Pulses he had been enduring, and had worked to undo, left him working with most of his life hidden and in flux most of the time.

Jade thought about her year four final test, with the two Doctor Time’s. One that said he was retiring, and the other that called himself Professor Time. iOi had marked that as a Time branch to leave unconnected as it didn’t know where it would lead.

Doctor Time - Zapp Grounded

Officer Nathan ‘Captain Time’ had a fairly predictable routine. That was almost guaranteed under Chief Zapp. A patrol around the University grounds to check the time stabilization in the morning, a short break for lunch, and a quick check in at Seismics to see what kind of aberrations were likely to occur.

 

He had only been at the Time University for three years and while it was interesting, he wanted to get into the public to help shepherd people through TimeQuakes and other serious incidents.

The Time Police were more to police time, rather than go after criminals and law breakers. Not that the two definitions didn’t have some overlap. More than once, students leaving the University had snuck out some kind of experimental equipment and sent things into confusion.

Zapp had allowed minor alterations to time, as tracking and tracing everything would take too much resources. But even changing a few bytes on a computer a few years previous could have a whole domino of effects. Getaway cars could have their colour adjusted at the factory before they were sold and witness statements wouldn’t match. Given enough incremental changes, whole cases could get thrown out.

Zapp put in a request to the University to improve the robot’s temporal error checking ability, and Nathan suggested storing some records at time neutral locations, for a kind of backup.

When the yearly semi-scheduled TimeQuake arrived, the new iteration brought the robots abilities up. Previously they were mainly safety devices and now were active parts of the day to day work. Zapp had the safeties up quite high for a while after the shift so people wouldn’t notice the changes quite so dramatically. It was important to keep things running smoothly so less savoury people wouldn’t take advantage of the disorientation.

Doctor Time - Exit Strategy

Detective Time left the University. That was a bit more of a procedure than simply leaving a building. One had to exit through Temporal Seismics and the Vanilla Room, to provide a kind of clean exit to the timeline as a whole.

He walked with Jade to get the lay of the land. There was an iteration of her that seemed to hang around the building as a kind of tour guide. She insisted it wasn’t her job, but it was nice to see a friendly face.

She led the Detective to the Vanilla room and went through the basics, the equipment scanning his reaction to various videos of himself in other iterations. 

 

You had to account for, or at least trust the AIs to slot, any interactions with the outside world before leaving, and chose when in the non-University timeline that you wanted to fit in. Jade would do a trial loop with you in then and see how it played out.

The whole thing reeked of Zapps overwrought control and measurement of time. Nathan knew things could change very quickly once the pieces were actually in play. So far their experiments and experiences at the University were just mostly theoretical, or ‘Partially Integrated’. The language of the upgraded Chronometers was starting to catch on during this iteration.

Despite the University not having the technology or power to reset the whole outside world, the underlying nature of time had allowed for almost the same things with TimeQuakes. It wasn’t something they liked to rely on, but without successful resolution of events in play, they would repeat the thirty years surrounding the University’s appearance indefinitely.

Doctor Time - Jade, Have We Done This Before?

Jade thought the iteration was still salvageable. Focusing the Timequake on the wrong person could throw things off and collapse the entire event chain. That might mean redoing at least 15 iterations. That would strain the Universities safeties and people would start getting loop sickness.

 

Zapp had been the lead candidate. His rock solid adherence to logical, mechanical time just felt more secure. Any of the faculty or year four students could be a focus point, in theory, but the simulations found the results unpredictable.

It was, however, simulations run on Zapps machines so there was bias there. Not that the AIs felt anything like loyalty or favouritism, but they shared Zapps logical process.

Jade insisted that there be some contingency plans put in place, so that things wouldn’t entirely be relying on what was essentially a single point of view.

First, Jade would send out a pilot pulse of herself to future loops so she could get people up to speed quickly and identify important meetings, files and comms traffic that should persist between loops.

Second, she would work to improve the Universities robots to include alternate interpretations of time and to include random checks so that it would know when they too were in nearly imperceptible loops.

On that second problem she included Doctor Times language processor for random ‘voice’ output. The mechanical sounds the robots would make for conversation, as a kind of reference point for unique to loop positions for being in a paradox. It was a small addition, and it had to be. Zapps simulations couldn’t account for Doctor Time’s randomness and any large addition to things from him would make things entirely unpredictable.

With Jades spying into other loops, that unknown unknown became less of an impossible element to manage, and she refined her part of the robot’s programming to include a ‘best fit’ Vanilla time estimation of Doctor Time’s antics.

With his tendencies to both cause and live through severe paradoxes – and his anti-Null Pulse technology quantified to a certain frequency and upper limit – he suddenly became a more useful element to work with.

Doctor Time - Detective Time Day 1

 

Detective Time sat in his office, or Doctor Time’s office, he wasn’t sure which of those two things were more true at the moment.

 

For the last little while he had been trying to find out who he was in relation to everyone else, and when he was in relation to events. On the computer was a video file. Did he watch it yet? He didn’t remember. Lately he had been practising filing away memories that didn’t match up with external reality so he wouldn’t fixate on them.

There was a fragment of a story on his desk. Various papers on people he knew, or seemed to know. Was it fiction, or fact? A memoir, embellished? Or a plan not seen to conclusion?

He noticed the chronometer on the wall near the door. He scanned himself. “Partially Integrated” was the unhelpful response. He scanned again. Same answer.

That triggered a response from the AI. A robot, at once both familiar and strange appeared from a small alcove that seemed to be designed for it. It was blue and looked like a cross between a traffic light and an inside out watch.

It floated over to the chronometer and seemed to talk to it in numbers. “159265359” appeared on the screen of the chronometer.

/Clunk-Whirr-Dunt/ said the robot. “Yes I know” said Nathan. He remembered his own name again. “It’s to do with locating things in time. Pi coordinates. It means I’m near the beginning.”

/Click-Sprong-Tick/ “Oh, beginning of this chapter. That makes a bit of a reference point. I could use a bit of a slow start today. Canon in D. Detective.”

The robot seemed to understand, and moved the room to time/space/iteration/loop coordinates that would make sense for the context, but still be enough of a puzzle for what Nathan had decided his persona would be for the next little while.

Doctor Time - Nature of Time

 

The nature of Time is hard to imagine, let alone see. The trouble is that so many other measurements use time as a point of reference. How long light, or anything else, takes to travel a certain distance for speed. The number of peaks and troughs how often in a wave for a frequency.

However, if you go where everything to do with time is stopped, but you’re still using energy to be there, you can begin to map out time as a kind of 3d structure. In order to go somewhere faster than light, you have to take a different route. But it’s not quite as easy as that. Because if you go somewhere you can see yourself, or beam out a signal, it can be sent before you leave. The trouble with that is, you can always decide not to go – and then where did the signal come from?

But if you are getting a signal from the future, when is it from? How do all signals from the future, or past, not crash together all at once?

The answer is a bit counter intuitive. All decisions can be boiled down into a binary state. Yes or No. How long it takes to make a decision to do something doesn’t matter. If you send a signal back to a certain point in time, it either gets there, or not. You might have to use more energy if it’s from a longer distance in time away or a bolder signal, but not for the reason you might think.

Like space, time is filled with obstacles and shortcuts. In somewhere like the Time University, it’s low on obstacles and high on shortcuts. Moving through time is as simple as having a current location, destination and a means to connect the two – like a Time Gate.

The nice thing with Time Gates is that they can take you to times that don’t necessarily exist. That is, times that don’t have a specific past and future for them to go. Instead, they meander around a winding path that only really begins and ends when all the people in the same environment sort out when they came from and when they exit to. And not cause too big of a paradox.

Depending on what technology you have, and what space-time looks like around you, paradoxes can either be a funny joke, or a universe ending calamity, or anything in between.

Doctor Time - First Flight

Nathan had been a Time Pilot for – a while. It was hard to keep track of his own chronometer settings as he kept flying out to different branches of time, looking for somewhen stable to build the Time University.

The one he already graduated from.

Of course it was a paradox. It would probably cause a level 5 TimeQuake, but that didn’t mean much in a TimeShip except for a bit of turbulence.

He found a signal to orient himself. For a while he has assumed it was background noise, but it seemed to be from a time about 11 years in the future.

He recognized the University Timecode – Pi on repeat after about a hundred digits, but another one spliced on top of it at random intervals. 32..... 32..32..32.......... fifteen of them, then static, then fifteen more and then the high pitched whistle up noise that was the first warning sign of a paradox.

There was a sudden jolt to the controls and the dull robot that was with him vanished. Without it he couldn’t go any farther. Static would envelop his ship and it would slowly rip apart in what the University called a Causality Storm.

Standard procedure was to turn on the binary code distress beacon and rewind back to the last safe event. That is, before he took off. Back to the chronometer check in and do it all over again.

He felt like he had done that before. Probably a few times. You could keep a little tiny bit of memory when you did it, but being stuck in a loop would drive you insane after a while.

Instead, he tried to find the calmest bit of Time-Space and buy himself a little bit of breathing room.

Doctor Time - Prologue

The robot had a few versions of how this encounter would go in it’s processor. It had crunched the simulation of the events, and determined the likelihood of a paradox was high. 

 

Nathan, a Time Pilot after three years at the Time University stepped toward the TimeShip. The robot flew out, square and nondescript except for a screen on the front that could display Time Neutral syntax.

“I remember something like you from when I was a kid. It was why I wanted to get into Time Machines. Did you kidnap me when I was younger?” Nathan asked the robot.

It’s internal CPU got stuck in a loop. Yes/No, Yes/No. It didn’t like either answer. It had requested a Time Scout and Jade showed up. She arrived with a small upgrade board that she plugged into a port on the outside.

One loop later and it was there again, the board integrated into it’s design and it’s screen was offloaded into the ship, which could have a different Time/Space reference than the robot. 

 

The basic safeties in the robot didn’t quite process the logic, but thought it was for a good reason.

This time when Nathan asked the question it docked with the ship and it spat out the answer instead. “Partially Integrated.”

Jade looked at the display and thought it could do better. She jumped out of the loop and grabbed a board from Doctor Time as well, and went back to the same Time and Space coordinates. The previous meetings had since fallen into a Time fissure, real, but not contributing to the true timeline anymore.

“I remember something like you from when I was a kid. It was why I wanted to get into Time Machines. Did you kidnap me when I was younger?” Nathan asked the robot.

/Whir-Clunk-Thud/ said the robot.

Jade looked puzzled, but Nathan just smiled.

“He’s saying ‘Maybe later’ – it’s the same noise the robot made in the past, when I asked if I could stay in the future with it. At least, that’s what I figured it meant. The robot I remember was a bit different. Cooler looking.”

The robot hummed. Internal Logic Check – Passed said the screen on the Time ship.

Jade took the robot aside as a screen in the ship showed an incoming paradox. “Let’s get you a makeover”

Doctor Time - Shift in Perspective

Jade was touring Temporal Seismics Buildings as part of her Crisis Management course of year 4. Not surprisingly it was THE crisis that everyone was talking about. The complex was off campus, so it could set it’s own iteration size so it could make sense of the yearly iterations of the main University.

 

Seismic was always on the precipice of the most dangerous time shifts, and as such moved throughout the years of the quake as aftershocks and stray signals intercepted events and people. But for the most part, stayed anchored to a certain iteration window. Relative to the University and the strongest TimeQuake measured.

To counter the effects of itself moving through time, but still have it accessible, it broadcast a signal that represented a level 9 TimeQuake and 30 years of time. The various distortions of that static could be interpreted by Comms and TimeShips as a kind of Universal Chronometer.

She walked through the hallways, trying to make sense of everything that happened outside of the University and the scale of the larger problem. A guided display took her up to speed rather quickly. Her training at the university helped her make sense of the diagrams that Siesmics was only just starting to understand.

Nearby, but not in the same iteration window, was the dorms. They worked individually to keep the students in a loop of the university that kept their progress across multiple years.

There was, or will be a TimeQuake, rather high on the scale, possibly displacing as much as 30 years worth of events.

The current goal was to try and minimize the damage to the timeline, and each student and faculty was asked to sacrifice a certain amount of experiences, as a kind of buffer to the shift in circumstances that so many things changing would cause. Energy could be dissipated into smaller TimeQuakes that made smaller shifts for larger numbers of people. It was, however, a stopgap measure.

All of the paradoxes from time travel were starting to create a new underlying nature to Space-Time. There would be a Before-and After in which the nature of the Universe would settle out into a new configuration that allowed for more Time Travel, with less side effects.

The University was on the leading edge of that shift and was already experiencing some of the benefits and drawbacks. Null Pulses could reset the University to the Before bit of the timeline, but more and more people were living in the After. Years passed, and things advanced, but not as quickly as at the University where time was more fluid. Without a way to properly dissipate the paradoxes, things could get exponential worse, and more unstable.

Doctor Time - Zapp Safety First

Doctor Zapp was starting to relax a bit. He realized that Jades note about “32” had more significance than simply the number of iterations a TimeQuake would take to dissipate. It was also the first localized paradox that didn’t actually upset anything.

For someone who’s work it was to eliminate illogical use of Time Machines it was a bit of a sticking point. There was the shudder and the room shifting when Seismic Jade mentioned the answer before it was calculated, but on the whole, nothing that bad.

It helped that Doctor Time seemed to walk him toward the solution, connecting with Detective Time after the TimeQuake, and another Jade who was somewhen in between.

Her initial detection as ‘Nominal’ was something he had dug into in the mean time. It seemed like it was a kind of Pilot Pulse. Something cooked up by the people working on Temporal Triggering. Something that kind of tested the waters and could cause an origin point for ideas and events that were in the middle of playing out.

It seemed like a kind of average between all the versions of people running around, with a certain amount of memories to be useful, but not so much as it could go off task very easily. An anchor point in time that had a certain amount of autonomy that made a trail of memories that a full person could settle into.

Of course, people couldn’t spill out all their memories at once and tended to react badly to large changes in the timeline. That would, however, be something an AI could handle fairly easily.

“Doctor Zapp to Year 4 Fractal Integration Final -1 day, Robot Design” Jade’s voice echoed through his room. That was the strange thing with Comms. They didn’t have a specific time to send messages, but a backlog of traffic that seemed to wait for a certain amount of Vanilla Time to get slotted in.

It was almost eerie how well it worked and he didn’t follow the logic till someone from Comms joined him for lunch. They described time more like a map, with strings joining up all the major cities. If each event was a city, it became question of finding it, rather than the person and time.

Communications had access to any of the public information said within a certain radius of a chronometer, as well as computer use and pads.

Nominally everyone was labelled as being at a specific time and a relative time based on other events. Various safeties kept people remembering too much out of order or before the proven work was done on pubic record. Any time jump could be simulated first, to calculate the damage it would cause to the timeline.

Detective Time - Jades Journey

 

It had been a few cycles since they had finished the first run of the previews. What that meant in terms of time depended a lot on what section of Metric you were in. Some areas had the idea back propagate a few weeks or months, so there was a mountain of feedback to sort through already. Officially one couldn’t release derivative works until the original release time had passed, but there was a lot of preparation behind the scenes.

Professor Time, the version of Nathan that stayed at the Time University, got one of the most back dated copies, and had plenty of time to go over the logistics and feasibility of the Time Doctoring the situation would need. Jade scheduled a time for Detective Time to chat with Professor, and pick up files for Captain Time and Doctor Time versions of himself to open when the variables called for it.

Switching between the three modes of his current self could be disorienting without the proper transition protocols. In particular, reorganizing his thoughts with new information took less time if it was explained with the proper persona in mind.

Doctor Zapp had been instrumental in parsing out the various logic directions that each version of Nathan would need to understand the problem. Their relationship was still sometimes rocky, Zapp still not past the choice of his linear integration vs Nathan’s more chaotic shifts. He found he could understand each of Nathan’s current travelling selves, but not comprehend how they couldn’t follow each other’s logic.

Jade had fractal integration of her various selves and she could understand the situation Nathan was in. She felt different in each body, and thought some parts of her mind were faster or slower depending on how she specialized. For him, it was likely that some ideas and habits were locked out or nearly dormant.

She had seen some of the scans he had taken while in Doctor Time mode, and that seemed to be the indication. Jade was happy for the variety and his novel approaches to the various problems they ran across.

It did mean that he was always a little out of harmony with people though, and hard to work into a pattern. She remembered the trouble of the Time University days and how his input would often overbalance whatever task they were working on.

Often, like now, and in the Media Room, it was better to have Nathan work at arm’s length and not upset the fine tuning that Jade was so good at.

Nightside

 

Nightside. It had been a while since his mind had drifted there.

It was like waking life, but different. Slippery, in the sense of Time. Soft, like a Dream.

You could crash in front of a computer and do a three hundred page novel in two minutes. The chances of finding it again were next to none though. Websites had a better chance at propagating, but it had to be simple to leave an impression. Past a certain point though, it morphed and changed on it’s own as readers input tipped the site away from the original design.

There were ways to prevent tampering, but they made the page ‘heavy’ and hard to travel on the network. The best thing to do was to describe the pictures and keep the text short. That way people were busy building the page in their own mind rather than distracting themselves about how it could be.

Popular websites from the waking world were anchors, and people could dream-surf made up filler indefinitely. If it was hard to find true content in the daytime, it was nearly impossible on Nightside. Self reinforcing feedback kept all but the most reflective people on their preferred course and mindset.

TV tended to be reruns, old EM signals being beamed between minds as they relived the impression of the original broadcast within the Nightside world.

Everything and nothing was memorable. Movie stars and old high school friends walked around vaguely recognizable landmarks all around the world. Death was common and temporary.

It was inevitable that this was where the first Time Travellers went. It was ‘easy’. You could land, get an impression of the time, make an impression, and yet come back and have none of it matter.

It made most people think the whole process had failed. That is, until they stayed long enough to leave a real difference in the malleable version of the world.

They found they could adapt Nightside to be stable enough for long term visiting. People were still prone to missing time, and strange feedback, but nothing that would force their exit to when they came from.

-----

The easiest way to meet new people was to make them up. Combine a famous first or last name with a different last name, or an age, or job. Nathan Ellis might look like Nathan Fillion, but have a completely different backstory. Or it could be Nathan Fillion with a completely different face. You could make someone in the Sims format, but in Nightside it was probably easier to just look through FacesBook, the infinite version of the famous website. Add a number after the name and you could build a custom combo character. Me 80 Prank 20 would be you with a habit of, pranking, obviously. Not amazingly creative writing, but good for a harmless foil in a twin v twin story.

It took a while to organize the various variables into meaningful houses, plots and dreams, but it was worth it.

Looking back, it seemed that Dayside and Nightside were just points on a spectrum. How much oddness and how much order. It boiled down to what one got used to. Unreality level is what the science types eventually went with. With that, it boiled down to a matter of sifting the various technologies, mental shortcuts and memory aids into appropriate levels.

Missing Piece cards became handy as equipment you dreamt/Nightsided with could be distilled into something specific, and yet innocuous, during Dayside. It was easier to plan missions with having to make or buy stand-in technologies and props.

A few times it seemed to backfire, leaving a person with cards rather than the ‘real’ equipment on a mission. Usually it was only one or two items, and also an indicator the object in question had improved or changed, needing new art or rules to cement.

Detective Time - Media Room

 

Nathan thought about going to the Media Room anyway. He knew he wouldn’t be there in the same time-slot as the girl and Jade, but he had other business there. It was one of the more overlooked pocket realms of Metric, considering how interconnected it was to everything.

There was the obvious connection between the Text AI and the Stanley Apartments, the Apartments back to the TV, and the audio hookup to the Temporal Lighthouse – Metric Radio.

It was also one of the few private areas to get a full menu Time Pizza delivery. That solved the issue of travelling out to other locations to back and forth the process. Best done in small doses, but not bad for exposition or quickly fleshing out new areas.

The computers there seemed under-powered, for what they did, but the exponential effect of using them was pretty obvious. Stories written up and movies roughly cut became part of the greater Metric idea ‘farm’ and frequently led to inspiring citizens in vague yet significant ways. A character written up here could influence who you met outside and failing that, found its way into jobs available at the Actors Guild.

Most of this Nathan knew, but even then, he hardly used the place to it’s full potential. He figured Jade and the girl might be a bit more thorough in it’s use, but he only ever saw the obvious parts of their work here. It wasn’t that he couldn’t dig a bit deeper, but he’d rather be surprised than over rehearsed.

Knowing that, Jade left the TV on the preview channel and had a custom Time Pizza order for Nathan to make use of once he settled in. The other devices were powered down, but showed signs of recent use. The Missing Piece card printer was still warm. Again, he could have signed in and checked their public game accounts, but he preferred to do that after taking in other media first.

Nathan sat down and scanned through the options. “Fragments” “Never Say Goodbye” “It Matters What We Leave Behind” were all in the que to play, but he wanted something to set the scope of what he’d be doing in ‘Pizza Mode’ a little better.

He looked a little closer at the order. “#675 NPC Breadsticks” was the appetizer. He switched to that channel on the TV and had a quick bite. He saw himself on screen, at the Stanley Apartments, but it wasn’t quite the future or the past. The Pizza place’s motto – When you don’t have Time, there’s always Time for Time Pizza. You could split your awareness with a time echo of yourself and as long as you had somewhere to direct it, you could do so pretty well. The Media Room was pretty much set up for that. As was the main restaurant, naturally, and also the Game Room on the far side of the Pocket Realms.

Detective Time - Rescue On Set

 

Nathan went back to the scene of the crime to get more readings. Having the jacket in place acted as a tracker to the doubles and the various stories they spawned. Some died anyway, when the rescuers couldn’t find them in time, delayed by obstacles or just generally lost.

It seemed the girl was in charge of her own rescue and was directing the process from behind the scenes. It was only when she stepped out of the shadows that things really fell into place.

Several different scenarios felt plausible, and memories for them filtered in as the doubles experienced them. Some of them hardly included anything based on Time Travel, and different editing suggesting it was either a source of confusion, or the answer to the problem. Others featured it heavily and events were impossible without it.

Everyone around seemed to have a different opinion, and the girl was obviously flustered with the conflicting views. It caused her to loop back to the beginning and try things again, somehow her version of Time Travel was tied to her emotions.

In the end she green lit a whole spectrum of versions and sorted out the various crews to go through each scenario. It was a lot more work than strictly necessary but seemed the only way to end the conflicting accounts of the events.

Nathan surveyed the various tangents and made sure the various groups were kept clear of each other, and swept away the initial confusion. Each branch could have it’s own test timeline, as events were happening concurrently, and the directing of the experience would be hidden from memory.

That way things could happen as naturally as possible and still be exact enough that there was a solid anchor to the whole thing. Balancing the probability matrix would be a job for Doctor Time but Nathan hadn’t seen enough of the puzzle to try moving everything at once.

It would be a long night, but he worked himself into each of the timelines as a stunt coordinator or dialogue coach, or someone with enough pull to tweak things at the critical moments.

He generally succeeded into blending into the background, till the fourth time he tried it. The girl, now comfortable in the director’s chair, spotted him almost immediately.

“You’re here again” she said plainly. Nathan looked away for a moment, his cover blown, but quickly found a thread to follow. “I’m a technical advisor, for the Time Travel” he blustered out. Close enough to truth he thought.

Detective Time - Reap the Paradox

Nathan sat in the Polished Lightning looking for a good trajectory to approach the Paradox Enabled business. There was always the chance you’d meet yourself on the way out, and that caused problems for most people.

Common sense said you’d have to do/say exactly what your ‘older self’ did on the way out again, or get stuck in a time loop, but that was just a sad rumour. Businesses like this had refraction projectors around the premises to make the experience less of a hurdle. Still, the idea that you’d meet yourself a few hours smarter and still have to go through the encounter was too much for some people.

Nathan usually found a way to supercharge the interaction, giving himself enough of a hint that it doesn’t bootstrap the problem, but enough of a nudge to steer the conversations inside so that he could get ahead on an active investigation.

This time, he wouldn’t have that chance. It seemed the authorities had enforced Vanilla Time on the neighbourhood, and that made things more difficult for everyone.

The Time Detective landed and tried to get a handle on the situation. “What seems to be the problem officer?” he asked the nearest Time Cop. “Level 4 Paradox” said the man, not giving out any more information than he had to.

Nathan shrugged. It was a ‘life and limb’ kind of situation, but he already knew that from his investigation. His short trip on the Polished Lightning had left him ready for some fast and loose time play, so jumping into a Vanilla Time enforced environment was a bit harsh.

Still, the bravado was there, and he had talked himself past the perimeter of the business in question with a quick flash of his badge and some small talk.

He was about to go in the building when he heard a familiar voice behind him. “So you’re just going to walk in there?” It was Jade, but he didn’t know what capacity she was acting in at the moment.

“I’ve got to see a tailor about a jacket.” said Nathan. Jade answered “Seems harmless enough.” the way she said it though meant they both knew it wasn’t. It was a shared understanding, and not something the Time Cops picked up on. She was there to make sure things went smoothly, even if not predictably.

Dan - Fire

Dan smelled the smoke. It was rich, earthy and clean. None of the usual sharp notes from melting plastic, foam and other trappings of the modern age. No, it was just plain wood burning.

Burning. The word snapped him back to the moment.

He was here to put out the fire, not analyze it. Not yet anyway. On with the mask and helmet.

He was right though. It was a log cabin and only natural oils, fabrics and untreated wood were lost. Dan hauled out the hose and got ready to go into the building.

Safety first, one should always assume that something worse was adding dangerous chemicals into the air. Not that all smoke wasn’t bad, but this was on the safer end of the spectrum. He made one final check of his mask before striding through the doorway.

It was like a camp-out. No. This was serious. Dan’s mind wandered. It was a poor defence mechanism to distract him from the hazards of going into a burning building.

Flames crawled along the logs. Slowly, methodically. Not accelerated by anything. Good. He relaxed.

A sharp crack above his head sent him back into high alert mode.

Detective Time - Following Threads

Nathan was in the garment district of Metric and had found a number of places that made jackets very similar to the one he was holding. It was frustrating, but it solidified the community atmosphere of the place. Plans, patterns and designs were shared among the various shopkeepers and each individual built onto the basic idea rather than quibble about basic copyright.

He thought he was stuck, but a helpful merchant told him what he should have already known. “This has been in a paradox” he said, adjusting the optics on his glasses. “That’s not important..” Nathan began, but realized he was incorrect. “No, that would take some extra reinforcing to stay existing.”

As the words left his mouth the merchant flipped through his peers catalogues. “This one here” he said, touching a blank card to the particular advertisement, making a fresh business card for Nathan to find the place with.

“We don’t like to openly condone paradoxes, but this card should get you to the right person.” The merchant sighed. Untamed paradoxes could make whole neighbourhoods vanish, so making things to help facilitate working with them was frowned on in some circles. There was always a ‘test’ to see if the person getting the information was suitable for the task. Nathan’s reputation for making sense of things and keeping them under control very much preceded him and got him through some strange doors. It didn’t get him past the test though, as stray time duplicates and artificial clones still stumbled into things.

Nathan stood at the desk for a short time longer than was comfortable, and then tapped the card on the table, freeing any nano-ink bots that didn’t have a good grip to the paper. It made the thing look a little worn, which meant he could go straight to the location, rather than make a round about trip. The merchant smiled knowingly. The whole procedure for going to a Paradox Enabled business was a bit of security theatre, mostly padding the time so you’d think about what you’re doing. Very few people knew the link between the condition of the card and likelihood of finding the destination. Nathan had been through the trip a few times and noticed about the third time.

Most people who had figured it out partially thought each of the nano-ink bots were supposed to fall off at a set rate -- depending on how well you looked and a few other intangible variables. While other people got caught up in the drama of finding a particular location and the web of places they went in the meantime, the Detective saw through the illusion and noticed that the more use the card got, the faster he got to where he needed to be.

The idea was that more people could talk you out of causing a paradox, or at least prepare you for it. While that was part of their job, their real task was to evaluate you and ‘age’ the card, effectively stamping a passport.

Shortcircuiting the whole procedure, tapping the card for instant wear, was only possible for a very small window, and you had to have pretty good timesense to know when that was.

The merchant grabbed the card back from the Time Detective and put a finger on the corner of the paper. A few more of the nano-ink bots moved, and cleared out the less helpful versions of the address. “Not taking the scenic route?” asked the vendor rhetorically.

Outside his Timeship, the Polished Lightning, had finally decided on a new designation.

 

Detective Time - Quiet Eddy

 

Nathan looked around his timeship as the whine of the machinery hit a low point. The Tired Lightning, as it now branded itself, was definitely resting. He didn’t think he’d been flying it anywhere, but with everything happening it was still using a lot of energy to simply stay in place – relative to events.

He had just found a quiet eddy in the timestream that let the ship take a break and he was doing a quick scout of the area. Things were looking up. This area of Metric, where flotsam and jetsam regularly accumulated from other times, was remarkably clean. At the end of his manic phase, it seemed that everything found a place, and was working toward, not against, the overall goals.

Nathan put a hand on his ship and it beeped almost contentedly. It wasn’t strictly alive, but the AI in it seemed to have more than the standard level of intelligence, even without iOi plugged in. Usually by now he’d be inside, scanning some clue or misplaced trinket to see where he should go next. This time he was left to his own devices.

He shrugged. It was as if the universe said to him, “Pursue this or not, it’s up to you.” He felt the threads of the investigation so far slipping from his mind. This wasn’t entirely a surprise. Time Travel antics always faded away without constant effort – right up to the point when they’re absolutely critical to have happening. That’s just how it worked.

Still he wanted to see things through, rather than see everything undo itself. Without any new leads he thought he’d go over old ones and see if explanations had sorted themselves out in the down time. He went to the ships locker and did another scan of the fake body’s clothing. The computer hummed as it sorted through the quantum fuzz on the threads and tried to match the pattern.

His ship had dropped the ‘Tired’ bit and was still settling on a new adjective. The lettering swam around, shifting quickly as it picked up bits of personal chatter from the relevant parties.

What Nathan didn’t know, or rather only suspected, was that Time Travel and Investigations aren’t quite so much about finding Truth as finding plausible paths. In any given situation, many things could possibly be equally true at any one moment, but some patterns just worked better.

A garment might be manufactured in any of a dozen Metric locations, and be virtually identical, with only vague, coincidental hints pointing at one conclusion or another.

A duplicate set of clothing for a body double wouldn’t have to be that well made to fool most people, especially from an area that didn’t have active time travellers, but in this case it seemed to be.

He only had a quick scan from iOi of the original jacket, and both it and the duplicate had been through a quantum wash, because of the paradox, but the blue robot insisted the thread count was identical, or very nearly so.

It seemed like a few threads had been pulled out of the original jacket, something the girl said about an illustration, jogged his memory. If the hairs on your head are numbered, the threads of a jacket wouldn’t be far off either.

The Pocket Realms of Metric - Sampler District and Dream Docks

 

Experimenting with different AIs to turn a story into a screenplay

Detective Time needed a palate cleanser. Enough of baffling cases and paradoxes and impossible time travel. Just a quiet visit to one of the stranger districts in the lesser explored areas of Metric.

He went down to the docks, the robots were offloading another set of dream cubes from the ferries. Something about the water aged the cubes, giving the dreams within them an ancient quality to them. Silly fluffy dreams about the home you grew up in became twinged with nostalgia like fine wine. Wasting time with friends became warm slumbers around a perfect campfire with soul stirring songs and majestic nature surrounding you.

Nathan wondered if he could get a sample of the water to see if it had an effect on anything else. The robots didn’t seem to mind, as long as he didn’t get in the way. He went out to the edge of the pier and found a small bucket to lower down into the mysterious waters. The rope was smooth from use and the container had seen better days. It was typical of Metric. Something you thought was unique was actually quite common, but nobody bothered to spoil the surprise for you. He tasted the water. In an instant he felt his time as a detective and a time pilot and temporal surgeon quantified as a strange and otherworldly flavour. He thought about bottling it, and how it might taste to others.

It was then that the fog cleared and Nathan felt slightly disoriented. He was suddenly on the other side of the body of water, in Metric’s Sampler District. It was cramped and haphazard. Exotic wooden signs for fuels, alcohol, teas and coffees, dyes and candy and soda filled the jumbled streets. One particular sign caught his eye. “Detective Draughts” read the large lettering, and a smaller card in the window had a crude drawing of his sonic pen in it.

He rushed inside and almost demanded to know what was going on, then he remembered how time worked in this area of Metric. Small chance encounters spun around, collected time and blossomed into full products and stores with very little input. A small man behind the counter noticed Nathan’s somewhat flustered appearance and quickly said “With your permission of course. It’s so nice not to have to explain the whole procedure.” Nathan quickly smartened up. He knew that drinking the water on the pier made the experience bear fruit, and it was free for any citizen of Metric to harvest the result and refine it for as many weeks at that would take. It would generally attract the original person quite quickly once the process was finished and they could negotiate on the continued viability of the products.

Nathan quickly apologized for his initial reaction and the storekeeper laughed. “In all my years, you’ve been one of the quickest people to grasp what’s happened here, no surprise either considering.” Nathan swats away the compliment “So, what’s it taste like?” “Oh, it’s quite something” says the storekeeper “I thought of a few different products, but a beer seemed the most appropriate. He hands Nathan a large mug containing the best of the initial batch. “I won’t bore you with the details” he says, “but the water gives a kind of reverse hangover. A sharp pain to start with which mellows out into a pleasant buzz.” It probably wasn’t the most marketable idea, but it suited Nathan’s philosophy – get the rough stuff out of the way first and bask in the resolution.

Nathan was satisfied with the result. It was something he could probably get behind, not too much mind you, but probably a store or two beyond the Sampler District as long as his name wasn’t too associated with it. There was a soft limit on how famous a Detective could get before it started working against them