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.
The question from the body was actually deeper than it first appeared. There was care taken to show some injuries, but nothing traumatic or gruesome. It was as though the girl had to see the body herself to know that chapter of her life would be closed, but not so much as to be scarred by it.
It was the kind of thing that probably wouldn’t make for a clean autopsy, or dissuade anyone from thinking one was required. Better to have a clear and unquestionable cause of death that didn’t implicate anyone else – death by pills or whatever this was meant to be – might spark some kind of investigation into how she got them and from whom. They had went through the trouble of checking themselves into a mental hospital, but didn’t see how that would close some of the less gruesome options for staging a death.
It was possible that whoever had planned the faking the event might come back again, and put a new body down. That was the trouble with Time Travel cases, they never quite closed till everything was settled to everyone’s satisfaction. There was ways to make it so events were locked, or at least harder to mess around with, but Nathan didn’t see any reason to leave things in the state they were at.
He tried to find any hint as to where or when they had gone, or what kind of bigger picture was at play here. Taking out his Sonic Pen, he made a quick scan of the area to see if anything else odd was around. It was then the body sat up and began speaking in a robotic voice. “Temporal Incursion Detected!”
Nathan jumped back and looked around to see if anyone else had heard the voice. iOi made a noise in answer /Click-Clunk-Whirr/ Detective Time nodded. “Yes I know we’re in a stasis loop, it’s just that thing is loud.”
The flesh melted off the body and the robotic skeleton formed itself into a kind of tin woodsman shape. It was both more and less threatening than the robotic sounding girl. Detective Time shook his head and tried to remember the standard procedure for dealing with this variation of stand in body double.
He reached slowly for his holographic badge that would show his chronometer reading. “Proceed” said the robot, guessing his likely next move. Nathan relaxed and showed the robot his credentials. Different areas of time had different methods for mapping and policing it, but there was enough overlap to recognize the variations.
“You are acceptable.” said the machine. Nathan laughed. “Glowing endorsement sparky. What’s the deal?”
The robot tried to parse the odd language. It was obviously programmed for a much different kind of encounter. “I am not the girl.” it said plainly.
“Yes, and...?” said Detective Time. The robot seemed puzzled again. “I was programmed to answer questions about her.” it finally said. “She did not die.” it added, trying to be helpful.
Nathan sighed. Obviously just a stopgap measure. He doubted it even knew where she was. There was nothing in that design that suggested any kind of non-linear communications.
There was an impossibly large number of places she could go, since time was neither linear nor all that predictable. Branches of Time were being studied by the University that suggested a few versions of events that settled out into predictable patterns. “Anachronistic Mess” “Protracted War” “Sudden Utopia” “Mysterious Inscrutable” were some of the meme templates for them.
“iOi – can you ‘interrogate’ this Oz throwback and give me a Branch direction that we can narrow down to?” iOi floated over and flashed a thousand pictures at the shiny metal stand-in to narrow down what kind of future it came from and where it likely returned to.
It seemed to understand the other robot well enough. Pictures were the easiest language after all.
Answering the question in robot fashion, it gave out a series of numbers. “655-253-511-474-849”
Detective Time recognized it as a Universal Branch Locator Address, but nothing specific about it.
/Clunk-Whir-Tick-Tick/ said iOi. “Big jump?” Nathan frowned, but needed the extra hint from his Sonic Pen. “Unseen War – Sudden Utopia – Hidden Mystery” was it’s translation.
He felt like things could wrap up here. “Little more obvious Cause of Death Oz-bot.” The bot switched back to skeleton mode and reformed the flesh over itself. Nathan turned away and headed back to the Escaped Lightning.
That branch of time was usually off limits. No need to cause any anachronisms or make any showy kind of display. Not when most of the population was in a Utopia. How they got there was less important than simply maintaining it.
If left alone, that direction of time would eventually discover time travel, but, unlike the University, kept it mostly quiet. Once knowledge of it got into the open, it was regarded mostly as a curiosity, and near unbreakable safeties kept experiments as more a hobby than a lifestyle.
There were exceptions though, and they eventually found their way to the Time University, and registered their craft and robots as a formality. They generally didn’t cause paradoxical entanglements, but obviously a few people were wanting to make a lifestyle out of time travel after all, and kept gifting tech back to earlier and earlier versions of themselves.
That lead to more and more odd happenings, but the eccentric group usually self policed themselves pretty well. A few in the ruling council were given knowledge of Time Travel, if not the equipment, and had some sensible guidelines written out.
Going back to before the ‘Sudden Utopia’, except as an observer, was generally frowned upon. It wasn’t strictly forbidden, but generally not recommended for the side effects.
Nathan had dug into the groups plans – at least the ones registered at the University – and found some dates flagged in the system. One he had just been to, and another a few years later in a different and unrelated location.
He pulled up a log of unusual communications from those areas and found they hinged on an intermediary device, like iOi, but disguised for the era. One device moved around, both in time and in space randomly, but the other lurched along a more predictable pattern. While it seemed to be at the same physical location, it’s time index was all over the place, as if it was self correcting various paths.
Nathan recognized some of the technology. It was similar to his 7D Narration field that Doctor Time had come up with. Except this one was wired into itself, as a kind of crude steering wheel. It almost represented a Time Machine that couldn’t quite look like one, as if all the controls had to be abstracted into something else.
Being on board the Escaped Lightning had slowly changed Nathan from Detective Time into Captain Time. He could switch over faster, if the need had called for it, but that usually came with an information hangover that left him disoriented. If he waited for the ship to acclimatize him into flying mode, he could shift more seamlessly from tracking down the clues to actually navigating to them.
/Whir-Click-Whir/ asked iOi. “Nope, I don’t need to bottle this experience up. We’ll call this the beginning from my POV and go with that.”
With Time Travel events happening in a different order for each person, it sometimes helped to keep individual encounters as just locked memories that could be shuffled around. Sometimes though, having a definite order to events helped talk people down from time sickness.
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