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.
For one, it isolated the branch that this Timeline was in and made the outer limits of improbability effectively dreamscapes. Anything from before the Utopia was rough and rocky, while after was cloudy and soft – at least in the ‘night’ sections.
The time machines designed for this kind of space were less discrete and mechanical than Nathan was used to. They acted more like webs that attracted or repelled certain outcomes on a quantum macro-level – as least during Day/Linear Time. At Night, they could take up any shape or form, but the more exotic, the more tradeoffs there were.
Probable Events floated around the Day corridor like electron shells, real, but small and mass-less in the Night that surrounded this branch of time.
It wasn’t so much navigating to a specific time, though that was part of it, but collecting enough weight and surrounding feel that you could rejoin ‘Day’.
At it’s most basic, it meant the girl could depart from her ‘Death’ point, and arrive in the Utopia at her rebirth, but getting anywhere, anywhen else would be more work.
That explained the strange path her TimeShip was taking, as if tracking down bits of a larger puzzle. It seemed like it was programmed to give the girl an overview of their life, and the lives of the people around her.
One obvious time/location to visit was shortly before her linear resurrection in the Utopia. She could arrive, see what the reaction from people was, and yet have the safety net of a dreamlike environment.
Captain Time Navigated to one of the locations and brought up the viewscreen.
The girl arrived in the Utopia, stepped out of a white light into the arms of her friends and family. There were hugs, tears of joy, like seeing someone again after a long trip, but amplified.
The girl looked down as her watch beeped and she ran back to the white light and vanished. Nathan did a quick scan of the area, and a look at this branches TimeMachine specs.
She seemed to be on a tether of about 10 minutes. If the situation was conducive to a reintegration into the ‘Day’ timeline it would give her a warning. She could either leave the area and go back to TimeTravelling, or be stuck when and where she was.
As this appearance was close enough to a normal resurrection, it would have been grafted into the timeline, if a day earlier than planned.
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