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.

He took out the emergency manual and set about putting the ship in a loop, but keeping the interior flowing forward.

The comms crackled on. “Hello Pilot, are you in distress?” came a woman’s voice. The cabin’s safeties were on so he couldn’t place who it was, but they were probably going to burn out soon anyway. Leaving him to deal with loop sickness on his own.

Nathan lied. “Nope, fine here, just flying.” He felt like running for the escape hatch and ending it all, but hung on.

The voice seemed annoyed at his answer. “Whatever you’re doing, you’re creating an subduction zone’ – which happens to be what we’re looking for.”

“So I’m here?” said Nathan, getting his confidence back. “Feels like a Causality Storm to me.”

A laugh on the other end. “Oh, that’s Zapp’s old terminology, he thought time travel propagates changes instantly. Advanced Time Theory is a much better understanding. Doctor Time bases the whole course around sand.”

“That’s very interesting, but I’m still stuck” says Nathan.

“Not really” says the voice, “unless you’re in a Mark I”.

“You mean there’s more than one kind of TimeShip?”

A gasp. “You are in a MK 1! THE MARK ONE. You’re Captain Time!”

Nathan laughs. “That’s just my nickname. I used to dress up as a kid.”

The voice calms down a bit. “Quick what’s the last thing you remember, before the comms, but after you went off course?”

Nathan blinks trying to remember. “Usually a robot would help record everything, but I lost mine somehow”

“You must have gotten hit with a paradox filament, blacked out and appeared on a slightly different timeline. The university time signal and the binary background must have corrected your course enough so you didn’t vanish. Is there something else you remember as different, or any extra items in the cockpit?”

Nathan looks around. He sees a diagram scratched into the back of the escape hatch. It triggers his memory. He carved that in the door, jumped out and fired a binary flare.

“I remember a flare, but that isn’t me. Or not now.”

The voice answers. "Right. You were going a bit insane from the loops. You jumped and started a whole new chain of events. It meant a new safety signal that could steer people away from loops. You probably heard it this time. It was partially integrated in your last loop, but we couldn’t save you, you might have heard something though."

“I scratched it on the door. 15 thirty 32’s, static, another set of 32’s and a paradox jump”

“Internal Logic Satisfied” came a mechanical voice over the comms.

“What’s that?” asks Nathan.

“That’s you upgrading to a Mark II.”

Nathan was about to say he didn’t remember that, but thought it best to just roll with it. “Jade?”

The safeties had dropped and the voice was recognizable again. “Yup. Do you want to know what you missed, or you just want to improv your way out of this again?”

Nathan ignored her and asked a question back “You know how everyone wants to go back in time and give themselves a time machine? So you don’t have the chronometer blackouts and such whenever you try and paradox?”

“Which is itself a paradox” says Jade warily.

Nathan continues. “I know, we’ve probably been down this road before, but I thought, what if a robot went back and gave you a tour? They’re supposed to keep you safe, right?"

“Except when you throw it out the escape hatch.” Warns Jade.

“What?” Says Nathan, a bit shocked.

“You don’t remember what you’re doing between loops, do you?” says Jade.

“Not really, but not important. But, if I did throw it out, and it had a binary beacon, what would it do?”

Jade thinks it over. “Well, if there wasn’t a human chronometer detected with the beacon, it wouldn’t be a priority signal, but it would probably get back to base eventually. It would try and pilot the TimeShip itself, but it might get lost looking for you in a loop.”

“Then what would it do?”

“I’ll have to get back to you on that, the bots that came with the Mark I didn’t have the proper programming to deal with outside the box thinking. It’d probably replace itself on your initial flight and do something to ensure some other kind of AI is helping you. Like in the Mark II’s”

Nathan smiles “Didn’t you just say I upgraded?”

Jade shoots back “Who’s walking who through this?”

Static.

Jade is on Comms again. “Captain. This is your <static> loop. Did you require assistance?”

“That’s not what you said last time.” says Nathan.

“Did you just get the static? What’s the checklist?” Jade asks, thankful he’s out of the loop enough to sound coherent.

“Lost robot, Non University Signal, Paradox filament, Origin Story, and a Mark II AI.” he says, not knowing quite where it all came from.

Jade sounds relieved. “We did that enough times it survived the loop.”