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 had yet to contribute anything to the Chronometer Updates, but had managed to sneak in some Temporal Triggering elements to iOi. He could use his Narration Field and careful use of monologuing Vanilla Time hints as to his state of mind and desired pace of events.
Jade saw a window to shift Zapp into another position relative to everyone else and she took it. His level, style of organization and time/event management was starting to dwindle in usefulness as the upgraded robots effectively acted as more useful proxies of him. She began to transition him to an oversight position in the Time Cops. Leaving his position in the University to manage a larger, more consequence heavy environment.
That change let the University flow in a less inhibited way. The robots, while still rigid in their application of logic, seemed to tolerate more paradoxes and unusual events, as long as the triggers played out safely.
The harmony of the situation increased, but almost too much. Time loops became alarmingly frequent, as the robots too aggressively minimized the noise on the timescape and left little resistance to repeating events. It was better than the extreme disorientation and lost time of a TimeQuake, but the pendulum could swing too far. While it was nice to gain the confidence and certainty that nearly identical loops could provide, it didn’t move the needle in terms of progress.
Robot Safety was refined, and the prevention of unnecessary time loops became a goal as well.
As such, events and even people were classified as partially integrated, pending, or as belonging to a certain estimate of near identical loops.
Doctor Time became instrumental in sorting out which variations of almost identical loops could produce the most fruitful results. He was willing to take the biggest leaps in terms of seeing a decision to it’s logical conclusion and seeing what benefits and drawbacks it brought to the larger problem.
Jade was a natural foil to this, having effectively finished the Fractal Integration Comms/Traffic and having split her awareness into each of the roles. While Nathan’s change was more pronounced, Jade could still jump between her fractal variants to keep them on a similar trajectory and shared pool of experiences.
She provided the framework to allow Nathan to explore his different choices and interact with himself. She, in turn, relied heavily on the robots to keep Nathan safe, and give him enough practice loops to sort out the best version of any particular choice. They kept him isolated to specific trajectories to provide a reference point for other people navigating the winding and sometimes self contradictory path through time they were all on.
Jade felt like they were losing the forest for the trees though and wanted to put things on pause. Finally having the elements necessary to keep things at a dull roar of manageable chaos, she found a quiet stretch of time where she wouldn’t be interrupted.
The University existed to study and manipulate time. It seemed to build on it’s own understanding as bits and pieces of vital information were baked into its own design. It was assumed that their knowledge of time had been based on studying natural phenomenon that were isolated and enhanced. That seemed to be the most logical, but any individual records showed that someone or something had been at each of the occurrences. It seemed like they were studying themselves.
She consulted her own version of iOi. It checked the safeties of the room and began to offload information to the display. It confirmed that each of the phenomenon was artificial and had indeed come from the University. It boiled down that, given sufficient study into time, humans would eventually learn it’s secrets. Natural phenomenon did exist, but were astonishingly small and barely detectable. Overall it was determined that discovery of these things could be flexible or ‘time neutral’. It then became a question of when the revelation would produce the most interesting outcome.
While time travel to the distant future was impossible at the moment – there were too many variables and variants to safely plot a course, there was something. Enough of them had a kind of welcome signal to explain the general shape of the future to anyone scanning for the right kind of intelligent pattern.
It was mainly something an AI could make sense of, one that relied on a certain number of existing conditions to unlock. A certain number of paradoxes in play, a system for managing them and detectable and predictable resolutions to the basic problems of time travel.
There was a single signal that always started the chain of events that would lead to a Time University at a particular point in history and that always originated from this distant future.
It was almost always incorporated into the University Time signal as a kind of homage to the original cause. It was, of course, the Pi signal. This was the first detectable iteration that also produced another unique signal embedding into the same basic identification point. It seemed to be centred around a large enough paradox that produced it’s own stable chain of events.
This was something the future had been looking for, in order to improve their own understanding of time. Their culture had since matured, and almost seemed to take things too cautiously, confirmed too much and that was incompatible with the wilder nature of Time Travel.
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