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.

More had changed that Zapp realized though, and he was too caught up in his usual adjustment routine to notice. For one thing, Seismics and the Police HQ were now under the same roof, and that meant the latter had sections that were just a little more connected to unachored time than before.

Memories of hunting down every single time aberration were fading rapidly, as Zapp got used to relying on the robots to catalogue them and map them out to Seismic. New iterations were now more than incrementally different, and incidents were considered closed if they were more than a few loops ago.

He had a more or less live connection to his University Self, once the various comms people had decided on a time code outside the University that was flexible, but not precisely fixed in time – rubbery is what he heard.

He felt a strange anxiousness, as if he knew on some level he was right down the hall from himself. While Doctor Time might be disjointed enough to do that on University grounds, he didn’t want the hassle or the headaches. He settled for calling it the next, or last loop and that kept it straight in his head. The displays in the Siesmics area of the building adjusted to the general tone of the conversation. It mapped out his interactions with himself as if being at different layers of Time, with the lower ones being ‘past’ and the upper ones being ‘future’.

He looked at the displays and asked if things could be separated out for everyone. For a large majority of people it could, showing small shifts as reports of time loss filtered in to the department. The picture resolved itself around a central point. Where he determined it would be about year 15 of the TimeQuake protocol.

He filled in the appropriate paperwork and did a small check in with the robots, ensuring the logic of the timejump and broadcasts would be stable.

The robots were already ahead of him and had the Vanilla room ready for him to record from. He wasn’t quite sure when year 15 was now that he was here, and the robots had blocked his exact memory of when he left. He struggled to remember some reference points and the room noticed him settle down as he focused on the displays he had seen.

Zapp began.

“I’ve determined that a level 9 TimeQuake is about 3/4 of a year shift if focused on a normal person.”

The Time police will use that as a yardstick and retroactively use a TimeQuake of 5 as threshold of Time Crimes that will be dealt with. That’s about a memory conflict of about day about a week out”

“For reasons of public safety, the University, Seismeics and anything related will be confined to specific iterations and in a time loop till they sort out their mess. This message is from year 15 of the start of that enforcement, the accompanying TimeCode will verify this.”

He put a gap in the broadcast to 15 sections, or 1500 units, later and put in the digits of pi, assuming that 100 units was one year based on University Time. That planted a flag at the middle of the signal.

Jade asked him to repeat himself for the end of the signal. He was very close, having rehearsed his speech in a focused loop till it was nearly perfect. Still there were enough differences that a machine could pick them out. Jade marked each of them with a ‘32’ and assigned them equal weight. She spaced them out over the whole signal, so the message could uncompress to a size the amount of time it took to say the words. There ended up being 15 ‘mistakes’ in the first half, and 15 more in the second half. Without a strong signal you could only hear the 32 marks, but that seemed to fit.

Having narrowly avoided realizing he just set his own arbitrary non-linear timeline, Zapp asked to take him back to his most recent Vanilla Time reference, which he could only describe as the day the displays settled out and the robots came out of the background.

The room had a small safety exercise about various Time Police procedures and various ways the chronometers could be spoofed or tampered with. In reality he was again building his own backstory, but one based on logic and vanilla time calculations, rather than flights of fancy.