Doctor Time - Zapp Safety First

Doctor Zapp was starting to relax a bit. He realized that Jades note about “32” had more significance than simply the number of iterations a TimeQuake would take to dissipate. It was also the first localized paradox that didn’t actually upset anything.

For someone who’s work it was to eliminate illogical use of Time Machines it was a bit of a sticking point. There was the shudder and the room shifting when Seismic Jade mentioned the answer before it was calculated, but on the whole, nothing that bad.

It helped that Doctor Time seemed to walk him toward the solution, connecting with Detective Time after the TimeQuake, and another Jade who was somewhen in between.

Her initial detection as ‘Nominal’ was something he had dug into in the mean time. It seemed like it was a kind of Pilot Pulse. Something cooked up by the people working on Temporal Triggering. Something that kind of tested the waters and could cause an origin point for ideas and events that were in the middle of playing out.

It seemed like a kind of average between all the versions of people running around, with a certain amount of memories to be useful, but not so much as it could go off task very easily. An anchor point in time that had a certain amount of autonomy that made a trail of memories that a full person could settle into.

Of course, people couldn’t spill out all their memories at once and tended to react badly to large changes in the timeline. That would, however, be something an AI could handle fairly easily.

“Doctor Zapp to Year 4 Fractal Integration Final -1 day, Robot Design” Jade’s voice echoed through his room. That was the strange thing with Comms. They didn’t have a specific time to send messages, but a backlog of traffic that seemed to wait for a certain amount of Vanilla Time to get slotted in.

It was almost eerie how well it worked and he didn’t follow the logic till someone from Comms joined him for lunch. They described time more like a map, with strings joining up all the major cities. If each event was a city, it became question of finding it, rather than the person and time.

Communications had access to any of the public information said within a certain radius of a chronometer, as well as computer use and pads.

Nominally everyone was labelled as being at a specific time and a relative time based on other events. Various safeties kept people remembering too much out of order or before the proven work was done on pubic record. Any time jump could be simulated first, to calculate the damage it would cause to the timeline.

Zapp felt like going to the relative coordinates Jade was suggesting would be a bit much, so he picked a time after those events and got the Null Pulse to remove any memories of Robots so as not to cause a conversational paradox.

Zapp took a time door to after the class mentioned by Jade 32. Professor Time, as he now called himself, seemed a lot more with it than usual. He sits in his office as if waiting for Zapp. He motions him to a chair.

Zapp wasn’t sure where to begin, so he started with his usual illustration. “Time is a straight line.” The professor bit his lip, but let Zapp continue. “Each of the cars is an event, and we’re trying to prevent a train wreck”

It was an analogy that Professor Time was familiar with, now that he had a good chunk of his memories back. Professor Time wondered how many times they had that conversation. “You mean TimeQuake” he said, surprising Zapp.

“Who told you about that?” Zapp seemed angry. “I figured it out myself, once the Fractal Integration team sort out the mess with me talking with myself. And teaching years worth of classes with almost no memory.”

“Sorry about that, I guess it’s you that should be upset.” Zapp said sheepishly. “And we probably should have been a bit more honest about the TimeQuake, but we had to keep you as a baseline as a ‘before’ Null Pulse.”

“So how long have you been working on the problem? Years I imagine.” the Professor says seriously.

Zapp shrugs “That’s a tough question to answer, but most of your career. But also only the better part of this iteration”

Professor Time leans back. “My future self told me about ‘Vanilla Time’ today, it seems useful for back of napkin calculations. Thirty years from my angle and about 3/4 of a year for you?”

Zapp focuses himself. “Right. It’s a rough measurement of time based on output. I suppose we can get comms to go through your records and sort out how much unique work you do before the...

Professor Time finishes the sentence “Null Pulse. Yes, I’ve been working at cancelling it out too. You don’t expect a man to live his life doing the same thing over and over, do you?”

Zapp again shuffles back in his seat. “I guess the deja vue got a bit much. Wait, you said 30 years?”

“It didn’t take as long as you might have thought. In fact, I could isolate the reaction and study it. It lead me to the antenna you saw in class and my sonic pen, which I gifted to myself.” the Professor looks around the room proudly as the facade drops.

Zapp gets a bit nervous. “The Null Pulse is supposed to prevent things like that. It’s a paradox.

The professor laughs. “Settle down. I’ve only used the highest Null Removal setting once, and that was earlier today. Events are already in motion, if Jade’s presence are any indication of things.

Zapp stands up and starts pacing the room. “So that static coming from your classroom, that was a cover, and you only pretended to to be in a loop?”

“I’ve put in the time” says Professor Time. “And all that energy has to go somewhere. I’d talk to Seismic, they’ve figured it out.”

Zapp dashes out of the office, before the Professor can get out another word.