Nathan looked around his timeship as the whine of the machinery hit a low point. The Tired Lightning, as it now branded itself, was definitely resting. He didn’t think he’d been flying it anywhere, but with everything happening it was still using a lot of energy to simply stay in place – relative to events.
He had just found a quiet eddy in the timestream that let the ship take a break and he was doing a quick scout of the area. Things were looking up. This area of Metric, where flotsam and jetsam regularly accumulated from other times, was remarkably clean. At the end of his manic phase, it seemed that everything found a place, and was working toward, not against, the overall goals.
Nathan put a hand on his ship and it beeped almost contentedly. It wasn’t strictly alive, but the AI in it seemed to have more than the standard level of intelligence, even without iOi plugged in. Usually by now he’d be inside, scanning some clue or misplaced trinket to see where he should go next. This time he was left to his own devices.
He shrugged. It was as if the universe said to him, “Pursue this or not, it’s up to you.” He felt the threads of the investigation so far slipping from his mind. This wasn’t entirely a surprise. Time Travel antics always faded away without constant effort – right up to the point when they’re absolutely critical to have happening. That’s just how it worked.
Still he wanted to see things through, rather than see everything undo itself. Without any new leads he thought he’d go over old ones and see if explanations had sorted themselves out in the down time. He went to the ships locker and did another scan of the fake body’s clothing. The computer hummed as it sorted through the quantum fuzz on the threads and tried to match the pattern.
His ship had dropped the ‘Tired’ bit and was still settling on a new adjective. The lettering swam around, shifting quickly as it picked up bits of personal chatter from the relevant parties.
What Nathan didn’t know, or rather only suspected, was that Time Travel and Investigations aren’t quite so much about finding Truth as finding plausible paths. In any given situation, many things could possibly be equally true at any one moment, but some patterns just worked better.
A garment might be manufactured in any of a dozen Metric locations, and be virtually identical, with only vague, coincidental hints pointing at one conclusion or another.
A duplicate set of clothing for a body double wouldn’t have to be that well made to fool most people, especially from an area that didn’t have active time travellers, but in this case it seemed to be.
He only had a quick scan from iOi of the original jacket, and both it and the duplicate had been through a quantum wash, because of the paradox, but the blue robot insisted the thread count was identical, or very nearly so.
It seemed like a few threads had been pulled out of the original jacket, something the girl said about an illustration, jogged his memory. If the hairs on your head are numbered, the threads of a jacket wouldn’t be far off either.
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