Nathan went back to the scene of the crime to get more readings. Having the jacket in place acted as a tracker to the doubles and the various stories they spawned. Some died anyway, when the rescuers couldn’t find them in time, delayed by obstacles or just generally lost.
It seemed the girl was in charge of her own rescue and was directing the process from behind the scenes. It was only when she stepped out of the shadows that things really fell into place.
Several different scenarios felt plausible, and memories for them filtered in as the doubles experienced them. Some of them hardly included anything based on Time Travel, and different editing suggesting it was either a source of confusion, or the answer to the problem. Others featured it heavily and events were impossible without it.
Everyone around seemed to have a different opinion, and the girl was obviously flustered with the conflicting views. It caused her to loop back to the beginning and try things again, somehow her version of Time Travel was tied to her emotions.
In the end she green lit a whole spectrum of versions and sorted out the various crews to go through each scenario. It was a lot more work than strictly necessary but seemed the only way to end the conflicting accounts of the events.
Nathan surveyed the various tangents and made sure the various groups were kept clear of each other, and swept away the initial confusion. Each branch could have it’s own test timeline, as events were happening concurrently, and the directing of the experience would be hidden from memory.
That way things could happen as naturally as possible and still be exact enough that there was a solid anchor to the whole thing. Balancing the probability matrix would be a job for Doctor Time but Nathan hadn’t seen enough of the puzzle to try moving everything at once.
It would be a long night, but he worked himself into each of the timelines as a stunt coordinator or dialogue coach, or someone with enough pull to tweak things at the critical moments.
He generally succeeded into blending into the background, till the fourth time he tried it. The girl, now comfortable in the director’s chair, spotted him almost immediately.
“You’re here again” she said plainly. Nathan looked away for a moment, his cover blown, but quickly found a thread to follow. “I’m a technical advisor, for the Time Travel” he blustered out. Close enough to truth he thought.
She seemed satisfied with the answer, her awareness over the multiple paths blossomed for a moment, and settled down again. Nathan got a new memory of being called a ‘technical advisor’ on the runs he had already done, and then... blank. If he wasn’t used to Jade pulling the same trick, he might have been phased.
“Warn me.” he said and it was the girl’s turn to look surprised. At this point Nathan thought that women must experience some time travel differently than men, though he was working with a small sample size to jump to that conclusion.
Seeing some kind of link between them, the girl confided. “I don’t really know what I’m doing. I mean, I’ve been through this before, but I’m not sure why I’m not happy with the results.”
Nathan looked thoughtful for a moment. For staying relatively sane in this circumstance she was doing a lot better than most would, and he hadn’t seen anything wrong with her actions. He did have a better record for wrapping things up though, which is what she was having trouble with.
He thought about explaining everything, but settled it down to a few questions. Did she want to Time Travel again after this, did she want to remember anything in particular, did she want to be well known.
She had a good handle on the first questions, wanting to avoid it in the future if possible, but still remember enough of it to not discount the option of changing her mind. Fame hadn’t quite crossed her mind yet, despite making a movie of the whole situation. In her mind it was just a way to explore the problem while being a bit removed from it.
Nathan noticed the Dream Fog was a bit high in the area, and while it smoothed the process along, it didn’t really keep people at their sharpest mentally.
He radioed iOi back at the Polished Lightning to drain some of the fog out of the area. The girl yelled not to. “No. I feel trapped if it’s not here!” Nathan scanned the area again and found the problem. “There’s Narrative Bracers here, that’s what is keeping everything from collapsing.” The girl wasn’t convinced.
“If we take the fog down a level or two, you can set up your own Bracers.” Nathan saw a blank look and realized this was a ‘show me don’t tell me’ kind of problem.
He brought out his Metric Guide to Pocket Dimensions. It wasn’t super helpful in this much Dream Fog, as the text swam unsteadily, but he just needed relative coordinates. “Stanley’s Narrative Apartments.”
“No, not there!” she said. Nathan was puzzled, then realized what the problem was. “Oh, you don’t have to go via Night Jumps, I’ve got a ship.”
The girl didn’t know the terminology, but that seemed like what had happened. In the middle of a dream she’d end up in a distorted version of a room and get berated by the voices coming from the ceiling.
“You see we’re here now, orbiting the Temporal lighthouse, that’s just the broken rooms that smash against the shore. But it’s good that you’re trying to jump out of here.”
“You mean I don’t need to solve this now?” she asked. Nathan brought her to his timeship. He turned on the external projectors and pointed them at a suitable bank of neutral Dream Fog. It was one of the few patches left, now the area was stabilizing.
“You’ve already ‘solved it’, several times over, but you’re not happy with any one result, since it’s not the whole truth. I can take you to the Media Room after Stanley’s, we can hash together something...”
Jade’s Time Window opened as the girl was weighing her options. “Too much fog here before” said Jade, pointing back at the Time Window she had just walked through.
“Media room first” explained Jade, who evidently scouted the options out a bit. “And just us, sorry Nathan”
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