Regulations

 

“We can’t do that.” “Of course we can, we just have to put the gain up to 145.5” “No I mean it’s against regulations”

Dan felt like he’d had this argument before, and it wasn’t impossible to think it might be a time loop. They had found the most likely candidate for a non-linear incursion, but background radiation at the site implied a certain maximum to the interference.

The trouble was, it was a self fulfilling prophecy. As Dan increased the gain, or focused the effect, the new local maximums spiked. That was expected, or should have been. Too many people were still limited in 4d thinking.

The target was 238 years ago, but with all the technology it may as well be the next room over. At the power levels they were using, it was almost 1:1 for procedure and result. Still, too many in the experiment put unnecessary weight on ‘old’ readings.

“We can’t make direct contact with that power level” “But records say...” “How do you think the current records got there?”

It was a circular argument. There would be no record of them doing it, till they did it. It was like time was being written in two places at once, and a tangent in the past could lead them to a new future. It would be like having the rug taken out from under you. It would jump things from a passive study to actively living the consequences.

Would they live the altered time again, or would they just jump to the new track and have to catch up on the changes? That depended on how well they could isolate themselves from the ripple effect.

It took a while to realize they were already cocooned, as they were already deep into the mystery.

Sally got back from vacation that afternoon, and she was surprised how far the team had gotten in her absence. “Really? That high? When I left there wasn’t anything at that location.” The rest of the team looked at her like she had gone crazy. They remembered something different. The location was always that high in their records. They checked to make sure.

Locally, they were right, but off site copies showed a strange pattern. Different versions floated around with conflicting values. It wasn’t strictly based on distance, but on how direct the contact was with the satellite labs.

A nearby building with no contact showed lowered activity compared to a farther site with more regular interaction. They mapped out the values and put a not entirely arbitrary value on the ‘closeness’ of the data site. The graph plotted out showed very strong correlation.

Sally felt dizzy and seemed to doubt her memories for a moment. There seemed to be several versions of the truth floating in her mind and she wasn’t sure where to settle on things.

She tried to remember why she had been called back from vacation, but couldn’t recall who or why. She was here and the lab was voting on whether to ignore the previous guidelines for maximum gain or stay at the current settings.

She felt like she had done this before, but she didn’t have the records. Maybe she had voted remotely. She checked her phone and saw that she did. She had voted to stay at current levels and that was the last she heard of it.

She checked Dan’s phone, since he had been the one to send the message. Instead it had a message to show up in person.

They let the team know, and they stopped everything to have a better look at the situation. Various conversations, file backups and correspondence were strangely out of sync with the rest of the world.

The lab results for the background radiation were just the tip of the iceberg, but also a handy reference point for the scale of the differences.

During the time they were sorting things, the main testing equipment was shut down and various fields and invisible bubbles wavered. That was silent too, for a while, but then Sally got an alert on her phone.

“If you’re reading this, they shut down the system again, turn it on standby or we’ll have to do this again – S”. Without telling anyone, she turned on the system again, and sent herself a message to do so. “You’ve already sent this message” said her phone.

Dan got an alert as well and sent Sally a message to come back to the lab, yesterday.

They both realized they weren’t sure how they knew to plug their phones into the field attenuators. Nor did they realize how they could specify a date before today to send the message. It just seemed like second nature. Like they had been here before and gave themselves hints how to succeed.

They felt like checking the system messages and backups again. They looked for any small files on the desktop that they normally kept clean. Every few days, in the backups, they found a series of folders on the desktop, numbered on the various gain levels for the current experiments. They had documents for other locations, the power levels and the results found.

It was like they were mapping everything out, but somewhere that would only give feedback if they poked it. In one of the deeper folders they found a small serious of programs that were ready to compile and be sent to their phones.

They went through the code and found that the code would detect and piggyback through the phone network and fields that the time travel technology had set up. It would allow them to send themselves messages at certain times if certain conditions were met. It promised there would be a solution if they got the settings past 145.5 if they could get everyone there, and ready. It mentioned how the backup system worked and how they would lose progress if things went offline too long.

They compiled the programs and sent a copy to their phones. It also created a new app that let them scan AR style for various ‘bubbles’ that formed around people and equipment in proximity to the experiments.

It lamented that a lot of the results were on shaky ground as they bumbled around various power levels that produced a lot of destructive interference. It mentioned that at peak times of communication it would send out results to the other labs so various ‘high tide’ marks would be recorded and be safely out of range of the following destructive interactions.

It mentioned that a lot of semi-stable timelines would exist, but would settle out given enough experiments. It also needed Sally to be back since she would have the right levels of charge to interact with the peak levels of fields and, more importantly, base unaltered reality.

The phone app was getting quite a bit of use as the team viewed the various bubbles and fields surrounding the equipment and each other.

Between the readings and the file backups, they were starting to get a better picture of the larger things at work. Like anything else, past work was being built on – but with the past being flexible, it was more like momentum or juggling. A stable pattern made more things possible and a less predictable one undid work. But, at the same time, a shift from one pattern to another meant a minor disruption in between.

It was a delicate balance and one they were only barely starting to figure out. Still even when things seemed to collapse, the knowledge and work wasn’t entirely gone. The software on their phones had some feedback detection in it and could send and receive micro messages. These flashed random messages from different timelines and tweaked auto complete and spell check to get patterns to repeat in different variations.

It took a while, but they realized this crazy structure of time bubbles was happening in the past as well. There was more work to finding the results, but they found their subject had spinoff timelines as well.

They had to be at a sympathetic point in relation to past to properly view the extreme values. Usually that meant making an incursion and flooding the target with energy. However they could now predict higher level bubbles and scan for them without causing them.

The target area was more saturated than they initially estimated. They were looking at a nexus of temporal activity and were previously fixated on a tiny island of it.

In the past, it seemed that things build up, collapsed and reformed more naturally, like coral growing on a reef.