Time Blocks

 

“Path Generator error 402. Target not found. Try again?”

Time travel was never meant to be mainstream, but eventually it was. It took a while for scientists and experimenters to standardize everything, making it safe and easy for just about everyone to travel.

The process had been distilled down to blocks. Start with Goal blocks, or rather targets. A certain person and a time. Get a few blocks for a Time Corridor to have an interaction window with the target, then a Cleanup block to wipe out the incursion.

She wasn’t sure what was wrong. Her help bot suggested that a Rescue block wasn’t valid as an end point. “You’re just a Gen 1 bot, you don’t do the non-standard blocks.” was her response. The trial had worked regardless and the actual mission was in que, almost. As soon as she put it in the Path generator it froze with the error message.

The bot might be right anyway, but when she tried to append a Cleanup block to the string it erred again.

“Path Generator error 850. Rescue missions should not need cleanup. Cleanup is already part of the original Time String.”

‘What?’ she thought. ‘He isn’t part of a Time String, he’s being Rescued’. Her bot prompted her again. The Rescue was supposed to be used as a part of another incursion. To rescue another time traveller.

 

She wasn’t sure she should have been using that block. It was part of a maintenance set, not part of the usually available blocks for tours, interviews and other pedestrian stuff. She had a little trouble getting it, but everyone had assumed it was just backup for someone looking after her.

There had been a few cases of people overusing their energy store or getting lost looking for the entrance/exit point. The roll-out of the standardized packs had put in a lot of safeguards, a lot of the Rescue block functions were internalized into other technology. Still they kept a stash of them just in case.

The Path generator had since triggered a technician alert when the problem didn’t resolve itself.

“What seems to be the trouble?” he asked as he brought out his diagnostic equipment.

“There’s error messages. I don’t know!” she said flustered. She hadn’t asked for help and didn’t want to be banned from the equipment.

“It’s in a paradox cool-down at the moment.” he said. She threw up her hands and closed her eyes. “I don’t even remember what I was doing!”

The technician turned to the bot when he realized she wasn’t going to be very helpful at the moment. It had a bit of temporal shielding, able to record alternate choice timelines whenever a Path Generator was being used nearby.

“Rescue Non-Traveller – Superposition Error 402 + 850” That was going to be a tough one. They wouldn’t be able to keep a target lock on a non-traveller one they left the Time Corridor. That would make a successful rescue unsuccessful and start a loop.

Where that left the target depended on when in the cycle the Path Generator realized the problem and switched to cool-down mode. The lack of a pre-existing Cleanup block would snowball the errors.

There was one more problem. The trial was more than just a computer simulation. It represented the actual mission working. Bots swarms would fill in for people, do things mathematically, test the Time Corridor and do the quantum calculations. That would narrow the success and cleanup states to a manageable number of variables. All of that was necessary for a simplified end user product.

It had the advantage of working without the safeguards normally in place, since everything was just a mechanical simulation. It never technically intersected with the timelines, but its existence still counted and helped, or in this case hampered, further readings.

She slowly woke from her dazed state. She had been trying to rescue her friend. He had vanished a while ago. Long before Time Machines had been even close to fruition.

“I caused his disappearance, didn’t I?” she finally sobbed.

“You still don’t recognize me?” asked the technician.

“No, why would I?” she finally said.

“I’m your friend!” he said smiling. He saw her confused face and explained further. “We had to make sure you caused something, since rescuing me set a lot of other things in motion. I did make it out, but not to the timeline you experienced. We’ve been wanting to join the two versions of events for a while, but you hadn’t done your part yet. We kept trying to push you into joining the Time experiments, but the more we did that, the more upset you got. We finally had to make the whole thing public and hope you’d eventually pick up the hobby.”