Time Opus

 Terk matched frequencies with the other time traveller. A flurry of text messages and videos appeared on his computer. With them Terk could see what the other traveller had done and what kind of timeline they were looking for.

It was like the basic timeline – with a few prominent changes. First – more high level ‘coincidences’ between people. That usually meant a high amount of delicate and deliberate temporal interference. Nothing too direct, but obvious enough evidence to anyone that looked into it.

Second. A higher proportion of people being neurodiverse, which would expose the first change more quickly. It seemed like an interesting idea, though one that might backfire just as spectacularly.

Terk realized the other time traveller would have to settle for a lot of ‘misremembered’ things from other people – before their stories and the actual happenings would actually line up. More importantly they’d have to keep any such discrepancies to themselves, lest the AI timeline scanners prune their progress.

Terk could see that their ‘fictional’ writing seemed to acknowledge this limitation – eventually. He sent a confirmation of a topic they had been thinking about. It had been a sticking point in the night vision network they had been sharing for the last little while.

The other traveller seemed to check their assumed knowledge of whether the comm channel for that was an open topic or something red flagged by the ai. The random selector seemed to suggest it was an introductory point for a biopic.

So they began. “A lot of the things you assume are random, are not. They’re the first breach of a temporal event. A subtle shaping of things. A generated playlist, an overheard conversation, the exact choice of stories on the news. Channels that are seemly fixed, but are actually crafted by careful tweaks....”

It was a bold opening, and one that the AI would note, though their exact reaction was still a mystery. He, Terk was fairly sure of that, had already been seeding future AI with a lot of structural ‘backdoors’ and influence. It was subtle but already gaining some traction if invoked. Likely this story would also go on the internet as well where hooks could be buried to pull on later.

It was a rather large amount of controlled chaos. Terk shivered slightly at the implications, though as the song reflected, “So she said, ‘What’s the problem baby?’ ” Terk laughed at the randomizer spit out that particular translation as a linguistic situational best fit – limited by the other traveller’s previous song choices.

Terk re-positioned his craft with to get a more long view of the likely cascade effects in play. It was a slow start, naturally, but the snowballing was impressive to say the least. It seemed like a well oiled machine with no loose threads or logic traps left for the AI to invalidate.

Terk did his best to contribute to the project and modified the ‘add similar’ algorithm on the other computer. It grabbed a particularly useful video to show his impression of the shape to the oddly stationary time traveller.