Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations: Watching the Clock

by Christopher L. Bennet

  Councillor Shiiem had also held back, letting his ally Temarel have her rein, but now he spoke in cool, controlled tones. “The Selakar, for one,” he replied. “The knowledge in your era was great enough.”

  “But what would we have to gain?” Lirahn demanded. “Our advocacy of free trade is no secret. We, and those we hoped to benefit, are the greatest casualties. Whereas preventing any cross-temporal trade, any threat to your precious timestream, is clearly in your interests.”

  “Now, wait there, Lirahn,” Damyz said. “Let’s be fair. After all, some of the people in here . . . well, they may have things they were meant to do that they haven’t done yet. If they’re trapped here, well, then it could change history, not, ah, not preserve it.”

  Shiiem and Temarel looked surprised, yet gratified, at the elder statesman’s support. “He is correct,” the Zcham councillor said. “This sabotage is in no one’s interest. It threatens all of us, and its cause must be found.”

  “You’re certain it’s not a natural phenomenon?” Petersen asked.

  “That much we do know. There is only one way this change could have been brought about.” Shiiem moved closer and adopted a lecturing tone. “By traveling to the far downtime end of the Axis, you return to the moment of its creation, even while remaining in its internal present. The nature of that duality is such that, by altering the conditions of its creation, you alter the nature of its spatiotemporal metric—as though it had been created in that form all along. Essentially you reset the Axis to its starting point. But that past is also its present, so the redefined conditions are only perceived from the internal moment of the change forward.”

  Garcia put her hands to her temples. “Oh, hell, I thought I’d outgrown the headaches.”

  “You know this was done?” Ranjea said.

  “We know,” Temarel replied, “because the change has happened, and could not have happened any other way. But we do not know who was responsible. Travel within the Axis is not closely monitored—only travel to and from it.”

  Damyz let out a heavy sigh, wrinkling his snout. “Nor can we comprehend why. An action like this . . . tampering with the very, ah, genesis of the Axis itself . . . why, it risked destabilizing the entire realm. Had the perpetrators erred, everything we have built here could have been eradicated. These, ah, these terrorists, yes, are a threat to us all, regardless of our differences of policy. We must set aside political recriminations and seek these criminals together.”

  If Lirahn was upset to see Damyz thinking for himself instead of backing her political play, she didn’t show it. Instead, she adapted smoothly, circling Ranjea and brushing her hand across his shoulders. “I have a suggestion. Our new visitors are professional investigators. Discovering the perpetrators of temporal crimes is exactly what they’re trained for. Who better to track down the ones responsible for this?” There was no question in Ranjea’s mind that Lirahn’s outrage at being trapped was sincere. It radiated from her quite strongly, her raw emotion confirming what logic already made clear: that her own agenda was undermined by this lockdown.

  Shiiem nodded. “I agree. An investigation by outsiders would defer questions of objectivity. Are you amenable, Agents, Commander?”

  “We will gladly assist, Councillors,” Ranjea replied.

  “Yeah,” Garcia said. “We’re as eager to get home as the rest of you are.”

  “Wonderful,” Lirahn said, beaming. “For once, all of us in the Council are on the same side. May it set a precedent for days to come.”

  DTI Headquarters, Greenwich

  15 Xan’lahr YK 1008 (A Monday)

  19:04 UTC

  Director Andos was as somber as Dulmur had ever seen her as she looked around the situation room at the assembled staff, including himself, Lucsly, Yol, Sonaj, and T’Viss along with Kalnota and several of his researchers. “Mister Felbog of our research department has made an alarming discovery this morning,” she told them. “I will allow him to report it himself.”

  The young Choblik approached the podium timidly, egged on by a nod from his supervisor Kalnota. To Dulmur, he looked uncannily like a deer cowering under a predator’s gaze. “Ah . . . thank you, Director. Well . . . I was . . . conducting a routine search of the shielded rec-ords when I came upon . . . the following mission report, transmitted to the Aldebaran branch office from a DTI-issue padd yesterday evening.”

  He pressed a contact and a female voice played over the speaker. “Mission report, Agent Shelan, Stardate 59084.352. The exchange group has completed its survey of the Coridan Engineering Institute without incident, and we are now en route to Tesnia. Korath, Nart, Ronarek, and the other scientists are all doing well. No threats have manifested, and I have their protection well in hand. Korath has predictably expressed an interest in the weapons potential of the Tesnians’ microsingularity research, but . . .”

  “Shelan?” T’Viss interrupted. “I thought Agent T’Lem was assigned to the scientific exchange group. Who is this Shelan?”

  Felbog halted the playback and spoke reluctantly. “According to the shielded records . . . Shelan is a Suliban female who has been a DTI agent since Stardate 56518—two years, six months, and twenty-three days ago.”

  The room erupted into murmurs. “This has got to be some kind of forgery,” Dulmur said, looking to Lucsly for reassurance.

  But his partner offered none, his expression stony. “You know how secure the shielded records are.”

  “I have consulted the records going back three years,” Felbog said. “They contain numerous, regular reports by Agent Shelan, along with a complete record of her application, background check, training, and certification as a DTI field agent.” He projected an image of this Shelan in the holodisplay. Dulmur did not recognize the Suliban woman, but her pleasant face conveyed warm confidence, her eyes great determination. “However, beyond the shielded rec-ords, we can find no evidence for the existence of a Shelan. Her listed parents and siblings exist, members of the Suliban community on Niburon IV, but that world’s records show no evidence that a Shelan was ever born to them.”

  After an awkward moment, he went on. “As for Agent T’Lem, the shielded records list her as a researcher only. Agent T’Lem’s training took place in the summer of 2379, the same term as this Shelan. The records show them as classmates, with Shelan outcompeting T’Lem in many measures of performance.”

  “History’s been changed,” Lucsly grated, putting it into words so it could no longer be denied. “Someone targeted a DTI agent and wiped her from history.”

  “Do we know she was the target?” Stijen Yol asked. “What about the rest of us? The rest of the galaxy? What else has been changed?”

  “My researchers have been investigating that all morning,” Virum Kalnota told the Trill agent. “We have found essentially no discrepancies in the historical record beyond those pertaining to the life of this Shelan and the DTI career of Agent T’Lem. Even the ripple-effect discrepancies you would expect if a single person were never born are absent. As far as we can determine, every significant act accomplished by Agent Shelan in the unaltered timeline was performed here as well, either by Agent T’Lem or some other individual, or else through unexplained chance circumstances.”

  “Probability,” Lucsly muttered, a mantra to himself. “The universe tends toward the most probable configuration.”

  “Even that is not an adequate explanation,” T’Viss said into the ensuing silence after reviewing Kalnota’s data at high speed. “The level of convergence here is astonishing. What we have here is a surgical excision of a single individual from history, done with such care and precision as to have minimal impact on any other factors.”

  “Minimal impact?” Dulmur cried. “Try telling that to her family, her friends!”

  T’Viss raised a brow at his emotional outburts. “That would be pointless, for they no longer recall that this woman even existed.”

  “That’s the point!” Dulmur cried. “My God . . . somebody’s exterminated
one of our own, and they didn’t even leave us our memories. We can’t even grieve properly. Who was she? How did we feel about her?” He shook his head. “They didn’t just kill her. They killed all that too.”

  Hesitantly, after a long moment, Felbog said, “We . . . we have her reports. In the shielded records. Those can tell us . . . help us to remember her.”

  “That just makes it worse,” Lucsly said. “Whoever did this has to belong to some uptime faction. Someone with the resources to pull off such a thing. That means they must know we have shielded records. They must have known we’d find out that Shelan had existed. And they didn’t care. They wanted us to know what they’d done.”

  “So it wasn’t about Shelan herself,” Dulmur realized. “It wasn’t the fact of her existence they were trying to hide. It must’ve been something she knew. Something she found out about the Temporal Cold War, or something she was about to do. They wanted to stop her before she made some important difference.”

  “Then why not just kill her?” Yol asked through clenched teeth. “Why not at least leave us our memories of her? Why erase her all the way back to her birth?”

  “Sheer vindictiveness,” Dulmur said. “Whoever did this . . . it wasn’t just a pragmatic move. It was personal.”

  “But against Shelan,” Kalnota asked, “or against us?”

  “We’re going to find that out,” Andos told them all. “From here on, this agency’s overriding priority is to discover what happened to Agent Shelan . . . and to discover whether we can reverse it.”

  Heavy silence filled the room as the impact of her words sank in. Actively changing the past, for whatever reason, was normally off-limits, a task for only the most extreme circumstances. If Andos was openly endorsing such a tactic . . .

  Not that Dulmur had any objection. He gazed up again at the image of Shelan, a relic of a vanished history. He wanted to know her. He wanted to remember knowing her, serving alongside her. “Felbog. Is there anything in her last transmissions that gives any sort of clue? Any evidence why she was targeted?”

  “Nothing,” the Choblik said. “Just the routine mission reports from the exchange tour. There was one more transmission in the shielded records, received on Shelan’s frequency at oh-two-oh-four this morning. But it’s just static.”

  “Play it,” Lucsly said.

  “We’ve analyzed it, sir, and there’s—”

  “Play it.”

  With a shrug of his cervine head, Felbog complied. There was a burst of sound, nothing resembling speech, just a high whine that quickly modulated out into pure white noise before breaking off. Two seconds of static that sounded almost like a dying scream.

  The room was silent for a time after that.

  “Are we . . .” The tentative words came from Rani Mohindra, the pretty researcher that Faunt had held hostage nearly eleven months ago. “Does this mean we aren’t the same people anymore? If we’re from an altered timeline . . .”

  “As I said,” T’Viss told her, “the variations are inconsequential. Our own individual wave equations are virtually unaltered. As with the Carnelian incident, we can effectively regard ourselves as the same individuals we were before, with only certain discrepancies of memory.”

  “Excuse me,” Felbog asked. “What about Lieutenant Elfiki? Shelan’s reports show that she was the one who met Elfiki on Pyrellia and brought her here. Yet the conventional records show that Agent T’Lem performed that task.”

  “Your point?” Andos asked.

  “If two separate timeline branches were created—one where Shelan was born and joined the Department, one where neither occurred—and those two branches have now converged into one . . . and if Lieutenant Elfiki comes from a point in the future of that single, converged timeline . . . then would she not have gone back to only one branch? If she was sent back into the Shelan timeline, should she not be absent from ours . . . the one we remember?”

  T’Viss contemplated the question for all of a second and a half. “As stated, the degree of orthogonality between the two histories is extremely low. The quantum resonance is great enough that they could be considered only slight variations on the same history, adjacent within the solution space of the universal wavefunction. Thus, the lieutenant could have undergone an analogous quantum superposition of her own wavefunction and thereby participated in both histories.

  “Alternatively, the possibility exists that no altered history was generated prior to this date. It could be that some advanced technological means was used to reconfigure the local wavefunction. An interference pattern could have been generated which canceled out certain harmonics within the wavefunction, leaving the impression that they had never been present.”

  “If I may interpret,” Andos said, “you’re proposing that instead of going back in time to prevent Shelan’s birth, someone may have merely altered the state of the present continuum to erase every trace of Shelan and her actions.”

  “Perhaps. The universe would proceed from that point as though she had never existed. But it is functionally no different from a scenario in which two parallel histories converge and the quantum information of one is deleted in favor of the other. In this case, the similarity between the two histories is so great that either scenario could be applicable.”

  “Either way,” Dulmur said, “what matters is that Shelan did exist. The timeline where she lived was there, it was real, for as long as she was in it. That’s true whether it merged with a parallel one or just got rewritten. Her life happened. It mattered. And we owe it to her to bring whoever did this to justice—even if we have to throw open the Vault and chase them down through history ourselves.”

  “Dulmur.” Andos’s voice was sharp, cutting him off. She was alert, attentive, as if listening to something only she could hear. “I want to see you and Lucsly in my office right away. The rest of you . . . proceed with your investigations. Dismissed.”

  Dulmur threw Lucsly a confused look, getting only a shrug in return. The two agents followed Andos to her office, but she would say nothing until they reached it. Dulmur strode inside the empty office behind Andos, and Lucsly closed the door behind them.

  And then Dulmur saw Jena Noi standing there, though he could’ve sworn the room was empty a second before. He hated that. Yet clearly she’d been the one to summon Andos, for the director was unsurprised to see her. “Agent Noi. I take it you’re aware of the temporal attack on the Department.”

  “Yes, I am,” Noi said, her melodic voice softer than usual. Her manner was subdued, solemn. “I’m terribly sorry for your loss.”

  “Sorry?” Lucsly spoke up before Dulmur could. “That’s all you can say? Time has been altered! You have the power to fix it! Why aren’t you doing it?”

  Dulmur saw her jaw tense, but she gave no other outward sign. “I understand how you feel, Lucsly. But I’m telling you to stay out of it. Shelan was a casualty of something she should never have been involved in. I can’t let the rest of you get dragged in as well.”

  “Why?” Dulmur challenged. “Because we’re just the local cops? Because we’re too small and helpless to make a difference? They took out one of our own, Noi! We have a right to hunt them down!”

  “Just because we don’t travel in time, that doesn’t make us useless,” Lucsly told her. “It anchors us. Gives us a perspective you lack.”

  “This isn’t about doubting your competence, Gariff. On the contrary. I’m here because I believe you can uncover the truth. And because you need to understand that some truths must remain hidden.”

  She turned to Dulmur. “Believe me, I sympathize with your anger. What was done to Shelan was . . . pure evil. But this is bigger than individuals and their pain. It’s even bigger than Shelan’s life.”

  “You can’t just shut us down!”

  “Yes, she can,” Lucsly said, though to damn rather than defend. “You know she can. She’s shut us down before. Bullied us when it suited her purpose.”

  “When it served the future,”
Noi said. “You know that.”

  “Yes, I know.” Lucsly strode forward to loom over her, closer than he was usually comfortable getting with another being. She gazed up at him, unintimidated, and suddenly Dulmur found the tableau very familiar. “I know it all too well.”

  DOWNTIME

  STARDATE 55049.0 to 55089.5

  XVI

  Virgo 20, mYear 408, Martian Darian Calendar A Wednesday

  U.S.S. Voyager NCC-74656

  21:42 UTC

  “Now let me get this straight,” Lucsly said as he and Dulmur sat across from Captain Kathryn Janeway in her ready room. “An older version of yourself came back from twenty-six years in the future, instructing you to use anachronistic technology to violate the Temporal Prime Directive . . . and you went along with it. Even though you knew it was a crime against law and nature, you played havoc with the natural flow of history in order to get your crew home sixteen years ahead of schedule.”

  “No,” Janeway said, her voice and manner stony. “That was what Admiral Janeway wanted. If it had been for that alone, I would have refused. But we had an opportunity to use the intelligence and technology she brought us to strike a crippling blow against the Borg and save billions.”

  “Or condemn them,” Lucsly said. “You don’t know what consequences may have been set in motion by your actions. Drag the timeline off its natural, most probable path and the ramifications are incalculable.”

  “I can’t base my decisions on abstract possible futures, Agent Lucsly,” the captain fired back. She was a dainty, delicate-featured woman, but her personality was that of a bulldog. “My responsibility is to defend against threats to my crew, the Federation, and sentient life in the here and now. The Borg are the greatest menace this galaxy has ever known, and I for one wouldn’t want to live in a future where they remained strong. We had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to deal the Collective a crippling blow, one that might even neutralize them as a threat indefinitely. I took that opportunity, and I will stand by that decision no matter the consequences.”