Lucsly was slow to respond. “You’re nowhere near ready to discuss that question. You need to learn the routine before you’re qualified to deal with the unusual. The routine is what we’re here to protect. Because when it comes to time, disruptions to the routine are just too dangerous. If you value adventure, then go join Starfleet and get yourself killed on some exotic planet. Adventure is the result of carelessness and poor planning. We have no use for that here.”
Sanioth dropped out the next day.
Garcia didn’t see his problem. As far as she was concerned, it was adventure enough just trying to follow the temporal physics lectures of Professor T’Viss. The elderly, white-haired Vulcan, one of the Federation’s leading temporal physicists, had been with the Department since its founding a hundred and eleven years before. She grasped the nature of time in a way few others could, and she was disinclined to dumb her lectures down for her students. It was a struggle to keep up.
Even figuring out how to talk about travel through time was confounding, since tenses themselves were an issue. T’Viss grew stern and impatient whenever one of her students spoke of going back in time and creating a “new” timeline. “There is no ‘new,’” T’Viss intoned. “No before, no after. In order to perceive the whole shape of time, one must step outside of time.” She projected a hologram before the students: a simplified chart of the known timelines, ramifying out from left to right like a sideways tree. “From this perspective, the observer experiences no passage of time. Past and future are merely points on a curve. Change is merely the shape of that curve. All processes, all interactions, are to be treated as instantaneous.”
Garcia struggled to grasp this. “So you’re saying everything’s predestined anyway? It’s all happened already?”
“‘Predestined’? ‘Happened already’? You must divorce your thinking from these illusory concepts of relative time! In physics, there is no preferred direction of time or causality. There is only the progression of cause and effect within the wave equation. As long as an interaction is logically consistent, the directionality of time is irrelevant.”
“Okay, maybe I’m not saying it right. But what I mean is, if all timelines exist side by side, if you can’t go back and unmake a history once it’s happened, why do we need to worry about time travel? Wouldn’t that just mean that any new timeline—”
“Retrocausally generated history,” T’Viss corrected.
“—would coexist with the ol—the original—the seed timeline?” Just figuring out how to ask the question was enough to give her a headache.
T’Viss’s answers were highly technical, but Garcia gradually managed to get the gist of them, largely with the help of a fellow recruit named Felbog Bu-Tsop-Vee. Felbog was a member of a species unknown in Garcia’s time, the Choblik—small herbivores with deerlike heads and ostrich-shaped bodies, modified with cybernetic enhancements that gave them full sentience, arms and grasping appendages, and other advantages their native forms lacked. They struck Garcia as what the Borg might have been as cute woodland creatures, but she quickly learned that Choblik, generally a very levelheaded people, took umbrage at any comparison to the Borg.
Felbog was training to be a DTI researcher rather than a field agent, but he threw himself into it with great enthusiasm and dedication, and was glad to help Garcia translate T’Viss’s lectures and equations into comprehensible language. “Of course it’s a logical absurdity for a timeline to be erased,” Felbog told her as they strolled through Greenwich Park on a lightly overcast afternoon. “Anything that’s happened has happened. You can’t change the shape of time as a whole.”
“Because change is just part of the shape itself,” Garcia interpreted.
“Exactly. So the only way one timeline could replace another is if they coexisted side by side from the moment of their divergence . . . but then merged together again once they both reached a later point in the timeline.”
“Could that happen?” Garcia asked.
Felbog’s cervine ears flicked in a shrug. “Quantum theory doesn’t rule it out. Timelines diverge when they shift sufficiently out of phase to become non-interacting, but it’s not impossible for them to interfere again at a later point in time. And if they did become entangled as a single system, then quantum information theory would demand that only one of the two conflicting sets of information survived.”
“Since a given quantum history has to be self-consistent.”
“Yes. It would be as if one timeline suddenly transformed into another. The previous events would still have occurred, but they would no longer be remembered. The information would have been destroyed.”
By now, they’d reached the grounds of the Royal Observatory. As usual, there were a number of tourists congregated around the Shepherd Gate Clock, the large analog timepiece with its 24-hour face inscribed in Roman numerals, embedded in the brick column to one side of the wrought-iron gate outside the observatory. The “galvano-magnetic clock,” as its inscription called it, had been the first timepiece to display and transmit Greenwich Mean Time to the world. It had long since been supplanted by more modern means, but it remained as a symbol of humanity’s establishment of a single universal time standard.
Despite the tourists, Felbog continued his explanation. It was mostly theoretical, and few listeners could follow it anyway. “The catch is, for two timelines that have drifted apart to come back into phase would violate entropy. There’d need to be some kind of force acting to merge them back together.”
“But there were documented cases where that kind of . . . merger did happen, weren’t there?”
“The observers believed they did,” Felbog agreed. Even this early in their studies, both students had heard the tales of Starfleet captains like Kirk, Picard, and Janeway, all infamous in the Department for their frequent temporal violations—including cases where, while in the protected field of a temporal displacement metric, they had witnessed the timeline seeming to change around them, as Kirk had in his first encounter with the legendary Guardian of Forever. “But because of the entropy question, many theorists believed they might simply have been jumping between two alternate histories, rather than seeing one overwritten by another. It’s been a matter of controversy for over a century.”
“Hm. Did they try asking the Guardian?” she asked, keeping her voice low.
“It never gave clear answers to much of anything,” Felbog said. “Either it was operating on a cognitive level we’re unable to comprehend or—”
“I know,” Garcia said with a chuckle. T’Viss had gone on a lengthy rant about the Guardian when the subject had come up in class. “‘Let me be your gateway’ indeed. What sort of ‘Guardian’ eagerly invites strangers to ransack the very thing it’s guarding? Its behavior was not remotely rational or consistent. I daresay the device’s artificial intelligence has been in an advanced state of deterioration for a considerable period of time. We’re better off without it now.” Some years back, the spacetime turbulence surrounding the Guardian planet had grown so intense that it was no longer safe to approach orbit or transport down. Perhaps the device had finally broken down completely, or perhaps it had come to its senses and was refusing to let anyone use it to tamper with reality anymore. Either way, nobody would be going anywhere near the Guardian of Forever for the foreseeable future.
But the Guardian hadn’t been needed to resolve the mystery of shifting timelines. In subequent classes, Garcia struggled to understand the theory of a negative-entropy “anti-time” phenomenon that a Dr. Naadri of Paraagan had been developing for the past decade and a half. It seemed that T’Viss had a grudging tone in her voice as she spelled out Naadri’s equations demonstrating how that force could act to facilitate the merger of two timelines back into one, effectively resolving the long-standing theoretical debate.
Garcia wondered why they were getting their lectures from an old-guard physicist like T’Viss, who seemed to be well behind the state of the art, rather than the cutting-edge theorist
s like Naadri or Vard, whose breakthroughs T’Viss explained grudgingly at best. But it seemed to be part of the general conservatism the agency stressed. Whatever sexy new temporal breakthroughs were being made, an agent still needed a solid grounding in the basics, the foundations on which the rest was built. Her job, Garcia was reminded daily, would not be to probe the frontiers, but to defend the established and the ordinary.
Although, from some of the tales she’d heard about the bizarre cases solved by Lucsly, Dulmur, and their fellow agents over the years, Garcia suspected that principle was more often an aspiration than a reality.
Julian Days 2590825 to 2590833
By this point, of the six other recruits Garcia had started with, three had dropped out, and Garcia was the only human remaining. She and Felbog shared their classes with a young Vulcan, Teyak, and a gold-skinned Selenean female named Borah. Humans like Lucsly and Dulmur were a distinct minority among the DTI staffers she met; the agency was dominated by species known for emotional stability or self-discipline: Vulcans, Rhaandarites, Zakdorn, Benzites. Felbog himself, though enthusiastic about learning, was not prone to passion or anxiety; Garcia doubted the work would stress him even if it weren’t so easy for his cybernetically enhanced mind. She valued his calming influence and his knack for interpreting complex ideas. She doubted she would be able to make it as a DTI agent without his aid. Though she reminded herself that she still might not make it at all.
There was much more to the training than temporal physics, of course. Aspiring agents needed to learn techniques for investigation, enforcement, and if necessary, physical confrontation. Garcia took readily to the physical side of things, though she wished she could do without the firearms training. She didn’t care for weapons, even nonlethal ones like phasers. “That’s good,” she was told by her weapons instructor, a joined Trill agent named Stijen Yol. “The people most reluctant to use weapons are the ones who can best be trusted with them.” He held up his DTI-issue phaser. “This is a deterrent and a last resort. A DTI agent relies on her mind, her judgment, and her discipline. Wield those weapons successfully, and Time willing, you will never need to fire this one.”
The courses on investigative techniques proved easy for Garcia to master as well, for the skills required were much like those of the archaeologist. Both involved careful, patient sifting through information, the ability to discern a tiny shard of useful information from the matrix that surrounded it, delicately extract it, and piece it together with other shards to reconstruct its meaning. Of course, not all temporal investigation was so difficult. The majority of temporal events in the Federation befell Starfleet vessels, for they were the ones most prone to investigate mysterious phenomena and most capable of surviving the stresses, and they were obligated to give thorough reports. Natural anomalies were not too difficult to detect, not with the array of gravimetric and chronitonic sensors the Department had at its disposal, and deciphering their mysteries was more a matter for physicists like T’Viss. And temporal researchers like Naadri and Vard usually had to do their work in the open, for the sake of peer review and access to resources, so the Department’s job there was more along the lines of supervision than investigation.
Still, Garcia’s own experience aboard the Verity showed that people involved in temporal incidents weren’t always forthright about their actions. And there were researchers such as the now-retired Paul Manheim who conducted their temporal experiments in secret, either for fear of ridicule or because their ends were less than ethical. Not to mention the schemes that sufficiently reckless hostile powers might devise against the Federation from time to time. The “I” in “DTI” was there for a very good reason.
But the more the students learned about the various forces arrayed against the Department, the more disturbing it became. The basics were laid out for them by a young DTI agent named Shelan, a female of the Suliban species. She was a hairless humanoid with spongy gray-green skin, but her features were pleasant and her eyes lively and smiling. She met with the remaining recruits in her office at headquarters and spoke to them informally, insisting that she’d been in their shoes only two years before and considered them kindred spirits. “By now you’ve heard of the Temporal Cold War,” she told them, “if you didn’t know about it already.” Garcia was familiar with the concept, but she’d always considered it a galactic legend until she joined the Department. “It’s a conflict being fought across the ages by factions in many different centuries, even different timelines. And one of its fronts was in the middle of the twenty-second century. A mysterious faction from six centuries uptime, whose identity still remains unknown, recruited a group of Suliban as its agents.”
“Why not intervene directly?” asked Teyak.
“Because of the Temporal Accords,” she said. “We have an early version of the Accords today, a broad agreement among the major governments to avoid nonscientific applications of temporal research, but in the future, when time travel becomes a practical, reliable technology rather than the result of lucky accidents or natural phenomena, the Accords become much stronger, and there are uptime agencies that enforce them: the Temporal Integrity Commission of twenty-ninth-century Starfleet, the civilian Federation Temporal Agency of two centuries beyond that, the Tholian Chronological Defense Corps which has existed for centuries already, and others.
“That’s why it’s a cold war. The factions that want to meddle with the past need to do so clandestinely, indirectly, to avoid exposing themselves to sanctions or counter-attacks.” Shelan spoke in the present tense, the simplest one to use when speaking about time travel. As T’Viss taught, it was clearer to step outside of time and consider it all as a simultaneous whole. “The twenty-eighth-century faction chose the Suliban because we were an obscure people, a collection of small nomadic bands scattered across space, with no homeworld of our own. They gave genetic enhancements and anachronistic technology to one such band, which called itself the Cabal. Starting in 2144 and for a decade or so thereafter, the Cabal struck at various targets, mostly the Tandaran worlds, but also the Klingons, the Paraagans, the Tholians, and Jonathan Archer’s Starship Enterprise. To this day, we have no idea what ultimate purpose their attacks were meant to serve.” Shelan gave a heavy sigh. “Even though most of my people were uninvolved, they were blamed for the Cabal’s attacks. The Tandarans imprisoned and persecuted us for decades, even after the Cabal’s backers abandoned them. We learned to retreat more and more from galactic affairs, to keep to ourselves.”
Shelan met the recruits’ eyes one by one. “And after two hundred years, I think enough is enough. I didn’t believe the Federation would still blame us for the actions of one group of our ancestors. So, over my family’s protests, I came to Earth to become part of the Federation, to show my people and the rest of the galaxy that the Suliban don’t have to be cut off anymore. That we can make a difference.”
Garcia studied her. “And you ended up joining the DTI. The agency responsible for fighting things like the Cabal.”
Shelan smiled back. “Exactly. I’ll tell you something I don’t like to advertise. I had an ancestor in the Cabal. Some vestiges of their Augment genes remain in me. I don’t have their special powers—I can’t alter my appearance or flatten my body and squeeze through a crack—but it’s given me improved senses, good health, considerable flexibility and agility.” She smirked. “Gifts from the Cabal’s sponsors, which I hope I will someday get to use to bring them down.”
Teyak frowned. “But . . . they won’t exist until nearly four centuries in the future.”
Shelan’s bright, friendly eyes suddenly grew intense. “I’ll outlast them if I have to,” she said, and as Garcia looked into those eyes, she somehow had no doubt that the youthful agent could pull it off.
Still, knowing that so many other factions centuries out of the Department’s reach were pursuing agendas that could erase reality as they knew it was disheartening to the trainees. True, there were other, more advanced groups upholding the Temp
oral Accords, such as the TIC, the Temporal Agents, and the mysterious, ancient organization known as the Aegis which had been safeguarding history for thousands of years. “But it’s a vast galaxy,” Shelan explained, “and even the Accordist factions can’t police against every temporal intervention.” Her vivid gaze took in the recruits. “That’s why we’re needed.”
Julian Days 2590834 to 2590838
The next day, Federation President Nanietta Bacco held a press conference announcing that the Romulan Star Empire (the half of it that remained after the secession of the Imperial Romulan State) had joined with the Breen, Tholian, Gorn, Tzenkethi, and Kinshaya civilizations in a new alliance called the Typhon Pact, creating in one fell swoop an astropolitical entity rivaling the size and power of the Federation and more or less surrounding it on three sides. The whole Federation was soon abuzz with speculation and concern; while the Pact’s first action had been to stop Kinshaya aggression against the Klingons and its second had been to formally apologize for said aggression, the fact was that many of its members had a history of enmity toward the Federation. Among the DTI trainees, the speculations took on an added dimension. Had the Department known this was going to happen? If so, was it something they should have tried to prevent? Their instructors were quick to quash such speculations, reminding them that the Department’s highest priority was to minimize any meddling in the natural flow of probability.
Indeed, as T’Viss’s ongoing lectures spelled out, knowing one possible future wasn’t the same as knowing the future. The Everett equations that had been the basis of quantum physics for centuries made it clear that timelines diverged from each other spontaneously all the time, producing myriad parallel histories that could coexist indefinitely. It was only those histories created by time travel that could recombine with the branches they’d sprung from—and not always then. When a traveler went back in time and generated an alternative history, it remained quantum-entangled with the “original” history, retaining some of its state information so that the two timelines never went completely out of phase. “If the exchange of matter or information is only one-way,” Felbog explained to Garcia, Teyak, and Borah that Saturday as they studied together in the gorgeous, mural-roofed Painted Hall on the university grounds, “then the entanglement is as well. The ‘new’ timeline”—it was hard even for him to avoid the misleading terminology, though Garcia could hear the quotes around it—“has a phase resonance with the ‘old’ one, so that some of its events might be influenced to occur in similar ways—the same people being born, meeting each other, and so forth. But other than that, it endures as a separate history.”
Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations - 01 - Watching the Clock Page 6