Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations - 01 - Watching the Clock

by Christopher L. Bennett

  “But if the exchange is two-way,” Teyak replied, “then they are mutually in phase resonance and are drawn toward each other.”

  “Exactly,” Felbog said. “And when the altered timeline catches up with the moment entangled with it in the original timeline—the moment when the time travel occurs—then the timelines come into synch and it’s like opening a floodgate. The resonance draws them together, and the particles of one timeline quantum-tunnel to their positions in the other. The two timelines become one, and the original history is forgotten.”

  “Which is why Kirk and Picard saw the timeline change around them at the moment the time travel occurred,” Borah concluded.

  Garcia envied the others’ ease with the physics. All of their species had an edge over her—Vulcans had their keenly trained intellects, Choblik their cybernetic enhancements, Seleneans their highly analytical five-lobed brains. All she had to keep her going was the need to understand time, the need to make sense of what her life had become. However much of a struggle it was, the physics was comfortingly abstract compared to the philosophical side

  of things.

  “So if I did get thrown back in time and changed things,” she asked, “my old history would be okay as long as I just stayed there, didn’t try to go back?”

  “If you could be certain the temporal passage was strictly one-way,” Teyak replied sternly. “A black hole, for example. If any information flows the other way, that creates the mutual entanglement and the risk of terminating your home timeline, even if you do not go back.” Garcia didn’t appreciate his condescending tone. Teyak took it as a given that Vulcans made better DTI agents than humans, and he treated Garcia more as a rival than a partner.

  Felbog swished his tail nervously at the tension, working the cybernetic digits attached to its end. “Besides,” he added in a more friendly tone, “you can’t be sure someone else won’t make a round trip to try to retrieve you. There was a starship called Defiant where that happened, back on Stardate 48481—the crew saw the timeline change around them, so they went back after their displaced crewmates to try to retrieve them, and they made several round trips while searching.”

  Garcia’s eyes widened. “So it was their search after the change that caused the change in the first place?”

  Felbog nodded. “Or the last place, I suppose,” he replied, taking too much pleasure in his own joke. “I guess that’s why fixing temporal disruptions should be left to trained professionals.”

  Borah’s cabochon eyes were always wide, but the way she shook her gold-tendriled head made it clear she was struggling with the causality of it. “But they couldn’t have known. The change already happened before they made the decision to go back, so from their perspective, they couldn’t have made any other choice. That means the change caused itself. A predestination paradox.”

  “Not a paradox, Borah. It’s entirely self-consistent physically. It’s only our expectations about causality that it contradicts.”

  Borah clutched her head in her hands. Garcia could sympathize. She took a moment to gaze up at the ceiling of the Painted Hall, losing herself in the lush golds, reds, and sky blues of Sir James Thornhill’s elaborate mural. Finally her own headache subsided enough for her to ask, “So why is it always the altered timeline that wins out? What gives it the edge?”

  “Entropy again,” Felbog said. “When you come back from a future point in history, you inject a higher level of entropy into that past moment. So the timeline you create has slightly higher entropy than the original. It’s water flowing downhill—a system always tends toward the highest-entropy state.”

  “Even when you’ve got negative entropy acting to merge the timelines?”

  “That acts from outside the multiverse. Within the spacetime shared by the two histories, higher entropy still wins.”

  Garcia shook her head. “And all this was just figured out in the past few years?”

  “Well, the ideas have been around for a long time, but it’s been unknown which model was correct. The recent work of Manheim, Naadri, and others has really cleared up a lot of uncertainty.”

  She whistled. “So for a century, the DTI’s been operating on the assumption that time travel could erase this timeline, just in case, but they didn’t really know. And now it turns out they were right all along.”

  “That’s right,” Felbog replied with his usual good cheer.

  “And you don’t find that a little scary?”

  Felbog curved his neck into a Choblik shrug. “I’m an herbivore. Lots of things in life are scary. But we get the chance to do something about this one. Knowing the risk is real just reassures me that I’m in the right place.”

  Garcia smiled and clasped his bionic hand. “We both are, pal.”

  Julian Days 2590841 to 2590849

  The existential realities of the job understandably took their toll on most of the trainees. Felbog treated it all as an entertaining intellectual exercise, of course. But Garcia had nightmares in which her reality changed around her and no one would believe it when she told them—or in which she herself was erased from reality, reduced to a negative probability ghost staring in at time from the outside, seeing it all as a frozen whole in which she had never existed and could not participate. Teyak admitted nothing, certainly not to Garcia, but he began to look increasingly haggard and haunted. Borah was more open about her anxieties, and Garcia wondered if she spoke for her Vulcan classmate as well. “I’ve been conditioned—no, bred—to think analytically,” the gilt-complexioned Selenean said, her gemstone eyes showing nothing of the distress in her voice. “To assess the facts and calculate the single best option in any situation. But this is a fiction! No matter the situation, there are multiple outcomes. How can I judge one choice superior to another when I cannot anticipate a single specific outcome?”

  “There is only one solution per measurement history,” Teyak droned, seeming to take comfort in the litany. “Other histories are unobservable and thus not relevant.”

  “But we know that’s not true!” Borah countered. “Nonlinear quantum processes allow information exchange between timelines. Other histories are knowable, even reachable, and thus are functionally real. With such a multiplicity of histories, how can any decision be meaningful?”

  Borah grew increasingly paralyzed by her inability to make clear decisions, and the growing anxiety of the formerly unflappable Selenean put strain on the whole group. But the training process was designed to deal with the psychological stresses. They were guided through the process by Ranjea, a Deltan special agent that Garcia instantly fell in lust with. She tried to remind herself that Deltans had that effect on most humanoids thanks to their potent pheromones, but it was no use convincing her own hormones of that. Ranjea was gorgeous, tall and bronze-skinned with deep, soulful eyes and an elegantly shaped hairless cranium. It was hard to imagine an agent more different from the craggy-faced, avuncular Dulmur or the sour, aloof Lucsly. Ranjea projected the kind of secret-agent glamour that those two aggressively deconstructed.

  “I know how hard it is to deal with this knowledge,” Ranjea told the trainees in a warm, lilting baritone. “My own former partner ultimately had to resign because of it, despite my best efforts to help him through it. But there are ways of learning to cope. Techniques for meditation, new perspectives on the nature of choice and outcomes. I will guide you through these.” Garcia hung on Ranjea’s every word, though she had to remind herself to focus on what he was saying rather than just the mellow suppleness of his voice.

  At first, she’d been surprised to see a Deltan DTI agent, given what she’d been told about the pitfalls of excess emotionalism in this job. But listening to Ranjea drove home that the Deltan people weren’t just more emotional than most, but more emotionally mature and stable. They had their own path to mastery, one based on embracing and understanding their passions rather than repressing them as the Vulcans did. Ranjea’s easy serenity was one of his most alluring features. He was just comfort
able to be around—though by no means relaxing.

  One of the first lessons he offered was to reject the belief that a person’s decisions would directly cause the creation of new universes. “This is claiming a culpability that does not exist,” Ranjea explained one day in the commissary at headquarters, a modern addition to the Victorian structure, with large picture windows affording a view of the Thames and Canary Wharf. “It’s actually quantum variations that create possible histories. Billions of alternate states arise every second on the level of subatomic particles, engaging in a Darwinian competition until a stable few win out, spread into the larger universe, and live on as consistent timelines. But the competition usually resolves in nanoseconds, too quickly to have any effect on our thoughts and decisions. So in all those parallel possibilities, you’d still make the same choice. Most of the alternate versions of any given moment are effectively identical and quickly merge back into the mass.”

  “But not always,” Borah said, her manner intense. “Say you’re on a cusp of a decision that could go either way, the flip of a coin. If you’re still in multiple quantum states at a key moment, you might decide differently in one.”

  “Yes,” Ranjea said. “But if the decision has a minor enough impact on the universe, that branch will be outcompeted, overwhelmed by the other streams that share a single redundant outcome. It will simply be a brief, quasi-stable fluctuation in the flow of time, quickly forgotten.

  “So you needn’t worry about every tiny decision, Borah. Most of those potential realities you’re concerned about creating will never matter in this or any other timeline.”

  Garcia jumped on that. “But parallel timelines can last for centuries, not just vanish back into the foam.”

  Felbog chuckled. “Don’t let T’Viss hear you call them that. Mathematically speaking, they’re actually perpendicular.”

  Ranjea nodded. “True. Sometimes, an alternate probability branch becomes stable enough to become a persistent reality of its own. But only if the variations are major enough.” He gestured at the pastry Garcia was nibbling on. “You don’t create a whole new reality just by, say, choosing an apple danish instead of strawberry. That variation just gets lost in the flow. It’s mostly the critical nexus points, the events where a specific change at a key moment can cause major, long-term consequences, that generate lasting alternate timelines. So it’s not something you need to worry about when you’re making ordinary, everyday decisions.”

  “How can you know what decisions are ordinary?” Borah challenged. “Say you crowd someone out of a lift instead of waiting for the next one. As a result, they fail to meet their future spouse, their children are never conceived, and an individual responsible for saving a planet is never born! There’s no way to know which decision might be a critical nexus!”

  Ranjea placed his hand atop hers, filling Garcia with envy and making her wonder if she should fake a panic attack of her own. “And that, Borah, is precisely why you are absolved of culpability for the decision. All that matters is what you choose based on what you do know.”

  “The man is right,” came a new voice. Garcia looked up to see Agent Dulmur, who’d just strolled over from the replicators with a mug of coffee in his hand. He smiled at Garcia, and she returned it. Dulmur had sponsored her admission and took something of a paternal interest in her training, which she appreciated, having lacked a father figure for most of her life.

  Dulmur turned a chair backward and sat on it, looking around at the trainees. “This is the bottom line. There’s all sorts of psychological stuff Ranjea can teach you to help you cope with the heebie-jeebies and the nightmares. And that’s valuable, if it works for you. I don’t want to say a word against it,” he said, trading a nod with Ranjea. “But lemme tell you the most important lesson I’ve learned in this job: Don’t worry about the big cosmic stuff. Just don’t worry about it. Focus on the job in front of you. Focus on what you can do in the here and now, and get it done. The bigger ramifications, the cosmic meaning of it all, that’s for philosophers and physicists. We’re cops. Our job isn’t to think about it, it’s to do something about it.

  “Now, if meditation and Deltan philosophy helps you get past all this, that’s great, I’m all for it. But once you get out there in the field, you don’t need to worry about any of this stuff. We teach it because you need to know the nuts and bolts of the time machines and cosmic warps and whatnot that you run into out there, and so you’ll know the right way to deal with a tricky situation, instead of just stumbling through it the way those Starfleet losers keep doing.” Garcia chuckled.

  “But it’s just tools for the job. It’s not something that should keep you up at nights wondering about the meaning of it all. I’ll tell you what the meaning of it all is, boys and girls.” Dulmur reached into his pocket and took out a holo of a chubby-faced, white-haired woman whose pale eyes and bulbous nose resembled his own. “This is my mother. This woman is a saint. End of story. And the concept of a reality without her in it is simply unacceptable to me. So I’ll do whatever it takes to keep her around.” He looked at each of the trainees in turn. “If the weirdness ever starts to get too much for you, to get in the way of doing your job, you just keep a picture like this in your pocket. A picture of someone whose existence in this universe gives it meaning to you. And you take it out and look at it and remember why it is you do this job.” He studied the holo, smiling gently. “I tell ya, it really puts the big cosmic stuff in perspective.”

  At that point, Ranjea’s comlink went off and he listened for a moment. “I’m sorry, I’m needed elsewhere. Thank you all, it’s been a good session. And thank you, Marion.” Dulmur winced.

  Garcia lost herself in watching Ranjea walk away, and then was somewhere else for a few moments before a tap on the shoulder brought her back to reality. She and Dulmur were now alone at the table, and the special agent was grinning at her. “I know what you’re thinking, kid. You know it’d ruin you for life, right?”

  She winced. “I know, I know.” Everyone knew the stories: Deltan sex was so intense that it was instantly, incurably addictive for a human. And that was the least exaggerated version. “Still, you have to wonder what it’s like. It might be worth it.”

  Dulmur rolled his eyes. “Oh, boy. Well, I wouldn’t know. Luckily he’s not my type.”

  Garcia couldn’t resist ribbing him back. “Well, I’ve heard some rumors about you and Lucsly. You two are kind of inseparable.”

  Dulmur glared, but took it in good humor. “Really, that’s the best rumor you’ve heard about Lucsly so far? The grapevine is slipping.”

  “Oh, I’ve heard a bunch,” Garcia said. “Let’s see, that he’s secretly a Vulcan . . .”

  “Too obvious.”

  “Or that he’s actually Abraham Lincoln, rescued from the Ford’s Theatre and given a new identity.”

  “Lucsly hates theater.”

  “Or that he’s a highly advanced hologram from the future, so perfect he even fools medical exams.”

  “No way. Holograms are far more three-dimensional.”

  Garcia laughed. “Ohh, you’re awful! Whatever happened to partners sticking together?”

  “Hey, Lucsly can take care of himself. He doesn’t care how much ribbing he gets, as long as he gets the job done.” Dulmur grew serious. “It’s a great quality for a DTI agent, that kind of thick skin. A lot of people don’t appreciate the kind of scrutiny we have to put them under. It’s important to be okay with not being liked.” He caught himself. “Not that we don’t like Lucsly around here. Any ribbing, it’s all in good fun. Everyone respects the hell out of him. This agency would fall apart without him.”

  “But he’s not exactly easy to get close to, is he? What’s your secret?”

  Dulmur shrugged. “I figure it out, you’ll be the first to know, kiddo.”

  Dulmur stood and glanced at his mother’s holo one more time before pocketing it. “So that’s your reason for doing this thankless job,” Garcia said, nodding at
the holo. “So why does Lucsly do it?”

  Dulmur mulled it over for a minute, then looked at her and said, in all seriousness, “Because he’s Lucsly.”

  DOWNTIME

  STARDATE 42692.8 to 42704.5

  IV

  Day 18 of et’Khior, Year of ShiKahr 9051 A Saturday

  Lucsly Residence

  San Francisco

  14:54 UTC

  As usual, Gariff Lucsly awoke several minutes before his alarm went off, remaining in bed to ease himself into wakefulness, then rising as the alarm sounded at precisely 7 AM local time. He completed his morning ablutions at 7:15, was dressed by 7:18, and ordered his usual Saturday breakfast (two whole grain waffles topped with mixed fruit and plain yogurt, three sausage links, and 360 milliliters of orange juice) from the replicator. At 7:20, he commenced eating while listening to the morning news bulletin from FNS and checking his DTI padd for status updates. The empty dishes went back in the replicator at 7:35.

  He was on call today, scheduled to report to the branch office at 9 AM. He preferred to walk, weather permitting; a field agent needed to stay in shape. The weather forecast today was for clear, hot weather, but the expected temperature at 9 AM was only 22 Celsius. Adjusting for likely pedestrian density at that time and in that weather, Lucsly would need to depart at 8:40 to arrive in a timely manner.