DULMER: It’s called a “predestination paradox.” Maybe that hypothetical subwarp, time-dilated starship was supposed to displace itself in time.
I get it. If the DTI were to send that ship back to the time it came from, somebody’s grandfather might die at the wrong time, and history comes unstitched. My God. Thinking about these things can give you a real headache.
DULMER: Or worse.
LUCSLY: The DTI concerned itself with the more exotic types of time-travel accidents. A merchant ship getting retrodisplaced by an unexpected gravimetric slingshot effect, say.
DULMER: Or a vessel getting flung back in time by the space-time lensing that can happen near the event horizon of a black hole. Those sorts of things aren’t as unusual as you might think. Enough Starfleet officers have been temporally displaced over the years to force the DTI to create an entire office just to handle those incidents.*
LUCSLY: The rest of the temporal incidents that the DTI would act on generally involved some deliberate action on the time traveler’s part. But only a handful of those actions were motivated by actual malice. For instance, there was the musicologist who tried to prevent the late-twentieth-century assassination of John Lennon; he sincerely believed that he was increasing the universe’s net content of peace and love.
DULMER: And then there was the disgraced Klingon agent* who returned to the twenty-third century with a plan to assassinate James Kirk. He was a totally different story.
As were the Undine. When they came, everything changed.
LUCSLY: I remember all of those incidents clearly enough. Except for that last part… I’m sorry, Wolf, but the idea that the DTI was somehow maintaining the thin line between order and chaos during the Long War… well, it’s just—it’s more than a little paranoid.
I notice that both Lucsly and Quelle—the latter still hanging back near one of the walls—have tensed as though expecting Dulmer to react explosively.
Instead, the elder time cop merely sits quietly, nodding as he absorbs his old friend’s words, still diamond-hard despite their almost apologetic delivery. Then Dulmer chuckles gently, as if enjoying a private joke at everyone else’s expense.
DULMER: Don’t worry about offending me, Adam. I wouldn’t expect you to remember the bigger temporal picture in quite the same way I do. Even though you saw it all, right alongside me. Before everything that happened that day—or almost everything that happened that day—got… canceled out.
Lucsly says nothing as he releases a sad sigh. Quelle approaches and addresses me in a tone that seems calculated not to provoke his patient.
QUELLE: I’m afraid what you’re hearing is one of the classic markers of temporal psychosis.
I regard Quelle for a moment. For the first time since his arrival in the room, his face is becoming familiar to me. I’m almost certain I’ve seen it somewhere before, though I’ll be damned if I can say where.
Temporal psychosis. Can you define that for me?
QUELLE: Well, I’m certainly no expert on the subject, but temporal psychosis is a disorder of the central nervous system that sometimes results from multiple incidents of time displacement. One of the disorder’s most common manifestations is the emergence of persistent memories of events that can be verified as never having occurred.
DULMER: There’s a couple of major problems with that diagnosis, Quelle. For one, it doesn’t square with my complete lack of sensory aphasia symptoms, which nearly always accompany temporal psychosis. And for another, it doesn’t take into account the fact that there’s no way to tell the difference between events that never occurred and events that did occur, but were subsequently canceled out of the timeline because of the corrective action of a time traveler. The best temp-ops always cover their tracks.
QUELLE: Only not quite completely enough to erase the memories of everyone involved.
DULMER: Exactly.
QUELLE: As convenient as that may be for you, Mister Dulmer, I suppose I have to grant you that. After all, you’re absolutely right about the fact that I can’t prove that some temporal incursion didn’t erase all the events you claim to remember. On the other hand, I can’t prove that you’re not at this moment sitting beside an invisible two-meter-tall white rabbit cloaked in a tricorder-proof force field.
DULMER: I know. I know. The fact that everything neatly cancels out is all part of the delusion. Or so Doctor Wykoff keeps telling me.
I take a few moments to study Dulmer carefully. He seems anything but crazy. In fact, he seems preternaturally calm, almost priestly. I wonder if he’s had to go out of his way to cultivate that quality as part of whatever therapy regime he’s undergoing here—wherever “here” is. What’s more, his words resonate with me, evoking ghost images of my future—including my eventual death as an old, old man—that I’ve somehow retained in bits and pieces, like the fragments of half-remembered dreams.
Or are these images really something more substantial than that?
Mister Dulmer, are you talking about events that were “canceled out” because of actions that you took—you, personally—as a time traveler?
DULMER: Yes. Actions that I—that a lot of us—had to take, in order to correct the horrendous damage the Undine had done to humanity’s history.
So you weren’t working alone when you took these… actions.
DULMER: Sometimes I was on my own. At other times I had Lucsly or other agents working closely with me, depending on the specific circumstances, personnel deployment situations, and the degree of danger the timeline might be facing from a particular Undine incursion.
When some sort of temporal crisis occurs, how do you assess the degree of danger to the timeline?
LUCSLY: It’s not an easy thing to measure, even for a trained professional.
DULMER: There’s an element of instinct involved, in addition to all the empirical measures.
Is “fixing” broken timelines a big part of a typical DTI agent’s training?
LUCSLY: Let’s just say that DTI field agents never know when they might have to perform “surgery” on the time stream—without having any assurance in advance how it’s all going to turn out.
DULMER: Even if the circumstances of the “surgery” might prevent the agent from remembering anything about whatever temporal crisis he had to fix.
It all sounds really risky. How do you know when it’s appropriate to do something like that?
LUCSLY: It’s all about weighing causes and consequences, Mister Sisko. Making a prospective appraisal of not just the repercussions that will emanate from actions you may be about to take, but also whatever consequences might flow from your inaction. That’s a complicated process, because the “timeline” isn’t really a line at all. It’s actually more like a bush. A network of branching and twisting consequences that has a nearly infinite capacity to confuse.
QUELLE: I’ve always preferred to think of the timeline as more of a tapestry. Pull on one thread, and others beside it can become unraveled. If you pull too hard on too many threads, the entire weave could begin to collapse.
LUCSLY: Unless you take a needle and thread to it on occasion, and make some rough-and-dirty repairs when it becomes necessary.
DULMER: Sometimes the scalpel has to come first. And then the needle and thread.
So it really is time surgery, in an almost literal sense. But isn’t cutting and sewing the timeline nearly as risky a business as letting it try to heal itself?
DULMER: There are some who say it’s unnecessary to try to intervene to preserve the timeline. They say that no temporal incursion can ever really erase any of us from history, because all a time traveler can ever really do—even a malevolent time traveler—is add a new “track” to reality, running parallel to our own. And forever inaccessible to us.
LUCSLY: Everett’s gamble. The “many worlds” hypothesis.*
Several decades ago, the crew of the Enterprise briefly came into contact with thousands of their counterparts from parallel universes. Doesn’t
that pretty much prove the “many worlds” idea and render the DTI unnecessary?
DULMER: It’s hard to argue with Everett when you have several of his “many worlds” living right inside your head with you, keeping you company all the time. If Everett were still alive, I imagine the DTI would have sent him here to study me.
LUCSLY: I don’t know about that. But I do know that there’s no hard proof that any of those parallel universes the Enterprise discovered bore any relationship to time travel or its consequences. Time carries with it a lot of unknowns. The only thing that the DTI knew to an operational certainty was that we could never afford to sit back and do nothing when somebody altered the timeline, either deliberately or by accident.
Did our fixes pose some risks of their own? Sure they did. That’s why DTI agents receive as much training as they do. You might not realize this, Mister Sisko, but both Agent Dulmer and myself hold advanced degrees in probability-matrix calculus and psychohistory. We’ve both been through extensive field training, including multiple passages through the time portal at [CONTENT REDACTED BY STARFLEET INTELLIGENCE]. So when circumstances forced one or the other of us to perform a “temporal surgery,” the risks were roughly comparable to when a competent surgeon performs a procedure on a patient.
But patients have been known to die during surgery from time to time—so to speak.
LUCSLY: Since the universe is still here, I’d have to characterize our “surgeries” as one hundred percent successful. Or at least close enough to one hundred percent so that the difference isn’t worth mentioning.
DULMER: No comment.
Agent Lucsly’s point appears to be a valid one, Agent Dulmer. We wouldn’t be having this conversation if the patient had died on the table, as it were.
DULMER: True. But there’s a big difference between “one hundred percent successful” and “close enough for DTI work.” Even after an imperfect-but-good-enough battlefield surgery, a patient might live on for the remainder of a normal lifespan. But he might also have to hide a nasty scar or two, or learn to live with a permanent limp.
I’m not sure I understand.
DULMER: How should I put it? Whenever history undergoes a major repair—or sometimes even a minor one—there’s always the potential for leaving behind a little continuity glitch of some sort.
“Continuity glitch”?
LUCSLY: Sorry, Mister Sisko. It’s DTI field jargon. A continuity glitch is a small anachronism. Some minor detail in the fabric of history that doesn’t really belong where it is, but also doesn’t quite rise to the level of requiring additional corrective temporal action. Like the official picture of Gabriel Bell, taken in the twenty-first century.
Gabriel Bell. The antipoverty activist after whom the Bell Riots of 2024 were named.
LUCSLY: The same. Back in the year 2024, Bell’s official identification photograph somehow got replaced with an image of your father.
Yeah, I’ve seen it. Weird.
LUCSLY: Very. After the DTI discovered this small anachronism, we officially classified it as only a continuity glitch associated with an accidental temporal displacement experienced by your father and several members of his crew. It posed no real danger. Therefore we didn’t have to take any further action in dealing with it.
Because taking action might have made a small-to-negligible “glitch” into a much bigger one. And would have risked pulling more threads than you’d intended from the weave of the “time tapestry,” to borrow Mister Quelle’s metaphor.
DULMER: Exactly.
QUELLE: Since you’re borrowing one of my metaphors, I hope you don’t mind me embroidering it a bit.
Please go right ahead, Mister Quelle.
QUELLE: Thank you. Imagine you’ve accidentally started a small fire in the living room of your home. After you put the fire out, you discover that your replicators are down, so you can’t use them to simply replace the carpeting. So you might have to make do with a little emergency stitching and some throw rugs to cover up the worst of the damage.
DULMER: And to hide the really bad scars in the carpet, you might even have to rearrange the furniture a bit.
So you’re saying that the DTI’s repair work may have left some fairly big scars and rips hidden under the universe’s sofa?
LUCSLY: I suppose that’s been common knowledge ever since Friedman* wrote up his visit to the time portal at [CONTENT REDACTED BY STARFLEET INTELLIGENCE]. The DTI has always done its best to keep all temporal inconsistencies and discontinuities to a minimum. But no matter how carefully the DTI conducts its business, this sort of thing is still bound to come up occasionally.
DULMER: Some of the temporal discontinuities we’re talking about can even take the form of spatial phenomena. Like the eruption of anti-time particles that appeared about forty years ago in the Devron system. Or that Borg temporal anomaly that turned out to be instrumental in saving Vega from an all-out invasion by the collective. Others can center around certain people, who can become the focal point of temporal forces. Something like that happened to Jean-Luc Picard, during the very same Devron incident I just mentioned.
Dulmer’s mention of people becoming temporal focal points makes me wonder if something like that might not have happened to him as well. Because unless the universe has transformed him into some sort of temporal lightning rod, a nexus at which multiple timestreams intersect, he’s just a burned-out wretch caught in the grip of a time-travel-generated psychosis. I’d much rather believe the former to be true than the latter, and the sad, pleading look on Lucsly’s face makes it obvious to me that he feels the same way.
LUCSLY: Wolf, I don’t remember any “anti-time eruption” ever happening in the Devron system. Or anywhere else, for that matter.
DULMER: Then I suppose we can chalk it up to yet another continuity glitch. Or maybe an even larger temporal discontinuity, like the alternate Gorn timeline I can remember, the one that started back in ’eighty-one. That was when Captain Riker and Titan’s crew gathered the Federation’s first detailed intel about the Gorn civilization’s nonwarrior castes.
The technological and religious castes. I thought the Federation hadn’t discovered those until years later, when the Cestus Accords between the Gorn Hegemony and the Klingon Empire were being settled.
Dulmer’s lips tighten into a bitter, humorless smile that does nothing to relieve the haunted look I see in his eyes.
So does everybody else, Mister Sisko. But that’s the nature of self-canceling temporal discontinuities—at least when they don’t quite cancel themselves out completely. After all, it’s not as though the DTI hasn’t encountered and identified things like that before. Some very large TDs popped up when the Undine tried to reach back into humanity’s past. When they made their first preemptive attempt to exterminate us.
LUCSLY: Only it doesn’t count as a temporal discontinuity if nobody can remember it.
DULMER: Or even if almost nobody remembers it, evidently.
Mister Dulmer, doesn’t this memory discrepancy itself—that is, your ability to recall events that your former partner can’t—constitute a pretty significant continuity glitch in its own right?
Dulmer aims an accusing stare at Lucsly.
DULMER: It would, I suppose. Unless you’ve chosen to misclassify it as a sign of temporal psychosis.
Mister Quelle, has Mister Dulmer been misclassified in your opinion? Or misdiagnosed?
QUELLE: It’s not my place to say, Mister Sisko. I’m not a doctor. When it comes to temporal disorders, I’m strictly an amateur.
Do you have any proof, Mister Dulmer, that any of your disputed memories are—or were—real?
DULMER: Proof? Other than the sworn affidavits of three Vulcan mind-meld specialists, four Betazoid telepaths, and a Ullian memory engram expert? Not a shred.
I’m appalled by this revelation, and I can tell from Lucsly’s defensive body language that I haven’t done a very good job of concealing my reaction.
Is that true, Mister Lu
csly? Mister Quelle?
LUCSLY: It’s true. But as much as I personally might want to believe Wolf, I have to be objective about this.
QUELLE: I’d like to think that Mister Dulmer’s alleged “canceled-out experiences” constitute something other than an unusually self-consistent delusion. But I’m only a caregiver, not a psychiatrist. I’m afraid I simply don’t have the credentials to circle this particular square.
DULMER: Mister Sisko, in all fairness to Adam and Quelle, the only thing those telepaths really proved to the DTI was that I’m sincere—that I believe in the contents of my own… orphan memories.
LUCSLY: But they couldn’t vouch for the veracity of the memories themselves, since the timelines that would have produced them don’t appear to exist.
DULMER: At least not anymore.
QUELLE: If you don’t mind my saying it, Mister Dulmer, that’s a far too binary way of looking at the world. Existence or nonexistence. One or zero. On or off.
LUCSLY: Didn’t you just get done explaining that you have to believe that my old friend’s memories are just self-constructed delusions? Or have you finally decided that he’s really not delusional after all?
QUELLE: I was merely trying to explain Doctor Wykoff’s diagnosis. Like I said, I’m not qualified to have an opinion on the matter. I’m just a therapy provider.
LUCSLY: And a part-time philosopher, too, apparently. Look, Quelle, things either exist or they don’t. What other way is there to look at the world?
Quelle regards Lucsly for a long, silent moment. A look of sadness crosses the orderly’s face, and I’m now more certain than ever that I’ve seen him before. But where? And when?
QUELLE: There may be an infinitude of other ways, Mister Lucsly. Unfortunately, most humans—and most humanoids, for that matter—aren’t evolved enough to grasp that one simple truth about the cosmos.
DULMER: You’re right, Quelle. What I should have said was that the timelines that produced my orphan memories aren’t accessible from this timeline, at least not directly. Regardless, a lot of what’s in here in my head—the dead-end memories I’ve been trying for years to integrate with what all the psych specialists call “timeline prime”—is what the DTI would classify as “counterfactual.”
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