Tempus Fugit Timelock Station – part of Midas City but temporally isolated out of necessity. It was anchored in what was effectively its own pocket universe with its own timeflow – all timeports had a place like this located near them for the purposes of monitoring what went on. There was no hope of really regulating it – they’d once tried that and it had instigated full on wars across several periods of time that they found hard to fight because of their position on the edge of it all and their codes of conduct which restricted interference in local matters of territory.
Joyce had been here for an undetermined amount of time – he wouldn’t be able to tell you because time didn’t really behave the same way in these places. How old was he? Nothing about him would tell you that, and his memories if stacked chronologically might mislead you into thinking he was older than he was. The lifelines of workers here followed two paths – the strictly linear one that you could plot alongside history and that gave a false sense of the data; or sequentially which jumped around from one time period to the next and was almost impossible to follow.
They would wander out from these places and try to correct anachronistic events that travellers were trying to engineer in order to benefit themselves. Bearing in mind that they considered time to be a multidirectional fairly flexible system they often would let something go that others would have considered ethically unsound. Some evolutionary jumps forward were just people from one alternative continuum bouncing back along the streams and pushing people there ahead faster than they might have moved under their own impetus. Gods, angels, some geniuses – they were merely people from the future sharing what they knew with those who were, what? Temporally disadvantaged?
Joyce knew that something strange was occurring in Midas though – stereo spatiotemporal signatures were not in the least unusual as people looped around through the various eras of their lives, but to have one terminated and a second remaining fixed thereafter? That was not so usual – it was not so good. Joyce was a student of lifesign trajectories and was fairly good at working out when someone had come from and when they were going to from studying their angle of approach in the dimensional analyser and then plotting the course of their exit, but this was puzzling to him.
He was monitoring the infofeeds to see if anyone anywhere else was noticing any weird anomalies in the data they were collecting but nothing was coming through. He often wondered what would occur if someone in a local timespace sector found a way to penetrate their shielding and shut down what amounted to the only kind of defence they had against timeline collapse? He and his co-workers relied on the highly trained network they had developed and if one element were out of place it might irreparably damage the finely tuned instrument they thought of themselves as.
He had not yet decided whether or not he should make an excursion into Midas to try and see if he could help them re-establish the natural order of things. Should he wait and see whether or not the situation escalated or not? Then he might be too late to do anything – it was a hard thing to judge; how far along one should let things travel before making a move. Him and his comrades were all trained in analytical thinking; all of them played chess to Grandmaster level; they were encouraged to keep sharp with sudoku, with crosswords, with writing in various poetic forms. Sometimes though you could just sit there and overthink yourself into missing your window of opportunity – it was no good having your balls on the line if all you did was move them around: all that got you was friction burns.
He liked Midas; had, against all the rules laid out for them, grown attached to it. In the eventuality of a major chronological deviation he might be reassigned – if it grew to the scale where it might threaten his reality’s integrity he might actually be called upon to initiate a STOPWATCH.
STOPWATCH was a continuum shutdown device – a doomsday weapon that would detonate, causing the implosion and sealing off of his entire sub-sector; the sub-sector being his temporally indexed version of the universe. It was a drastic measure and they didn’t like to use it – but they would have no qualms if they considered it a necessary precaution. He had never witnessed one himself but he had read the reports and the personal logs of those who had.
Part of their job was to stand on the brink of the collapse-point and guard against any potential dimensional egress – they operated a shoot to kill policy on anyone trying to leave. If your universe was marked for deletion then nothing was going to get you out of it. It seemed somewhat barbaric; part of him questioned whether he would actually be able to carry out the task. He had often sat there and pondered the action – its ramifications – it represented more than a single genocide; but it also represented the saving of countless more. There were those who had had their minds wiped because they could not come to terms with what they had done; could not exorcise the ghosts of an entire reality from their teeming skulls.
What if he were to have to go into Midas and then he failed? What then? He would be doubly responsible for their extermination. That would kill him – wouldn’t it? He knew those who had survived doing just what he would be called on to do – so it was doable; but that didn’t make it conscionable.
They had tried putting machines out here in these stations: artificial intelligences, ones that were indeed capable of making split second decisions, but it had proved a bad decision. No matter how delicately crafted their emotional software, they lacked the necessary empathy that might allow them to hold off initiating extreme measures – they were clinical and efficient as they had been required to be. The beings that had died as a result of the error could not truly be grasped.
He would watch, he would wait, and he would hope.
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