This one connects with this one. With any luck it almost seems coherent; I didn't read the old one before I wrote the new one.
PS, apologies to both of my readers; stuff has been going on Outside My Head this last couple of weeks which has made writing spotty. Hopefully it gets back to regular soonish.
“Evil fucking clowns.” Jack muttered it under his breath, but it had the curl of lip and emphasis of enunciation to make it sound like a passionate curse nonetheless. I looked up from what I was doing.
“What?” I asked, just to see what he said. I knew what he was looking at, I just wanted to hear what he was thinking.
“Gamma team. They’re working on some sort of intramural vendetta; some bureaucrat pissed them off and they’re exacting revenge...”
“Sanctioned, though.”
“Just because Galambos signed off on it doesn’t mean it’s not an intramural vendetta.” Jack hit some combination on his keyboard with enough force to leave dents in it. “Evil fucking clown.”
Galambos, our boss -- actually, my boss’s boss’s boss; Jack was my boss -- did not sit high in Jack’s esteem. I knew better than to try to offer tempering to that particular opinion, it would only set Jack off on some rant.
“This guy, this... Hitler... he’s obviously a bad guy,” I said. “We’d be better off without him.”
“Nobody denies that. Well, Hitler probably does.” Jack leaned back in his chair and sighed. “I don’t have a problem with doing away with Hitler. The problem is this hair-brained scheme they’ve come up with to do it. They’re going to go back to the end of the Great War and track him out of government, into private-sector political work.”
“And... they think that’s going to neutralize him?”
“That’s what I’m saying.” Jack stood up abruptly and walked to the door, grabbing the bundle of his trench coat and scarf in one hand and his hat in the other. He jammed the hat onto his head and turned toward me. “Coming?”
I stood up and followed Jack, less because I shared his mission than because I wanted to make sure he didn’t do anything crazy. This is Jack’s and my working relationship: He acts on impulse -- often inspired, brilliant impulse, but still impulse -- and I follow along and make sure his impulse doesn’t lead anywhere particularly damaging.
This, for example, had all the hallmarks of particularly damaging: we were sticking our noses into the middle of a war between the head of Time Division and a semi-retired higher-up in the Intelligence Service. There was every possibility that we could affect the outcome; but that just meant that we were going to be personally screwed.
“Re-tracking someone as talented and unpredictable as Adolf Hitler is not something to do lightly.” Jack was in full lecture mode as he strode down the hallway, coat whipping around his ankles. “You can’t just...” And he was off, delivering a speech that was half The Book and half Jack’s Philosophy of Time Travel. The fact that a lot of The Book consisted of Jack’s Philosophy of Time Travel -- because he’d written several chapters of it -- made it difficult to tell which was which.
Re-tracking is the technical term for when we go back in time to a critical juncture of someone’s life and nudge, somehow influencing a major life choice -- which may not seem like a major life choice at the time, but which will tend to have major implications down the road. Jack’s right, it’s not something to do lightly, and not something to undertake without a very careful study and -- especially -- without controls.
There’s a vault in Greenland where we keep controls. It’s been there since 1066 or so; it’s where we keep records of tasks undertaken, outcomes achieved. When you fuck with time, you can accidentally undo all your work with an accident, and even undo yourself; we control for this by recording everything and sticking it in the vault at a time before whatever tweak we’re about to undertake.
If you go back in time to 1491 and scratch “Columbus was here” on a rock in Haiti, and then you go back to 1999 and accidentally prevent yourself from being born, the rock in Haiti will still say “Columbus was here.” Whatever forking happens, happens from the time you make the change; so even though the action of writing on the rock was performed by someone who now never existed, it had already happened by the time you didn’t exist...
Anyway, this is why there’s a control system in Greenland. It consists of two parts: One, a record of every mission, transmitted via an hourly backup disk that gets automatically moved back; and two, a standby agent with a time machine, waiting to leap into action in case the backup disks stop coming back.
We’ve uninvented time travel something like fifteen times, everything from re-tracking the guy who actually did all the work that the guy who got the credit for it stole to accidentally arranging for a car that would have been broken down to be in working-enough order to run over the inventor as a twelve-year-old boy.
There’s a moratorium on actions in a several-hundred kilometer radius around a particular village in India and another one around Brooklyn to prevent this sort of thing from happening.
In all fifteen cases, the standby agent -- four times, it’s been Jack -- managed to undo the damage, but many of them were touch-and-go. There’s a coded phrase you say to an agent that means “I was the standby agent when you broke the universe and you have to stop whatever you’re doing,” which sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t, depending on just how the timeline is broken.
Anyway, I caught Jack at the elevator and grabbed his arm.
“What the fuck are you doing, Jack?”
“They haven’t filed a plan,” he said. “Greenland has no idea what they’re doing. So they’re undertaking a major re-track and the standby guy has no idea what to fix if something goes wrong.”
“Shit,” I said. “Well, let’s file our suspicions, then.”
“I did that,” said Jack. “But it’s going to be an hour before it goes back, and they’re already in motion; there’s every possibility that it might not arrive in time, and even if it does, Carruthers, who is on standby today, is not the brightest bulb; he might not figure it out.
“So we’re going to do what any moral person would in this situation: we’re going to go back in time, and save Hitler.”
PS, apologies to both of my readers; stuff has been going on Outside My Head this last couple of weeks which has made writing spotty. Hopefully it gets back to regular soonish.
“Evil fucking clowns.” Jack muttered it under his breath, but it had the curl of lip and emphasis of enunciation to make it sound like a passionate curse nonetheless. I looked up from what I was doing.
“What?” I asked, just to see what he said. I knew what he was looking at, I just wanted to hear what he was thinking.
“Gamma team. They’re working on some sort of intramural vendetta; some bureaucrat pissed them off and they’re exacting revenge...”
“Sanctioned, though.”
“Just because Galambos signed off on it doesn’t mean it’s not an intramural vendetta.” Jack hit some combination on his keyboard with enough force to leave dents in it. “Evil fucking clown.”
Galambos, our boss -- actually, my boss’s boss’s boss; Jack was my boss -- did not sit high in Jack’s esteem. I knew better than to try to offer tempering to that particular opinion, it would only set Jack off on some rant.
“This guy, this... Hitler... he’s obviously a bad guy,” I said. “We’d be better off without him.”
“Nobody denies that. Well, Hitler probably does.” Jack leaned back in his chair and sighed. “I don’t have a problem with doing away with Hitler. The problem is this hair-brained scheme they’ve come up with to do it. They’re going to go back to the end of the Great War and track him out of government, into private-sector political work.”
“And... they think that’s going to neutralize him?”
“That’s what I’m saying.” Jack stood up abruptly and walked to the door, grabbing the bundle of his trench coat and scarf in one hand and his hat in the other. He jammed the hat onto his head and turned toward me. “Coming?”
I stood up and followed Jack, less because I shared his mission than because I wanted to make sure he didn’t do anything crazy. This is Jack’s and my working relationship: He acts on impulse -- often inspired, brilliant impulse, but still impulse -- and I follow along and make sure his impulse doesn’t lead anywhere particularly damaging.
This, for example, had all the hallmarks of particularly damaging: we were sticking our noses into the middle of a war between the head of Time Division and a semi-retired higher-up in the Intelligence Service. There was every possibility that we could affect the outcome; but that just meant that we were going to be personally screwed.
“Re-tracking someone as talented and unpredictable as Adolf Hitler is not something to do lightly.” Jack was in full lecture mode as he strode down the hallway, coat whipping around his ankles. “You can’t just...” And he was off, delivering a speech that was half The Book and half Jack’s Philosophy of Time Travel. The fact that a lot of The Book consisted of Jack’s Philosophy of Time Travel -- because he’d written several chapters of it -- made it difficult to tell which was which.
Re-tracking is the technical term for when we go back in time to a critical juncture of someone’s life and nudge, somehow influencing a major life choice -- which may not seem like a major life choice at the time, but which will tend to have major implications down the road. Jack’s right, it’s not something to do lightly, and not something to undertake without a very careful study and -- especially -- without controls.
There’s a vault in Greenland where we keep controls. It’s been there since 1066 or so; it’s where we keep records of tasks undertaken, outcomes achieved. When you fuck with time, you can accidentally undo all your work with an accident, and even undo yourself; we control for this by recording everything and sticking it in the vault at a time before whatever tweak we’re about to undertake.
If you go back in time to 1491 and scratch “Columbus was here” on a rock in Haiti, and then you go back to 1999 and accidentally prevent yourself from being born, the rock in Haiti will still say “Columbus was here.” Whatever forking happens, happens from the time you make the change; so even though the action of writing on the rock was performed by someone who now never existed, it had already happened by the time you didn’t exist...
Anyway, this is why there’s a control system in Greenland. It consists of two parts: One, a record of every mission, transmitted via an hourly backup disk that gets automatically moved back; and two, a standby agent with a time machine, waiting to leap into action in case the backup disks stop coming back.
We’ve uninvented time travel something like fifteen times, everything from re-tracking the guy who actually did all the work that the guy who got the credit for it stole to accidentally arranging for a car that would have been broken down to be in working-enough order to run over the inventor as a twelve-year-old boy.
There’s a moratorium on actions in a several-hundred kilometer radius around a particular village in India and another one around Brooklyn to prevent this sort of thing from happening.
In all fifteen cases, the standby agent -- four times, it’s been Jack -- managed to undo the damage, but many of them were touch-and-go. There’s a coded phrase you say to an agent that means “I was the standby agent when you broke the universe and you have to stop whatever you’re doing,” which sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t, depending on just how the timeline is broken.
Anyway, I caught Jack at the elevator and grabbed his arm.
“What the fuck are you doing, Jack?”
“They haven’t filed a plan,” he said. “Greenland has no idea what they’re doing. So they’re undertaking a major re-track and the standby guy has no idea what to fix if something goes wrong.”
“Shit,” I said. “Well, let’s file our suspicions, then.”
“I did that,” said Jack. “But it’s going to be an hour before it goes back, and they’re already in motion; there’s every possibility that it might not arrive in time, and even if it does, Carruthers, who is on standby today, is not the brightest bulb; he might not figure it out.
“So we’re going to do what any moral person would in this situation: we’re going to go back in time, and save Hitler.”
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