The tale of Niv and Nicks is a lamentable one.
Niv and Nicks lived in a year so distant from our own (on the temporal axis), that the mere contemplation of it would make your mind dance the reverse-foxtrot right off a metaphorical cliff and into a sea of philosophical abstraction. The abstraction, having been annoyed to see you, would then rudely thrust your general personhood into a black-hole it was loitering around, and that would be that for you. You would end up little more than a bunch of spaghetti-fied flesh, and in the slow evaporation of space-time, be re-released in an eternal stream of Hawking radiation, just so as to keep the law of thermodynamics happy.
The year, in which the tale of Niv and Nicks takes place, and in which the two of them alter the course of the Everywhen, was in the obnoxiously distant future.
Almost no one in the Universe is able to say with any real precision when exactly in the future this particular tale takes place. Needless to say it was generally agreed to be pretty darn far in the future by any standard you may wish to choose.
Now that I come to think about it, the terms ‘far’ and ‘distant’ are fancifully inadequate words for just how far in the future this year was. It was extremely, exponentially, logarithmically distant. The year of which I speak, was a maddeningly long stretch of time from almost any other fixed point in its past.
Let’s pick a fixed point, just for fun. Let’s say, the month of July in the year 1987.
Compared to July 1987, the year that Niv and Nicks together changed the course of the Everywhen, was very, very, very, very, very, very (…) very, very inappropriately far in the future.
See? I told you.
Really bloody far.
And do you know the reason why almost no one in the Universe knew the exact year that the tale of Niv and Nicks took place?
Time no longer mattered.
It may sound silly to you, because you’ve no doubt spent your whole existence knowing exactly what year it is; what month; what day; what hour; what minute and so on. You have perception bias. But to the people around in that very, very, very, very (…) very distant time, caring what year it was, was like having a favourite grain of sand, amongst a trillion grains of sand, on an infinite number of beaches, on a planet composed entirely of Mykonos Islands.
CORRECTION: While the year, the month and the day didn't matter much to most of the people in this distant future, the HOUR did. Especially the lunch hour. Meal-time in general was really all the people of that distant future had, and it therefore occupied a special, singular place of importance in their endless punishment. It is widely accepted that lunch is just a generally important thing. At the end of the Universe, some say, there will be a buffet lunch to lazily graze upon, as the curtains close on what was a very suspicious and quite pointless experiment.
Long story short. Meals mattered.
What didn’t matter a goat’s left nipple to most was whether it was year fifteen million, one hundred thousand and one (for instance) or year fifteen million one hundred thousand and two. Almost no one on Earth or anywhere else could care less if they tried. And they did try, often and with great vigour.
Speaking of Earth, time mattered the least of all to those poor guys; now listless and indifferent after years of pesky and accidental immortality.
You will notice above that I said that the year (or any other measure of time except meal times) mattered to almost no one almost nowhere.
There was still one guy (and his buddy) to whom the precise time it was, mattered a whole bunch.
That guy and his buddy were Dr Hunter Nickel (Nicks) and his super-computer ‘No-Nonsense’. Nicks was the only Temporal Therapist ever to exist in this or any other place in the whole general tangle of the Everywhen. It goes without saying, that when you are the only Temporal Therapist who has or ever will exist AND your grasp of time is essential to the most important mission humanity has ever been on, that you need to be quite precise about time. This includes being precise about the year, the month, the day, the hour, the minute, the second and everything else.
Dr Nickel and No-Nonsense, were the only entities on Earth for whom the term ‘precise moment’ meant a damn. And at that precise moment Nicks was worried. When Nicks was worried, No-Nonsense was apoplectic.
Nicks was partially ducked behind a screen, on the bottom half of which was opaque. Hence the ducking. He ducked quite awkwardly so as to remain hidden. The screen behind which he was ducked separated the temporal launch-room, from the clients scheduled to use it.
Nicks wasn’t normally one to duck. He definitely never hunched either. But there were thousands of scheduled clients lined up on the other side of that screen, waiting for their destiny to be fulfilled; waiting to travel back in time to July of 1987. They were quite an angry mob - if Nicks was being honest - dosed up to the eyeballs on stimulants and ready to kill. And as it was before-lunch, so they were quite a bit hangrier than usual too.
On that particular day, another hectic day in a long and very much protracted history of hectic days, Nicks had good reason to be ducked. For one thing, the murderous clients now lining up outside of the launch room, which housed his very unique time machine, had been waiting for many centuries (some for a millennia) for this opportunity. They wouldn’t take too kindly at all to the things being done just out of their view. For another, the person with whom Nicks was hunched, Nieves Boru Ohio, was an enemy of the state. A rather slippery enemy of the state at that. So you can imagine his clients would have had good reason to put a quick end to the plotting and scheming now going on.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
Nicks was whispering, in a very obviously surreptitious way to a very determined Nieves Boru Ohio. Nieves, or Niv as she was known, was also, at that precise moment, ducking under the screen too. But unlike Nicks, who was worried, Niv was relaxed, determined and cautiously optimistic that her timing was right and her theory would work. It just had to.
“They’re going to not-kill you for this Niv,” Nicks whispered anxiously in the most reproachful whisper he could muster without attracting the attention of the sentry security robots lurking in one or another of these corridors.
“Y-Y-Yes,” agreed No-Nonsense. Shaking his holographic face in a show of disapproval.
“You’ll be forced to be forever. You know that right?” Nicks continued.
“Nicks,” she said placing a hand on his hunched shoulder. “…I am trying to do the opposite of that. We haven’t got time for this talk anyway. Not again and definitely not now. This will be my only chance to go. It’s literally now or never."
She paused as though hearing something he couldn't.
"They are so close to stopping me here...and there. I have to stop this from happening while I still can.”
“You don’t know, though,” he said sighing a little patronisingly. “…You can’t know that this is going to work.”
“You used to trust me Nicks! Trust me again.”
He shook his head, now angrily. He remembered what it was like to shake his head at her like this. She was exasperating. But Niv knew that Nicks loved him (even if it had been in another life) and he wouldn’t stop her from doing what she thought was right, especially if it meant unliving for everyone. She could end things without all the fear and the pain and the horror - not to mention the enormous karmic bill. So he would help her. He was helping her.
“I trust you Nivs,” he said honestly. “But…” he stopped, unsure what else to say.
The both stared at each other. Knowing it would be the last time.
“As soon as I sit in that thing, and you pull that switch, you will know that it’s worked,” she said.
“I wouldn’t be here to pull the switch if it had,” he replied, a faint teary redness appearing around the edges of his eyes. “I wouldn’t be. We wouldn’t be.”
“Thank me when you’re finally gone,” she said sarcastically, shrugging her broad shoulders. “That’s what this is all about right?”
“We will never have met. We’ll have missed all of it,” he continued.
“The Universe won’t let our energy go to waste like that Nicks. You know, for someone who sends people back in time, you sure don’t sound like you studied Preferential Temporal Narrative Mechanistics.”
“I know it very well thanks. Though I find it really amusing that you think this is your story.”
He smiled hopelessly. “You aren’t the constant Nivs, you’re the variable.”
“I have to believe that this,”she said pointing to herself theatrically, “is main character material. That’s the only way this will work out.”
She didn’t wait a second longer, and didn’t look at Nicks again. She crawled on all fours to the titanium machine, loading herself into the throne-like rig, and strapping in with an economy of purpose.
Preferential Temporal Narrative Mechanistics was first theorised by the Quadrupedal overlords of Thrace Omega to resolve an argument between a gang of unemployed film critics over which was the proper interpretation of time travel in the then recently released Galactic smash-hit of the Summer: ‘Time Lovers - A Rift in Space’.
A cabal of the Thrace Galaxy’s best robotic scientists slaved away for more than a million years to come up with the theoretical proof, that is now the most widely accepted bit of common knowledge every garden variety Relomatrician and Time Scientist can quote, ten drinks in to an all-night cocktail binge.
As with most scientific proofs, the first five hundred thousand years of research were dedicated to sorting out what time travel wasn’t. After millions of experiments were conducted, on an equal number of insane null-hypotheses the following was finally considered to be quite obvious. Time travel was not constant or dynamic. It was not relativistic, nor was it super-spatial. It was very definitely not linear, which should not give you the impression that it was curved, skewed, twisted, bent, broken or bifurcated, looped, cubed, squared, boxed or vaguely squiggly, jagged, zagged or zigged.
The theory, that emerged after almost every other possibility was slowly and meticulously carved out goes something like this:
Time travel is the hyper-fictive derivation of a subjectively supervised, character-driven, narrative arc divided by the number of writers employed to brain-storm it.
This theory, the Narrative Theory of Time Travel (Or N3T), came as a surprise to the cabal of robot scientists who had been employed for a million years to sort the whole thing out. It was largely regarded as gobbledygook by the galactic council’s research-grant division who had bank-rolled the project. And therefore, the idea - and the robots who came up with it - were scrapped immediately and forgotten for a millennia. The notion was replaced by the easier to understand but mathematically unhelpful idea that time travel was just a little difficult and generally not to be messed with.
N3T was rediscovered about ten-thousand years later, to sort out another fight between film critics on a remake Time Lovers, and after a couple of hundred thousand more years of thumb twiddling was simplified as such:
Time travel equates to the base convenience of the narrative to the power of the main character.
That is to say, it’s whatever the main character in a story thinks it damn well should be.
“I wish you didn’t have to go,” Nicks said, as he fiddled mindlessly with the controls.
“Someone has to fix your mess,” she said more to herself, as she finally began to fret about what she had now to do.
“I’ll see you never,” Nicks said finally to her. “No-Nonsense,” Nicks said, so quietly that Nivs could barely hear him over the hums and whirs of the many machines and computers required to send her back in time.
“Yes Sir?” It responded.
“Send her back in exactly 12.745329452 seconds.”
“Yes Sir. Bye Nivs. I really do like your hair today. You look radiant.”
And in a puff of light, and a flash of smoke, she was gone.
Footnote: While science fiction writers all over the Universe were busily trying to avoid the paradoxes which inevitably arose in time-travel tales such as this, actual scientists had come up with a simple solution.
All one really had to do to avoid a paradox, was add a button to your various time machines, portals-generators, quantum-field thingo-ma-bobs and so forth which solved for the paradox before you went back in time.
Anyone who is anyone has installed such a button on their time machine. For instance Nick’s machine has a button which solves for the grand-father paradox. His grand-father paradox button even had a nice little picture of an old man being stabbed by himself from behind. One simply flicked the button and the traveller in time could happily murder themselves (or their grand-dad if they so wish) and stay dead. None of this pesky not having been alive in the first place to kill yourself.