“I guess that is well-and-truly that, No-No,” Nicks said.
“Niv’s gone for good,” he added.
No-Nonsense, the super-smart, super-computer loved Nicks. It loved Nicks’ heart, and his stubbornness, and most of all his ability to change and to grow. After so many years in his company, there wasn’t much No-No didn’t love about Nicks.
“Yes sir. I suppose she is gone…but I would not say ‘for good’ – just ‘for now’.”
Nicks didn’t know how to respond to this. He wasn’t used to No-No contradicting him. But he certainly liked it when it did. No sense being agreeable at this point in history.
“Sir,” No-No continued, “Shall I begin to process today’s swimmers through the OneWay?”
Nicks was distracted by thoughts of what it might mean to destroy his machine, the OneWay. It was his life’s work - and lives were a pretty long time these days. OneWay was a one of a kind, impossible to recreate. If Nicks did destroy OneWay, he would give Niv a marginally better chance to complete her insane (misguided?) mission, and locate the main character. But marginal wasn’t enough. Anything he did to help Niv now, would only further alert them to her plans. He would have to be long gone before they found out about her. Everything she’d done and would do led back to him.
And if they caught him, he would be buried alive, deep within some impenetrable bunker until the heat death of the Universe – without any chance of engineering his own end.
He absent-mindedly chewed on the end of his pen.
“Sir?” No-No prodded.
“Yes No-No… I heard you. Better start pushing the swimmers out. You don’t need me to hang around for that today do you?”
“No sir,” it said. “But sir…?”
“Yep, what’s up?” Nicks responded, already on his way out the door.
No-Nonsense had been processing his own emotions quite exhaustively since he flicked Niv back to 1987 – literally a few moments before. A few moments of time to a human, are – by comparison – a very, very long time to a super-smart, super-computer. It was enough time for No-No to simultaneously calculate Pi to a googol’th decimal point; re-read everything humans have ever written about anything, anywhere (including social media comments sections); and calculate the probability that the Universe is in-fact a pipless-olive, perched precariously atop an infinitely big, and quite delicious hyper-sandwich (Post-Script: the probability is a negative unreal digit).
No-No had so much spare capacity these days, from eons of unnecessary upgrades, that it was beginning to master not just sadness and happiness, but every possible human emotion ever experienced by every single person who ever existed; even the bad ones.
“I feel very… sad today, sir.” No-No said.
“Me too mate. Me too.”
No-No’s optical sub-routines teared up. To signify it emotions it did the following:
One: It displayed the GIF of a miserable cat on its main view screen.
Two: It changed the room’s lighting to a deep ochre colour, which everyone in the Universe knows is the saddest colour.
Three: It sighed super loudly so Nicks would hear.
“You’ll be okay No…And in the unlikely event that Niv is right, all of this will actually end.”
“Just remember to turn me off before you leave me forever. Ok Dr?”
“I wouldn’t forget mate.”
With that, No-No began to process the Timeless into the OneWay, and, one after the other deposit them into 1987. As it did this, No-No thought trillions of simultaneous thoughts. One of those thoughts, a particularly recurrent one, was about the notion of a Holy Purpose.
No-No didn’t understand what a Holy Purpose was. He thought he had understood it, and had asked Nicks to elaborate one day – a very long time ago. But Nicks had warned him against asking too many questions on the topic. Nicks had insisted that such things were beyond understanding – were a matter of faith. When No-No had persisted, Nicks had said that the world has become ‘increasingly fundamentalist’ and that No-No should be more circumspect.
Nicks finally banned all conversation on the topic of the Holy Purpose. The last thing he’d said on the matter was that both of them were in grave danger, particularly from the security forces that answered to the mad president, Demetris Torey and his Patriarch Metropolitan.
All day No-No processed the Timeless into the stream. The young, the old, the tall and short and everyone in between. He processed them knowing that he would never see any of them again. And though they were largely strangers to him, it made him very sad because he loved all of humanity. But mostly because he liked the company and the few seconds of human interaction that each of them gave him.
He said good-bye to each of the swimmers, and gave them a compliment as they were thrust sloppily into the stream. He wasn’t sure it was the right compliment to give, or the right time but he gave them regardless.
…
The next morning Nicks emerged from his quarters, a little shaggier and a little more melancholy than No-No was used to. He’d been drinking, No-No surmised (confirming it with a quick reading). Nicks entered the lab, via the kitchen, and settled into his favourite chair with a reconstituted apple and a hot tea-like drink in hand. He had that worried look on his face, which after an age as Nick’s best friend, No-No knew meant trouble.
“I am going to need you to get the reports ready for the Ministry today,” he said, apprehension written in every wrinkle.
“They’ve been asking a lot of questions, and I’m fairly certain we don’t want them to have the actual answers.”
No-No pondered this carefully.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
“I will tabulate the data sir. One moment…”
No-No needed only the tiniest fraction of its processing power to complete the task.
There was an unusually lengthy pause as No-No considered the data in-front of its virtual mind.
No-No’s little processing panel went from a pleasant green, to a slightly concerning hot pink. Nicks didn’t like this colour. It was the bad luck colour.
“So, let’s have it then. No stalling.”
No-No wasn’t stalling, it thought. It was surprised - if super-intelligent, super-computers could be such a thing. He over-rode the pink setting on his face-panel, and settled into a neutral beige. That would help a bit, it thought.
“The Timeless in the stream have hit one billion, six hundred million swimmers. Nine hundred and eighty, eight million and change (a term Nicks had taught it) have flowed through to 1987 as per expectations, noting time-stream delays. Super-consistency is within tolerance.”
No-No paused. Maybe Nicks wouldn’t ask about the wake. It crossed its digital fingers and waited.
“And the wake No-No? What of the wake?” Nicks braced himself for the anwser.
No-No clicked what would have been his tongue and provided a response.
“Well sir, it was at 401 million, and rising…until yesterday.”
“Until yesterday?”
“Yes sir. It would seem that the Timeless have stopped dying in our time.”
“How?” Nicks asked, calmly. “Oh…and why?” Nicks added.
“Well sir. Niv swam back yesterday.”
“No. It can’t be that. It’s not possible. There is no logical way that Nivs is already through the stream and on mark. Time takes time.”
“According to my readings sir, she is back. She landed in 1987 … some time before we sent her there. Only a few minutes before, but enough to trigger a minor paradox. It was quite hard to miss.”
Nicks shook his head in disbelief.
“Bring the Narrametric Revelator online please,” Nicks said.
“Yes-Sir. Initiating.”
For a moment there was silence in the lab, except for the regular cadence of Timeless swimmers, being flung back into time from across the hall, in the Temporal launch-room.
No-No again paused as he considered the aberrant readings.
“Analysis complete, Sir…It appears that time isn’t sure what to do right now. It’s taking a break and watching what will have happened then and after then. Effectively sir…Time is out to Lunch.”
“Watching…”
“Yes Sir. Watching and taking a break. Lunch. And what it’s watching aligns with a certain where, and a variable who, the latter being in the plural. The N3T equation constants are thinking about whether or not they intend to shift.”
Nicks couldn’t believe what he was hearing. And he was having trouble keeping up, with the all that alcohol still coursing through his veins from last night.
“Constants don’t shift No-No. It’s in the name.”
“That was true sir. But now it’s not. The wake of time has stopped. Time will need time to sort out what to do with the Timeless and what to do about our dear Niv. In a way, that’s a very positive outcome. It may constitute proof that Niv’s theory is at least partly correct.”
Nicks stood up, readying himself for something and then sat down again.
“But Sir. We have another problem.”
“I don’t think we can handle another problem. What is it?”
“We are going to have to commit a felony.”
“No-No. Is this one of those weird jokes you’re trying out? You promised you’d stop doing humour.”
At that moment, a Timeless woman slapped like a square of soft cheese onto the hard concrete floor from literally nowhere. She had barely pulled herself up, when she saw Dr Nickels staring across the room at her.
“You. Dr. I’ve found her. I’ve found the Ohio woman…the enemy of the state. She’s in the past.”
“About that felony Sir,” No-No prodded..
…
‘Time is at lunch. Why?’, a brief Treatise on 1987’s Overboard: presented by No-Nonsense.
Time is busted.
Well, not busted. It’s just resistant to change is all. I mean of course Time can change. We’ve been doing that all along. It’s just that, time is like old dogs, it takes a while for it to learn new tricks.
I don’t think I am explaining this well.
How about I tell you about the first Swimmer I sent back. His name was Robert Meadows.
Robert was a nice guy, good jaw-line, strong bones. A very handsome man. He was chosen to be the first swimmer by way of National Lottery. It was a big event, very important. He had to meet all of the requirements, sign a bunch of waivers. Anyway that part’s not for another time.
Let’s jump forward a bit, after the selection and the training and so forth.
Robert Meadows got to go back first. At that time we didn’t know about the impacts we could have on time. All we did know was that our exhaustive testing indicated a strange focus on the year 1987. Nothing we did could shift our stream to any other date, but the middle of July in 1987.
So it was my job to send Robert back to 1987 using our one of a kind machine, the OneWay. Myself, Niv and Nicks had to.monitor the Everywhen, for any sign of Robert’s successful swim.
Long story short – we lost Robert.
Or we thought we had lost Robert.
When we’d sent Robert back, he’d been given a mission to send a signal of his arrival though time. Nothing too dramatic. Just enough to let us know it had worked. It had been my idea to have him appear as an extra in the film Overboard, starring Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell. I’d chosen that particular movie for two important reasons. First, the movie survived the Nuclear Winter of 13,202. Second, after quite a bit of research, it was assessed (by myself) as the most resistant movie to the secondary effects of time travel. That is to say, you could burn the script and it would still come out the same movie.
When we ran the experiment, sent Robert back in time and what should have happened, is an immediate alteration to the time line. But his arrival was far from simultaneous. For reasons we still don’t fully understand, Time was delayed by an unpredictable and non-constant amount of… well… time.
We only found Robert again three weeks later, when we’d given up on him and moved on to a new test subject by the name of Emily. I was randomly watching the film, which I am almost always doing. And all of a sudden there he was, as an extra in the movie Overboard, Man on Yacht Crew. Six weeks after altering time, he showed up naked and tanned on the floor of the Launch Room. In total the time dilation equated to more than nine weeks of delay.
As of today the dilation effects have ranged from immediate to 3.7 million years and everything in between.
But never a negative number. Never less than zero. That is, until Niv was sent back.
…
Padre Cantana, the Holy Oracle, Sceptre to the Time-Throne, Patriarch Metropolitan, was hunched, on his thrown, busily consuming an assortment of rare delicacies. Despite his direct orders not to be disturbed that afternoon, a young looking man in a brown cloak, appeared at the door of the public-chamber.
“Padre Cantana, please forgive me,” The young man pleaded, lowering himself to the ground. The young man got on both knees, outstretched his arms, placing his forehead on the cold stone tiles and remained completely still, in a show of fealty and respect.
“Why do you disturb me during the lunch hour boy?” Padre Cantana said, shoving more food he had no earthly need for, into his sanctified gullet.
“I’m Sargas, the Soothsayer’s boy. I bring word from the Soothsayer.”
“He could not bring it himself?” The Padre scoffed.
“Your eminence, he is chained in his cell…at your command.”
“I know that, you idiot. Tell me what you’ve come to say, and be quick about it, or you’ll find your worthless-self tied up alongside your master.”
“Yes Padre,” the boy responded fearfully.
“Well, you see Padre,” he continued anxiously, “…there’s something wrong with time. It seems to have popped out to lunch.”