Chapter 16: February 3, 2012

Tyrone was in his lab, trying to make sense of the numbers he was looking at. He’d detected the chroniton flux, of course, and had—with the help of his biologist wife—isolated the time mites. But something about the whole scenario was still eluding him.

“—tired of this!” It was Megan, yelling, suddenly appearing in his lab. She had on a yellow shirt and blue jeans, a wedding ring sparkling on her finger. A look of consternation crossed her face as she realized she’d gotten unstuck.

“Uh, hello there,” Tyrone said, looking up from his monitors.

She had her arms crossed in front of her chest. “Case in fucking point! I can’t even have a normal conversation these days, it seems! And with the dryness issues I’m having down there, it’s significantly less pleasant to get back than it used to be.”

“First thing’s first. February 3, 2012,” he said calmly, not wanting to know any more about her sex life than he already had to.

“Well, fuck. A week from now, or something like that,” she said, rolling her eyes. “So that explains why you weren’t surprised when I came to bother you in the lab.”

He sighed, tenting his hands and setting them on the desk. “Do you want to explain what’s going on, Megan?”

“Well, at least I won’t be any more unstuck than I currently am,” she grumbled. “Anyways. What I was saying—will say, whatever—is that I’m tired of getting unstuck. It was fun at first, and even a bit of a game, avoiding myself and all that. Even in these Spaghetti Years, it hasn’t been too bad. But lately...”

“It’s become a chore,” he confirmed. “Rory’s said similar to me. It’s like it’s getting worse.”

“Yes!” She spread her arms wide in exasperation. “You once told me that it would happen less frequently as time went on! The chroniton flux would quiet down or whatever whatever.”

“You’re the one who told me that,” he commented. The ontological paradoxes bothered him. In all of his equations, he still couldn’t figure out how they were even possible, even with a dynamic tau. Yes, time travel was weird, but it followed rules. And those broke the rules as near as he could tell.

“Did I? I don’t remember. I have a hard enough time keeping track of what day it is, much less—ugh.” She brought her hand up to her forehead again. “Okay, so. Let’s talk about how we can fix this.”

He nodded. “When the Accident happened, you somehow got unmoored in time.” He clicked around on his computer, bringing up some data files and diagrams. “Come look at this.”

She came around to look; he pointed. “So, I’ve been able to get some data around the whole situation, and you being able to report at least some of your ‘jumps’ has been helpful. There’s a helpful spike in the local area whenever you do get unstuck—and then stuck again. So I can kind of track that, and build some degree of correlation with when you end up. Maybe. The data’s incomplete, though.”

“Okay, but why does that—” He looked at her, and she shut her mouth, mumbling, “Go on.”

“The thing is, the flux actually follows some degree of pattern. If we look closely, there’s a pre-flux. Kind of like how earthquakes actually have a small shockwave that proceeds the actual earthquake itself; we key early warning devices off of that shockwave. In the same way, I think I can make a device that can detect that early pre-flux and emit an inverse chroniton flux pattern to dampen the effects. Presumably, it would keep you from getting unstuck. Like an anchor keeps a ship from moving too much in the waves.”

“It sounds like you’ve been binge watching Star Trek again.”

He laughed. “My wife hasn’t seen all of it yet, so, yes.”

“Well, skip the next two movies; they’re both pretty terrible. Anyway, so you think this can actually work?”

He shrugged. “Maybe? I don’t think we can induce time travel, but it might be able to prevent it. You’ve alluded to having such a device in the future—or maybe Rory has, it’s hard to keep it straight sometimes—so I think it’s possible, and this is the most plausible way of doing it.”

“Mmhmm,” she said, nodding.

“And, I think that even if the flux is big enough that you get unstuck ... I might be able to take advantage of the flux generation process to mimic what happens when you... you know ... and thus allow you to pop back without having to deal with actually doing the work, as it were.”

“You can say the word ‘orgasm’, Tyrone,” she teased him.

He felt blood rising to his cheeks. “Yes, I know, and I do—with my wife.”

She rolled her eyes. “Okay. So, what’s the hurdle on making this?”

“Data.” He pointed to the beginning of when he actually was able to keep the scanner going at a reasonable pattern, in the middle of 2009. “I only go back three years, and I have no real readings of what it was like before the Accident. That Accident did something to create the chroniton flux, but without data from then, I can’t accurately reconstruct what it looked like, so I can’t build the thing.”

She pursed her lips. “Why don’t you have that data? You were here when the Accident happened, yes?”

So was she—but that was a future her, wasn’t it? “I was, but it’s been eight years, and the department wasn’t keen on my budget for a couple of them. And you probably remember the Excel debacle...” He didn’t want to bring it up, but it still pained him how much data they had lost because of that.

She waved it away. “Alright. I do know the date of the Accident, if not the time—”

“Three twelve p.m.,” Tyrone said. He knew that number well.

“—so if I end up there, I can ask you for a printout or something. Data compatibility and all.”

“That would suffice,” he said calmly, and she narrowed her eyes at him.

“I did end up there, didn’t I? My future, your past.”

“Spoilers,” he said with a chuckle, “But I think it’s fair to warn you that the Accident is caused by your ah ... attempt to get back. And I need the readings from when you’re doing so.”

She frowned at that, her eyes rolling up into her skull. “Interesting,” she said. “Good to know.”

He turned back to the computer to pull something else up. “I did have another thing, though.”

“What’s that?” Her eyes returned to him.

“So, believe it or not, I’ve been keeping a journal of all of your trips, based on what got reported to me. Your idea, actually, when you invoked the Sphere Protocol that first time.”

“Mmhmm,” she said, her eyes narrowing again.

“And also using what Rory tells me, and your self-reported data. It’s ... incomplete. But there’s still a ... pattern.”

He brought up the diagram, knowing it would be inscrutable as just a mess of lines. She squinted at it. “What am I looking at?”

“Let me adjust the eta to a logarithmic form,” he said, tapping some buttons on the rendering software. The squiggle of lines seemed to untangle, create curves, showing clear places where several curves all bent at once. “There was something you told me—will tell me—that made me think to do this analysis. We’ve talked about Pivot points, right?”

“Mmhmm.”

He pointed at the diagram; she mouthed numbers as she pointed at them. “Three,” she verbalized at the end.

“Three points in space-time upon which your journeys seem to pivot. I’m not sure if you visit them, or even do so multiple times. But they’re there, in the data. Three pivotal points.”

“Interesting,” she said, and there was something cagey about her response.

He paused, contemplating her. She’d mentioned four when the Accident happened, but the data clearly showed three, and they weren’t correlated with what she had said. There had to be a reason for her to lie about it. What would be the point of doing so?

“Do you know when those are?” she wondered.

“Roughly, ish. It helps that your future self mentioned them to my past self, so I knew to look at the data. Ontological paradoxes galore.”

“You get used to it,” she shrugged.

“It’s been eight years, Megan, and I’m still not used to it.”

“Hm,” she shrugged that off. “So when are these?” She tapped at the points.

He pointed at the first one. “This one here seems to be about a decade ago; late 2002 or so.” Then the next. “This one is almost undoubtedly the Accident, late 2004.”

“Mmhmm,” she nodded along, a frown tugging at her mouth.

And then he got to the one that he couldn’t map to any of the ones she had told him. “And then the last one is a little after the middle of 2006.” A dark look crossed her face. She knew what it was, but didn’t want to say. “That’s them.”