DOWNTIME
STARDATE 41697.9 to 41906.7
II
Kartika 13, 2286 Saka Era, Indian National Calendar A Wednesday
Dulmur Residence
Motilal City, Nehru Colony
05:46 UTC
“Marion Frances Dulmur, do you have any idea what time it is?”
Dulmur winced at Megumi’s use of his full name, not just for the name itself, but from the realization that he must have really irritated her to earn its use. “Sorry, honey,” he told his wife as she gave off a massive yawn. “You know I lose track.”
“Do I ever. Late to our wedding, but you can’t be bothered to let me sleep till morning when one of your inspirations hits.”
“Never gonna let me live that one down, are you?”
She stared. “And they call you a detective?”
“That’s what I’m counting on.”
Blinking the blear from her eyes, Megumi came into the study to look at the screen on his desk. “You got a lead?”
“Had a thought, had to track it down. Sorry, I thought I was being quiet.”
“So you gonna tell me? Long as I’m up.”
He smiled and put a hand on her waist. This was why he loved her. “I remembered something the client said about our guy. How he always served her Ongilin caviar when they ate at his place.”
“Mmm,” Meg said. “That guy knew how to treat a lady. No wonder she wants him back.”
“That and the designs he seduced her in order to steal.”
“Yeah, but caviar.”
Dulmur suspected his client had lost her taste for On-gilin caviar lately. The man she’d known as Dennis Harmon had won her heart deftly, then broken it when it turned out he’d just been after her latest fashion innovation, a compact holo-emitter system that could project virtual images into midair for several centimeters around the wearer, letting one cloak oneself in intangible, dancing patterns of light and color. Dulmur found the whole idea quite frivolous, but this was the gig the Chandra Detective Agency had assigned him. And it seemed that fashion design was quite valuable to some people. Money may not have been an obsession within Federation society, but prestige and success were always valued, and whoever got credit for this fashion breakthrough would get more work, more parties, more suitors, you name it. Ms. Chandra considered this an important case, and she’d assigned it to Dulmur, giving her newest junior detective his first big chance to prove himself. His years of experience back on Centauri VII meant nothing to her; she was a true colonial, only judging people by what they achieved in their new home.
But Dulmur’s brainstorm this morning gave him confidence that he was up to the challenge. “Anyway, I double-checked with her, and she confirmed it was genuine imported caviar, not replicated.”
“Mm, and how did she feel about being woken up before sunrise?”
“Different city. It’s a few hours later there.”
“Lucky them. So what’s important about it being imported?”
Dulmur smiled. “There’s only one place on Nehru that handles the real thing.”
“So you go there, show them the picture of the guy, and they can tell you his real name?”
“If he even used it. At least they can give me more to go on.”
She kissed his cheek. “Good. Go find him.”
“Now?”
“Like you said, it’s already morning there. And you’re not gonna be able to quiet down so long as you’ve got your hot lead.” She bumped his chin with her fist. “So get the hell out of here so I can go back to sleep.”
He chuckled, then kissed her firmly on the lips. It must’ve been some kiss, since he felt dizzy for a moment, like the universe was spinning around him.
She bumped his chin with her fist. “So get the hell out of here so I can go back to sleep.”
He chuckled, then kissed her firmly on the lips. No dizzy this time. “You already said that.”
“Did I? Must be sleepier than I thought.”
Indira City
13:27 UTC
Dulmur ducked behind a public recycling station as a phaser bolt seared the air where he had stood. He waited tensely until he heard the shooter’s footsteps receding; evidently Dennis Harmon would rather escape than finish him off.
Or rather, Daisen Hamor. His client’s suitor had turned out to be a Farian, disguised with cosmetic surgery to eliminate his frontal-nasal ridge. The staff at the import shop had identified him clearly as one of their regular customers. A little more legwork had led Dulmur to the one local cosmetic surgeon qualified and disreputable enough to do the work. He’d played tough guy and tried to intimidate the doctor with little success, but that was fine, since it had just been a distraction while the scanner in his pocket cloned the contents of the surgeon’s computer and gave him an address. It had all been going smoothly until Hamor had opened fire. Dulmur had been taken by surprise. After all, why would anyone try to kill him over clothes?
Well, he didn’t like to engage in species profiling, but if the culprit was Farian, the Orion Syndicate might be involved. Still, would even the Syndicate go to these lengths just to steal fashion designs? He suspected he was onto something bigger than he’d thought. He looked forward to the look of surprise and respect on Ms. Chandra’s face when he brought this guy in.
But first he had to catch him. He’d studied a satellite map of Indira City on the way here, and he knew Hamor was most likely heading for the spaceport to make his getaway. Consulting the map on his padd as he ran, Dulmur formulated his strategy.
A shortcut brought Dulmur to a part of town dominated by single-story shops along the road. Nehru’s gravity was about ten percent less than he was used to, so it didn’t take too much effort to clamber onto the roof of one and wait. Soon, he saw Hamor emerge from an alley, glance furtively around, then dash across the street and into the next alley in his path—bringing him right toward Dulmur.
Even with the lower gravity, leaping off the roof and knocking Hamor to the ground hurt more than he expected. But that meant Hamor wouldn’t be too happy about it either, which was fine, since he was the one with the phaser. Or he had been; the impact sent it flying, saving Dulmur the added trouble.
Regaining his footing, Dulmur hauled Hamor up into an armlock and slammed him against the wall. “Okay, pal, what’s the big idea? Are next year’s runway fashions really worth roasting a guy for?”
Hamor laughed. “You think this is about fashion?” He relaxed. “I thought you were a competitor, but you’re just hired security, aren’t you? Listen,” he went on with a devious expression. “You have any idea of the espionage potential of this kind of holographic camouflage? You have any idea how rich we could both be if you let me go?”
Inwardly, Dulmur thrilled at the realization that this was an even bigger case than he’d anticipated. With this success under his belt, he’d have job security for sure, and then he and Meg could finally start a family. Next to that, no bribe could sway him. “Sorry, pal,” he said, hauling Hamor around and starting to march him out of the alley. “I’ve already had a better offer. You’re—”
He broke off as someone ran into the alley. Someone who looked exactly like Hamor.
The other Hamor gasped, pulled to a stop, and ran off into the street. Dulmur heard a curse from above, saw a movement on the roof, and looked up to see . . .
Himself.
On the ledge, ready to jump off.
Just where he’d been thirty seconds ago.
Dulmur stared at himself, who stared back at himself, and for a freakish moment it was like he was in both places at once.
And then he was in one place—the roof, looking down at himself holding Hamor. But Hamor had never entered the alley. He was running off . . . Dulmur turned his head to look for him, saw nothing. He turned back to the alley . . . and it was empty. No Dulmur, no Hamor, no phaser on the ground. And Dulmur’s aches from the jump were gone. It was as if none of it had ever happened.
He shook
himself. Hamor was running, and he was still armed. Dulmur had his priorities. He climbed off the roof, more carefully this time (or was it the first time?), and set off in pursuit.
But he was distracted as he ran, trying to figure out what had happened. Had he imagined the whole thing? As he ran, he saw people in the street, having animated conversations. He picked up snippets: “. . . and there I was back where I’d . . .” “. . . looking right at me, but it was me . . .” “. . . like time looped back, they’re saying it happened all over . . .”
But that was a mystery for later. Right now he had to intercept Hamor before he got to the spaceport. Yet he was losing the trail, and all the people coming out into the streets to chatter impeded his progress.
Then he turned a corner and found a crashed ground transport blocking the road in front of him. From the way the driver was telling it, it had swerved to avoid an impact with itself and crashed into a building instead. The crowd of onlookers was too dense for Dulmur to get past, forcing him to find an alternate route. His odds of getting to the spaceport before Hamor got away were plummeting.Although at this point, he was no longer sure what “before” meant.
Dulmur Residence
17:54 UTC
“She fired you?!” Megumi clapped her hand to her forehead, brushed back her lustrous black hair. “How could Chandra fire you?”
“He got away, Meg,” Dulmur said. “Biggest case of my career, and he gets off-planet with the goods. I notified the authorities. Maybe Starfleet or somebody will get him. But I let him get away.”
“But it wasn’t your fault! You had him, but then that . . . time thing happened!”
Dulmur shrugged. “Chandra didn’t believe me when I told her.”
“How could she not believe you? It happened to everyone on the planet! FNS is saying it’s been happening over half the quadrant!”
“Well, apparently Chandra missed it. Can’t blame her—I think it happened to us this morning, just before I left, but I thought you were just repeating yourself.”
“Yeah, but the next one was bigger, almost thirty seconds. And people seeing themselves . . . what was Chandra doing that she didn’t notice that?”
“Probably asleep in her office. But she wouldn’t admit it.”
“And what about everyone else telling her it happened?”
“They tried. But the woman has no imagination. She thought the others were just trying to cover for me.” He scoffed. “Like that creep Piccolo wasn’t happy to see me fired.”
Meg took a calming breath. “Well . . . maybe when she sees it on the news . . . realizes this really happened, and it wasn’t your fault . . .”
Dulmur shook his head. “Not gonna happen, honey. That woman is legendary for her stubbornness. It’s what made her a great detective in her day, but as an administrator . . .” He sighed. “Let’s just say she’s not going to lose face by admitting a mistake. She’ll just tell herself she fired me for letting a target get away, and won’t worry about the rest.”
“Well, that’s just not fair.”
Dulmur rose and started to pace. “Maybe, maybe not. I had a shot to fix my mistake, and I blew it.”
“Mare, I can’t believe you’re saying this! You’re just gonna lie back and take it?” Meg rose and put her hands on her hips. “We were just getting settled, Mare. We were talking about starting a family. Dammit, I like it here!”
Dulmur winced, knowing there was nothing he could do to fix things. A colony like this wasn’t as luxurious as Earth; people still needed to contribute materially in some way to earn their share of the resources. They couldn’t stay here without a job, and there weren’t that many openings here for a private investigator and a sculptor.
“Believe me, Meg, I’m as mad as you are.”
“Then do something about it!”
“I intend to,” he said. “But Chandra’s not the one responsible here.”
Megumi frowned. “Then who is?”
Dulmur looked at the holoscreen. “They’re saying on the news that this . . . time thing wasn’t natural. Somebody caused it. Somebody messed around with some kind of weird science and didn’t care how many lives they screwed up in the process.” He clenched his fists, seething. “They’re the real criminals here.”
“So what are you going to do about it?”
“I’m gonna do my job,” Dulmur said. “I’m gonna find them and make them pay.”
Vandor IV
Agrahayana 7, 2286 SE (A Friday)
20:43 UTC
It hadn’t been easy for Dulmur to track down the source of the time distortions. According to the physicists he’d consulted, the quadrant-spanning event had rendered time and space so variable that it threw off their equations, making it impossible to narrow down the origin point beyond a volume about fifteen parsecs across. Dulmur had run a search for any time-related news pertaining to those sectors, and he’d found a tenuous link. Several temporal researchers, colleagues of a noted scientist (or crackpot, depending on whom you asked) named Dr. Paul Manheim, had recently been reported dead, and the transport returning their remains had originated in that sector. Dulmur had spoken to the transport crew and extracted a name: Vandor IV. He’d learned that Vandor was a remote, uninhabited binary system, but the Federation Science Council was reportedly opening a research annex in the system, under the purview of an obscure branch called the Department of Temporal Investigations. Temporal Investigations? Dulmur had wondered. Probably a bunch of bureaucrats responsible for maintaining a consistent Federation-wide time standard, resolving relativistic discrepancies and the like. But one way or another, they dealt with time, and they were going to Vandor IV.
Starfleet and its Corps of Engineers were handling the establishment of the research annex, but that wasn’t as great an impediment to Dulmur as it might have been in another era. With peace prevailing in most of the Federation, aside from the occasional flare-up on the Cardassian border, Starfleet these days was as much a research institution as a defense force, and plenty of its vessels had civilian scientists, specialists, and family members on board. Dulmur’s years working with security and surveillance systems gave him the skills and credentials to sign on as a sensor technician with the appropriate security clearance, once he called in a few favors and arranged for certain barter transactions benefitting certain members of Starfleet’s personnel bureau.
So now, three weeks and change after Dr. Paul Manheim had ruined his life, Dulmur finally stood in the same room with the man. Manheim was an unimposing figure, bearded and middle-aged, looking a bit like Sigmund Freud. He had just come into the lab Dulmur was helping to bring online, speaking animatedly to a group of several people, including a Zakdorn male and a human male in conservative dark suits, an elderly Vulcan woman, and a younger dark-haired female from a species he couldn’t place, human-looking save for a higher, narrower cranium.
“That’s what I’ve been trying to explain to you,” Manheim was insisting. “The event proves the nonlinearity of time. If the same event can occur two different ways within a single observer’s measurement history, then the probabilities do add to more than one.”
“Absurd,” said the Vulcan. “Without unitarity, quantum theory becomes unviable.”
“Exactly, Doctor T’Viss. Don’t you see? We now have experimental confirmation of a third dimension of time. That means the Bars gauge symmetry is no longer valid.” Dulmur blinked. He hadn’t even been aware there was a second dimension of time.
The high-browed younger female spoke up. “Meaning negative probability can exist after all!”
“Indeed. In fact, it must. It’s the only way to conserve T’Viss’s precious unitarity.”
“By canceling out the excess positive probabilities! You’re saying it’s locally negative, like the Casimir Effect.”
“A good analogy, Doctor, err . . . I’m sorry, what was your name again?”
“Naadri. Of the Paraagan Science Council.”
“Of course.”
“But how would negative probabilities manifest?” asked the Zakdorn male, an older fellow with pronounced jowls even by his species’ standards. “What’s the real-world meaning of a probability that is not between zero and one?”
“Well, you’re getting ahead of the theory there, Agent Borvala,” Manheim said.
But Naadri was still pondering. “Perhaps . . . some kind of retrocausal influence that acts to negate excess probabilities. A sort of ‘anti-time,’ as it were.”
T’Viss scoffed. “That would entail negative entropy as well. How do you imagine such a thing would manifest physically?”
“In combination with positive entropy, I have no idea,” Manheim replied, though Naadri retreated into thought at the question. “But if you’ll consider, T’Viss, a force of negative entropy acting on a holistic level could explain the mystery of macrorealm convergence.”
The Vulcan conceded reluctantly. “Hypothetically. If one accepts the convergence interpretation at all.”
Manheim laughed. “Doctor, that is why I must continue my work! What we have achieved here is the first experimental confirmation of a principle that could resolve the greatest conundrums of quantum temporal physics. And that,” he went on with a messianic gleam in his eye, “is only the beginning of the secrets it could expose!”
“And so that makes it worth it to you?” Dulmur was a bit surprised to realize the voice was his own. No, he wasn’t in two places at once again, but he had impulsively spoken up, turning to confront the doctor and no longer caring about his cover. He had enough evidence by now to make a case anyway. “You think causing chaos across half the Federation is okay because you learned something about abstract physics?” He turned to the two DTI men in their dark suits. “And you! You’re with the government. Why are you helping this guy instead of hauling him off to jail?”
Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations - 01 - Watching the Clock Page 4
