Stardate 5344.7
March 2269
“This session of the Chronal Assessment Committee is now called to order,” Meijan Grey said from her seat at the head of the large, rectangular Louis XVI table that dominated the committee’s conference room. Grey thought the table’s clean-lined, neoclassical style meshed well with the early Federation-era design of the conference room, whose lines evoked both classicism and forward-looking art deco optimism. On the sides of the table sat the other members of the CAC. At her left hand was Arthur Manners, retired science adviser to the Qasr administration, whose focus was the policy applications of scientific innovations. Beyond him sat the sociologist Crenfel, a Denobulan woman charged with evaluating the potential social consequences of time-travel technology. Opposite Crenfel sat Vaacith sh’Lesinas, the Federation’s most acclaimed author of time-travel fiction. Finally, at Grey’s right hand sat Professor Simok, former director of the Central Research Institute of Aldebaran III. The 140-year-old Vulcan was an accomplished administrator as well as an able quantum physicist, and it still surprised Grey that she and not Simok was running the show. Secretary Vexam had selected Grey for her achievements in xenoarchaeology and history, notably her development of computer models for simulating alternate historical development on alien worlds. In Vexam’s view, this made Grey the closest thing available to an expert on how history could be altered by time travel. She had been selected as leader, she’d been told, for her dedication and objectivity—though in her private thoughts she understood that “dedication” translated to “almost total lack of social life to create distractions.” Her near-exclusive focus on her work wasn’t something she’d chosen, just something she’d fallen into through having little success in any other aspect of life. Still, if her work was all she had, she was determined to be her best at it.
After taking a few moments to get prior business out of the way, Grey turned to the man at the far end of the conference table. “Commodore Delgado, the floor is yours.”
Delgado smiled his calculated smile, making sure to achieve eye contact with all the committee members in turn. “Thank you, Jan. Gentlebeings, we’re here today to follow up on the recent discoveries made by the U.S.S. Enterprise at Beta Niobe.” Several of the committee members smirked or sighed; they couldn’t seem to get away from dealing with Kirk and his ship. “By now you’ve all read the logs, but to summarize for the record:
“The Enterprise had been monitoring the star Beta Niobe, which has been known for years to be on the verge of supernova. Their scans revealed that the supernova had become imminent, decades sooner than anticipated, leaving only hours for a final survey of the star’s inhabited planet, Sarpeidon. A survey performed sixty-two years ago by the U.S.S. Neumann showed that Sarpeidon’s humanoid natives had an industrial civilization, but were far from achieving space travel; with no other sizable bodies orbiting their star, they had little incentive to develop spaceflight. However, the Enterprise found the planet devoid of intelligent life, or of any active technology save for a single power source, which Captain Kirk and Commanders Spock and McCoy beamed down to investigate.” Delgado’s tone showed disapproval of Kirk’s tendency to beam into danger himself rather than delegating the task to his officers. Grey, conversely, found it rather admirable that Kirk chose to lead from the front.
“To make a long story short, they discovered that the power source was a device identified to them as the atavachron.”
“Greek for ‘ancestral time,’” sh’Lesinas observed. “Whoever programmed their translators is an Earth classicist.”
“Exactly. Kirk and his party discovered—by accident—that the device was a working time machine, which the entire population had used to escape into Sarpeidon’s past. Somehow, in just six decades, a people with no space travel mastered time travel, jumped right past slingshot effects to something far more advanced and controllable. The device had properties we can’t even begin to explain; for instance, when Commanders Spock and McCoy traveled through the atavachron and emerged five thousand years in the past, it affected Spock’s behavior in a manner consistent with that of the Vulcans of the time, before the Reformation.”
Simok frowned at the thought of a modern Vulcan reduced to the savage behavior of the past. Still, he said, “We cannot be sure that interpretation is correct. Perhaps the transportation process affected Spock’s hormonal balance, with his resultant behavior only coincidentally resembling that of primitive Vulcans.”
“You’re quite right, Professor,” Delgado said. “There’s so much we don’t understand about their achievement. How it worked. How it affected the minds of its travelers. The nature of the so-called ‘preparation’ that would adapt time travelers to their new eras and make it fatal for them to return.”
“Allegedly,” Crenfel said with a wide Denobulan grin. “Maybe they just told people that so they wouldn’t change their minds and try to come home.”
Grey spoke up. “We can speculate all we want, but we can’t do much more than that. Sarpeidon no longer exists. All we know about the atavachron, all we can know, is what this report from the Enterprise tells us. So Commodore, what are you here to ask of us?”
Delgado leaned forward. “There is more we might be able to do, Jan. The planet is gone, but the radio signals its civilization generated are still expanding through space. We can send ships to intercept them, maybe reconstruct information about the atavachron and the physics behind it.”
Crenfel pursed her lips skeptically. “Judging from these reports, the Sarpeidons never developed communication satellites. They relied on cables and short-range microwaves for most of their planetary transmissions. There’s unlikely to be much signal leakage into space.”
“Still, we have to try,” Delgado said urgently. “Surely the very fact of what the Sarpeidons did is of the utmost importance. They sent their whole population, over a billion people, to live in times throughout their planet’s past, and yet apparently caused no disruption or alteration to the timeline.”
“Or did they?” Vaacith sh’Lesinas asked, the rakish cant of her antennae matching the smirk on her blue-skinned face. “Maybe the reason they achieved time travel so quickly is that they sent their physicists back to help boost its development. A self-causative loop.”
Arthur Manners furrowed his high, hairless forehead. “Knowledge out of nowhere? How is that even possible?”
“As long as the event is self-consistent, it is mathematically permissible,” Simok replied. “Quantum information can spontaneously emerge from the vacuum.”
“Even so, it remains consistent,” Delgado said. “No erasure or destruction of an ‘original’ history. If there were an original history where they didn’t go back in time, how would they ever have achieved time travel at all, if Vaacith here is right?”
“Merely conjecture,” Simok said. “We can say nothing for sure at this point.”
“Which is exactly why we have to keep studying the Beta Niobe system,” Delgado stressed. “What if there’s some other explanation? What if they tapped into some natural spacetime warp that still exists?”
Sh’Lesinas’s antennae tilted back thoughtfully. “Maybe a time rift caused by the supernova, propagating backward far enough that they could harness it to escape.” She chuckled. “That’s a good one. I can get a story out of that.”
“In which case its existence might be impermanent,” Delgado went on. “Time, pardon the expression, may be of the essence.”
Grey sighed. She’d learned to be skeptical of Delgado’s enthusiasms. Before the CAC had been formed, the commodore and his team had spent some time investigating the planet Omega IV, another Enterprise discovery. The natives there had reputedly recapitulated the political development of twentieth-century Earth superpowers, with a tribal people called Yangs even possessing exact duplicates of the flag of the United States of America, its Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and the Christian Bible—yet their warring civilizations had been wiped out in a
global conflict millennia before any of those things had existed on Earth. Delgado had been convinced that the only explanation was some kind of time travel or alternate history. But once Grey had looked at the evidence, she’d seen the fundamental flaw in that idea. The American artifacts documented in the Enterprise logs and scans were far too intact to be thousands of years old; given the primitive conditions in which the Yang tribe had kept them, they couldn’t have dated back much more than a century. A careful study of the logs revealed that the Yangs had never actually claimed that these “holy” artifacts were ancient; Kirk had simply jumped to that conclusion, as observers of indigenous cultures often made the mistake of assuming that their contemporary customs represented ancient tradition. With some further investigation, the committee had concluded that an Earth ship from the “space boomer” era, the E.C.S. Philadelphia, had visited Omega IV sometime in the late 2140s and then disappeared, probably dying from the same disease that had killed the crew of the U.S.S. Exeter twelve decades later. As far as Grey and Crenfel had been able to reconstruct, the Philadelphia’s traders, operating in the days before the Prime Directive of noninterference, had found the Yangs’ traditional beliefs strongly similar to American democratic values and so had given them replicas of American paraphernalia to encourage them in their fight for freedom. The ideas were similar enough that the Yangs had easily embraced these writings as new revelations from their existing deities, seamlessly folding them into their culture as though they’d always been part of it. A fascinating sociological case study, but hardly a time-travel incident.
Still, Grey knew that not everyone on the committee shared her doubts. Delgado was a master politician and had been wooing all the committee members individually, trying to win them to his side. Manners and Crenfel had both fallen under his sway and were inclined to vote in favor of pursuing temporal research. Simok was immune to Delgado’s persuasion, and sh’Lesinas had reacted rather negatively. Unexpectedly, the time-fiction author had proven reluctant to see time travel developed in reality; not only could she easily imagine the risks, but she feared seeing her novels rendered obsolete or made to look foolish by real breakthroughs. So Grey herself often cast the deciding vote.
The Sarpeidon issue was not one that came down to a divided committee. Simok was curious to see if more could be learned about the Sarpeidons’ achievement, and even sh’Lesinas was intrigued to see what methods could be used to study a world after its destruction, in case she could crib something for her fiction. And though Grey felt Delgado was wasting his time on another wild goose chase, she couldn’t see any harm in looking—unless they actually found something like an active time warp, in which case she might reconsider.
Delgado’s next motion, however, was more divisive. “Kirk’s encounter with the atavachron further underlines that it is possible to travel into the past and return without altering the timeline. Whatever uncertainties we may have about the theory behind time travel, the empirical evidence shows that it can be done safely, even when it occurs by accident. Imagine what we could achieve under controlled conditions—such as a carefully designed expedition through the Guardian of Forever.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Grey advised.
“On the contrary, we’ve been lagging too far behind. The potential of the Guardian is too great to ignore. Why, we wouldn’t even have to speculate about how the Sarpeidons developed time travel—we could just watch it happen through the Guardian.”
“Well, that would take all the fun out of finding out, wouldn’t it?” asked sh’Lesinas.
“Haven’t your teams had problems getting detailed data through passive scans of the Guardian’s playbacks?” Manners asked. It felt like a rehearsed question.
“That’s right,” Delgado said, sounding equally rehearsed. “The sheer volume of information is extremely dense, and it can be difficult to filter specifics out of the mass. Historically important events can stand out in the data, but the Guardian seems to have its own definitions of what’s important. It’s very stream-of-consciousness. Which underlines the importance of having historians to interpret events,” Delgado said, meeting Grey’s eyes. “Without that interpretation, the raw data can be very confusing. Especially when there’s so much of it piled together, racing by so quickly that it’s hard to tell what images go with what years or even decades.”
“So you think we could learn more through actual expeditions,” Crenfel prompted.
“I do. The value of observers on the scene cannot be overstated.”
“Neither can the risks,” Simok countered, “if the observers should inadvertently make a significant change. I remain skeptical of Doctor T’Viss’s model of timeline invariance.”
“Even so, there are ways that risk can be minimized,” the commodore answered. “Our first expeditions could be to places and times that we know will have little effect on the future. As I said, Sarpeidon before its destruction is a possibility. Pompeii in the days before Vesuvius erupted. Galos Sigma before the dwarf planet collision.”
“The dawn of Orion,” Grey murmured, almost involuntarily. It was a longtime fascination of hers—an indigenous civilization undergoing its first great blossoming, only to be almost completely annihilated in a wave of alien invasions. The native Orions had been conquered and enslaved for generations, and though they’d finally overthrown their oppressors, by then their indigenous culture was lost, replaced with the language and customs of their former slavers. What little remained of their original, pristine civilization was an enduring archaeological mystery. What had the Orions been like before the event that so traumatized them as a people? What might they have become without the conquest? Even her simulations had been unable to provide useful answers, with so little data on Orion’s dawn civilization to work from. Although Grey had eventually managed to bribe and buy her way onto Orion to conduct an archaeological dig, she’d been able to find little intact evidence. What the ancient invaders hadn’t destroyed, centuries of Orion industrial development and internecine war mostly had. It was a gap in the archaeological record that she had despaired of ever filling.
“Perfect,” Delgado said. “With your expertise, and that of any other experts you care to recruit, the expedition could be carefully designed to minimize any risk of historical disruption.”
“This is premature,” Simok warned. “There are too many unpredictable variables.”
“But that’s the beauty of it,” Manners countered, no doubt repeating the words Delgado had already swayed him with. “Change the future of a place that has no future, and nothing is affected. Any alterations would just get canceled out.”
Grey felt Delgado’s eyes on her and knew she was being played. The prospect was enticing, but that was exactly why she had to approach it with caution.
Still . . . what if Orion history were to be changed . . . and the changes then canceled out, as Arthur says? Imagine if we could observe alternate histories for real, compare them against my models.
No—that kind of thinking was risky. Intentionally altering history, using real people’s lives as an experiment? That was where the danger lay, in the sheer power to play God.
Still, she knew that Manners and Crenfel would vote for Delgado’s plan, Simok and sh’Lesinas most likely against it. The deciding vote would be hers, and though she was reluctant to be the one to approve this plan, neither was she comfortable being the one who scuttled it altogether—not until she’d had more time to think about it. “I propose we table a decision until we’ve researched the proposal further. First we need to determine if a plausible methodology can be developed to minimize the risk of interference. If we can achieve that, then we can vote on whether to authorize it. Agreed?”
The motion passed easily, for after all it was just an agreement to discuss it more. Still, Grey saw the satisfaction in Delgado’s eyes. He’d found her weakness now.
Time vortex system
Location classified
Stardate 5373.4
“We are in orbit around the planet of the time vortex, the focus of all the timelines of our galaxy,” James Kirk said into his log recorder. “Our mission is to assist a team of historians in the investigation of Federation history.” Meijan Grey, who stood next to Kirk on the Enterprise bridge, declined to point out that she was more an archaeologist than a historian. After all, that was the least of Kirk’s concerns.
The captain snapped off the recorder and turned to her. “It would be redundant, Doctor Grey, to restate my objections for the record. But I still consider this an unacceptably dangerous experiment.”
“Believe me, Captain Kirk, I have considerable reservations about it myself. And I appreciate that no one understands the risks posed by the Guardian better than you and your crew. But taking risks in the name of knowledge is what Starfleet is for, and the potential for knowledge offered here is extraordinary.” Alas, attempts to probe Sarpeidon’s past through the Guardian had proved unsuccessful; whatever temporal phenomenon made the atavachron possible seemed to create interference that the Guardian could not penetrate. Or perhaps, as a member of the Guardian observation team had proposed, the sentient time portal was simply jealous of the competition. The Chronal Assessment Committee’s decision on whether to undertake Delgado’s proposed expedition had been delayed for months as other time-related incidents had taken priority, such as the Enterprise’s second encounter with Gary Seven (in the present, confirming that Seven’s technology did allow transporting through time) and the raid on the Guardian planet by the race calling itself Clan Ru. The latter event had brought the committee within a hairsbreadth of abandoning the plan altogether, but Delgado had won them over by citing the remarkable scientific insights that had resulted from that affair, including detailed documentation of the asteroid impact that had triggered the death of Earth’s dinosaurs. Delgado’s knack for exploiting his political alliances had played a role as well; he’d recently managed to wangle a promotion to rear admiral and Chief of Starfleet Science Ops, and had used that clout to push the mission through over the Science Council’s resistance, in exchange for assurances from Starfleet that much more stringent security would be put in place around the time vortex planet.
Star Trek: DTI: Forgotten History Page 6
