Star Trek: DTI: Forgotten History

by Christopher L. Bennett

  SCOTT: No, ma’am. Not with my bair—ah, my engines. It’s too great a strain on the ship. You don’t force a machine to do something it wasn’t designed for.

  GREY: So your only objections are technological? Do you have an opinion about the more . . . existential risks posed by time travel?

  SCOTT: I don’t know anything about that. That’s for the philosophers and the theoreticians to hash out. I mean . . . aye, it’s common sense that if the same day happens two ways, it’s still the same day. The same time. And if two things happen at the same time, well, then obviously one hasn’t replaced the other, but they’re simultaneous. Side by side. Ah, if you see what I’m saying, ma’am.

  GREY: As you’ve witnessed yourself in your crossing to the Terran Empire timeline.

  SCOTT: Aye. Still, though . . . I’ve seen some things these past few years that make me wonder. That Guardian . . . when we saw history changed, it didn’t say we’d just been shunted into a parallel track. It said our history was gone. That we had no home to return to. So I . . . I just don’t know.

  Excerpt from interview transcript: T’Viss, Doctor, Research Fellow in Quantum Physics, Cambridge University

  Recorded at Starfleet Headquarters, San Francisco, Stardate 5534.8

  GREY: Granted, Doctor, everyday logic says that an event cannot cease to have occurred. But haven’t we seen compelling evidence that time travel defies everyday logic? Common sense used to insist that time and space were constant for all observers, or that one’s own planet was the center of the universe.

  T’VISS: My thesis is grounded in nothing so pedestrian, Doctor. It is a matter of detailed mathematics, a wave theory of the universe supported by extensive observational and experimental data. There have always been those who have sought to employ the counter-intuitive aspects of quantum theory to justify beliefs in the irrationality or unknowability of the universe, but in fact, quantum equations are precise and deterministic. Every possible state of a particle and the relative probabilities thereof can be precisely described by its Schrödinger equation. The same can be extended to any ensemble of particles up to and including the entire universe. Any mystery or uncertainty we perceive is merely the result of incomplete information about the entire state of events. To the audience of a stage magician, an item may appear to transform or vanish mysteriously, but this is because they only perceive selected aspects of the performance. To one aware of the full scenario, the event becomes entirely rational and self-consistent. In our case, quantum linearity prevents us from perceiving more than one measurement history at a time. Could we but measure the entire universe at once, encompassing all contributing histories, all perception of paradox or erasure of events would vanish.

  GREY: But the very act of crossing between timelines requires nonlinear quantum mechanics to exist.

  T’VISS: To a limited extent. Still, each observer perceives only one outcome at a time, so unitarity is effectively conserved, and the mechanics are still essentially linear.

  GREY: But if they remember a different outcome to an event . . .

  T’VISS: Memory is classical. A mind can remember events that have no quantum existence, such as a dream.

  GREY: So you remain convinced that there is no danger to our timeline from anything that a traveler might do in the past. All they would do is displace themselves from their own history into a different one.

  T’VISS: There is no logical basis to doubt it. Any alternative models are grounded in hypotheticals and impossibilities.

  Excerpt from interview transcript: McCoy, Dr. Leonard H., Lt. Cmdr., CMO U.S.S. Enterprise

  Recorded on Starbase 23, Stardate 5578.4

  McCOY: All right, let’s say for the sake of argument that if you go back in time and foul things up, it won’t affect your past, just create some other reality alongside it. Well, what gives us the right to foul things up for the people in that reality?

  GREY: Any change wouldn’t necessarily be for the worse, though.

  McCOY: Maybe not, but who are we to decide that? Isn’t that why we have the Prime Directive? To remind us we can’t always judge what’ll help and what’ll hurt, so sometimes it’s best just to leave well enough alone?

  GREY: And yet your crewmates have always managed to correct whatever disruptions they caused.

  McCOY: Maybe. (pause) What scares me, though . . . when I came to my senses back in 1930, after the Guardian threw me back . . . I’d lost my hand phaser. And the damn stone doughnut whipped us back before I could look for it. I’ve got no idea what could’ve happened to it. Ever since, I’ve been watching for signs that it changed something, that this isn’t the world I started out in.

  GREY: But you haven’t found any?

  McCOY: I don’t know. How do I know what’s a change and what’s me forgetting my history lessons? I . . . I try to convince myself that I’m worried over nothing. The Guardian said everything was back to normal. Probably the phaser fell in an old-style sewer and washed out to sea or something. But still . . . something that powerful lost in a primitive world . . . it’s scary to think of the harm it could’ve done.

  GREY: So you don’t think the risks of time travel are justified by the potential for historical research?

  McCOY: No, I do not. What’s so blasted great about the past anyway? Rampant filth and disease, primitive medicine little better than butchery, ignorance and hate everywhere. . . . They say people who don’t study the past are doomed to repeat it, but in my experience, it’s the people who can’t let go of the past who end up repeating it.

  GREY: I’m surprised, Doctor. The impression I’ve gotten is that you consider yourself an old-fashioned type, suspicious of progress.

  McCOY: Oh, I’m suspicious of all sorts of things, Doctor Grey. Too much focus on the past or the future can keep people from making the right choices in the present. I don’t appreciate old-fashioned values because they’re old, but because they’ve stood the test of time and still have value today. You wouldn’t want to drink a fine wine before it matured. No, Doctor—the value of time is that it moves forward.

  Excerpt from interview transcript: Aleek-Om, Dr. Loom, Professor of Ancient History, Institute of Galactic History

  Recorded in New Samarkand, Alpha Centauri III, Stardate 5708.0

  ALEEK-OM: The importance of the past in our lives cannot be overstated. It can be difficult for you short-lived races to understand this. But we Aurelians have strong ties to the past through the tales and insights of our elders, preservers of an oral heritage that stretches back over twenty thousand standard years. We look upon you humanoids, with your short lives and imperfect memories, and lament that so much of your past is lost to you, leaving you without a sense of direction. It is why I became a historian—to do what I could to help improve your sense of your past.

  GREY: And you think that being able to go back and witness the past firsthand . . .

  ALEEK-OM: Yes. It would anchor you to your history in a way otherwise unattainable.

  GREY: Is that worth the risk that time travel might disrupt the past?

  ALEEK-OM: I take a risk every time I fly to work in the morning. But I am trained in the use of my wings and my senses, so it is a manageable risk. There is hazard now, in the infancy of temporal research, but only due to ignorance. We are fledglings, tentatively venturing forth from the aerie and struggling not to fall. The more we practice, the more we stretch our wings, the surer and safer our flights will become.

  Excerpt from interview transcript: Kirk, James T., Cpt., Cmd. Off. U.S.S. Enterprise

  Recorded on Starbase 23, Stardate 5578.6

  KIRK: As an explorer, I certainly appreciate the incredible potential for discovery that time travel offers. And I’d be lying if I denied there was a part of me drawn to the adventure of opening a whole new kind of frontier.

  GREY: It’s not the nature of a starship captain to be risk-averse.

  KIRK: As a rule, no. Risk in the pursuit of knowledge is what Starfleet is all about. (pause)
But it’s one thing for this ship, this crew, to risk our own lives in that pursuit. Every one of us has chosen to make that gamble. But to risk the existence of others who don’t have a say—let alone whole worlds, whole . . . time continuums that could be jeopardized without ever knowing why—is another matter altogether. That’s not just a matter of our risk anymore. It’s being reckless with the lives of other people, other civilizations. And my duty as a Starfleet officer is to protect those lives, not to gamble with them.

  GREY: So in your best judgment, the experiments should stop?

  KIRK: I know that once a thing is discovered, it can’t be undiscovered. Our descendants will travel in time—that’s a reality we can’t avoid. But as for us, here and now . . . we’re not ready. We’re children playing with fire. And we’ve seen how little it takes for that fire to burn out of control. Someday we will master this, but now is not the time. We need to stop before we burn ourselves away.

  The halls of power

  May–July 2270

  Admiral Antonio Delgado could see the writing on the wall as the interviews played before the joint session of the Science and Intelligence subcouncils. These fourteen Federation councillors would decide the fate of his temporal research based on the findings of Meijan Grey’s committee, and it was clear that they were leaning toward an outright ban. As politicians, they had little grasp of the scientific arguments. And the testimony of the Enterprise crew, the very individuals with the most direct experience of time travel, was damning. Delgado couldn’t help feeling betrayed as he listened to Kirk, Spock, and the rest of them forming a united front against the very research they had made possible. He had begun this with such high hopes of a long, productive partnership with these men, and now they had the sheer selfishness to pull the rug out from under him just because they’d had a few painful experiences or didn’t want their precious ship to endure a few bumps and bruises.

  No matter; Delgado had spent years cultivating friends on the Science Council. The seven-member subcouncil had been one of the Federation’s most powerful legislative subdivisions from the start, overseeing the Institutes of the Federation Science Council, the leading state-sponsored research facilities in the known galaxy, as well as holding authority over Starfleet’s scientific arms such as Science Ops and UESPA. And he still had Intelligence Council allies left over from his years in SI. He’d lost some supporters on both subcouncils in the recent elections, but he’d gone right to work on winning over the newest members.

  “We can’t close the door completely here, Maria,” he urged the freshman Councillor Moi of Regulus III as he let her beat him at racquetball. “Imagine the insights into the nature of time and the universe that could be right around the corner. I’ve seen some of Doctor B’kash’s recent papers,” he added, citing the noted Caitian physicist from the Regulus III Science Academy, an institution in which the novice Science Council member took warranted pride. “He may be onto something important. Imagine the tragedy if his work were cut short.”

  For others, it was a matter of appealing to their relationship with the past. Councillor Chab jav Lorg of Mars longed to unearth more about the overlooked role the planet’s small Tellarite population, his ancestors, had played in its colonial history, while his fellow Intelligence Council member Jard Elbir of Tiburon wished to recover ancient knowledge lost in the post-Zoran purges on his world.

  Still, Delgado could tell that the majority of the councillors were concerned about the risks of altering the past. For them, he tried a different tack. “Time travel doesn’t have to be one-way,” he told two of the Science Council members, Danga Sitru of Ithen and Konahr Lutet of Makus III, as they dined together in one of Paris’s finest restaurants. The two councillors made a striking contrast, Sitru a child-sized male with bright copper skin and a colorful fez and scarf, Lutet a strikingly tall female with mahogany skin and a hooded, multicolored robe. So Delgado had chosen a restaurant with privacy screens so they could talk without worrying about curious bystanders. “Imagine traveling into the future. Coming back with technologies that could push us centuries ahead of rival powers. Learning about wars and disasters before they happen, giving us a chance to prevent them.”

  “But if history can’t be changed . . .” Sitru began.

  “We couldn’t erase those future timelines, but we could create a new branch for ourselves that would exist apart from them. We could shape the future however we wish.”

  During a round of Lunar golf with the Betelgeusian Science Councillor Chuu’iik Hru’uith and the Intelligence Councillors S’kaa of Sauria and Grace Murabi of Izar, he asked, “And what about our enemies? We’ve stumbled across time warps and portals by accident more than once—what’s to stop the Klingons or Romulans or Tholians from doing the same? Imagine, say, the Klingons going back a week before an important conference, before security’s in place, and hiding a time bomb. Or the Romulans traveling into the future to read about our classified military plans in a history book. We need to keep researching time travel so we can develop defenses against it.” Hru’uith perked up at that; Betelgeusians thrived on competition, which was why Delgado only played golf against Hru’uith when he needed to persuade him of something. S’kaa and Murabi kept their own counsel, but he knew they were two of the most hawkish members of Intelligence.

  “There must be laws, Antonio,” said the chair of the Intelligence Council, Zhimen ch’Rhettel of Andor, as they took in Paris’s most acclaimed multispecies burlesque revue along with freshman Intelligence member Lyo Morhas of Icor IX, whose purple skin flushed darker at the sights onstage. “You can’t stop that. A lot of councillors and cabinet members are frankly frightened out of their wits by what they heard in Grey’s reports. Either that or outraged that Starfleet has proceeded so recklessly with these experiments.”

  “I understand that, Zhim. But the question is, how far should those laws go? The Federation has laws against genetic augmentation, laws we both support, but I know how hard you’ve worked to make sure those laws don’t become so draconian that they impede legitimate genetic medicine and research. That’s how the Federation works. We seek a responsible balance, not absolutism and ideological purity. Even where we impose limits, we still recognize the value of pure knowledge, and of safe, practical applications of that knowledge within the limits we choose.”

  And so the legislation began to take shape. Temporal research within the Federation would be strictly regulated by the Science Council. The work of theorists studying temporal physics in the abstract would not be suppressed, of course, but any active experiments would have to be monitored and regulated in the name of galactic security. Any time machines or naturally occurring temporal warps discovered in the course of space exploration would be confiscated or secured.

  But new law meant new bureaucracy to enforce it, so there would have to be a department established to carry out these responsibilities, under the aegis of the Science Council Institutes. (Ch’Rhettel had pressed for Intelligence or Starfleet oversight, but the Science Council chair, T’Nuri of Vulcan, had argued persuasively that this was fundamentally a scientific matter, one that the Science Council and its Institutes were best equipped to cope with.) Thanks to Delgado’s lobbying, what was initially mooted as a Department of Temporal Regulation or Control was legislated as the Federation Department of Temporal Investigations—an agreeably ambiguous name, satisfying those who saw its mandate as criminal investigation to enforce the new temporal laws as well as those who saw it as scientific investigation of temporal phenomena and their applications. As for the general public, or those curious enough about government to notice this new line item in the Science Council budget, any guesses they might make as to its meaning would probably be off the mark, since who besides the crackpots would believe the government had a department investigating time travel?

  The legislation passed in both subcouncils by a margin of ten to four, over the objections of those who found it too strict or too lenient. The closed-session vote in t
he general council was closer, though the reasons for opposition were different; many councillors simply couldn’t grasp time travel as more than an abstraction and questioned what they saw as a frivolous allocation of resources. But it passed thanks to the clout of the two subcouncils that sponsored it and the willingness of the more reasonable councillors to defer to the judgment of those who actually understood the subject being legislated. And so, on Stardate 5886.7 (Sol referent), 7:08 PM Greenwich Mean Time on the twenty-second of July in the year 2270 Common Era—a Friday—the Federation Department of Temporal Investigations was created by law.

  DTI Headquarters

  Greenwich, European Alliance, Earth

  Stardate 5909.3

  August 2270

  In Delgado’s ideal world, he would have been appointed as the inaugural director of the DTI; but of course there was no chance of that, given that the Council saw it as a civilian check on Starfleet’s reckless experimentation with time. Besides, Secretary Vexam and the Science Council had felt the simplest way to staff it was to ask the Chronal Assessment Committee’s members to stay on permanently. Crenfel declined, wishing to spend more time with her family, and sh’Lesinas already had her own career as a full-time author, though she agreed to remain available to the DTI as a consultant. So Meijan Grey, Simok, and Arthur Manners would form the core of the department’s leadership. Its research staff would be drawn from those personnel within the Science Council Institutes who were most qualified to deal with temporal physics and technology.

  “You need T’Viss,” Delgado told Grey at their first meeting following her appointment as DTI director. Her private office was a small, spartan space within the equally austere headquarters of the novice, low-profile agency, which some whimsical Science Council planner had arranged to situate in a restored semidetached Victorian house just north of the Royal Observatory, sitting practically on top of the Prime Meridian. “She’s possibly the finest, most experienced temporal physicist in the Federation.”