Chapter 6: Aperture
Date: February 16, 1996
Location: Aboard Inferno
Mission: TBD
Sometimes, failure is the hardest thing to deal with. All your effort, all your dedication, and it amounts to nothing. In economics, they call it a "sunk cost." No matter how much you've put into it, you shouldn't factor that into your decision to continue. If it's not working, you need to walk away--period. Don't throw good money after bad.
In my case, money was no longer an issue. It wasn't about money. No, I'd spent almost eight years in this era, making it my "home base" from which I launched excursions through time, trying to make a better future. "Better" being a rather subjective goal, difficult to quantify, I'd set myself on something more specific: save June's life. I'd tried it the easy way, once--just go to the future, stop her from being killed. Let's just say that whole thing didn't go so well. I couldn't save her directly, but I could influence the surrounding events. Reduce the death toll, shorten the conflict, change the targets. Just get her--and me--out of harm's way. Mark, too, if I could manage it, but I never could figure out where he was on that fateful day in 2066.
DANTE did his best to help, but in the end, he was just a very powerful computer. He had no initiative or intuition other than what was programmed into him. He kept this ship running and that was enough. But it had limitations. It couldn't do everything. It could move me through time, but only about 80 years in either direction--and, like a rubber band, I always had to snap back to this time. Unless I wanted to have the ship lay dormant for decades or centuries, there was no way for me to go any further into the future, and anything more than eighty years in the past became inaccessible.
I did occasionally give a passing thought to just wiping out the families of those who caused the war. Tai, Montoya, all the petty bureaucrats and generals that surrounded them, sycophants and sympathizers, cowards and cretins, just murder the whole lot. DANTE always advised against it, though, with good reason: we could predict with some accuracy how one change might affect the future. But making dozens of changes, all at once, snuffing out hundreds of lives like that in one fell swoop? I knew it was a stupid idea. The effects would not be predictable without jetting off to the future after doing it. And he warned me, repeatedly, that if I wound up in a vastly-altered future, it was possible he'd be unable to locate me and pull me back right away. He explained it as a kind of interference, as changes in the past radiated into the future. It required him to recalibrate all sorts of equipment I admit I knew nothing about.
So, the changes I did make took lots of planning, careful execution, and meticulous follow-up. I'd say in the past seven or so years, since I "acquired" this ship, I must have performed about a hundred runs into the past, tweaking things here and there. And what did I get for it? Well, the present sure didn't look much different. Tiny things here and there. The ripple effects, I knew, wouldn't necessarily become widespread until further into the future. But, even then, June didn't make it through March 10, 2066 alive. I don't know, I think she died slightly differently, taking one or two fewer bullets, at a different cross street. I still got blown up much the same way. For all my efforts, for the lives saved, taken, and altered, the future just didn't change that much. To his credit, DANTE warned me of that possibility. In the end, some people just don't matter that much. Whatever happens to them has no appreciable effect on the future. It was a grim realization. Even grimmer, to me, was the thought that June just wouldn't survive, ever, and maybe she was never supposed to. Me not being the religious type, I refused to accept a deterministic universe. The future was not set--never set. Never firmly carved in stone.
"You are correct," DANTE said, "However, this does not mean every change to the past necessitates chaotic and vast consequences for the future. Many alterations have little or no discernable effect over the long term. In fact, in the case of many temporal changes, the further from the focal point you go, the less of an impact remains."
That was true, too. I hadn't thought as much about that. A change becomes less significant over time, depending on how important of an effect it had in the first place. I wondered if I was going about this all wrong.
"DANTE, you're always telling me about how my 'past self' did things. Did he ever decide to give up on the temporal incursion thing, and just stick around in this era and try to effect change there?"
"He did not share such information with me."
"No, of course he didn't. That would be too easy. I don't know, I'm thinking I should just make a concerted effort to change things right here, right now, and watch the effects unfold, and guide them down the path I want. Making these little one-off alterations just isn't doing it. By necessity, they have to be rather small, and I think they're too small to do any good."
"It is difficult to say one way or the other."
"I know. But I think this is the way to go. It has to be. What else is there? I'm not a spring chicken anymore. I don't know how many years I have left--ten, twenty, fifty. Whatever. But I want to spend them making a difference, not beating my head against a wall." It wasn't like I hadn't bothered to set up any kind of network here, in what was my "past," but I hadn't given much thought to really digging my heels in and trying to reshape this time toward my own ends. The days of half-assing it were over. A plan began to formulate in my head. "Where's Jennifer?" I asked aloud.
"She is currently practicing her marksmanship in the shooting range."
"Good, I think we'll need that. Get Paul up here. I'm going to go down and get her."
"What are you planning?"
I smiled. It had been a while since I'd actually done that. "Well, I won't be able to do all this alone. We'll need to get a team together. Start scanning the planet for potential candidates. You know the type: alienated, misunderstood, but with useful skills and a desire to belong."
"Robert, it is against my ethical programming to exploit the psychological weaknesses of others."
"Relax. They'll be duly compensated and well cared for. This is going to be a team. And it will be strictly voluntary. But we need help, and we need it now."
Chapter 6
- Printer-friendly version
- Login or register to post comments
- Send to friend
