Day 195 - Repeat Offenders - Chapter 3.1 - (1011 words)

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REPEAT OFFENDERS

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 3.1

“Anything about us?” Ivan was standing over Michael's shoulder and peering at the screen.


“Of course not, there's nothing to … there's no chance of anything. It hasn't happened.” Michael was reading the news on various sites, each site in a new tab, at least ten open at a time, but he was not scanning for any updates on them or the crime they committed, any of the crimes they technically had already committed. Those things simply did not exist, they were gone, reset by the anomaly being closed. They were anachronistic events, not the crimes but they the people were anachronisms along with the loot.


The crimes had not happened, time had reset and everything that was within the anomaly field was designated anachronisms and reset back to the field's point of origin. The machine drew back things within the field, and drew them back. This was Brian's big idea, the machine that recognised the stream of time as a forward moving series of events, reference points that he used a coding language to 'mark' with the machine. The basic concept he dreamed up some time ago but had very little success in executing, until inspiration and fatal diagnosis enhanced his imagination.


They were instances of the anachronism class and physically marked with a radioactive tag that used a very short half life as a timer of a kind. When the half life expired the anomaly field separated the field events from the real events still happening around it. This was the reset, and the events were the men who had become time travellers of a kind, they were unable to go far or for long, at some point they would be reset with the machine and returned to base and the machine. The men were specific instances within the anachronism class and they and anything within their individual field would be reset along with themselves.


They would have to be careful, all it really did was bounce the men and anything they had within their fields. The tags were in the wrist devices they wore, they projected an EMF signature powered by the radioactive element that provided the battery for the device. Brian constructed the short lived elements in his machine, each one carefully calibrated with the event time to provide the return path for the machine. Then the field would collapse and time would return to normal.


Brian explained it to his accomplices as the machine tagging them and bringing them back but as best he could figure it he was proving the multiverse theory in some fashion, time-lines that wrote themselves in a temporary cache of events where time continued, on borrowed time as it were, temporarily writing to a memory that was extended from reality until the anomaly collapsed and the last 'save point' was activated and the instances within that anachronism class were rolled back to that point.


The machine did not know what a human being was, what living tissue was or anything of that nature. The men were injected with the same material each time they would need to make a trip and the machine would decode the existence of the two markers to allow the separation of the anachronism events as people from the real people that were in existence at the save point. If one of the men was not wearing the wrist device, if it were damaged or removed on their return then there was the possibility of a double of a person, something they did not want to happen. Things that were not individually tagged with the element, but were within the field of the device, or devices, were returned with the men.


Therefore it was possible to die or be harmed, and then allow the field to be pulled away, to return to the reset point and re unite with an earlier version of themselves. No one wanted this to happen, not openly anyway, but it did allow for the potential of fixing fatal errors. There was a manual reset switch, which they had used, not letting the timer run out with the exception of the initial dry run testing, before they involved any criminal incidents. The manual switch would collapse the field directly, not waiting for each individuals field to expire on their half lives. This was a panic button event, but convenient for them to date. If one of them died or was injured beyond repair then they could abandon that person to die, reverse the field to prevent their body from negating the duplicated return and use that as a lesson for the person who would be there at the start point, to avoid that situation in the future.


The reversal of the field was a two man job, it required the authorisation of two out of the three participants to work, to stop any single person creating multiples of himself to overbalance the team or create a multiplicity type scenario where the person existed in two bodies with the potential madness and risk from being faced with that.


Ivan was sure that the 'double opt in” process for allowing duplication in the instances was aimed at him, to not give the chance for two of him to overwhelm the other two physically. Ivan did not take this as an insult, it showed the power and fear he wielded in his corporeal dominance. They could not risk him running amok, though he saw the potential for this he never had any intention of taking that path. The machine was beyond his ability to comprehend or to engage in any useful way. Michael was the planner, the one with the angles and the ideas on how to manipulate the anomaly field to their advantage. Ivan could not, even with an army of himself at this beck and call, even begin to try anything on the scale that Mike would do, and he could not take the operational elements from the Brains behind it all.



It was nice to be seen as a threat though.