Brian Hollenbeck

Imagine that time is a towering spiral of water, arcing through a vast void, and disappearing into infinity at either end. You can move freely along its graceful curve, dipping in and out of it at will, making no wave or ripple. You can watch dinosaurs grazing in Pangaea; the Battle of Hastings; the day when two thieves and another man were crucified on Golgotha. All that ever was is yours to observe, and record.

Touch the column, though ? interact with it, change it, and ripples begin to flow up the column, towards the present. They begin slowly, gaining momentum and power, until some years or centuries or eons in the future, the column shatters into a fine spray of droplets, vanishing into the void.

Now you know the power of time travel, and you understand the First Law:

The Past Cannot Be Undone.

Setting

In the far future, humanity has embarked on a bold adventure. Massive ships drift silently between the planets of the Solar System, bringing raw materials back to Earth, and the terraformed worlds of Venus and Mars are home to billions. These billions live in a paradise – war, poverty, hunger and disease have all been eliminated. No one is born into want, and none but the foolish or the unfortunate need ever die.

These are the fruits of the mastery of time.

Orbiting silently above each of the three homes of humanity is a great sphere, carved and fused from an icy body from the furthest reaches of the Oort Cloud. In each of these spheres, time travelers, known as Factors, study and train for decades to become perfectly proficient at their Function, the aspect of time travel over which they have unfettered domain.

When they are ready, they shed most of their physical reality – they are sealed inside neural caskets, their consciousness drifting in and out of the nanofoam circuitry substrates, picofactory clusters, and quantum computers which are their tools of trade. They are banded together in groups called Pods, and enter the Deep, the water-filled inner chamber of the Spheres, where the vast time machines themselves reside.

When they are called to service, the members of the Pod enter the machine and their consciousness’ meld into a fifth-dimension construct, grounded in the here and now by their bodies and the skill of their Engineer, who keeps watch over the Pod.

From there, they are projected down the Spiral – the shared psychoconstruct of spacetime which represents the planet in its endless revolutions around the Sun, to the source of any disturbance in the timeline. Once there, they begin the task of repairing splits, divergences or disruptions before they become the equivalent of spacetime tsunamis, washing away all of the progress and peace which humanity has worked so hard to create.

But the struggle never ends – that is the First Paradox:

Once time travel is invented, its inventors must constantly strive to keep it from being uninvented.

There are those – warlords and libertines – who believe that humanity has been stripped of its free will and vitality. Working quietly in the far corners of the Three Worlds, they prepare students to enter the ranks of the Factors, and undo what has been done. And there are those within the ranks of the Factors who forget that they serve, and instead seek to rule – to remake time in their image. They learn enough of the other Functions to travel on their own, in secret, and alter the course of the Spiral.

They are the cause of every paradox, every knot and divergence in time.

They are traitors.