Memoirs of a Timelord (26 page)

       "Make note of that location.  It is your outer limits until you learn more control." He nodded matter-of-factly.

       "Why does it do that?" I blinked twice to clear my head.

       "As I said, you are not of that place. The very matter you are composed of oscillates at a different frequency than atomic matter in another dimension.  All of the timelines in our multiverse exist in the same space, separated only by the frequency of their atomic building blocks.  The further you get from your own thread, the more pronounced the effect is.  It will also grow in intensity the longer you stay.  Hence the short trips.  We Editors do have a few limitations, but not many." He grinned right before vanishing.  It was his way, to never linger after the lesson.  The guy never stood still.

       

       

       

       

       After finally mastering extradimensional travel, I was ready to begin my residency.  I was the Boss now, sorta.  My assignment was to be Alpha for the training galaxy.  The student ahead of me (Bara actually,) had relinquished his hold on Vinny.  Remember, the Well of Souls will talk to many people in different ways, but it is monogamous when it comes to the Timelords.  The Guf will only bind to one of us at a time, and for the next few millennia it would be me.  And Vinny would be my guinea pig to raise.  I will hug him and squeeze him and call him George...  You get the picture.

       It wasn't really thousands of years actual.  Editors don't sit through the whole timeline.  That'd take forever.  We pop in and out wherever we need to.  I have assets in place who look after my interests when I'm not there.  All I had to do was check the situation down the time-stream, make note of where the errors occurred, and go fix those people.  

       But that brings up an interesting point.  How can I edit the timeline without creating a temporal paradox?  If I make a change to the past, fix something, then how will I know to go back and fix it if it wasn't broken in the first place because I already fixed it?  Logically I'd never make the original repair and the thing would be broken again.  Any attempts to fix it would result in a repetitive loop, right?

       Wrong.  The classic time paradox is a myth based on an over-simplified model of time.  The upper dimensions are much more diverse than you had prolly imagined.  Think of time as a single string, like a strand of thread, that's the 4th dimension.  Like a piece of string, you can only go two directions; up or down the timeline.

       Now imagine that string woven into a great, thick rope of other temporal threads similar to your own.  Each of those other strings are the alternate timelines that make up the fifth dimension.  Originally they had been your world until an event significant enough occurred to cause a split in the original thread.  Sometimes it's the result of poor editing, some occur naturally.  Regardless of the cause, there are millions of alternate timelines in the 5th dimension, all crowding one another for the finite space available.  That's where I have to be careful to not crowd the rope with too many new timelines.  There is a limit on how big our dimensional rope can be, if you exceed that volume then there will be compression and you can have dimensional spillover in places where the fabric is weakest.  Dinosaurs could again walk the Earth if I wasn't careful.

       So that leads to the next question; how do I make any edits without overloading the dimension?  Creating an alternate timeline is not fixing the problem, it's crowding things.  So for every change we make, we have to take the new timeline and merge it back into the original thread.  Have you ever experienced DejaVu?  It's the fragments of a memory from the original timeline.  The way I merge the two timelines favors the alternate, so I am essentially paving over your experiences of the original world.  Only the time traveler is immune to the temporal influence.  Everyone else forgets the alternate world, mostly.  Me? I remember both realities.

       When it comes to why we use all of these techniques to engineer these worlds, the answer is a little more complicated.  Imagine you're making a big pot of stew, it's simmering on the stove and every now and again you give it a taste.  Right away you can tell that something's missing.  So you reach up to your spice rack and grab a few ingredients, flavoring it until it's just right.  That's essentially what I do for a living.  I commune with the Guf to get a taste of where its mind is, then I dump a few quadrillion socially engineered souls into the Guf to evolve it in a particular direction.  Each culture has their own properties and qualities.  The more of a species you needed, the more prosperous they need to be in order to be able to spread their seed across multiple planets. The trick is in ensuring that they are quality souls before their numbers are great enough for exponential growth.

       But Vinny is a relatively young galaxy.  The only space-borne races extant are those transplanted from other realms.  All of the indigenous stuff is still pretty primitive.  Lotsa plants and such, but not a lotta intelligent life that wasn't trucked in.  It may sound like a lot of souls when you consider there are 9 billion Voh, but in the big scheme of things that's a drop in the ocean to a celestial body the size of a dwarf galaxy. At this point along the timeline, the entire Voh civilization was but a toenail of Vinny's entire essence.

       Down the timeline some interesting species develop, but that's way after my tenure.  I have studied the long term plan thoroughly enough that I can be sure that my contribution fits into the overall scheme like a brick in a wall.  I wasn't the first student here, and I knew I wouldn't be the last.

       My chief management focus was the Voh.  By the time that I took over as Alpha, they were in the middle of an exponential growth spurt.  When you are talking about big numbers like these, you have to remember that with every generational tick of the clock a prosperous civilization will increase their numbers by a third or more, roughly doubling their size every 60 years.  Unimpeded, the 9 billion Voh souls already living in the galaxy would grow to 36,000,000,000 in little more than 120 years.  By the time you are turning out these kinds of astronomical numbers you need to make sure your society is on the right track or you risk flooding the Guf with idiots and assholes.  Imagine if you get to the point of a super-society and your people are still bigots, or believe in slavery, or have a poor understanding of human rights (known by the DuNai as The Rights of Life) then you have just infected the embryo.  You might as well be filling the Guf by flushing the toilet.

       So the Voh that I managed during my residency were vastly different people than I had met during the days of the KuluMata.  After their defeat at Genesis Pass, their quest for new worlds had been blunted considerably, leading them to rethink their ways.  It was this awakening that was the foundation for their green-revolution.  They had come to a point where they polluted their worlds so badly that they were having trouble reproducing.  Faced with extinction and a shrinking choice of systems to colonize, they had no choice but to clean up their act.

       But none of that would have been possible had they not been seriously liberalized by a series of campaigns.  I'd done most of it before I became the Alpha.  Ending apartheid was just one of the little housetraining steps I had to teach them along the way.  They had no bill of rights to protect themselves from their own government so as a people they were accustomed to being shit on.  I'd say the biggest challenge had been getting these knuckleheads to understand how many of the things being done to them were wrong, and that it was only their tormentors telling them the shape of their own world.  Humans are pack animals, and the natural instinct is to resist things that are different, even when they were good for you.

       Once you instill people with an understanding of basic human rights, then comes the fun part; teaching that lesson to the government.  With an oligarchy like the Voh of the nineteenth century you have to attack them from multiple angles; political, financial, and personal.  Usually in that order.  You hit the leaders hard enough where it counts and they will acquiesce.    You'd be surprised what people will do when you have a firm grip on their financial balls.  Just a squeeze every now and again to remind them who runs Bartertown, and you can get most things done without having to resort to blackmail or outright substitution.  In more than a few cases, I simply replaced politicians when they died of strokes or myocardial infarctions.  Plugging my own operative into their spot was ideal.  

       Technically I could go around giving heart attacks and replacing anyone I feel the need to trade out, but the DuNai were big believers in Karma.  Hence, killing people was something reserved for situations where there was no other alternative.  You'd be responsible for enough death and misery along the way, no need to add to that needlessly.  Usually if the obstructionists weren't polite enough to die of natural causes, I'd just pull them out of the timeline and let them live out their sorry existences in a purgatory camp or one of the frontier planets.  They'd finish their natural life as the DuNai preferred, but they'd do it somewhere out of my way.  In the meantime I had someone else sitting in their chair.

       Although I had a pretty good network of cut-outs and agents operating at all levels and branches of the government, I needed something different.  It wasn't until the Boss stopped by one afternoon to examine my work that I had a clue.

       "Have you considered that you are shaping the Voh based on your own ideals as applied to Earth?  Are you really taking this in the direction it needs or go, or just trying to create the Jetsons?" He spoke with a straight face, even as he made the Hanna-Barbera reference.

       "You're saying that I have a perspective issue?" I was trying to put into words what I felt thru the Guf.  Sometimes the things the Boss said were so subtle that you only caught a whisp of it, like that scent you just can't place.

       "That is one element of what I am saying, yes." He agreed.  "But almost your management network is composed of foreigners, off-worlders.  While they have been admirably trained, they are not of this culture, most not even of this species, and they lack some basic understandings of the people they monitor.  It colors their reports which in turn influence your decisions."

       "So I need to harvest more Voh to manage the Voh?" I hoped it was as simple as that.  I had inherited most of this crew from my brother Bara, and he had scrounged them from all over the universe.

       "I believe you already have a head start on that.  Don't you have a small collection of the Voh's finest and bravest in storage?  Over a thousand of them if I'm not mistaken." Hands clasped in front, he stood calmly waiting for my reply.

       I knew he was talking about Roxy and the crew of the Mata.  I'd just not had the heart to unpack that memory.  What do you say to someone when they wake to find out you let them be slaughtered?  How do you justify that?  Sorry man, we were making history and the director cast y'all as the victims of a massacre.  Bummer of a role, but we're good right?  

       "Don't..." I begged him with my eyes to just leave this one alone.  But I knew he wouldn't.  If the old man brought it up, then he had a goal in mind.  With DorLek there was no random water cooler conversation, he mentioned it for a reason.

       "It would only be logical to start there.  They were a loyal crew, a known-good quantity that could be counted on to perform a wide range of duties.  They have intimate understanding of Voh history and the social foundation the modern world is built upon.  Then you must consider their personal feelings." He stepped close before continuing.  "How would they feel if they knew that they were not your first choice?  That you preferred to recruit strangers over them?  Would that bode well for your relationship?"

       I considered that.  In reality I'd had this very same argument with myself more than a dozen times.  I think what I really needed at that moment was just someone to give me a little convincing.  The whole thing had me so conflicted.  I desperately wanted my sister back, but I truly felt like I just couldn't face those eyes, especially when she found out my role in all of this.  

       "Your fears are unfounded." DorLek placed a reassuring hand on my shoulder.  "When you awoke in that mountain pasture not so long ago, did you bear a grudge towards me for having allowed you to die from cancer?"

       I stopped dead at that.  He was right, I never blamed anyone but myself for my death, and even that was stupid. I didn't give myself breast cancer. So would she really be mad at me?

       "I have harvested millions of souls, and every single one of them had at least one complaint, but not once was it that I had saved their life.  Harvested beings may be upset at the separation from family, or hometown, or Mother's cooking, but never once did someone come to me and say they were unhappy with being snatched from the boat dock of the River Styx.  When I was harvested, I personally danced a small jig to discover that I was still of this world.  Those last moments had been so terrifying that the absolute relief of finding myself free from the torturer's blade had made me forget all of the other inconveniences of my situation.  I was alive and well, and that trumped every other emotion in my book." DorLek flashed me that grin of his.

       I could not help but smile at the way he had of knowing exactly what to say.  My guess is that he read me like a book thru the Guf.  In his time as a Master Trainer of Timelords he had seen thousands of students like me.  Hell, he's prolly had this very same conversation a hundred times before.  

       

       As an apprentice in my residency, I was expected to build my own orientation facilities for new-hires.  Consider that one of my functions as a Timelord is to find the manpower (and woman power) to maintain my network.  You need tens of thousands to manage a planet the size of Earth, and these employees need to be processed before they can be put to work.  So think of the Reception Facility as a machine where you insert raw materials, ie; good, capable people of limited technological background.  The process acclimates them to their new world while updating their technological training.  It's all very similar to Devices Training and other coursework that I went through in my early days.  Add a little smidgen of grief counseling and out of the far end of the machine comes the finished product: brand new employees, each ready to blend into their target society better than the locals.