The SubTime Station

A David Sands Competition story by Paula Berman

An entry in The Sands of Time Writing Competition

I would say I showed up to work bright and early that morning, but “early” has no meaning when your workplace is outside time. I was a team manager at the SubTime station, and you’ve never heard of us. Even if you’ve been though the Station, the odds are 99.9% that you’ve never heard of us.

On the plus side, that means we didn’t need to follow all the usual rules of customer service: our customers weren’t always right, and we never needed to smile and tell them to have a nice day … because 99.1% of them were out cold when they got here.

Somewhere in the far future, they finally learned to understand and control time travel. The problem is, that wasn’t the first time that time travel was invented, not by a long shot. It had been invented eons before it was fully understood, and many times it was invented by one person or a few people, who had no desire to share it with the greater public. They only wanted to use their new invention to meet their own goals, whether that was choosing the correct lottery numbers or assassinating their least favorite historical figure.

And so those scientists of the far future, the ones who finally, after all those abortive inventions, finally truly understood time travel (or as some prefer to call it, investigating historical events in contemporary time) and who had worked out all the probabilities, set up the SubTime Station.

Our remits were multiple:

1) Save time travelers, and

2) Ruin their trips, if they were attempting to change history or their own futures.

The first part required us to capture all time travelers on their way through and re-adjust their trajectory. 97% of all time travelers forgot to include, in their calculations, the fact that they started and wanted to end their time travel on a moving planet. This means that they would have ended up in empty space, realizing their error, if they did so at all, in the microsecond before their bodily fluids boiled away into the vacuum where they had mistakenly expected Earth to be. The scientists who set up our station placed it in the formless void between times where gravitational interactions ensured that they couldn’t avoid us; since most humans (that same 99.9% who had never heard of us) were incapable of remaining conscious in the interstices between times, they arrived unconscious, we ran some automatic calculations that predicted their intended final destination, and we rerouted them to arrive where they’d meant to go. Since no time elapsed either where they left from or where they arrived, and since they weren’t conscious while they were here, there was nothing to let them know they had been diverted, and our founders, who had no interest in having time travel thoroughly understood at earlier points in history, where glad to leave it that way.

In 0.1% of cases, people were conscious when they arrived here. In those cases, we recruited them to work here. Because these were people who by definition were already fascinated by the intricacies of time and how it could be subverted, 75% of them accepted the job offer. The other 25% had their memories wipe (another benefit of far-future scientific knowledge) and were sent back home.

I mentioned that we had two goals. When our automated equations predicted that our traveler was going to have a significant effort on history (easier than you’d think, since 50% of those set out to assassinate Hitler) we diverted them to another place or time, from whence they returned home thinking their time travel machine wasn’t working quite right. Even when this happened repeatedly to the same traveler, they never did suspect that we existed and were thwarting them.

And then one day … Karen arrived.

We were excited at first; only 1 in 1,000 travelers were able to stay conscious in the SubTime Station, and this was our chance to gain a new coworker. We were perennially short-staffed, since so few people were physically able to work here.

We gave her the standard explanation and offered her the standard choice: to abort her planned trip and get the full guided tour here, or to go on with her plans and get the full tour on her return trip. (Only 5% of our potential recruits chose to go on with their original plans. After all, time travel means it never matters when you leave, and there is always another chance to try again.)

So Karen chose to learn about the SubTIme Station, and she seemed honestly excited. She asked endless questions:

“Who set this up?”

“Why are you doing this?”

“How many people work here?”

“Where do you go on your off days?”

“What is the work-life balance like?”

After some time, her questions grew creepier and more annoying.

“Can I see where you live? No, not an empty residence, I want to see where you really live, so I know what conditions are really like.”

“Do people here tend to date each other? Are you seeing anyone?”

“What’s your favorite time to visit? Why? Could I go with you sometime?”

“If we’re monitoring time travel, does that mean we can watch people whenever they’re visiting another time? Has anyone found Jack the Ripper yet?”

After more than 150 questions (I know, because it was 150 after I started counting) I excused myself briefly to get myself come coffee get rid of the previously-used coffee, and asked one of my team members to continue showing her around, while I headed toward the side of the offices where we kept the restrooms, the coffee maker, the first aid station, and a few other necessary functions.

When I returned, my team member was about to return to her duty station, when Karen keeled over suddenly. We bent over her, checking her breathing and peeling back one eyelid to check that this was just the usual unconsciousness in reaction to being here, rather than some health condition for which we’d need to get her treatment.

Everything seemed normal, so I said to my team member, Liz, “Welp, I guess this was just a delayed reaction. But clearly, she is out cold. I guess she’s unqualified to work here after all.”

Liz squinted at me suspiciously. “You did it, Maddy, didn’t you?”

I blinked at her innocently. “Did what?”

“You did something to her so that we wouldn’t have to work with her, didn’t you?”

“Why, did you want to work with her?”

“Well, no.”

“Then, as I said, did what?”

“What?”

“Exactly.”

Liz went back to her station without another word, and sent Karen on to the destination she’d intended when she originally programmed the time machine she’d bought off the black market in her own time. (Ancient Assyria, for the record – we had no idea what she planned to do there, but we had no objection to people traveling for fun or education. The time stream could deal with a good many variants before it deformed in major ways that we were there to prevent.)

Once again, I was grateful for perks of my job: the off-days in the far future, where I’d been able to visit the slightly illicit pharmacy where they had drugs that were undetectable by the clumsy methods of earlier times; the high-tech fabrics that allowed me to change the appearance of my clothing so that I could easily, for one hypothetical example, impersonate a new barista in Karen’s favorite coffee shop in her own time; and of course, time travel itself, because no matter how long you were gone, the only important thing was when you returned. I made a mental note to promote Liz for her quick comprehension, and another to burn the medicine wrapper later on (if there could be said to be a later on) in my own quarters.

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Paula Berman is recently retired from a technical career. Having spent much of her working life trying to explain facts and processes so that they could be easy understood, in clear defiance of the usual process, is employing her newfound freedom to make stuff up out of whole cloth.

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