St. Remedius Radio: “A Timewave Is Coming, And Some Of Us Want To Surf”

Not All Time Travelers Want or Need Accessories

(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)

A completely understandable supposition about time travel, forward or backward, is that travel is only possible with mechanical, magical, or psychotronic assistance. True, this helps consistent travel, but some sentients have absolutely no need or want of technology or thaumaturgy to visit new times. To use the obsolete and inadequate metaphor of time as a river, everyone and everything is drawn along at a consistent speed, but some can sense or be affected by currents, undertows, and whirlpools. Unlike a river, the timestream is more plastic, and most things find themselves snapped back to their normal places: almost every example of prognostication and precognition derives from the sense of self washing ahead in the timestream, only to be kicked back or run into an impediment and remembered only as dreams or visions. Likewise, future shock or debilitating nostalgia occur when the self drags far enough behind the flow that it also snaps back to its intended locale: the self only recognizes “Where did all the time go?” Many of these currents are mapped and easy to access, but for poorly understood reasons, forces move the timestream with them, causing dislocation and confusion. This may be a cause of the Mandela Effect, or may be completely unrelated.

Most travel of this sort is purely mental, whether through natural aptitude, mental adjustment, or the use of drugs and artifacts. A very talented few, though, are able to slide energy, mass, and density into the timestream and leave the timestream in different places than expected. Most use their proclivities sparingly, with a fair idea of where they came from and where they plan to go. Others, generally known as “timesurfers,” are temporal nomads, both gliding where the currents take them and tacking across to travel further in different directions. Some leave anachronisms or paradoxes, but most adhere to the temporal equivalent of “take nothing but photos, leave nothing but footprints.” Many live like backpack campers living off the land, stepping off when needed, taking in the local scenery, and catching the next wave when things become inconvenient or dangerous. Others eventually settle down in a specific corner of space-time that works the best for them, as demonstrated by the illustrious career of British diplomat Benjamin Bathurst as the first official human ambassador to the Larkash.

This sort of travel has its own dangers. Continuing the analogy of time as a river, the river has eddies and backwaters in which timesurfers can find themselves trapped with whatever else happened to float there. The trick is to know how to recognize flows, currents, and floods and being prepared to use them when they become accessible. The other trick is to recognize blockages and shoals that can be fatal on their own: gravity wells distort time as well as space, upwellings of quantum foam can block otherwise accessible routes, and even some individuals can act as anchors. Jefftys not only stay trapped in their own times, but large enough concentrations of them produce potentially lethal turbulence. Some Jefftys are the equivalent of river boulders made of broken glass and technetium, and some timesurfers, like whitewater kayakers, welcome the thrill.

Some individuals have better control over their timesurfing than others. The most famous was the contract killer Solendid Jones, who proudly bragged that she had never killed or even injured a hit in her career. This was absolutely true: she would pass by the target, grab them by the collar, and catch a regular timecurrent to Earth’s Manichean Era some 3 billion years in her general future, dropping the target on an Earth about a decade before the sun expanded into its red giant phase and devoured all of the inner planets. Those that survived massive ultraviolet solar flares, oxygen deprivation, and the latest iteration of coconut crabs (not to mention the crabs’ parasitic barnacles, generally poisonous or mind-altering if eaten) spent that time knowing that escape or rescue was impossible, that any journal or record would be blown to dust along with the planet beneath them, mostly because Jones made sure to include a handy survival guide with each dropoff. In her career, both targets and clients feared the name “Solendid Jones” not just because of what she had accomplished but because she gave the same treatment to anybody who tried to evade payment. As such, in the early 21st Century, so many TV producers, newspaper and website editors, commercial real estate developers, and book publisher and retailer executives disappeared without a trace in their time, only to spend weeks to months watching the sun grow gradually redder and larger every morning in their new home.

As for the others, many worked as members of the St. Remedius Bromley Contingent, passing on observations and occasional artifacts when they slalomed close enough to the times where St. Remedius Medical College existed. As such, many unknowingly became advance scouts for movements in the Quantum War, often before they realized it themselves.

(In loving memory of Rod Woodruff)

And while you’re at it, the request lines are now open.

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