Temple's Tale

A Story of the Time Corps
Copyright © 1997, 1999 Chris Halliday
All Rights Reserved

Chapter 1

He was a big man, immaculate in black fatigues, the hall's concealed illumination gleaming off his epaulettes and rank pins. Both his bearing and appearance betrayed his military origins, and an aura of self-possession surrounded him. He seemed a man tested by time, sure of his limits and capabilities. Taking his place at the podium in front of the omnipresent hourglass symbol, he paused briefly, surveying the silently expectant crowd. His eyes were in shadow, his expression unreadable. When he spoke, his voice was surprisingly soft.

"Allow me to introduce myself. Colonel John Temple, First Division. I was born in Minnesota, USA, in 1945. Studied physics at Princeton, and played a lot of football before I got bored and joined the army. Period records will tell you that I bought the farm at Nha Trang, but the stiff they shipped back after the ambush was what the tech boys call a Quantum Echo. Since the Corps recruited me I've completed fifty successful missions downtime, so I reckon I'm qualified to teach you a thing or two. I'll be your guide through the next few days, helping you adjust to your new world. I know that right now you're all a little freaked. That's only natural. After all, most of you were yanked out of time at a point when you thought death was inevitable. I've got good news and bad news about that. The bad news is that you did die, according to history. There's a body in your grave that's identical down to the last particle, your families have mourned and moved on, your life story is done. But there's good news too. You aren't dead, and you have a chance to live on. To become heroes."

The first induction session lasted an hour, the maximum period the crowd could absorb information whilst still in a state of borderline culture shock. John Temple did the best he could to cram his experience into their minds, giving them the standard recruits pep-talk, mixed with enough of the cold truth to let them keep their illusions while knowing what it was they were getting into. He told them about the Code - his voice deepening unconsciously with pride - and about some of the risks. He told them exactly what their options were and then he asked them to choose, silently praying for them to pick a life of peace and security.

Almost unanimously, they chose the Corps.

Afterwards, while the others gathered in groups and talked, one of the recruits walked out of the hall into the Triassic evening beyond. He was young, only twenty-five subjective years old, and was just beginning to realise what he had done and what he had lost. Alone with his thoughts, he wandered along the perimeter of the compound, listening to the hum of the security field and watching the stars come out. Eventually he stopped on a rise that overlooked the complex, and sat beneath a cycad trying to catalogue the changes to his life since his "death". Trying to find the point at which things had gone crazy.

"Nice night."

"Jesus!" The boy lurched to his feet, his heart racing. The voice had come from right next to him, but he hadn't been aware of anyone there.

"Whoa kid, slow down! I'm sorry. I didn't mean to scare you. Are you okay?"

"Yeah, yeah sure. I'm okay. I just didn't see you there." Gotta be another recruit, thought the boy, though he still couldn't see enough of his companion to be sure. Suppressing his annoyance at the intrusion into his private moment, he decided to be sociable.

"What did you think of the speech back there? About fifty percent truth, fifty percent computer generated bullshit I reckon."

"I'd say that was pretty close. Do you have experience in these matters?" said the colonel, leaning forward into the light.

"Er, no sir!"

"Just foolin'. Don't sweat it kid." The colonel gave the kid a tight, brief smile, turned on his heel and strode off toward the commissary building. He'd gone about twelve metres before the boy called his name.

"Colonel Temple?"

"What is it Recruit?"

Temple's voice sounded more terse than he'd intended, and he could see the kid going red. He regretted embarrassing the boy, but he was tired and impatient to be alone again.

"Sir, I need to talk to someone."

"Talk to your friends."

"I haven't made any yet sir. I don't mix well with my contemporaries, let alone people with hundreds of years between us."

"That'll change." Temple paused, then sighed. "Okay kid, what d'you want to talk about?"

The boy swallowed, trying hard to ease the sudden dryness in his mouth.

"I need to know that I've made the right choice sir. I need to know that what I'm doing will make a difference to someone somewhere, and that what you said back there about heroism wasn't just some line the computers or whatever it is you use fed you to get us all to volunteer. I want to know if I'm ever going to stop being scared."

"Tall order, kid. Walk with me"

They walked in silence for a while, and though he didn't speak the boy could almost hear the wheels spinning in the colonels mind. Eventually they came to a bench set on a rise that overlooked the Academy complex. They sat down, and the colonel gestured across the base with his cigarette. "Hard to believe this complex is over fifty thousand years old, isn't it?"

"Yes sir."

"The Corps will continue to use it for another fifty thousand years, y'know, and when they're finished, they'll pack it away like it never was."

"Yes sir."

Temple smiled. "I was like you once kid. Twice actually. The first time was when I enlisted to go to Vietnam. When are you from?"

"Nineteen ninety-five sir."

"You know about Vietnam then."

"I saw Platoon a couple of times."

"Whatever. The second time was when I joined the Corps."

The kid leaned forward, his eyes fixed on Temple. "Tell me about it sir, I want to know. Not the sanitised version we're getting down there." He stabbed a finger towards the complex. "I'm smart enough to know when things aren't being said. I want to know what it's really like."

Temple frowned, but inside he was smiling. The kid had guts, and Temple had enough vanity left to be flattered that the boy wanted to hear the truth from him. In a way, he thought, he kind of reminds me of me.

"Okay," he said. "I was a PFC on a search patrol, hunting Charlie. This was in the jungle back in sixty-five. Nineteen sixty-five that is, AD. I was nineteen. We'd been in country for five months without a scratch, and we'd gotten cocky I guess. We slogged straight into a crossfire and got cut to pieces. I was back man and took a shot in the thigh, but I got off light. I was zeroing the gooks approaching my position when my weapon jammed. Stuck way out and all alone, I thought I was dead, so when everything turned blue and froze I found it hard to be surprised."

"The stasis bubble," breathed the kid.

"Yeah, the stasis bubble. 'Course I didn't know it then, but while time was passing normally outside the bubble, a single picosecond was being stretched out almost indefinitely inside. I think I must have flipped out there for a while, because I sat there in the mud and started laughing. I was still laughing when the chronoshuttle rotated into real space in front of me. I don't remember much after that.

"I came to inside the shuttle, surrounded by people in these." Temple tugged at his fatigues. "They tried to explain stuff to me, but I was still pretty out of it, and they gave up after a while. I guess I was lucky in a way. The usual routine has them explaining to you in graphic detail the rest of your 'real' life, and though it never lasts long it can't be real pleasant. Given the choice, it's no wonder I've never heard of anyone turning it down."

The boy shivered, his mind briefly filled with the image of his own blood, cooling on a convenience store floor. "Yeah," he said bleakly.

"Anyway," the colonel continued, "they got me to the Academy Medcenter, and left me to be processed."

"Processed?" The kid's eyes were wide. "Sounds like what happens to meat."

Temple smiled. Was I ever that young?

"I suppose you could say it's similar. They inject you with a mutagenic virus that rewrites parts of your genetic code. It makes you faster, stronger and fitter. It slows down your ageing process and, in some cases, can actually reverse it. While that's going on they implant you with a biological tracking device and security chip."

"Does it hurt?"

"I couldn't say. They keep you asleep for most of the six weeks it takes for your body to adapt, but I did have some pretty wild dreams. Once you've accepted the changes to your DNA, they give you panimmunity nanites."

The kid laughed. "Sounds like a disease."

"Almost. They're artificial symbiotes the size of a virus. Some of our enemies aren't above using bioweaponry, and some of the eras we have to visit can be home to some pretty lethal shit, so we use the nanites to give ourselves an edge and ensure we don't spread disease from one period to another. They carry a copy of their host's new genetic template, and exterminate anything that doesn't belong.

"When I finally woke up after processing, I started to ask all the questions they'd been trying to answer for me after picking me up. They soon found out that I don't find it easy to trust people, so they let me talk to Mentor instead."

"Who's Mentor?"

"It's the Academy's artificial sapient. They hooked me up to a node - kind of like a computer terminal - and let Mentor tell me what I needed to know. He told me all about the Time Corps and what they do. He explained to me that history thought I had died when I was supposed to have died, and that my place had been taken by what he called a 'Quantum Echo', a sort of exact copy left over as the result of a deliberately unshielded probability jump. After he'd finished explaining to me I joined up."

"So you never got the induction speech from a human?"

"I never got the induction speech, period. Mentor can be a little quirky, but he firmly believes in the resilience of the human mind and flatly refuses to be involved in any form of deception, no matter how benevolent its intentions."

The kid frowned. "So why did you join up?"

Temple was silent for a moment, staring through the twilight to a moment more years away than he cared to remember. "I guess I didn't have a choice," he said sadly. "I know they gave me a few options. Y'know, relocation to a Corps sponsored colony world in the Cage and such. A life of peace and plenty sounds real nice, but that's not me. I joined the marines and went to 'Nam because I believed it was for a cause. Truth, justice, democracy, the American Way. The American Dream. I joined up because I believed - I still believe - that it was right and good to fight and even die for an ideal that is greater than any individual. That's why I joined the Corps.

"It's not about ideologies. The Corps are beyond that. It's about allowing people to make their own choices without interference. It's about free will, about giving sapients the right to act like assholes or angels, to be good or evil or just plain folks."

The kid was still frowning. "I don't get it. If the Corps can just dive into history and rescue people, why can't they change stuff? Why don't they make things better?"

"It's not that simple. If you change an event in history, you risk changing everything from that point on. Intentionally or not, you're affecting decisions and choices made by free-willed people in the future. That may not sound too bad if you're the omelettes and eggs type, but history was never meant to be altered in that way. Changes in the flow of events have consequences far beyond the obvious.

"Let me explain. Creation is a lot bigger than you think. The universe we inhabit right now is just one dimension in a whole group of linked dimensions that together we call a multiverse or parallel. There are a whole lot of parallels out there, and the Corps protects the history of all of them, because a change made on one parallel can have an effect on the history of another. Add this effect up and you have a situation where the wrong change at the wrong time can have a disastrous effect on the rest of the Omniverse."

"How disastrous?"

"The end of everything."

The kid swore softly. For a while they sat in silence, breathing the night air of an untamed world while the boy tried to assimilate what he had been told. Above them there was a dull crackle as something leathery flew into the security field and bounced off.

Eventually, the kid looked sharply at Temple. "How come you're different?"

"I don't understand."

"You. You're different to the others." The boy was gesturing to the complex with his chin. "Your rank markings are the same, but your fatigues are black and theirs are silver grey. And you've got that..." he waved his finger in a lazy figure eight, "thing under your badge."

Temple looked down at himself. Time Corps uniform fatigues were intentionally plain. His was no exception, unadorned except for the rank pins on his collar, the molybdenum-osmium hourglass badge over his left breast and the platinum mobius loop beneath it.

"I'm First Division. Temporal Marines." He noted with some surprise the hint of pride in his voice. Still? After so long? "They call us the Last Resort."

"How come?"

"Because we're the best kid. Because they don't bother us unless someone somewhere has fucked up and time is literally running out."

"Right," the kid nodded. " 'The odds are against us and the situation is grim'."

Temple blinked. "Sorry?"

"Star Trek: Generations?."

Temple looked blank.

"Ah, forget it." The kid smiled. "Beyond your time I guess."

Temple tried not to laugh. Much as he hated to admit it, the boy was getting under his skin, bypassing the armour so necessary to survive the uncaring brutality of history. He saw much of his younger self in the young man before him, getting another look at the reasons he'd chosen his life's path.

"Well?"

"Well what?" Temple frowned. Had he missed something? A question? The kid seemed to enjoy throwing him curve balls.

"What's it like? Being in the Corps, I mean."

"It's like life, y'know? Beauty and pain. Sometimes you get to see and do things that nobody back home has ever done or dreamed of seeing. Sometimes you have to stand back and let atrocities unfold before you. Sometimes you even have to help. You can save the Omniverse one day, and be deleted the next, nothing but a distant paramemory."

"Sounds like fun. What's a paramemory?"

Temple sighed and rubbed his eyebrows tiredly. "Has anyone mentioned you ask a whole lot of questions? Why can't you wait for the training like everyone else?"

The kid smiled ingenuously. "My mom always said 'preparation is everything'. "

"I knew someone who used to say that." Temple's eyes were briefly distant, and sad.

"You're avoiding the question. What's a paramemory?"

"Paramemory is the ability to recall details of altered histories. If you're uptime from a disruption, and that disruption alters your history, you can only remember the original history if you have paramemory."

"Useful."

"Yeah. We still don't have any real idea how it works. Most people can develop it, and it doesn't appear to be psionic in origin. It seems to be activated by the act of time travel, though it may take a while to appear. Some people seem to develop it spontaneously, and a lot of those have...trouble telling their memories of alternate timelines from their current experiences in their native timeline. You remember the street folk you'd see at home, stumbling around, shouting at the air, having conversations with walls?"

"Yeah."

"About forty percent of them have paramemory in some form or other. Even with Corps training, sorting out historically conflicting memories can be hard. Without it...."

Temple pulled a cigar and lighter from a pouch pocket on his thigh, and lit up. As the blue smoke coiled around him, the boy coughed pointedly and got up. After pacing into the dark for a moment he returned bearing a fern branch, which he proceeded to strip bare.

"Tell me more. Tell me about your first mission."

"What the hell for?"

"Because I asked you."

At least he's direct. "Okay," said Temple, "you win..."