Insert

INSERT

The war came, as we knew it would. Conflict was inevitable given the climate of general chaos in the world. Peace, after all, only remains alive so long as it is more profitable than war. On the other hand, war--the child of anger and injustice and unredressed wrongs--eats ultimately all the children to which it gives birth. Knowing this, the Government tried to ensure that the age of chaos would never reach our shores. How to ensure such a thing, when war is like water and finds its way everywhere? Simple to contemplate, hard to do; remove our shores from the world.

The trick was some new technology; it shifted a person or an object sideways in time, across the timestream rather than along it. Shifting someone forward or backward would solve nothing--you'd still be in the same place, and you'd end up in a mess of temporal confusion because the different time-periods would get involved with each other. You know what people are like--if they can possibly make a shambles of things, they'll do it every time without fail. Imagine the result if Twenty-First Century mixed with Ninteenth or Twenty-Third, for instance.

Here's the art of it; a small stainless steel tube packed with technology so advanced it makes a parallel-processing supercomputer look about as sophisticated as a box of matches. The thing didn't look like much, to be honest. It was the length and thickness of a child's forearm from elbow to wrist, and round at both ends. When it was switched on it created a time dislocation field all around it to a range of up to five hundred metres in all directions. Point it at someone, as a couple of fools found out, and you could send your fellow-idiot a couple of hundred timelines away with a directed burst of time-dislocation energy. The remaining technician was suitably remorseful--but he was fined, fired and imprisoned anyway.

Where the technology came from nobody would say. There were the usual dumb rumours, of course. Roswell aliens helping humanity advance; something the military had perfected years ago and kept to themselves for decades: some genius inventor who the Government were keeping under wraps--blah, blah, blah. According to the conspiracy theorists, it was all part of the vast hidden history which is waiting 'out there', known but unspoken, save by some select groups of cognescenti. Whatever; we had the technology and that was all that really mattered.

Because of the limited effect-range of the tubes and the great length of our coast, we needed to produce a lot of tubes. So that big factory was set up down south, and a production-line started pumping the things out at about a thousand a week. That led to problems, but that's for later. Anyway, six months' work saw us flush with tubes and ready to hit the road. Production had been stepped up, so we had a few thousand extra tubes; we decided to take the more important outlying islands with us as well.

So we fixed anchors, cables and floatation chambers to the tubes, and placed them out at sea around the coast at one-klick intervals. This took another three months, with the world war getting closer all the time. By the time the job was finished and everything was in place, things were getting distinctly hairy in our neighbourhood. So when they pulled the lever or pushed the button or whatever they did to start up the tubes, we were mighty glad to be quit of the place, I can say.

I can't properly describe the sensation of travelling sideways in time. You know what it's like going up or down in a really fast lift, when your stomach hits the floor or ends up in your mouth? Like that, only transferred through ninety degrees and multiplied tenfold, so you felt like you were being wrenched apart by a pair of tractors. In other words, the word 'unpleasant' didn't quite cover it.

The process didn't go off perfectly, of course. Nothing ever does, with Murphy's Law operating as it will. Part of the fault lay in the mass-production process, as I said earlier. Imperfections of various kinds crept into the production process, quality control wasn't one hundred percent, and mistakes were covered up to make the plant look more efficient than it actually was. All these are givens of the game, and should have been catered for. To a large extent they were, otherwise we'd have been in real trouble. When you've got thousands and thousands of units, some duds are going to slip through the net. Even the best net has tears, particularly when backhanders come to the party.

So some of the machines didn't work at all, and some worked to varying degrees, and some weren't there to work. An anchor would come adrift, and the tube would float too far away to be effective; the floatation failed and a tube would sink: a wave would damage a tube so that it worked only partially or went completely on the blink.

The end result was totally weird. Imagine driving a car along the road and having the nuts and bolts failing as you went. You would have bits of car spread for miles along both sides of the road. That was just how our country ended up. We crossed one timeline for every second the machines were turned on, and they were operating for a week non-stop. So we ended up with a country spread out like that flying-to-bits car, only in time instead of space. You can imagine the result.

For those who can't--and that included almost all of us until we got used to the idea--the journey has created temporal doorways--or at worse, whirlpools--where people, animals and objects vanish from their own timeline and appear in ours. So how complicated could the problem be, after all? Well, work it out. We crossed one timeline every second, and for every timeline there's a potential portal; so how many seconds are there in a week? That's how many doorways there are. See what we have to deal with?

This has led in turn to heaps of people wandering around in a sort of temporal daze, all wondering where they are, because the houses, the people and even the landscape are unfamiliar. On the other hand this has led to the growth of a new industry and given work to a lot of people. Who knows their own country better than those who live there, after all? So time-guides help out the lost, hosteleries look after them when they arrive, and for obvious reasons the police keep a close eye on everyone involved.

That wasn't the oddest part, though. As you can guess, we weren't the first or the only people to come up with this idea of slipping away across time. We have a lot of close neighbours. The thousands of temporal gates lead to all sorts of different versions of ourselves, scattered as they are throughout the timelines. You can step through just as easily as walking down a street--sometimes literally. A street on one timeline could by chance coincide with the same locality on another, and a gate could sit there waiting for a person to walk through unawares. It happens all the time, and my, it can be confusing. Never was it more truly said that life is a vast room with a billion doors leading to anywhere and anywhen.