Raveling

He skidded to a halt.

"Oh no.." he thought to himself. He caught a glimpse of a red dress disappearing around the corner. He listened, frozen, unable to move. He was too late. He heard them together, the waiting becoming an anticipated certainty. Her heels clicked rhythmically on the tile floor, and the door at the other end of the hall swished closed. It closed slowly, taking its time. A boy had thrown himself through the door and was careening down the hall, looking behind him. A loose pair of sneakers slapped on the floor as dark green jeans, rumpled hair, and a loose windbreaker all went flying down the hall. There was a muffled yell as the sneakers tried and failed to skid to a stop, and then a final explosion of red dress and teenage knees. A sickening crunch and a yelp of pain reached him as he slowly walked toward the wreckage. A frightened boy was trying to untangle himself from the red dress and keep running down the hall, but the commotion had caused a number of doors in the hallway to open up, and just as the boy broke loose, a large and severe hand clamped down on his shoulder.

A tanned, hairy forearm showed from beneath shirtsleeves. Mr. Duncan was standing stock still, his thin white shirt and plain brown tie proclaiming that this was, after all, a place of rules and order. The flailing young man flailed for another second or two and then slumped. He seemed to recognize defeat.

At the same time, a teacher came running across the hall and ran toward the red dress. She knelt quickly, laying a gentle hand on the red dress' forehead.

"Are you all right, Amy?" said the hand's voice. The red dress moaned a little, testing out her breath.

"I think --" she faltered, "I think something is broken."

Three or four other adults swarmed around, the first aid kit from the teachers' lounge disgorging tape and other assorted medical supplies. The red dress was soon lying down with her head held fast, a blanket over her paling skin.

All the while, he stood there, staring at this train wreck. When someone looked up at him, he realized how long he'd been standing there and reddened. He walked forward slowly, trying hard to think of a good reason to be there. He finally settled on Kindly Bystander.

"Is she all right?" he asked, in what he hoped was a voice of deepest concern.

"Call an ambulance!" Someone barked.

"Right!" he turned and quickly headed toward the office, hoping to find a phone along the way.

He kept walking, hoping to look purposeful, and hoping to catch a glipse of Flying Green Jeans. He had just reached the office when the door to the assistant principal's office swung closed. A boy in green jeans sat in the chair, looking appropriately contrite but also, he noticed, completely closed in. No emotion radiated from the boy other than a muted sense of silent remorse.

His heart sank. The boy was a Raveler. And he'd messed this up, badly. He was going to be in very, very deep manure when he got back.

He watched the door swing closed, his heart sinking in time to the faint hiss.



A few moments later he sat quietly, touching his fingertips and slowly rotating his thumbs. Denise would kill him for this. Just murder him. Or, if not kill him, she would place half of him inside a wall and then eat an entire pizza in front of him. He was doomed. The shiny floor and expensive metallic walls cheerfully bounced muted light all over him, but all he could see were the dust particles illuminated in the sunlight.

He stirred for a moment. Braindust! It might actually help him in this situation. He stood up quickly, shoving his hands in his pockets. He could get some braindust from the Pharmacy, go back to his room, and see if inspiration struck. Maybe there was a way to go back again and see if -- the door banged open, and Denise stood there, taking up the entire doorway and sucking all the air out of his lungs.

"Come inside," she said shortly. He sagged, all the braindust-inspired hope zooming straight down to his toes and settling between them. It might come out again once his dressing down was finished, he thought desperately. Some brilliant idea, some way to -- slam!

Denise slammed the door behind him and briskly walked over to her desk. It was not shiny or metal, like nearly everything else in the facility. Denise's desk was ancient. On her left was a wooden rolltop desk, pristine and beautiful, dating from the 1930's. In front of her was a solid slab of mahogany. It was a deep, beautiful brown, so well-polished it held streaks of lovely red in it. The center was covered with a green felt material, which kept her papers in place. At the moment, it was empty, save for Denise's fingers, which were laced together, not moving. She wasn't drumming her fingers, or even moving at all. She sat, staring intently at him. She was not angry, he realized suddenly. She was staring at him very intensely. She looked down, and started to read from a piece of paper she had retrieved from nowhere.

"You were originally assigned to follow Levi Levinson and prevent him from physically colliding with Angela Bennett on the 27th of March at 1:56 pm. Ms. Bennett Is a seventh-grade teacher at Newcastle Middle School. Mr. Levinson Originally collided with Ms. Bennett on the first floor of the school in which she teaches after she came out of her classroom to secure some additional teaching materials. Mr. Levinson was running from a Segue," she glanced up at him reproachfully, "who had seen him in his act of Raveling." She took a deep breath, quietly and professionally but clearly displaying her displeasure at having to speak these words.

"You were then seen by not less than three bystanders, and were spoken to by one, who gave you directions you agreed, but failed, to follow. After this you were able to secure your departure and return to headquarters." She finished this with some disinterest, sorting her papers back into a neat pile and returning her attention to him.

"Now," she began, "I understand that your task of preventing the collision was not altogether simple. There was the crowded location, for example, and the prominence of Ms. Bennett - as a teacher, she would stand out in a collision far more than would another student." She stared at him straight on. "However, where was your planning in all of this? Did you not know that Ms. Bennett would be in class? Did you not know that Mr. Levinson would be running, full-tilt, to escape the Segue? Did you not know When the Original act happened?" She stared at him directly, clearly expecting a response.

"Well, I... I mean, I thought I would just come into the school, see Levi coming, and direct him the other way," he said weakly.

"Did you not anticipate that this course of action would require very precise timing on your part?" she asked in a businesslike tone.

"I, er, well.." he looked down at his hands, and started to hunch protectively.

"Did you not research the hour before to the roughly hour afterwards? I show here," she produced a small sheet of plastic from thin air, "a requisition for the observation lab for two hours, during which you were to observe from one hour before to one full hour after the event you were to change." She stared at him again. It was beginning to feel as though she were trying to read his mind by ripping it out through his pores with her eyeballs.

"Did you perform this research?"

"Well, I mean, yes, sort of," he said quietly.

"'Sort of'?" she repeated shortly.

"Well, I looked at the half hour previous, and then about fifteen minutes afterwards. I -- well, it didn't really make sense to watch for a full hour *after* the event."

She seemed not to have heard him.

"Did you not know that this research is absolutely required before you undertake any timechanging?"

"Yes, I did," he said firmly, "but the wave was approaching, and I had to surf."

She looked down. She seemed to be trying to make up her mind about something. Finally she spoke.

"There are many ways of looking at a single event," she said briskly. She stood up, twiddled her fingers on her remote for a few seconds, and then stepped in front of her board. A pen appeared in her hand.

"You can look at all the previous actions that lead up to this one and see which ones fall outside the embrace of the Original person's overall moment." She drew a dot on the board, and then drew a single line out of it. "Some actions are Critical Path, and cannot be changed without affecting the person's momentum along their chain of events. We call this, you may recall," she allowed a hint of disapproval to enter her tone, "a person's timechain. But others," and here she drew a curved little line that went out, and then back in, to the original line on the board, "are simply little distractions from the main timechain. They are digressions, and can most often be changed without affecting the Original's personal momentum." She turned to face him.

"You can also look at the Raveler's actions. We sometimes find it more desirable to change the actions of a Raveler because he or she is aware that time is being manipulated. He or she is an active party to this change. He or she," she said with some impatience, "will not potentially have his or her timechain completely demolished by finding out that time can be changed from underneath him or her." She looked at him in silence for a moment. "However, changing a Raveler's actions has its own risks, which are often more dangerous than changing an Original. But that is something we can cover later. For now, it is enough for you to know that we essentially focus on changing the actions of the Original in order to clear the path for the Raveler to do his or her work. For now," she stared at him straight-on again, and he automatically sat up straighter, "you will focus on identifying and changing digressions." She turned slightly, facing the board.

"Some events can be ungrappled from the timechain more easily than others. Digressions are nearly always the easiest to change. There are some exceptions, but most of the time this is true. In any case, we always," and here she even glared at him, "endeavor to change the event that can be most easily ungrappled from someone's timechain. We do NOT --" she faced him, looking intensely and pointedly into his face now, "-- simply march in and fly by the seat of our pants!" she turned away from him, once again businesslike.

"It is important to keep your intervention simple, quiet, and to the point. Do you understand this?"

He nodded slowly. "I think so," he said carefully. He wasn't so sure about the "to the point" part. It wasn't like he'd gone out for ice cream or hung around checking out cars. He'd tried to do what he was supposed to do. He decided he'd better ask; he didn't want another lecture like this one anytime soon. "I'm a little confused. What do you mean by 'to the point'?"

She actually allowed a tiny corner of her mouth to quirk upward in what might have been the start of an approving smile. It faded quickly.

"I'm glad you asked that," she said briskly, once again sifting through her papers. She returned her piercing stare to his face. "You, I am afraid, have shown a flair for the dramatic."

He bristled. Who had he been trying to act for, exactly? She leaned forward, sighing. Her voice dropped slightly.

"Why did you choose to try to meet Mr. Levinson in front of the school doors?" He blinked. Wasn't this obvious? He guessed not, and decided to repeat it anyway.

"To tell him to go around, so that he would not crash into Ms. Bennett," he said carefully.

"Why did you need to tell him directly?" she asked, still leaning forward and looking at him, though not quite as intensely.

"How else would he know not to go down that hall?" he asked. It seemed obvious to him; why couldn't she see it?

"Why did you need to tell him at all?" she held up a hand as he opened his mouth to protest, and continued speaking. "What if you had changed events so that Ms. Bennett was not in the hall at the time?"

He stared at her, not speaking. It hadn't occurred to him that Levi's mad dash through the school wouldn't have been a problem if the teacher hadn't been tripping down the hall on her high heels at the time.

"I don't know, it just seemed like a bad idea for Levi to go pounding through a school. I mean," he warmed to his subject now, "he could have collided with anybody, couldn't he? If it wasn't Ms. Bennett, how do we know it wouldn't have been someone else?"

She peered at him through narrowed eyes.

"Did you check the **occupancy** in the hallway?" she asked, sounding genuinely curious.

"No," he said slowly, "but even though Levi went through a few minutes before the bell, if he'd been stopped at all he would have ended up in the hallway when the bell rang. He'd have been seen by dozens of students. It seemed like a bad idea, that's all." he finished with a shrug. She was silent for a moment or two.

"That is an interesting idea." His heart leapt, then sank again as her eyes returned to her papers and she continued. "However, as it happens, the hallway was empty until Ms. Bennett entered it. It only filled with people after Ms. Bennett and Mr. Levinson's collision and the noise it made drew several people. It also happens that a full ten minutes went by before the bell rang, leaving Levi plenty of time to dash through the school and out the opposite door before the halls filled with students." Her mouth grew thin, and her voice grim.

She looked at him once more. "Whether or not you thought Levi's actions were too assertive, you chose a corrective course of action that was foolhardy in the extreme. First, you chose a course that gave you less than eight minutes' margin for error."

"The janitors had come through about six minutes before you arrived. And as we have seen," she shot him a look over her glasses, "your arrival was actually two minutes too late. In order to be successful, you would have had to arrive after the janitors but in time to prevent Levi from hitting Ms. Bennett." She pursed her lips.

"Six minutes is barely enough time to orient. Even the most experienced time-travelers can get sick --" he snickered, and she turned to him, angry for the first time, "Even the very most experienced Ravelers can get sick, injured, mis-jump, or make any number of mistakes! We *expect* you to make mistakes, and we expect --" she bit this out, "we EXPECT you to use them to figure out your limitations!"

He sat very still, watching her carefully as she spoke every word slowly and carefully,

"Part of your job is to learn what you can and cannot do, what tools you need to succeed. I suggest you start paying attention to yourself."

She returned to her matter-of-fact voice.

"Secondly, you chose to act on the Raveler, Levi, instead of on the Original, which is virtually never what we recommend. Thirdly, your strategy had too many loose ends and no backup plan: your failure to prevent the collision actually created more intervention issues. No less than three people saw you, Levi, and the accident." She sighed a tired sigh, then spoke again in a voice that he usually heard when she assigned homework to a particularly dull student.

"I would like you to consider this: did you want to confront Levi yourself because you wanted him to *know* you'd just saved him?"

He didn't say anything.

"Consider what would have happened if, instead of trying to dash in front of Levi at the last moment, you'd gone to the teachers' lounge where Ms. Bennett had left her missing flimsies. Consider what would have happened if you'd simply picked them up, slowed time down, taken them back to her classroom, and then left. Would she have needed to leave the classroom at all?"

He was thunderstruck. It had never occurred to him that he could have changed her reason for leaving the room in the first place.

"You didn't think of that," she said flatly, "because you did not do your homework. You did not check on the coupling of events, or you would have seen her simple digression, one that could easily have been used to achieve the goal. There was a clear, simple, and to the point path you could have taken. You instead chose to be flashy -- become Levi's hero. As a result you bungled the job, unconcerned about exposing yourself, your team, and the work we do here."

Neither of them said anything for a moment. He was ashamed, and yet slightly resentful. She seemed to read his mind.

"You may feel that I have been unnecessarily harsh, but it is essential that you grasp the point: what you do has consequences! It matters! As you -- if you -- advance to more responsible roles, it will be of utmost importance that you take your work seriously. Flashy, dramatic entrances work well in action movies, but not in correcting the slow unraveling of time." He did not fail to notice her correcting her sentence from "when" to "if." He must be in big trouble. He finally spoke.

"I did learn something," he said quietly, hopefully.

"Yes?" she said stiffly.

"I think there's another reason it was a bad idea to try to stop Levi, and not to try to change the events that led Ms. Bennett out of her classroom," he said.

"What is that?" she asked, her face impassive.

"Well, it's that Levi was in the embrace of his moment," he said firmly, "and Ms. Bennett wasn't."

She nodded a tiny nod, encouraging him to go on.

"That is, to change a person's timechain, you should always go with their nature, never against it. And Levi," he allowed himself a brief grin, "is constantly running. You can't really get him to stop. But Ms. Bennett is so organized she alphabetizes her spice rack. Leaving her stuff was almost out of character for her, so it would have been better to, um," he trailed off, as he was finally running out of steam.

"Direct her back into herself?" she prompted, her voice surprisingly warm.

"Yes," he said, encouraged.

"Well then," she said, and she glanced down at her papers as her tone became brisk once more, "you may, in fact, actually be learning something. A good thing, too," she sniffed coolly, "since we now have to send two Ravelers back to clean up this mess."

"Two?" he couldn't help himself; why would two people be necessary?

"Yes, two," she said shortly, "you not only failed to save Mr. Levinson, but you also created a mess of your own. We have to send someone back to stop *you* from interacting with a teacher."

"But --" he blurted, "I didn't do anything with them! They didn't even notice me!"

She sighed. "I'm afraid they did. One of them asked you to call 9-1-1. You said, "Right," as you may recall. You obviously failed to do so. Unfortunately, since the teacher, a Mr. -" she glanced down at her records, "Milenysk, thought you were calling an ambulance, he told everyone else not to call them. Twenty minutes were lost, and Ms. Bennett bled so much during those twenty minutes that she required a transfusion. This changed the amount of medical care she needed, the doctors she met, and so on." Her voice had grown increasingly clipped with each sentence she uttered.

He was silent; he'd had no idea how badly he'd truly bungled it. He hunched over, looked at his hands, and drew his elbows protectively together.

"Your next task," she went on, as if he'd not reacted at all, "will be to schedule some time to practice your shifting. You'll need to spend several full days working on it, since your next assignment will involve it."

He looked up at her. He'd thought he was very near to getting chucked out, to be sent back to his hometown to work in a grocery store and read novels all night.

"You must master directional shifting, as you will be required to shift through walls without falling through the floor." She stood her papers up and tapped them into a neat stack, which he knew she was planning to put back in the file folder with his name on it. She was nearly done with him, then. "You will receive more information in a week or two as the cusp event comes into focus." She glanced up at him, folded her hands neatly on her desk, and stared intently at him once more.

"I suggest you work very hard over the next few weeks."

He nodded, murmured a "thank you", and stood up. She threw out an "mmm-hmm" and turned her back, already reaching for her headset.

He spilled out into the hallway, feeling depressed but exceedingly relieved: he knew what he had to do. This was much better than not.

"Your primary task is to analyze the timechain, find a digression, and

"In short,

She was drawing on the board now. Seven or eight lines all drew together to a single point. A single line came out of this point. She then draw several lines out of this point, all of them pointing randomly.

"

""

""
"Now then," she said in a teaching tone, "


Prototime.
Protosplit.
Proto

Digressions are nearly always easiest to change, but sometimes not because digressions take up time. Timewasting is sometimes a key activity. It promotes braindust gathering. It links together events in a timechain that may have gone awry because too much time elapsed between events. Digressions sometimes are the bone spurs of genius, creating an image of importance that cannot be changed or that creates great inspiration. We cannot read people's minds, we do not know what makes them tick. Digressions are sometimes very important because they are little enclaves of meaning.

Changing a Raveler can be very difficult because while an Original's timechain can be plotted, it is more or less a regular function, a Raveler's is not. An Original has a 1-to-1 relationship with time. He is eating dinner at 6 pm, it can reasonably be predicted that he'll be eating dinner at 6:03 pm. A Raveler is much more difficult because he or she has a much less linear relationship to time. A non-linear relationship, in fact. Eating dinner at 6:15 pm provides no assurance he'll be eating dinner at 6:18 pm. He might be out of his own timechain, suspended in past action. His dinner may get cold or even rot before he returns to it. Because of this, it's impossible to plot his timechain. Generally this isn't a problem because the Raveler is not simply an object to be acted on. A Raveler is in on it, and can change actions in response to what you tell him or her. However, you're still talking about a loose particle that cannot be plotted, and things sometimes do go haywire. For this reason, we nearly always try to change an Original, and simply clear the Raveler's path of potential problems.