Welcome to Archiving

You know that phrase ‘they should have sent a poet’? That’s kinda what I do. I’m the ‘sent poet.’

For the record, I do not write poetry and frankly find most of what I’ve read from years of being exposed to amateur writers about as insightful and beautiful as a collection of bugs on a car bumper. I mean, if you’re into that then go for it, but don’t be surprised when people cross the street when they see you coming the other way.

If you’re reading this, then my Archives are finally being printed and they are actually available for viewing. I’m intentionally writing this in such a way that there’s no god damn way the shit-heels at InfoCorp would publish this in their rag of an official publication. But then, they are just the sort of fucking smooth-brained troglodyte that would miss even the most obvious of subtext. Even that last sentence has no artistic merit other than to tick all of the boxes on the ‘we will never publish this’ list. ‘Disparage the brand?’ Check. ‘Foul language?’ Check. ‘Possible (not confirmed) slur?’ Check and check. ‘Writing in the present tense?’ Automatic meeting with your editor, your manager, and HR.

So again, if you’re actually reading this passage it means this article is appearing someplace outside of their normal channels, as I have been requesting with the growing popularity of my writing style. Editions that feature my Archives outsell all others and the ‘time spent on the page’ for those editions is lower than any other published editions. Which means people buy it, read my Archive, and put it down. I won’t go into their attempts to push their other Archivists into doing the same thing or getting an AI to rebuild what I do and how I do it. Suffice it to say, just about everything the AI puts out can’t be published and everything their lackeys put out shouldn’t be. Its complete and utter garbage.

I asked for my Archive to be placed somewhere it can be broadly accessed in isolation from the larger published editions and without advertising. I also asked for a mood room, an AI sex slave, and a baseball team. And mood rooms, sex slaves, and baseball teams for all of my players on the baseball team. After they started finally taking me seriously, I won and got everything I wanted. I got my Archives published with minimal advertising and that’s it.

About that, you’re probably going to cringe when I do it, but it’s in the contract so I have to. Every few chapters I have to include a Sponsorship message. There’s a checklist of things I have to do and another checklist of things I mustn’t do. I feel like both are open negotiations at all times but I also don’t want to lose this hard-earned piece of artistic real estate so I’ll probably play by the rules. It’s not perfect, but no one has what I have. So I might just stick to the copy the sponsors send me some of the time. It might be fun to read this message after the fact, especially if I just start showing incredibly boring Sponsorship messages. That will likely signal that I lost a negotiation or gotten my pee pee slapped.

“So just what is an ‘Archivist’” you ask? We are the closest thing The Galaxy has to an ‘anthropologist.’ Due to some rather extensive galactic politics that I will not bore you with, the planet known as Earth was destroyed some few hundred years ago. It was only after its destruction that several Rather Important People realized there was a treasure trove of information deemed incredibly important to The Galaxy. Stop me if you’ve heard this before. Management made a decision with an incredibly narrow focus and the net result was something so cataclysmic, it would take a lot of effort and marketing by people not making enough money to fix.

So here’s how important Earth was; they invented fucking Time-Travel℠ to learn more about it. That’s right, Someone Important and Someone Else Important and so on down the Very Important Line spent a lot of Very Important Money and enforcing a lot of Very Important Questionable Ethics to have a team of very, very smart people develop a system for kinda-sorta going back in time. What happened after that is entirely predictable but no less interesting.

We’ll get to the ‘kinda sorta’ part in a second. The original idea was to simply send cameras and bots en masse to different points in time and capture the information, while bringing it back for one of us Earth People to explain. This was about 100 years after Earth was uh, ‘collected.’ This proved incredibly inefficient as the bots had very little concept of what they were seeing and didn’t know enough about the culture to understand context and gather follow up information. Bots repeatedly were sent back to gather more information and if the operator wasn’t particularly good at what they did, they’d send them on a goose chase or they’d come back with a trove of information that was, inasmuch as it could be, almost without value. Couple that with a whole lot of committees and deadlocked decision-making and you got a ton of activity with very little to show for it.

The only good thing about this outcome was that a lot of people who had still been alive during the Earth’s End were still around and InfoCorp was smart enough to note that the anthropologists provided the richest feedback and best results. This was hardly a surprise since they were also uniquely suited to do this amongst their own people, let alone an entire galaxy of (let’s be real here) culturally-bereft species. This meant there was a concerted effort to keep many Earth People trained in the art of anthropology while a future solution was considered. One of the big issues they ran into though is – nobody wants to do it. To most people, sitting down and observing and then writing down what you see is about as interesting as watching a neutrino detector. I mean the concept is cool but just sitting there waiting for a light bulb to flash for a second is pretty dull. And for many of the newly ‘trained anthropologists’ that light bulb never came on and dots were not connected. Bottom line; some people were incredibly good at it and everybody else was incredibly bad at it or considerably more interested in enjoying being a Galactic VIP.

So eventually it just became smarter to train anthropologists to use new technology and send them into the past directly*, using their knowledge to adapt to circumstances and gather information relevant to what was being observed. The learning curve was steep at first, so a lot of the technology had to be dumbed down and then customized to match a more human experience. Most of The Galaxy had entirely different spectrums of vision, means of communication, and quantity of limbs – though two was more common than you’d think. So it first took a lot of UX/UI work to get the interface dialed in for the various support systems so the newly-appointed Archivers would spend minimal time trying to figure out knobs and dials and stick to the work of Archiving.

Note: Not directly.

Okay, let’s talk about Time-Travel℠. Keen observers will have noted how careful I am talking about it. It’s also worth carefully designating what I’m talking about when I use those two words together. ‘Time travel’ as you may believe it in a sci-fi senses poses all manner of weird paradoxes and situations. What if your dad killed your grandfather and so on. I want to make it abundantly clear that’s not what this technology is. Sort of like ‘Artificial Intelligence’ is not what they are pretending it to be. Its a really complex algorithm but its still just ‘if a then b.’ It’s not intelligent, it just seems intelligent to someone sufficiently dumb enough. It isn’t a robot with a brain that experiences things like humans do. It is given an input and it processes it quite a bit to come up with some output. We could get into a very wide discussion on free will and all of that jazz if you’d like but I’d rather use a serrated spoon to pierce my nipples.

Time-Travel℠ is about as dishonest a name you could possibly use when trying to describe a product you desperately hope is conceived as having that sort of power. This is time travel as much as a VR headset is ‘courtside seats’ at a Laker game. This is more like ‘Time Tivo’ or ‘Time DVR’ or something. Let me explain the difference.

Photons are abso-god-damn-lutely everywhere and in a way they’re almost anytime also. For instance, when you look up at the sky and see some distant starts, many of those stars – in this exact moment in time, such as it can be described – are already gone. It takes millions of years for the photons to be ejected from that star and land in your eyeballs where your photon detectors (read: ‘Eyes’) try to interpret what you’re seeing. The Nerds at InfoCorp (which itself is a merger of several companies with varying levels of involvement of the development of Time-Travel℠) are nothing if not extremely good at classifying and organizing information and they worked out a way to tell how old a given photon is. They have detectors in many spots across the universe that can determine the path the given photon is taking which helps them re-trace its steps to its point of origin. If you retrace enough of these photons, you start to get better at where you put your detectors to hone in on a certain time.

And that is key. Consider that if you had an enormously powerful telescope and you were 55 million miles away from where the Earth was, you’d peep through your telescope and have a wonderful bird’s eye view of a T-Rex taking a dump. If you moved a few million miles closer, your view would change to an early mammal taking a dump. If you know exactly where in time you want to gather data from, you just dial in how far your detectors go and you’ll get everything from around that time. So if I wanted to sojourn into the American West to see a coyote taking a dump, I’d go as many light-years away as years into the past it was and peer through my telescope. Cloudy weather tends to produce some minor glitches and resolution problems, but photons are notoriously good at bouncing around and InfoCorp has gotten incredibly good at re-tracing those steps. It’s actually pretty neat, all things considered, and I try not to grumble when there’s limited data available. Having said that, it doesn’t happen super often since the detectors are able to approximate a lot of data based on multiple points of observation (including neutrinos).

These correlating data also mean the detectors are pretty good at inferring other things like smells, touch, and even taste based entirely on a full chemical reconstruction. Not that we ever taste anything when we go ‘back in time’ but it’s good to know there’s at least some effort to make it immersive. Sound is mostly down to recreations based on Hollywood, so we really have no idea how accurate a lot of the sounds actually are.

So yeah, ‘time travel’ is the best way to describe it.

Okay, so now you have all of this data, you just plug it in to your friendly, star system neighborhood supercomputer and wait for it to spit out gems of wisdom or locations of treasure maps or whatever you want, right? Right? No. The sheer volume of information is useless to a computer that just does not have any concept of a culture or the various nuances that are associated with it. I think they did a calculation on what it would cost to pull off and the election cycle that followed it showed just how much appetite there was to murder several civilizations just to power a computer that might finally help The Galaxy understand just how amazing apple pie, fried rice, and Beethoven really were.

It was actually easier to take the collected remains of earth and put it into an inventory system that could 3D print any scene from any point in time recorded by the collectors. There were limitations when it came to buffers and resource availability and the like, so you couldn’t say ‘show me the western hemisphere’ and expect something all that interactive on a minute scale. And it wasn’t really instantaneous so you really had to have the right context to feed into the machine so it had time to rebuild the world. This was an early point of failure that actually almost caused the Archive program to be cut entirely, but a few Very Smart People demonstrated the importance of getting the build right and putting in the right orders. This narrowed the pool of possible people even further. Even then, some of the folks that put in orders are incompetent jackasses and your project options might be severely limited because Johnny Fuck-Wumble just asked for the Arizona coast during the late Cretaceous because he wants to just ‘double check’ that blue whales weren’t around yet. Because he’s an idiot and a fuck-wumble.

This also meant that someone operating in the same general region as you could potentially outbid you for a section where you both overlap or the computer would designate times for each Archiver to use the lab. More coin meant more uninterrupted time with your subject matter. Less coin meant you’d probably have to dramatically reduce the scope of your project if you wanted to even get it off the ground.

I’ve had the pick of the litter for quite some time though I’m also uniquely aware of the privilege I carry and some of the difficulties of first getting started with this so I go well out of my way to try and give other Archivers room to operate and try to be as careful as possible at minimizing both the timeline and geographic region I want to Archive. So a lot of my stories are more ‘slice of life’ in that sense. As technology improved on earth and people covered larger and larger distances in shorter periods of time, that gets pretty hard so I prefer to stick to pre-Industrial Revolution time and at that I also avoid urban centers or ruins since there are potentially many people interested in those areas and that would almost certainly lead to me rotating time, which I could not stand.

It was not uncommon of me to show up to the lab with an external-frame backpack loaded to the absolute piss with supplies. I wanted to lock myself in for days and sometimes I wanted to force myself to ‘rough it’ depending on the circumstances or the subject matter. Given that this was not affecting actual time, I could simply re-purpose many of the resources I was experiencing as I saw fit so I didn’t need things like water filters or even water. I’d just tell the computer to grab some oxygen and hydrogen molecules that weren’t important to the simulation and make me some water. Or vodka. Or filet mignon. Other times, I’d deliberately screw with the scene and it would call me naughty words and freeze the simulation on me until I calmed down. You haven’t lived until an automated ‘Holo-deck’ assistant informs you that you’ve been added to a ‘Last Call’ user group that limits how many alcoholic beverages you can have based on your recent interaction history. Hey man, if you’re gonna watch someone die of the plague several times and from several different angles because a sponsor ‘wants it’ then you’re probably going to bring a stiff one to that assignment.

To recoup some of the enormous cost of running this shindig, InfoCorp spun off a whole Galaxy’s worth of products that could apply the same technology. It was still a matter of making it affordable enough to be used on a mass scale while also charging enough to justify the expense of it all, but they were pulling it off. ‘Official’ services included things like guided tours of an actual Jurassic Park (the timeframe, not the park but they also did limited versions of a park, too), scheduled Colosseum re-enactments, or Trans-Pacific flights that seemed to cure insomnia for a lot of species. The ‘Unofficial’ services almost certainly happened when less-than-ethical Archivers brought in outside consultants to help on a given assignment. Though the company turned a bit of a blind eye to this. After all, if you were going to observe Caesar’s death anyway to establish a non-Shakespearean canonical version of the event, you’d bring along your buddy Brutus if he slipped you a few grand, wouldn’t you?

And let’s talk about the NPCs. No, that’s not short for Non-Player Character though clearly someone on the UX team wanted to sneak that in because it just made entirely too much sense. It’s literally ‘Non-Person Content’ in a really weird description meant to define things that looked, sounded, acted, and – importantly – felt like the real thing. They were programmed to more-or-less do what the sensors had recorded they had done, but the Archiver was given some creative license to alter their behavior and editorialize. It was a lot less than it seemed, but to debug some things and to prevent awful physical harm from befalling an Archiver, there was a sort of Sandbox Mode that allowed for the staging of various things for marketing materials, film production, or anything else. Suffice it to say, the ethics of Sandbox Mode were stretched to the limits by various Archivers and its not completely unreasonable to suggest that several of them had become digital pimps with projects in extreme locations that were unlikely to have any overlap with others so the party never really stopped. With all of the looking over one’s shoulder one had to do to maintain a front like that, I failed to see how it could possibly be lucrative enough to justify – especially when just straight up observing crazy shit and writing about it paid so damn well and pimping did not. It was only of interest to our species and we weren’t exactly a majority.

Earth’s history was of vital importance to someone and they paid out the ass for well-researched and insightful articles that provided context and helped other species develop depth of understanding for it. Few of us Earth-folk understood why as we were either raised by people who had an entire army’s worth of entertainment options at their disposal or their descendants. But in this universe we found ourselves in, knowledge seemed to be the single greatest indication of status and/or wealth and frankly humanity had no idea what to do about that. We’d always used it to make our entertainment better so we could continue chasing a sense of happiness that never hung around for very long at a time.

So that’s me.

I talk a lot of shit on my fellow humans and InfoCorp and will continue to do so, but I love what I do. Back when Earth was still around, many people talked about the mind-expanding effect travel had on the soul. Being exposed to different cultures and cuisines and geography had a humbling effect that permeated to every aspect of your life. Doing the same thing but accelerated by a few million by adding absolute freedom to your experience without fear* was an unending fountain of self-grounding activity. It was impossible to feel big when you repeatedly reminded yourself of how small everyone is and was.

Note: You can still totally die here.

So about that absolute freedom part. I suppose it’s important to note that we aren’t in some actual holo-deck like in Star Trek or exist with some kind of a force field around us. These are as-near-as-makes-no-difference, real, genuine, atomic recreations of actual events and if you’re not careful, you can absolutely stand somewhere you’re not supposed to and get hit with fast-moving particles that the computer simply does not anticipate. This was never common even in the early days, but it happened often enough that many safeguards were put in place to stop it happening. Having said that, the computer still had a delay in realizing a gun was being brandished and fired so there was often at least a few feet of high-speed travel close to its firing point. There is a whole project to classify all of these events so if they’re re-produced in the future, it happens in a censored way and the actual bullets don’t actually get fired, but a funny ‘BANG’ comic like something on 1980’s Batman episodes shows up in its place. But until the actual event is categorized, the system has to react on the fly and doesn’t always catch it the first time. Its on both it and us Archivers to know when to hit the pause button and then unpause when we’re safe.

The smart thing to do, of course, was to always observe events from a distance, preferably from a helicopter (if appropriate) and after you were certain you had spotted and categorized all of the fast-moving events, you’d run the simulation back and get in closer for a better look. But this increased project time considerably and if a Sponsor was waiting for your report the longer it took, the slower you got paid, the less beer you’d have in your life. And we like beer.

If you began to specialize in an area, you’d get pretty good at reading up as much as you could between projects and when project time came, you’d be better served at minimizing ‘rewind.’ I actually preferred to never pause or rewind as I thought a lot of ‘momentum’ and connections were lost when you stopped the action to consider what was happening. Instead, it was far better for me to experience the entire thing naturally the first time and then if I wanted to go back and get more info, I’d consult my notes and re-visit a scene if I wanted to. I still would delay that as much as possible and instead preferred to sit out in the lab and write my notes. It could be a bit dangerous, but not nearly as dangerous as actual time travel to that exact point in time.

I’d covered the filming of a spaghetti western one time and I think the single most enjoyable thing I’ve ever done is camp out on the set of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly while writing down my notes in a journal. I swore Clint Eastwood came over to my fire and played the harmonica, but the computer confirmed that I either hallucinated that after entirely too much whiskey or it was a dream. Or, far more likely, it was a fever dream after too much whiskey.

That’s… a recurring theme with me.