Temporal Investigations Agency

Introduction

It is now over one hundred years since the USS Enterprise made the first - accidental - trip a few minutes into the past, and the Federation remains the only known Alpha Quadrant power to posses temporal technology. As such, we bear a heavy burden of responsibility. Initially, the experts were convinced that the past must be fixed and immutable - the so called 'law of conservation of reality'. As a result Starfleet began sending historical research missions to several parts of Federation history, but within less than a year it was clear that the past was not in fact fixed, but highly sensitive to change. When another accident hurled the Enterprise into 1966, the crews unintentional interference with the past threatened to jeopardize future history significantly. Although Starfleet began to re-appraise its policies on time travel, historical research missions continued for some time until it became obvious that the dangers were simply too high.

By 2268 Starfleet instituted the Temporal Prime Directive. This policy, like its standard Prime Directive cousin, was a massively complex set of rules which basically boiled down to one sentence : no Federation vessel or crew would willingly jeopardize past history under any circumstances. As a consequence of the TPD, all Federation time travel was halted and the very existence of this technology was classified at the highest possible level. The Federation determined that it would be best if the very existence of temporal technology was quietly forgotten.

Unfortunately, it didn't work out that way. The Federation has since found itself dealing with a bewilderingly wide variety of cases involving time travel via long forgotten alien devices, natural and artificial anomalies, accidents and deliberate sabotage. The Federation response to this situation was the formation of the Temporal Investigation Agency in 2273; officially Temporal Investigations would be responsible for investigating all known instances of time travel, assessing the impact upon the timeline and, if necessary, assigning blame to those involved.

Less well known are the TIA's other roles. These have expanded over the years to include the use of highly classified temporal scanning devices to monitor the creation and state of alternate timelines, engaging in covert activity in order to ensure the lid of secrecy remained tightly closed over all temporal technology, and even acting to restore the timeline after it had been altered by accident or design.

Temporal Investigations continues in operation to this day, and contact with time travellers from the future indicates that it will continue in some form for many centuries to come. This section will detail some of the more intriguing cases that the agency has investigated in its one hundred and two year history.

Common Anomalies

Past / Future Incursions : This type of case is the most common one encountered by the Temporal Investigations Agency. A Future Incursion involves an object moving along the time axis at a rate, from the point of view of the present in the preferred timeline, greater than one second per second; hence, the objects and/or personnel involved will move into the future. A Past Incursion involves an object moving along the time axis at any negative rate, hence travelling into the past. Such incursions, more commonly called 'time jumps' or more simply 'time travel', unusually involve movement at a rate vastly higher than normal, so that the journey itself can be virtually instant. Temporal Investigations has dealt with many past and future incursions, and is authorized to make such incursions itself when circumstances require it.

All wormholes have two endpoints, which can be located anywhere in space-time and are connected by a tunnel of finite length. The remarkable aspect of the wormhole is that its internal length D_i seems to be entirely independent of the external distance D_e between its endpoints. Thus D_i can be very much greater or less than D_e. The large majority of known wormholes have a value for D_i which is very much less than D_e - for example the Bajoran wormhole has a value for D_e of 70,000 light years but D_i is only some 200,000 km, or 3.3 trillion times less. This would make wormholes ideal for long range travel  - but unfortunately the endpoints of a wormhole are notoriously prone to sudden and massive changes in their position. The Bajoran wormhole remains unique in that both ends are stable.

While wormhole endpoints can be separated by huge distances, it is common for both ends to be located at the same point in time. However, some examples have been discovered in which the endpoints are widely spaced in time, with little or no spatial displacement. Wormholes of this sort are commonly responsible for past/future incursions encountered by Temporal Investigations.

The rarest of all wormholes are those demonstrate significant time and space displacement. Such a one was discovered by USS Voyager in 2371. The Bajoran wormhole, which is unique in many respects, has also demonstrated time displacement on occasion.

Time Loops : These occur when a person or object involved in a Temporal Incursion initiates an event which results in that person or object becoming a causal factor in the original incursion. Loops of this kind rarely reset themselves perfectly, and as a result there is a slight departure from the original sequence of events within each repetition. The cumulative nature of the alterations makes it certain that, after a sufficient number of cycles, conditions within any time loop will alter so much that the initiating event would be avoided. Such loops must therefore be of limited life span.

Alternate Timelines : The universe we see around us is the end result of an apparently infinite number of events interacting with each other in a particular order. Each one of these events generates alternate timelines - 'what might have been' universes in which every possible outcome is played out. Any temporal incursion which alters any past event will therefore generate an alternate timeline; and since an 'event' in this context constitutes any degree of interference, even the disturbing of a single atom, then all incursions generate not one but many alternates.

This has led to the concept of the 'preferred timeline'. Temporal Investigations originally defined this as the timeline which would exist if temporal technology had never been created, but this has since been updated and the preferred timeline is now said to be the timeline which would exist if no further incursions occurred. Temporal scanning has recorded the signature of the preferred timeline, and this is used as the basis for comparison between timelines. The Temporal Prime Directive states that in cases involving temporal phenomena, Starfleet must act so as to minimize disruption to the preferred timeline. TI generally accepts changes to the preferred timeline if such changes are judged to be within certain limits - the actions of Captain Benjamin Sisko in deliberately meeting with Captain James Kirk during a recent temporal incursion is one example. Many people - both outside TI and within it - have complained that this means that the preferred timeline has thus become 'the timeline that the Federation wants to exist in', and this criticism has some justification. Nevertheless, repeated attempts to correct the timeline would likely generate even worse distortion. Strictly speaking this invalidates the concept of the preferred timeline, but some standard is required if Temporal Investigations is to fulfil its function and so the agency continues to act on this basis.

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