If the temporal enforcement agencies exist across all threads in the timeline, there are a bunch of copies of temporal enforcement agents, right? How do they pick who goes through time?
Not…really. Everyone who isn’t a temporal refugee has ‘a bunch of copies’, but they are not really distinct, they merge and blend into each other. Just like the rest of the threads.
And they don’t pick who travels through time, it just happens. This is really complicated and not particularly relevant to you, but just like all time travel is to a specific thread, all time travel is from a specific thread. In all threads but one, their time machine doesn’t work. Basically, if a time traveler, across all or most threads, try to take a trip, only one of them is going to happen. This was extremely confusing for early researchers.
You, as a temporal refugee, only exist in one thread, so your time travel will always work.
But the threads all average to the same, so in the end, either all timelines travels or didn’t right?
We’re getting in the weeds now, huh?
Yes, and the average always ends up at ‘there was no trip’. Because there’s always a lot more of those.
Historically, time travel does not exist. There will never be a recorded instance of time travel. No one will ever remember time travel. If you could go back to your thread, you’d eventually not remember either. There are people who refuse to go back because of that. They could return, but they’re lose all their memories and distinctiveness.
The MTPs have an extremely secretive workaround for memory loss they are very reluctant to reveal. It’s more than that, they somehow spread the memories around to all of them. But we also know that, if they die, they make sure that doesn’t stick. So it’s controllable somehow. And all MTP are not using the same method. It’s an open secret that InterAct is using brain implants to copy memories, which no other timeline has the technology for. Commonwealth is using some complicated invention by Tesla that no other timeline understands. And no one knows how Legacy does it except them, and they aren’t talking.
But this is unimportant to any of us, because this doesn’t apply to us, we only exist in one thread to start with, so our time travel will always work…and also we will be averaged out of existence entirely if we continue to stay anywhere but Timeline Zero.
Wait a second. If every time in time results in a new thread, couldn’t that duplicate us if we happened to be visiting a time that someone else arrived on? And we’d no longer be unique?
No. When you travel through time, to keep from being erased incidentally by thread collisions, you need keep the temporal flux higher than normal, aka, leave your time machine turned on in passive mode. All time machines basically do this by themselves. This helps repel other threads away from yours. As a side effect, this shoves aside other time travelers who might coincidentally land in your thread to instead land in a different one. So they’ll be running around at the exact time as you, but you’ll be in different threads. (It is very unlikely they’d hit your specific thread anyway, but the higher the flux, the more unlikely it is.)
This is, incidentally, how temporal refugees used to exist before Haven. They’d leave their time machine on, or even have custom devices keeping the temporal flux high enough that were designed to do less stress to the thread. But it is not a workable long-term solution, that sort of stress will eventually collapse the entire thread no matter you do. So they would skip somewhere else in time before that happened. It was, frankly, a nightmare of constant movement. But there are temporal refugees who are from that time who managed to make it to Haven.
The MTPs also have a way to get inside existing threads, which they keep classified. It’s hypothesized they managed to do it by making sure that they have a connection to all threads in their timeline, at all times, which it’s assumed they must be able to do anyway detect any changes at all. They notably only ever arrive after major changes have been put in motion, not before, and they don’t try to stop them as much as figure out who you are and what you are doing, which implies that either they don’t want to risk trying to change something they have already observed, or that they can’t do that.