Welcome to Space Station Tango’s Intervention Day Celebration. Since we’re spread all over the time track, this could be a bit baffling, depending on when you are. There’s never been so complex a holiday. Let me give you a timeline, because this will be confusing otherwise. In fact, the timeline can’t even be linear and make sense, so focus:
April 1, 1999:
You won’t remember this, because it’s already been fixed, but this WAS Intervention Day until mid-2003. Now we call it Intervention Day ’99. A computer system malfunction in an archaic but surviving governmental doomsday deterrent accidentally triggered a nuclear war. The Galactic Consolidation’s extreme non-interference policies end where planetary extinction is a possibility, so the missiles were simply shifted a light year to the right and detonated harmlessly in space.
The dysfunctional leadership of the world was replaced with those who should always have been the leaders (yes, we’ve been watching long enough to know) and the Earth was slowly welcomed into the Consolidation. The rest is history.
But History is fickle. Now the non-linear nature of time comes into play, because energy from the detonation helped cross-tie Time. Here’s where it twists like a pretzel.
April 1, 1987:
KBCO, a radio station in Boulder, Colorado, USA alarmingly broadcasts its own signal from 2027, where they will be celebrating Intervention Day in their usual manner, by playing oldies from their beginnings back in the 1980s, along with retrospectives of the original Intervention Day in 1999. Everyone congratulated the station on a great radio hoax, but they were as confused then amazed as everyone else. It turns out that this fork of the time-cross anomaly was caused by:
April 1, 2027:
Student hackers at Abbas University, trying to jail-break a Dondo PortaTime Shifter (a consumer time device), tie into the Sahariana power grid, and overestimate how much energy they need. Paradoxically, in trying to go back to Earth:1987 to research a paper on the 1987 KaBiCiO Anomaly just mentioned, their excess energy was inadvertantly entrained with the Earth:1999 detonation-shift energy, drawing enough extra force from it to tear the time-space continuum and cause the initial anomaly. Don’t try to make sense of this. You’ll hurt your brain. Quantum “Time” is like that.
Earth:2015
Pinning down Quantum Time is like fishing with chopsticks for one snake in a swimming pool to which more snakes are constantly being added. By this point, there are actually thirteen main time tracks (and a near-infinite number of orphaned tracks), and this is REALLY tricky until you get used to time manipulation, so let’s not bother. Suffice it to say, with a completely inadequate analogy, that it’s as if a stocking got folded in three layers, and a hole blew out from the middle layer in 1999 through both folded layers—one in 1987 and one in 2027—and once the “cloth” straightened out again, it ran.
We fixed the run, and it ran again, fixed and ran, fixed and ran. So it was one world ending event after another, the nukes in the Iraq War, the total collapse of the world economy and the resulting wars, the Fukushima catastrophe, the Greenland ice shelf slip-and-slide flooding the major cities (and coastal reactors) of the world, that whole North Korea thing, Antarctica… oh my… Antarctica… by now the list is becoming endless. It turns out that it works that way with temporal anomalies like this, but it was the first we’d seen, so who knew?
Of course, if you live any time before 2027 at the initial puncture, you won’t remember any of these disasters. They were all fixed. It’s like the flashy thingie in Men in Black: you don’t remember time tracks you didn’t follow, even if you have the occasional quantum blip you call déjà vu. There’s a trick you can learn, but it’s not easy and it’s mostly too confusing to be worth much.
So that’s why, here in Earth:2065, we’re celebrating the 50th anniversary of Intervention Day… or is it the 66th? Or the 38th? Or maybe even the 77th anniversary of that first anomalous radio broadcast back in 1987.
Who cares? Here on Space Station Tango, we just celebrate it all! We’re weird enough to love the whole twisted concept.
Happy Intervention Day from Space Station Tango.
