Reintegration

Crap, I always hate this part.

David sat on one side of the floating raft, reminiscent of an amusement park water ride. He looked at the polished, overly-expensive sides. It was better than looking at what lay ahead.

"David? David! David?"

He remembered, a bit too late, to squelch the instinct to turn around. The price he paid for a tardy brain signal was finding himself face-to-face with another David.

Well, he thought, at least he still looks like me.

In fact, there were around forty Davids on this raft, all coasting slowly to the reintegration chamber ahead. Why it took so long, he didn't know.

"Hi David! It's David! David David David! Hahaha!"

One of the side effects of multielement time travel was the creation of less-than-perfect shards, or copies of the original person. Occasionally the shard would be psychopathic, or philosophically inverted, or otherwise unsuitable for the job. Some would be deformed. All defective shards would be incarcerated upon creation and not released until reintegration.

Sometimes, they would have to be destroyed. The scientists said that the loss of a shard or two wouldn't affect his reintegrated self, though he always harbored doubts. He always felt a bit more... hollow... after a reintegration process short a few shards.

But most weren't psychopaths. Some were just... weird. Like this moron.

"We're going to the bright light! The bright light! Tra la la la la la!"

The first time he was being reintegrated, he tried to kill one of the annoying ones. But the technicians stopped him.

"Don't do it -- that's a part of your personality!"

"The fuck it is. There is no part of me that's like this dimwitted moron!"

But they stopped him. And it bothered him that he was part moron, deep down, somewhere in his psyche. He also knew, by the technicians' response to his attempted shardicide, that they were lying about the effects of reintegrating with fewer shards than were initially created.

He surveyed the large, open, metallic chamber. The sides, floor, and ceiling were unadorned and unbroken, except by occasional splotches of equipment and, of course, the river of glowing goo.

To tune out the babbling idiot next to him, he thought about how the program.

He was part of an elite group of agents responsible for protecting or repairing aspects of the timeline. They were chosen for the strength and consistency of their personalities and the ability to function under duress, important both for the multielement process as well as the missions proper.

I guess an average person would be stuck on a raft of weirdos. Maybe this is why I don't go out anymore.

Not all shards were created equal. Beyond occasional personality divergences, the process could generate a maximum of 16 shards at a time. Experiments involving more shards were ongoing, but he wasn't informed about them. The joke among agents was that the first 32-shard process generated a bunch of three-foot midgets. The truth was probably a lot less funny.

For complicated missions, it would sometimes be necessary to generate shards from shards. Sadly, the number of viable shards would decrease rapidly in subsequent generations. For that reason, no agent had been able to complete a mission that involved less than third-generation shards. At that point, it was classified a failure, the agent lost -- not enough viable shards would remain in the facility for reintegration -- and another agent would be sent to finish the job. David didn't know if there were any missions that were just total failures. In spite of his cynicism about how the program was run, the nature of temporal meddling could mean that new missions would just go back to the point when old missions were started, thereby providing infinite chances to get it right.

Despite this, some agents never came back. The cynicism resurfaced, and he concluded that it was because a failed mission mattered, while a success that involved an agent death was still a success. One didn't tempt the temporal gods through the pursuit of perfect outcomes. Or pester the director with rescue mission proposals.

And the missions could be hard. David had lost 11 shards -- two first-generation, nine second-generation -- during a mission last year. Shard 11 was able to blow up the power plant and return home, but died of radiation burns. Again, the scientists had assured him that reintegration would be complete and healthful, though they did insist he take a month of leave and scheduled intensive personality therapy afterward.

At least reintegration left only one real David at the end. Early efforts at multielement time travel didn't involve reintegration, which had the nasty side effect of agents not being certain who was the "real" one, and developing nasty psychological complexes over it. Initially, they tried killing all the shards except one, and only belatedly realized the nonviability of later-generation shards.

No, he thought, these are the golden days of this program. Even with stupid shards.

The stupid shard had gone back to bothering a shard in the fetal position two rows back. "Hey! Whassa matta wit you?" Another shard was masturbating.

David grimaced, then sighed. Well, he said, no one ever accused me of not being complicated.