Watching the Clock Annotations p. 1

Science Links

I provided these links in the Acknowledgments and Further Reading section of the novel, but here they are in a more convenient form:

The root of my physical model in this book (as well as the model followed in the 2009 Star Trek feature film) is Hugh Everett’s relative state formulation of quantum mechanics, better known as the Many-Worlds Interpretation. “The Everett FAQ” at http://www.hedweb.com/manworld.htm is a thorough, accessible overview of the MWI. Another good, only slightly technical primer is “The Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics: Many Worlds or Many Words?” by Max Tegmark (available at http://www.arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9709032/). These documents provided the critical revelation that parallel histories, once diverged, are not absolutely forbidden from recombining. This was the key to reconciling a plausible MWI-based temporal theory with Star Trek’s portrayal of timelines being erased or destroyed by time travel. Physicist David Deutsch’s work in quantum information theory influenced my model of quantum entanglement across timelines and the destruction of incompatible information being the key to such “erasure.” The “Quantum Decoherence” page at http://www.ipod.org.uk/reality/reality_decoherence.asp (EDIT: the current address is http://www.faculty.umb.edu/gary_zabel/Courses/Parallel%20Universes/Texts/Quantum%20Decoherence.htm) also helped me figure out the physics of timeline mergers.
The theory that time has more than one dimension is the work of Itzhak Bars, discussed on Bars’s site at http://physics1.usc.edu/~bars/research.html#2T and in Chapter 7 of Extra Dimensions in Space and Time by Terning, Bars, and Nekoogar (Springer, 2009), available on Google Books. (This is not to be confused with Stephen Hawking’s “imaginary time” dimension, which is merely a mathematical convenience.) Bars’s work leads to the conclusion that a third dimension of time would result in negative probabilities, a concept considered physically meaningless. Doctor Naadri’s interpretation of negative probability is my own fictionalized twist on the idea, grafted with the concept of “anti-time” from TNG: “All Good Things . . .” (written by Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga). Meanwhile, the role of non-linear quantum mechanics in allowing interaction between timelines (including Naadri’s “Everett-Wheeler radio”) and other violations of conventional causality is discussed in John Cramer’s essay “Quantum Telephones to Other Universes, to Times Past” at http://www.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw48.html.
Quantum Darwinism is a theory developed by Wojciech H. Zurek et al. to explain how the singular classical world arises from the multivalued quantum world. It gained preliminary experimental support in 2010, and may be the solution to the generations-old mystery embodied in the famous Schroedinger’s Cat thought experiment. Zurek’s 2005 paper at http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0505031 is the basis for Lucsly’s discussion of quantum palimpsests in Chapter XXII.

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Chapter Annotations (Prologue – Ch. VIII)

Pg.
Dedication	The quote is Picard’s from the final scene of Star Trek Generations.
Epigraph	The first quote is reportedly from a 1955 letter from Albert Einstein to the family of his friend Michele Besso upon learning of his death. The latter quote is from Doctor Who: “Blink” by Steven Moffat.
Chapter I
2	Though I use a different calendar in each chapter (starting here with the standard Gregorian calendar), there are a few things kept constant. Every date in any calendar system is followed up by its Gregorian day of the week in English (for instance, “A Tuesday” here), emulating this bit in “Trials and Tribble-ations”:
	DULMUR: What was the date of your arrival? SISKO: Stardate 4523.7. DULMUR: A hundred and five years, one month, and twelve days ago. LUCSLY: A Friday.
	Also, every time stamp is given in UTC, aka Universal Coordinated Time or Greenwich Mean Time (“Zulu” in military parlance), no matter what time zone or planet the scene take place in. Thus, the stated time does not represent local time except for those scenes set in London.
	The term “branch office” comes from Last Unicorn Games’ All Our Yesterdays: The Time Travel Sourcebook (hereinafter AOY). “North Am” as the 24th-century state encompassing the present-day United States was established in a graphic in TNG: “The Neutral Zone.”
	George Faunt is named for George, the main character in the 1960 film The Time Machine (named in turn for the original book’s author Herbert George Wells and perhaps for the film’s director George Pal), and for Jason Faunt, lead actor in Power Rangers Time Force. Rani Mohindra is named for Anjli Mohindra and her character Rani Chandra from The Sarah Jane Adventures, a spinoff of Doctor Who.
3	The number of minutes cited by Faunt translates to about 12.4 years, is in keeping with Faunt being a new agent at the start of 2369 in Ch. X.
	The events of the Borg invasion are detailed in Star Trek: Destiny by David Mack.
4	the Rasmussen affair: See Ch. X.
	“Prochronistic” is used here to mean “from the future.” A prochronism is an anachronism appearing at a time before it could exist — for example, Count Basie appearing in the Old West in Blazing Saddles. The opposite, an anachronism from an earlier time (or in this context, a time traveller from the past), would be a “parachronism,” a term I found no opportunity to smoothly incorporate in the novel.
5	Coridan’s involvement in formative events of Federation history is suggested mainly by the ENT novel The Good That Men Do by Andy Mangels & Michael A. Martin. Also, ENT established that Vulcans and Andorians were enemies in the 22nd century (and “Shadows of P’Jem” specifically established Coridan as a site of conflict between them). Thus, a Vulcan-Andorian Empire centuries in the past is clear evidence of an alternate history.
6	Lucsly’s argument about classical neurons is based on the Everett FAQ’s entry on free will in the MWI: http://www.hedweb.com/manworld.htm#free-will This is the first of several points in the book where I counter the popular misconception that the Many-Worlds Interpretation means that there is an infinite number of alternate timelines or that every conceivable outcome is compelled to occur. I dislike this notion not only because it’s a misunderstanding of the theory, but because it’s dramatically unsatisfying: if every crisis point is resolved in all possible ways at once, there’s no real risk of failure and no real triumph of success, and thus every story becomes meaningless. See Larry Niven’s story “…All the Myriad Ways” for a fictional exploration of this idea; Peter David’s TNG novel Q Squared also alludes to “the Niven effect.”
8	The DTI’s use of “uptime” and “downtime” to mean “in the future” and “in the past” is inspired by Isaac Asimov’s The End of Eternity, in which “upwhen” and “downwhen” were used equivalently. I chose not to follow the counterexample of Stephen Baxter’s Manifold: Time, which used “upstream” to mean the past and “downstream” to mean the future. That approach is logical — a river runs downstream, time runs into the future — but I was an Asimov fan long before I discovered Baxter, so the Good Doctor got the nod.
	The Verity is named for Verity Lambert, the first producer of Doctor Who.
	A cosmic-string Kerr loop is the same type of time warp used in TNG: “Yesterday’s Enterprise.” It was described in that episode as “a Kerr loop from superstring material,” but this is inaccurate; “superstring theory” is short for “supersymmetric string theory,” and the strings being referenced there are not the same thing as cosmic strings.
9	The DTI’s use of phase discriminator-shielded records as a defense against timeline alteration was established in “Gods, Fate, and Fractals” by William Leisner in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds II. That was based in turn on the use of phase discriminators to fend off temporal effects in TNG: “Timescape.”
	TNG: “The Wounded,” set in early 2367 (Stardate 44429.6), introduced the Cardassians and established that a treaty with them had existed for nearly a year. The Verity was lost on SD 43021.5, more than a year earlier, so it would be a few months before the treaty was in place. I used “truce” here to avoid confusion with the treaty later finalized in TNG: “Journey’s End.”
	The Everett is, of course, named for Hugh Everett, developer of the Many-Worlds Interpretation.
10	The stress-energy tensor is a measure of energy density and flux in physics. One of the things that makes faster-than-light drive and time travel (which are essentially facets of the same thing) unlikely is that the spacetime metrics (equations defining the geometry of spacetime) that would allow for space and time warps tend to have “divergent” stress-energy tensors, meaning (if I understand it correctly) that there are regions within them where energy flux or density would build up out of control, a sort of runaway feedback effect. Physics thought-experiments about warp drive and wormholes often postulate “exotic matter,” a hypothetical, imaginary substance with negative energy and enormous density, which would compensate for the runaway energy. So it follows that whatever exotic means are used in the Trek universe to keep a warp drive stable would also help a ship survive a time warp.
11	The scene cuts between question and answer are meant to approximate a familiar trope of cop and detective shows, though it’s a device used in all sorts of “multiple interrogation” scenes, for instance in TNG’s “Coming of Age.” The idea was to sell right up front that this was a procedural/detective-show approach to the Trek universe.
	M’grash’s name and appearance are based on a neighborhood cat who used to visit my balcony, a cat I nicknamed Gracie.
	The Caitian colony on Regulus VI is a reference to certain ST role-playing games’ use of the name “Regulan” as a veiled reference to Caitians due to copyright issues. A different tie-in work referred to Regulus VI as a gas giant. I’m not directly familiar with the sources in question, but I figured, why not?
12	The described cataclysm in which Regulus A swallowed much of its companion’s atmosphere really happened, and is also the reason for the star’s accelerated spin and flattened appearance as alluded to earlier in the text. It’s brighter at the poles because they’re closer to the star’s center of mass and thus have higher gravity, compressing and heating the atmosphere further. Regulus has no known planets, but it follows that any inner planets would’ve been destroyed by the cataclysm; thus I had to come up with a rationale for the established, inhabited Regulan planets in Trek. Regulus is of uncertain age, since the cataclysm made it appear spectroscopically younger than it otherwise would, but it’s still believed to be less than a billion years old and thus unlikely to have complex life. So I had to fudge the age and rationalize that the cataclysm triggered faster evolution (an idea that has some validity — it is believed that environmental catastrophes prompt faster evolution by creating stresses, opening new niches, and reducing the size of a species’ genome so that rare, novel mutations are more likely to propagate). The numbers still don’t add up to my satisfaction, but it’s the best I could do.
	According to http://www.solstation.com/stars2/regulus3.htm:
	“The distance from Regulus A where an Earth-type planet would be “comfortable” with liquid water is between 11.9 and 15.5 AUs — between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus in the Solar System. At such distances from the star, such a planet would have an orbital period between 22 and 33 Earth years.”
	Thus, Regulus III would be right on the inner edge of the habitable zone, while Reg VI would be well beyond it, though as a Jovian moon it would presumably be tidally heated from within. If we assume Caitians are catlike in more than surface appearance, they probably have keen night vision and would be okay living on a world so far from its star.
13	The “Einsteinian perspective” is a reference to the relativistic principle that simultaneity is subjective; you can’t say in absolute terms when an event happened, just when an observer perceived it.
	The folk legends would be those pursued by Magnus Hansen, father of Annika Hansen, aka VGR’s Seven of Nine. VGR established that Hansen was following these legends years before Picard’s “first contact” with the Borg in TNG: “Q Who.” Luckily, the sheer vastness of the galaxy makes it possible to justify how such things could be known in some parts of the Federation but not others. The coreward Beta Quadrant is the part of explored space that’s closest to Borg territory (most of which is in the Delta Quadrant, adjacent to Beta).
	Wataru Takizawa is named for two of the more antagonistic characters in Mirai Sentai Timeranger, the Japanese show adapted into Power Rangers Time Force. There is no intentional connection to the character of Russell Takizawa in my original novelette “No Dominion.” I may have drawn that character’s surname from the same source, merely because it struck me as a suitable-sounding Japanese surname, but I’d forgotten that by the time I wrote this.
14	Presumably sh’Lesinas is an Andorian shen (female, sort of) known for writing time-travel SF. Given that space travel and alien contact are routine things in the 24th century, I figure the speculative fiction of the era would have to concentrate on other things, so time travel is probably much more of a genre unto itself, hence “time-fic.”
16	Hawking radiation is blackbody (thermal) radiation given off by an event horizon as a result of virtual-particle pair formation. It’s usually associated with black holes, but spacetime warps can have similar horizons. Hawking radiation is a consequence of the runaway stress-energy tensor described above.
17	Garcia’s information about warp-capable civilizations is out of date; it was learned in TNG: “The Chase” that the first humanoid species spread across the galaxy four billion years ago. This was after the Verity was lost, and Teresa hasn’t had time to catch up yet.
	The Regulus III Science Academy was established in DS9: “Fascination” as a university with a good reputation.
18	Ian Purvis is named for two Doctor Who cast members: Ian Marter, who played Harry Sullivan in the ’70s, and Peter Purvis, who played Steven Taylor in the ’60s.
19	The term “temporal tricorder” comes from the AOY sourcebook’s section on DTI equipment. I have borrowed the name, but not the specifics.
19-20	the Bajoran wormhole disruption event of Stardate 48992: A reference to the events of the DS9 novel Invasion!: Time’s Enemy by L. A. Graf, where the character of Heather Petersen was introduced. I re-read plenty of Trek time-travel tales in researching the novel, and I wanted to acknowledge the more influential ones. Plus I enjoyed the Petersen character. The stardate was not specified in the novel, but I chose an appropriate one for its placement between the third and fourth seasons of DS9. Petersen’s hair color wasn’t specified either, but I imagined her as strawberry blonde.
23	The Manheim Event means the events of TNG: “We’ll Always Have Paris,” the focus of Chapter II.
29	Although the Garcia character was directly inspired by Wendy Watson (Natalie Morales) in The Middleman, it’s entirely a coincidence that they both lost their fathers. I’d forgotten that part of Wendy’s backstory when I wrote this. I was critiquing the tendency of some fans to protest when a fictional character is killed and to treat the character’s resurrection as an entitlement. That irritates me because I lost my mother when I was seven and didn’t have the luxury of getting her back. Garcia’s words here echo my own reaction to some people’s inability to cope with even a fictional death. In retrospect, her words seem prophetic, since I had to deal with the loss of my own father during the writing of this manuscript.
Chapter II
36	Kartika 13, 2286 Saka Era translates to November 4, 2364 CE. This doesn’t match the stardate of “We’ll Always Have Paris” as interpreted by the Stardate Calculator I generally employ, but the stardates in TNG’s first season were largely out of sequence so I don’t treat them as binding.
	Nehru Colony was established in DS9: “The Forsaken.” I wanted a human colony world with a non-Western name so I could use a non-Western calendar for the scene headings.
	Motilal City is named for Motilal Nehru, prominent Indian nationalist leader and father of Jawaharlal Nehru.
37	As stated in the Character Notes, Dulmur’s past as a private detective is based on Jack Blessing’s recurring role on Moonlighting as McGillicuddy, a junior member of the Blue Moon Detective Agency. This chapter contains several Moonlighting in-jokes. The Chandra Detective Agency is named for the Indian word for “Moon.” Dennis Harmon is named after prominent recurring guest stars Dennis Dugan and Mark Harmon. Dulmur’s rival Piccolo is a nod to McGillicuddy’s rival Bert Viola. And the fashion-themed, romance-themed case was intended to reflect the kind of cases Blue Moon dealt with.
38	The repetition of the kiss corresponds to the time loop in the teaser of “We’ll Always Have Paris” (WAHP) The episode suggested that different places experienced the time loops at different times, but I found it simplest to assume the time loops on Nehru had the same duration, effect, and interval as the ones in the episode (as if they were ripples propagating outward, striking different places at different times but with a consistent separation). In the episode, the first loop was about 8 seconds long, the second one 24 seconds long.
	Indira City is named for Jawaharlal Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi.
39	DS9: “Honor Among Thieves” established Farius Prime as a hotbed of Orion Syndicate activity.
40-1	This time loop matches the second one in WAHP: Picard, Riker, and Data enter a turbolift, then the door opens and they see themselves back where they were when they first entered it, then we cut to the corridor and the viewpoint of the “earlier” duplicates. The episode was unclear on whether the characters’ perception shifted as depicted here, but it was convenient to assume so.
41	How could a time loop cause a truck to crash into itself? Presumably if the truck stopped at an intersection, then in the second loop it approached the same intersection and found itself already stopped there.
42	I don’t portray the effects of the third and final time distortion in WAHP, on the assumption that Data successfully prevented its propagation.
44	Date: November 27, 2364 CE.
45	“looking a bit like Sigmund Freud”: I couldn’t resist. Manheim was played by Rod Loomis, perhaps best known for playing Dr. Freud in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.
45-6	Paraagans, introduced in ENT: “Shockwave, Part 1,” were never clearly depicted onscreen, but some were briefly glimpsed in a monitor image. The photos there look basically human, but one seems to have an abnormally high forehead, so I went with that.
	Most of the physics talk here is grounded in reality, though I’ve probably put it together in an awkward way. WAHP stated that Manheim was researching “non-linear time,” but didn’t define it aside from some handwaves about other dimensions. There really is such a thing as non-linear quantum mechanics, at least conjecturally. In a normal quantum system, the probabilities of all different outcomes of the wave equation (the possible states of a particle or outcomes of an interaction) must add up to one. This is fairly intuitive; if the probability of getting any given number on a die is 1/6, then the sum of all the probabilities is 6/6 = 1. Under normal circumstances, there’s no way the full range of probabilities can add up to more than 100% (= 100/100 = 1). This is called unitarity, and it’s basic to linear quantum mechanics. Violating unitarity, allowing a total probability greater than 1, would mean that you could have more outcomes than you have events — that a given event could have more than one outcome. Manheim is saying that since he’s shown a single observer can loop around and experience the same event — the same measurement — with two different outcomes, that proves the existence of a sum across probabilities greater than 1, so non-linear quantum mechanics must be real.
	There’s a possible inconsistency here, since non-linear QM would be required for things that have already been proven real in the Trek universe, including interaction with parallel timelines (as in TOS: “Mirror, Mirror”). Many-Worlds theory maintains unitarity within each timeline by having them unable to perceive or interact with each other (or maybe vice-versa — the lack of interaction follows from unitarity). After all, if you can perceive events in other timelines, then you can see multiple outcomes to the same event, and hence get a sum across probabilities greater than 1. However, perhaps what Manheim’s saying is that this is the first proof of unitarity violation within a single timeline, as opposed to multiple ones.
	For discussion of Bars gauge symmetry, see the Science Links above. How do you get from there to a third dimension of time? I’m actually following the reasoning backwards in the text here. We have probabilities greater than one within a single timeline, which violates unitarity. But the universe needs unitarity for quantum physics to function. Manheim’s argument is that the existence of excess probabilities requires the existence of negative probabilities to cancel them out, and Bars’s equations show that there would be negative probabilities if there were a third dimension of time. In real life, the existence of a physically meaningless result such as negative probabilities rules out the possibility of a third time dimension, but the idea is useful for justifying elements of Trek temporal physics.
	The Casimir Effect is a real phenomenon, the closest thing we have to “negative energy.” Put two plates really close together, and certain wavelengths of vacuum fluctuations are excluded and can’t form, so there’s less vacuum energy between the plates than outside. So while it’s still positive energy in absolute terms, it’s negative relative to the surrounding space. It’s not a very good analogy for negative probability, but the idea is that it isn’t literally negative probability (which is meaningless), but just something that cancels excess probabilities somehow. Don’t ask me how; I’m deep into handwave territory by this point (and boy, are my arms tired).
	“Macrorealm” is a genuine technical term for what we generally call a timeline — one complete, self-consistent set of measurement outcomes. The role of negative entropy in timeline convergence will be addressed in Ch. III.
48	If Dulmur’s unhappy with “Marion,” why not go by Frances or Frank? I never figured that out, but I’m okay with that. We all have our strange habits and hang-ups, and that small absurdity, having Dulmur make things more frustrating for himself than necessary when there’s an easy solution, helps make him funnier. I suppose it’s possible that his mother did the same full-name yelling thing Megumi does, so he lumps his two given names together in his mind.
49	Dulmur’s birthdate is July 29, 2328. I chose the characters’ ages to correspond to the actors’ ages at the time of “Trials and Tribble-ations,” and gave them the actors’ birthdates. This date would translate to stardate 5574.6 using the Stardate Calculator’s formula, but that sounds too much like a TOS date, so I fudged it. (Lucsly’s birthdate is July 27, 2322. Yep, their birthdays are two days apart.)
	“Negative delay” is a term used by physicists who approach time loops from the perspective of quantum information theory, modeling them in the context of hypothetical quantum computer circuits. Signal delay is an element of real computer circuits, so you can model time loops using the same equations and principles if you just set the delay time to a negative value.
50	WAHP was extremely vague about the nature of the energy source within the planetoid. The script fell victim to the 1988 WGA writers’ strike and its coherence suffered. I would’ve liked to elaborate on the energy source, but I didn’t have room to focus on it.
Chapter III
54	Julian days are an astronomical time standard, as befitting a chapter taking place largely around the Royal Greenwich Observatory. Julian day 2590805 corresponds to April 13, 2381.
	The European Alliance was established as a 24th-century state in TNG: “The Price.”
55	The Temporal Displacement Division of the DTI was established in “The Road to Edos” by Kevin Dilmore in the New Frontier: No Limits anthology, though a similarly-named entity was referenced in New Frontier: Cold Wars by Peter David.
	The basics of Clare Raymond’s death were established in TNG: “The Neutral Zone” (TNZ), but more specifics (such as the business trip) were established in The Eugenics Wars: The Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh, Volume Two by Greg Cox.
	“The Neutral Zone” also fell prey to the ’88 writers’ strike, having to be shot from a first-draft script. Thus the story is full of enormous holes, like the mystery of how a cryonics satellite got all the way to the Neutral Zone and the Enterprise crew’s uncharacteristic lack of curiosity about the revived 20th-century humans. The miraculous medical science allowing Crusher to resurrect the dead in a matter of minutes is also problematical. Still, I liked the idea of using Clare as a character, so I largely glossed over the problems with her backstory.
56	Ralph Offenhouse’s role as Federation Secretary of Commerce was established in Articles of the Federation (AOTF) by Keith R. A. DeCandido.
57	The reference to Clare’s descendant Jonathan marrying a man is based on the barely-visible gag text in her genealogy graphic screens in TNG. The screen in question shows that “Jonathan Frakes Raymond” married “Brent Spiner Raymond” and somehow gave birth to “Charles Emerson Winchester.” Below that is a reference to “Marina Sirtis Raymond” marrying “Denise (something) Raymond” and giving birth to “Sherman T. Potter” and “Francis J. Mulcahy.” I loosely adapted that to “his sister marrying an alien,” since Sirtis’s character was an alien.
58	The given Julian days encompass April 20-May 1, 2381.
	“just shy of five centuries now”: The International Meridian Conference of 1884 established the Greenwich meridian as zero degrees longitude, though the adoption of Greenwich Mean Time as a universal standard wasn’t an immediate outcome of the conference. So this is fudging things just a bit.
	The detonation of an aerial nuke over London in World War III was established in The Lost Era: The Sundered by Michael A. Martin and Andy Mangels. The panic following First Contact is my own conjecture, on the assumption that not everyone would’ve responded peacefully to the Vulcans’ arrival.
58-9	Click to enlarge The Victorian houses described here actually exist, and are the closest site I could find to the Prime Meridian and the Greenwich Observatory without actually occupying Greenwich Park itself. (I originally planned on siting HQ on the Observatory grounds, but I realized it was a bad idea to put a top-secret organization’s HQ within a major tourist attraction.) I’ve merged them with elements of the description of DTI HQ in AOY, although the sourcebook situated the HQ in the West End of London. To me, Greenwich was a more appropriate choice.
59	For more on the Greenwich campus of the University of Greenwich, see http://www2.gre.ac.uk/about/campus/greenwich.
	“Eigenstate” means “own state,” and refers to a property of a thing that remains unchanged when that thing is put through a mathematical transformation — its identity, as it were. Technically it’s a property of a vector that is unaltered by a matrix transformation — say, if you amplify the size of a vector but it continues to point in the same direction. Quantum states can be defined as vectors in a mathematical space. What does that mean? Well, it’s like using a 2-dimensional graph to plot two variables against each other on x and y axes, representing them as a line or curve on a plane. You can generalize that to more variables by adding more axes — three axes define a space, four define a hyperspace, and so on. So an equation with n variables can be represented as a vector in n-dimensional space. Now, if you’re talking about a quantum state of the entire universe, i.e. a timeline, that’s an effectively limitless number of variables — every property of every particle in the universe. But you can plot that in an n-space of infinite dimensions, which is called Hilbert space. A timeline, a particular solution of the Schroedinger wave equation of the universe, is a vector within Hilbert space. It’s an eigenvector, one that maintains its direction even as it’s transformed by movement through time, internal change, etc. That means it continues to exist as its own distinct vector pointing in a different direction from every other vector — i.e. a timeline separate from all others.
60	A chan is one of the two “male” Andorian sexes, in the Andorian biology developed for Trek Lit by Heather Jarman and Marco Palmieri.
62	The Choblik are a species I invented for my original SF but ended up including in Titan: Orion’s Hounds. Felbog is only the second Choblik character to appear in Trek Lit as far as I recall. He’s named in honor of Nebogipfel, the Morlock character from The Time Ships by Stephen Baxter.
63	In quantum theory, different timelines actually are “out of phase” with each other, in a very nice bit of synchronicity between real physics and Trek technobabble. The phase of a vector is its direction in Hilbert space. Since every variable in the equation defining a timeline — every state of its every particle — is a distinct dimension in Hilbert space, if two timelines diverge in their particle states, then that makes them orthogonal (perpendicular) to each other in the dimension defined by each altered state. As the changes propagate further and alter the states of more and more particles, the timeline vectors become perpendicular in more and more dimensions, pushing them even further out of phase and making it effectively impossible for them to align again. This is discussed in more depth at the Everett FAQ, Q6: http://www.hedweb.com/manworld.htm#split
	The Shepherd Gate Clock is the clock face represented on the cover of DTI: Watching the Clock. In retrospect, I wish I’d inserted some reference to Garcia and Felbog actually watching this clock, though it’s probably just as well that I didn’t.
64	When Felbog says a timeline merger would “violate entropy,” he means it would violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics by decreasing the total entropy of the universe. This is explained in the Everett FAQ, Q17: http://www.hedweb.com/manworld.htm#fuse It would be like putting the pieces of a broken glass back together. Because it’s so improbable, it would require some form of work to make it happen, something that locally decreases entropy/disorder at the cost of increasing it somewhere else.
64-5	The Guardian of Forever was, of course, created by Harlan Ellison in TOS: “The City on the Edge of Forever.” In recent years, Ellison has expressed objections to the use of elements of “City” in Trek Lit and other licensed properties without his consent and has threatened legal action, and thus it’s not necessarily “safe to approach” the Guardian (though I think his objections are to actually quoting dialogue from the episode, as opposed to merely referencing it). I probably would’ve avoided the Guardian in any case, since I feel it’s been overused.
66	Dates: May 3-11, 2381.
	This scene originally came after the following one, but I decided I had too much physics talk all at once and needed a change of pace here. The scenes actually flowed better when I switched them, and very little needed to be changed.
68	The Temporal Accords were established in ENT as an agreement among time-travelling factions in the future. Their existence in the present was postulated in SCE: Buying Time by Robert Greenberger.
	The Temporal Integrity Commission was established in VGR: “Future’s End.” The Temporal Agents were established in ENT, but the full name of their organization as the Federation Temporal Agency is my own extrapolation. The Tholian Chronological Defense Corps is my own coinage, and is intended to be the agency responsible for the Tholians’ participation in ENT: “Future Tense.” Given the extreme age of Tholian civilization as established in the Vanguard novels, it stood to reason that they may have already had a temporal agency well before the other regional powers.
70	Dates: May 12-16, 2381. The May 12 date for Bacco’s press conference about the Typhon Pact is given in A Singular Destiny.
71	more or less surrounding it on three sides: Here’s a rough map I made of the Typhon Pact as of 2381, based on a map from Star Trek Star Charts (with the Pact indicated in orange): Click to enlarge My conjectural placement of Kinshaya territory is questionable, though, since they have no common border with the Federation. Perhaps they are actually “above” or “below” UFP territory.
71-2	The discussion here is implicitly my explanation for how the alternate timeline established in the 2009 Star Trek feature film (ST’09) can coexist alongside the original timeline without eradicating it, even while other alternate timelines have been shown to replace the original one. Nero and Spock Prime made a one-way journey into the past, so there was no reciprocal exchange of matter, energy, or information. The “phase resonance” idea is a very simplified description of a concept derived from the Quantum Decoherence page at http://www.ipod.org.uk/reality/reality_decoherence.asp. In the “Decoherence in an Ensemble of Particles” section at the end of the article, it discusses how interference (interaction) between quantum states (timelines) is represented by the “off-diagonal” terms in the probability density matrix representing the two combined states, and shows how those off-diagonal terms average out to zero, meaning that the two states go completely out of phase. This is another way of expressing what I discussed above about divergent timelines continuing to diverge further until they’re completely isolated from one another. My thinking here is that if you go back in time and create a new timeline, you “imprint” your own timeline’s phase on it just a bit. As you breathe, as you shed skin and hair and leave oils on the things you touch, you leave particles from your own timeline behind in the new one even if you return afterward. So the new timeline retains a slight entanglement with the old one and the off-diagonal phase terms don’t go completely to zero because of the extra particles. So because the wave equation of the altered timeline retains a slight echo of the equation of the original one, there are resonances that cause the equations to evolve similarly — i.e. events can happen similarly, the same people can be born, etc. This could explain some of the extraordinary coincidences in ST’09. But if there’s a mutual exchange, then both timelines’ equations contain phase terms from the other, so the resonance is mutual and causes a reinforcing feedback loop that draws the two timelines together.
	Keep in mind that this is fictional. The underlying idea is that, if any two things interact, they become part of the same quantum system (i.e. they become entangled) and must be treated as a unified whole. So if two timelines interact, they become a single quantum system and their fates are joined. This is where you run into a bit of a conundrum. On the one hand, quantum information theory says that if two timelines entangle, they functionally become one and must have a single measurement history, which argues that they would converge and that one would vanish in favor of the other. On the other hand, thermodynamics and particle physics say that it’s all but impossible for two out-of-phase timelines to reconverge again. For the purposes of this novel, I resolve the contradiction by postulating “anti-time” as a negative-entropy fudge factor. In reality, I think the explanation is that quantum entanglement can be broken. Maybe if you went into another timeline, it would be entangled with your own for the duration of the interaction, but once the interaction ended, decoherence would set in and the two timelines would go their separate ways again. (And that’s assuming that there even are multiple timelines at all, which I’m agnostic about.)
	Now, the claim here is that spontaneously divergent timelines like the Mirror Universe are exempt from this collapse process, because they weren’t imprinted with the other timeline’s phase at the point of their creation. But why wouldn’t the MU have been imprinted with the Prime Universe’s phase, or vice-versa, during the various crossovers that have occurred? My idea is that it only works between two timelines that were in the same state when the crossover occurred, i.e. the crossover itself created the timeline split. In that case, the altered timeline is “imprinted” with phase information that can’t cancel out completely. But if the MU or any other parallel timeline diverged spontaneously, it wouldn’t have any such intrinsic imprint and would’ve already evolved into a rather different state by the time the interaction occurred, so the two timelines wouldn’t link in the same way. It’s not very well thought out, frankly, but it serves my purposes.
72	Seleneans and their psychology were established in “Chiaroscuro” by Geoffrey Thorne in the anthology Deep Space Nine: Prophecy and Change and in Titan: Sword of Damocles by the same author.
73	Teyak mentioning a black hole as a “safe” one-way exchange is, of course, a nod to the red-matter “black holes” of ST’09.
	The Defiant incident here comes from DS9: “Past Tense.” At first I wasn’t sure this episode fit my model, since the initial transporter accident could be interpreted as a one-way interaction. But the Defiant crew’s later jumps back and forth through time created the two-way interaction I needed, and from an objective chronological perspective, their arrival in the past happened before everything else, even if they came later from the characters’ and viewers’ POV. Thus, the timeline shift could indeed be caused by something that apparently hadn’t happened yet.
74	Previous works of Trek time-travel fiction had the characters expressing uncertainty about aspects of temporal physics, particularly the question of timeline survival, but Spock Prime in ST’09 (who came from 2387) showed no interest in attempting to “restore” his own history, suggesting he understood that it was unnecessary under the circumstances. Thus, I wanted to suggest that certain open questions about temporal physics came to be resolved in the interim. You can see the progression of this through the novel, if you take the chapters in chronological order. Manheim and Naadri are just beginning to catch onto the answers in Ch. II. By the time of the Bozeman incident four years later (Ch. X), they’ve formulated their theory, but it hasn’t been verified yet. (I would’ve liked it to be more vague at that early stage, but it suited the story. I’m assuming it was still a novel theory at the time, believed by the mutineers because they wanted to believe it, but far from widely known or accepted.) And by the novel’s “present” in 2381, it’s the consensus working model of temporal physics.
75	Dates: May 19-27, 2381.
	“Negative probability ghost” is a term from multidimensional time theories. It refers to a mathematical “ghost,” a numerical probability with no real-world meaning attached (because it’s negative). I avoided using the term in the discussion of Bars’s 2-D time in Ch. II since it would’ve been too hard to explain, but here I can use it more symbolically.
77	Canary Wharf is a significant site in modern Doctor Who mythology, the former home of the Torchwood Institute (specifically Torchwood One, the larger and more evil sibling of the Cardiff-based Torchwood Three in the series Torchwood). By sheer coincidence, it would probably be visible from the location I chose for DTI HQ.
	See the Science Links above for more on quantum Darwinism. As I said above, I’m unconvinced that MWI really means that parallel timelines exist; even many supporters of the theory interpret the other “timelines” as mathematical abstractions rather than coexisting realities. Quantum Darwinism offers an explanation for how the multiplicity of possible quantum states could add up to only a single timeline: most of the competing states are outcompeted and rendered irrelevant, and only the prevailing consensus can be considered real. This is the view I lean toward. However, I have to admit, if reality is shaped by an evolutionary selection process, it does allow for the possibility that more than one state could simultaneously thrive, just as one species can branch into two. This is the basis of the ideas Ranjea discusses here.
78	“Mathematically speaking, they’re actually perpendicular”: We covered this in the p. 63 note: different timelines are described as orthogonal (perpendicular) vectors in Hilbert space. So yes, what we think of as parallel timelines are technically perpendicular.
	This is one scene where I think my desire to explore scientific ideas got in the way of writing the characters. I feel Ranjea’s comments here should’ve come more from an emotional and spiritual direction rather than offering a rational argument to counter Borah’s fears. Then again, given that Seleneans are analytical by nature, maybe Ranjea figured she’d take more comfort in an intellectual argument.
81	The rumor about Lucsly being Abraham Lincoln rescued from the past is a nod of sorts to the 1986 Twilight Zone revival episode “Profile in Silver,” written by J. Neil Schulman, in which a history professor from the future (Lane Smith) went back in time to rescue John F. Kennedy (Andrew J. Robinson, later DS9’s Garak) from assassination.
Chapter IV
84-5	See the Alien Calendar Notes for explanation of the Vulcan calendar used here. I operated on the assumption that the starting date here is June 26, 2365, although this doesn’t mesh with the stardate for TNG: “Time Squared,” the episode this chapter follows up on. In my personal ST chronology, I’ve had to make a lot of assumptions to make things fit together logically, so my dates often diverge from how the stardates would translate (and despite the appearance of steady increase, the stardates in TNG, DS9, and VGR weren’t really consistent anyway).
87	The term “black star” comes from TOS: “Tomorrow is Yesterday.” It was probably intended to mean what we would now refer to as a black hole (a term that was not popularized until nearly a year after the episode aired). It’s rather a coincidence that the same black hole that sent Kirk’s Enterprise back in time also flung Voyager 6 across the cosmos, but I figured it would be an even greater coincidence if there were two black holes in such proximity to Earth.
	A Cauchy horizon is the interface between normal spacetime and a region of “inverted” spacetime that allows movement backward in time as well as forward. See the discussion of chronitons on p. 96. A Cauchy horizon is where the runaway Hawking radiation from a divergent stress-energy tensor would manifest, most likely destroying anything that tried to cross it.
87ff	This chapter revolving around the “Black Star” is full of in-joke references to Blackstar, a fantasy cartoon produced by Filmation Associates (makers of the animated Star Trek) in 1981 — essentially a prototype for He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, and a spiritual descendant of Filmation’s earlier Flash Gordon series. John Blackstar was an Earth astronaut who fell through a black hole into an alternate universe ruled by magic. Warlock Station is named after Blackstar’s very cool-looking dragon steed Warlock. Mara Kadray is similar in appearance to Mara the Sorceress, Blackstar’s main ally. Rif and Balkar were two of his comic-relief sidekicks, and Sagar was the world where the series took place.
89	In “Time Squared,” it was stated that the Enterprise would be destroyed in six hours; however, this meant six hours from the time the briefing was given, which I’ve here assumed was about 42 minutes (0.7 hours) after the shuttle was first detected.
91	Rhaandarites’ enhanced social-processing abilities were established in my own Ex Machina. See those annotations for further discussion.
	Note that Andos says there are few Vulcan comedians. Which suggests there must be some. Fascinating….
	Terellians were established as a four-armed species in TNG: “Liaisons.” A four-armed keyboard player was featured in TNG: “Unification II,” and I’ve implicitly assumed she was Terellian. However, the Myriad Universes novel The Embrace of Cold Architects gives her species a different name. Perhaps she was simply playing a Terellian-made keyboard.
92	The Deutsch is named for physicist David Deutsch, mentioned above in Science Links.
	Sector 006 is established in Star Trek Star Charts as the sector containing Andor (or Andoria if you prefer).
	The “Tholian incident” cited here is ENT: “Future Tense.” The Tigellan chronic hysteresis is a nod to the Doctor Who serial “Meglos,” which took place on the planet Tigella and used that term to refer to a time loop; the stardate of 8009 is derived from the September 1980 airdate of its first episode. The Kyushu incident is referenced in Chapter 20 of my novel The Buried Age.
	The hypothesis that one time-travel event causes you to attract others is my own invention here and is pretty much pure technobabble. I chose to leave it merely a hypothesis, but it would explain a lot.
96	Tipler spacetime: In 1974, Frank Tipler wrote a paper postulating that a massive rotating cylinder could generate a distorted spacetime around it that would allow an observer to travel along a closed timelike curve — i.e. loop back into one’s own past. Theoretically, a rotating black hole could do much the same thing. Note that this is basically what happened in “Tomorrow is Yesterday,” an episode written seven years before Tipler’s paper. (The same episode also correctly predicted the weekday on which “the first manned moon shot” would be launched. It’s almost enough to make one suspect temporal intervention.)
	It has never been precisely explained what “chronitons” are in ST; they’re just technobabble particles that have come to be identified with time travel. The initial temptation is to identify them with chronons, the quanta of time in real physics; but a chronon is not a particle, merely the smallest measurable duration of time in a given quantum system. ST unambiguously treated them as particles, so I’ve tried to postulate a type of particle that could credibly produce temporal effects. A different explanation for chronitons was offered in the TOS: Crucible novel trilogy by David R. George III, some kind of carrier particle for temporal energy, I believe, but I couldn’t figure out what that could mean in real-physics terms.
98	The recorded conversation here is verbatim from “We’ll Always Have Paris.” There was no indication in the scene that the conversation was being recorded, but it seemed a logical supposition and suited my purposes.
99	Originally, “Time Squared” was intended to lead into “Q Who,” with the vortex revealed at the end to be the work of Q. When that plan was scuttled, it left the episode without any real explanation for its events. I figured I’d provide one here, at least partially, and its similarities to WAHP (the time loop, the perception of an extradimensional consciousness) enabled me to tie them together.
100	Yvette Michael is another Blackstar nod. The composers who scored that and most other Filmation shows, Ray Ellis and Norm Prescott, did so under the pseudonyms Yvette Blais and Jeff Michael. The Anchar Sector and the Aquaria are named for locations from the show.
102	Alan Manheim is named for Alan Oppenheimer, who played Blackstar’s archnemesis Overlord (in between playing Ming on Flash Gordon and Skeletor in He-Man). Erika Manheim is named for Erika Scheimer, daughter of Filmation founder Lou Scheimer and an actress and composer in later Filmation shows.
	The identification of Kaferia with Tau Ceti and the description of the Kaferians as insectoid come from 1980’s Star Trek Maps, though both are probably better known from the later book The Worlds of the Federation by Shane Johnson. The Kaferians’ fierce individualism and libertarianism are my own postulate, because I needed a reason why it would be difficult to track down Alan Manheim.
103	The runabout Brin is a reference to SF novelist David Brin. Brin wrote a story called “The River of Time,” and ST runabouts are normally named for rivers. Yes, that’s how my mind works. This is probably a different, older class of runabout from the Danube class featured in DS9, however.
	Tau Ceti really does have a dense debris disk. Readers of my Over a Torrent Sea annotations will remember I based Droplet’s system on Tau Ceti for reasons explained there.
104	The figures Lucsly gives are based on the assumption that Kaferia has a semimajor axis (average orbital radius) of 0.702 AU and an orbital period of 238.694 days, given Tau Ceti’s estimated mass of 0.783 solar masses and a habitable zone centered at about 0.68 AU.
108	The stuttered dialogue here is meant to represent the characters’ difficulty getting their own vocal apparatus to work, but it could also be read as a representation of the same kind of speech distortion featured in the wormhole scene in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. I do not object if the reader chooses to interpret it in that way.
Chapter V
112	For more on the Maya calendar (a topic subject to gross misrepresentation in popular culture), see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_calendar. I chose it for this chapter because of the vast swaths of time the Maya calendar is able to encompass, analogous to the reach of the Axis of Time. Date: Sep. 13, 2381.
	The Vomnin were introduced in TTN: Orion’s Hounds. I included them and several other Gum Nebula civilizations in the book in case later authors wished to develop them further, but the series ended up going in a different direction. DTI:WTC gave me the opportunity to develop them further at last.
113	Originally, The Axis of Time was a TOS novel proposal I developed for editor Marco Palmieri in 2008, the idea being to come up with a standalone tale that could be adapted to either the original or Abrams continuity as desired. That plan fell through when Marco was laid off from Pocket in the economic crunch, but when new editor Jaime Costas asked me to do DTI, she mentioned that Axis would be her second choice from my list of proposals. So I decided to incorporate Axis as a subplot so it wouldn’t go to waste, although it plays out very differently here.
	When I chose the name “Axis of Time,” I was unaware that it was already in use for an alternate-history novel trilogy by John Birmingham. I was drawing purely on the physics terminology of spacelike and timelike axes.
113-4	The slipstream-capable Vesta-class starships were established in the Destiny trilogy. Slipstream’s dependence on rare benamite crystals was established in VGR: “Timeless” and elaborated on in the VGR novel Unworthy by Kirsten Beyer.
117	the British accomplishment of creating precision timepieces: The first precision chronometer for computing longitude was developed by English clockmaker John Harrison in the eighteenth century.
118	The Vulcan Science Directorate viewpoint described here is basically the same as our current understanding in reality. ENT treated the VSD as closed-minded dogmatists who wouldn’t even consider the possibility of time travel, but it was illogical (so to speak) that they’d be more ignorant of the physics than we are today. In the course of this novel, I often faced the problem that ST portrayed future knowledge of temporal physics as being more backward and vague than our actual current theoretical understanding of the subject. I had to try to reconcile that by establishing that the theoretical knowledge did exist but was subject to controversy over its ambiguities, and by assuming that the Starfleet officers and civilians who generally stumbled across temporal incidents weren’t as expert in the subject as the DTI agents and temporal physicists featured herein.
	In TOS: “The Naked Time,” Spock reacted to the Enterprise‘s brief time travel as confirmation of something hitherto only theoretical. Thus, it follows that the events in ENT involving time travel and the Temporal Cold War must have been classified at a level above Spock’s clearance.
119	The idea that only the Enterprise was capable of a successful slingshot came from discussions with David A McIntee, who dealt with related concepts in his novel Indistinguishable from Magic. His thinking was that if slingshot maneuvers were easily achievable, history would be subject to constant alteration. Luckily, the physics issues discussed above help justify this premise.
	The events referenced in Andos’s thoughts are, sequentially, TOS: “Assignment: Earth” (Aegis), the TOS novel First Frontier (Clan Ru), and TAS: “Yesteryear” (Empire of Orion).
120-1	The alien probe is from ST IV: The Voyage Home. The protomatter theft is from the DC comic book story “The Peacekeeper” by Howard Weinstein, in which the name “Aegis” was coined. The parasite infestation is my own invention here, serving merely as a way to slip in a reference to ENT: “Twilight” (whose events were erased from history and are thus difficult to reference directly).
122	Date: Sep. 14, 2381.
	The Vesta-class ships are named for the Seven Hills of Rome. The Capitoline has not been referenced before.
124	There is research linking romantic love to the same centers of the brain involved in addiction, for instance in this article: http://www.einstein.yu.edu/news/releases/546/study-links-romantic-rejection-with-reward-and-addiction-centers-in-the-brain/
	The concept of a “unitive” experience, an erasure of the boundaries between self and other, increasing empathy is extrapolated from research discussed here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/12/science/12psychedelics.html?_r=1&ref=john_tierney
	In interviews, Dr. Martin and other subjects described their egos and bodies vanishing as they felt part of some larger state of consciousness in which their personal worries and insecurities vanished. They found themselves reviewing past relationships with lovers and relatives with a new sense of empathy. “It was a whole personality shift for me,” Dr. Martin said. “I wasn’t any longer attached to my performance and trying to control things. I could see that the really good things in life will happen if you just show up and share your natural enthusiasms with people. You have a feeling of attunement with other people.” The subjects’ reports mirrored so closely the accounts of religious mystical experiences, Dr. Griffiths said, that it seems likely the human brain is wired to undergo these “unitive” experiences, perhaps because of some evolutionary advantage. “This feeling that we’re all in it together may have benefited communities by encouraging reciprocal generosity,” Dr. Griffiths said. “On the other hand, universal love isn’t always adaptive, either.”
	I mentioned Klingons taking Deltan sex slaves in “Empathy” in Mirror Universe: Shards and Shadows. Presumably this is not the incident Garcia is referring to, since it takes place in an alternate timeline. Then again, given that Garcia is DTI, I can’t rule that out completely.
125	What I seem to be implying here is that humans could “survive” sex with Deltans if it were casual enough on both parts. This seems a reasonable consequence of the model of Deltan sexuality I’m using here, and the portrayal of Deltans in Trek tie-ins has been inconsistent enough that I didn’t want to rule out the possibility completely. However, I think it would be very unlikely. Even if the Deltan participant were casual about it, the human would probably be intensely affected on an emotional level and would crave a deeper connection, and the Deltan would respond in kind. At the least, it would be very risky, and few Deltans would be so reckless with their prospective partners’ mental health as to consent to it.
	Note that VGR: Unworthy established a sexual liaison between a Deltan and a Kriosian/human hybrid, Aytar Gwyn. Gwyn’s Kriosian empathy probably “insulated” her, yet given that she was late for duty after the liaison, it’s possible she got too caught up in it and thus wasn’t completely immune to the risk of overdependence.
126	“get a better whiff of me”: Despite being a seductive ploy, Garcia’s reasoning is sound. There’s evidence that humans emit sex pheromones, and that our erogenous zones tend to be associated with concentrations of scent glands: the lips, the face, the breasts, etc. The close-up exposure to one’s partner’s pheromone glands may be part of the reason why kissing is sexually stimulating.
127-8	ST:TMP established a Deltan ability to ease pain, when Ilia tended to the injured Chekov. I chose to interpret it here in the context of the unitive psychology mentioned above.
130	Date: Sep. 22, 2381.
131	The “turbulent conditions” in the Gum Nebula arise from it being the home to multiple star-formation regions, as discussed in Orion’s Hounds.
131-2	The Caeliar temporal loop is from Destiny, the Orishan tesseract incident from TTN: Sword of Damocles.
132	The discussion between Ranjea and Garcia implicitly assumes that Betazoids are not “off-limits” to Deltans as sexual partners. Given the strong similarities between the two species, I think it likely that Betazoids could be “safe” partners for Deltans; indeed, I considered having Ranjea mention that the species were close relatives, but decided it would serve no narrative purpose to mention here. (The similarities are not coincidental; the characters of Riker and Troi in TNG were basically a revamp of the Decker and Ilia characters from TMP and the abortive Phase II TV revival.)
	A facultative biped is a normally quadrupedal species that can function bipedally when it needs to. Trinni/ek (the / represents a dental tongue click, made by tapping the tongue against the back of the upper front teeth) were introduced in AOTF.
137	It’s true that most time-travel stories in ST span only a few hundred years at most. The main exception, aside from passing visits to far prehistory in Q-related episodes, is the TOS novel First Frontier by Diane Carey and Dr. James I. Kirkland, in which the time travel is back to the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. That book depicts a notable exception to the rule alleged by Sikran.
	It belatedly occurs to me that Sikran’s argument that civilizations leave little long-term impact on the galaxy is inconsistent with the very basis for Vomnin civilization, their dependence on the relics of long-dead civilizations. The only justification I can offer is that Sikran is making this argument because it suits his ambitions, and is willfully ignoring the inconsistency. It’s harder to explain why none of the Federation negotiators call him on this. Perhaps the DTI agents, due to their area of expertise, focused more on the temporal theory itself, and left little room for Troi to bring up the philosophical inconsistency.
	Sikran’s assertion about the alteration of spacetime geometry permanently isolating timelines is based on the Everett FAQ entry Q15: http://www.hedweb.com/manworld.htm#where. It implicitly serves as an alternate possible explanation for how the new timeline created in the 2009 film can coexist safely with the Prime timeline, since the destruction of Vulcan in the film would change its mass distribution. I came upon both possible explanations in the course of my research, and decided not to settle for including just one.
139	I originally intended the inversion of space and time between the Axis and normal space to be complete, but I couldn’t figure out a way to make sense of it. So for story convenience, I decided to say that the axes rotated into alignment at the interface zones. It’s a cheat, but it beats the alternative.
Chapter VI
141	Date: September 26-27, 2381. ENT: “Detained” established that Tandar Prime has at least two moons. I named the moons Vien (with an orbit of about 12 Tandaran days, representing the “week” of the calendar) and Bregat (with an orbit of c. 30 Tandaran days, representing the “month”) So the date given here is the last day of the second “week” of the eighth “month” of YC 867. The local day is about 1.2 Earth days. I gave Tandar Prime a semimajor axis of 0.953 AU around 39 Tauri (see next note), for a year length of 0.922 y, which comes out to nine Bregat “months” plus 9-10 extra days.
	Star Trek Star Charts refers to 39 Tauri as Tandar on its “Route of Enterprise NX-01″ map on p. 60, but as Rakon (presumed home of the Rakonian swamp rat alluded to in DS9: “Hippocratic Oath”) on the third foldout map in back. I’ve chosen to resolve the inconsistency by assuming that Rakon is the Tandarans’ name for their home star.
	The Suliban detention camp was liberated by NX-01 in ENT: “Detained.”
143	“Amaranthine” means unchanging, eternal.
	A worldline, in physics, is the curve desribing a particle’s motion through spacetime. A stationary point (relative to the chosen coordinate system) in 3-dimensional space becomes a line parallel to the time axis in 4-dimensional spacetime. Who and where you are at any given moment can be considered an instantaneous cross-section of the worldline that defines you in four dimensions.
144	Vard’s use of indium nuclear spin states to detect tachyons is a nod to Gregory Benford’s Timescape. Indium oxides are often used in LCD display panels.
	The “maloc” as a Tandaran unit of field strength is an allusion to the “malcolm” unit from Doctor Who: “Planet of the Dead.” I initially typed “kilomalcolms” as an in-joke, but felt that was a little too on-the-nose.
145	“Paracausal event” is my own coinage, meaning an event not resulting from normal causality (where cause precedes effect).
147	The “biotemporal regression incident” is VGR: “Before and After.”
	There’s an inconsistency here. It turns out that the last time Lucsly and Dulmur encountered Noi before this was in January 2378, only 3 years, 8 months, 8 days earlier (sorry, it’s catching). At that time, Lucsly was already going gray and Dulmur’s face would’ve presumably been fairly lined. However, Noi doesn’t necessarily encounter them in the same order. This may be a Noi from an earlier point in her personal timeline than the Noi they met in 2378.A simpler explanation could be that, since that 2378 meeting was very tense, Noi just didn’t have the opportunity for small talk at the time. So now she’s able to comment on things she noticed before but didn’t have the opportunity to mention then. However, that doesn’t quite fit with the “Longer for you than me” line immediately preceding.
149	The idea of quantum-based time travel is a loose allusion to the idea of “postselection” as a basis for time travel as discussed in this article: http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/25494/. (The formal paper is here: http://arxiv.org/abs/1007.2615) As the article indicates, this form of quantum time travel doesn’t require the kind of spacetime distortions that most other methods do, suggesting it could be a more efficient, less disruptive method, a good choice for the kind of “stealth” time travel the Temporal Agents were shown to possess in ENT. (The undetected discontinuity effect is based on how Daniels’ time travel was portrayed in ENT, with the transition always seeming to occur invisibly between one shot and the next, taking Captain Archer by surprise.) Note that it’s only possible if quantum mechanics is nonlinear, something which, according to this book, was proven true by Manheim’s experiments in 2364.
Chapter VII
152	Again, my dating for TNG episodes differs from what the stardates would suggest; I’ve assumed a date of June 10-13, 2366 for this chapter. I didn’t work out a specific Risian calendar.
153	Noi’s uniform is the same type worn by Daniels in ENT. I imagine it would look a lot sexier on her.
153-4	The Ky’rha are one of the ancient civilizations I made up as throwaway references in The Buried Age, Ch. 5. Sarpeidon was from TOS: “All Our Yesterdays.” Miliani Langford is a character from The Buried Age (developed from a throwaway reference to a Professor Langford in TNG: “Rascals”).
155	There has been no prior indication that the Obsidian Order was in charge of temporal matters, but it stands to reason that the Cardassians’ top-secret espionage and black-ops organization would take responsibility for such things.
156-7	Galartha was established in ENT: “Two Days and Two Nights” as a popular rock-climbing destination on Risa. Making it the namesake of the sector containing the resort from TNG: “Captain’s Holiday” is a bit of small-universe syndrome, but I decided it worked because that resort was established as being near a cave system. “Siraven” as the name for that resort is my own coinage.
157	Star Charts establishes the Epsilon Ceti binary as Risa’s primary star.
158	Lucsly’s devout belief in an “original” timeline comes from “Gods, Fate, and Fractals.”
158-9	Yes, this chapter is simultaneously a prequel and a sequel to “Captain’s Holiday” (CH). The aired episode hinted at the possibility that the Vorgons could go back to an earlier time and try again for the Uthat, and a deleted scene actually showed them doing so (although in that scene they returned to the same starting point, which I disregarded here). The purpose of this chapter is to explain how that matter was finally resolved — and I loved the freakiness of resolving it before the events of the episode.
160	The perky-looking Risian described here is supposed to be Joval, the Risian woman who explained the hor’gahn to Picard in CH. Yep, it’s small-universe again, but she’s just so dang cute.
163	The name Shirna for the Vorgons’ archenemy is a Doctor Who in-joke. The 1973 serial “Carnival of Monsters” featured a pair of criminals named Vorg and Shirna.
164	CH was ambiguous on whether the Vorgons were beaming in directly from the future or beaming down from a timeship. I found the latter interpretation more useful. And I wasn’t sure I wanted the 27th-century Vorgons to have temporal transporters, a technology possessed by the Starfleet TIC in the 29th century. That would imply they’re more advanced than the UFP, an implication I preferred to avoid.
165	“With him of all people?”: As explained later in the novel, “him” means Captain Picard, who will turn out to be pivotal in events that nobody in the future wants to see altered.
Chapter VIII
168	The non-Axis portions of the chapter occur on September 30, 2381. I did not work out the Vomnin calendar in detail; however, given that a Vomnin sun cycle is c. 64 standard years, the fact that it’s Cycle 12 means that the Vomnin Confederacy counts its origins as stretching back between 704 and 768 years. We can also discern that Vomnin years are at most 90% as long as an Earth year, since they can fit at least 71 years into a sun cycle. This also must mean their days are at most 72% as long as an Earth day (or about 17 hours), in order to fit at least 459 of them into a Vomnin year. The actual lengths are probably smaller.
169	“Time has no meaning or relevance” is a recurring phrase from The Middleman (a show whose humor relied heavily on recurring phrases), specifically used in reference to the Underworld in the second episode and the unfilmed series finale (later published as a comic book). Since the Garcia character was inspired by Wendy Watson from The Middleman, I was determined to work the line into this subplot somewhere; I only regret I couldn’t put it in Garcia’s mouth.
171	The Sentry AIs were encountered in TTN: Synthesis.
172	The Cincinnatus is named in honor of my hometown Cincinnati, but is also (like the city name itself) a reference to the Roman emperor Cincinnatus, continuing the Roman theme of the Vesta class’s ship names.
174	How does the “ring of light” work again? Imagine you’re a 2-dimensional Flatlander passing through a cylindrical wormhole in spacetime. You’re not in the open space inside the cylinder, but embedded within the edge. You’d see light from either side of you looping around to hit the opposite side, mirror images to both sides, but reversed — you’d see your right side to your left and vice-versa. But if you’re 3-dimensional and passing through a 3-D space with two of its dimensions looped around through the fourth dimension, then this same effect happens not only to your left and right, but to your top and bottom, and every lateral direction in between. So you’d see a ring.
	There’s an inconsistency here. If Axis spacetime loops around in the interface zones to produce the light-ring effect, then how does a ship get out of the Axis? I never adequately worked that out while writing the book. My belated thought is that maybe you have to be travelling in a sufficiently radial vector to exit; if you’re travelling along a chord instead of a radius, you’ll loop back around. So the light that forms the ring is the light that isn’t travelling directly outward from the Axis center.
177	The Calabrian age (more properly Calabrian stage) spanned roughly from 1.8 to 0.78 million years ago (mya). To be specific, the hub station’s position corresponds to roughly 1.2 mya. It is thought by some anthropologists that the ancestors of humanity branched off from H. erectus around this time.
177-8	The description of the crustacean species here (later identified as Siri) is based on the “Sirians” from Gene Roddenberry’s first-draft outline for “The Cage,” the original Star Trek pilot (reprinted as Ch. 4 of The Making of Star Trek). The Sirians, evidently influenced by the Krell in Forbidden Planet, were replaced with the more humanoid (and thus more affordable) Talosians. Since the Selakar are contemporaries of the Talosians, it seemed a fitting homage (or rather, a handy source to swipe from, since I didn’t have the time to be more innovative).
178-9	“Damyz,” “Oydia,” and “Yeshel” are partial anagrams of “Ozymandias” (the poem) and “Shelley” (its author), in reference to the Yeshel’s keen awareness of how the future has forgotten them. “Temarel” is meant to resemble both Vulcan female names beginning with T’ and Romulan names like Tomalak.
	The Caratu are loosely inspired by another species mentioned in Roddenberry’s “The Cage” outline, described on p. 59 of The Making of Star Trek as “the intelligent Lemur-life of a Class M planet in the Arcturus system.”
	whose eyes glowed with a soft red-orange light from within like a cat’s: Fans of Blade Runner will not be surprised to learn I watched that film not long before writing this. Ridley Scott used this effect (achieved by using a beam splitter to shine light into the actor’s eyes so that it reflected straight into the camera) to distinguish replicants from ordinary humans.
182	The Middle Pleistocene or Ionian stage followed the Calabrian, spanning from 781 to 126 thousand years ago. Since this is in Lirahn’s home period, it’s somewhere around half a million years ago.
184	Arret is the name used for Sargon’s home planet in the script of TOS: “Return to Tomorrow,” though the name was never used onscreen. I’ve resisted using it in the past (because it’s “Terra” spelled backward, which is very corny), instead calling the species the Sargonians, but here it was necessary to use a name they would have been known by in their own time.”Return” implied that Sargon’s people could have been the ancestors of the various humanoids seen in ST, though Spock suggested they could have been forebears of the Vulcans. I’ve been torn between the assumption that the Sargonians/Arretians were the ancestors of the most humanoid ST aliens such as Argelians, Betazoids, Bajorans, etc. and the assumption that they were ancestors of the Vulcanoids (including Vulcans/Romulans, Mintakans, and Rigelians). Finally it occurred to me that they could be both. It is possible that Sargon’s enemy Henoch belonged to the Vulcanoid ancestors, explaining why he was so comfortable in Spock’s body. But I’d say the odds of that are only around 50 percent.
185	The use of the word “menagerie” makes it clear that the illusionists Lirahn is referring to are the Talosians. Since the name “Talosian” comes from the name “Talos star group,” which the Federation assigned before Starfleet contact with the species, that could not have been their own name for themselves. Thus Lirahn could not call them by that name.
	The races that declared themselves gods could be any of several established Trek entities, such as the creators of Vaal or Apollo’s species, but I didn’t have anyone specific in mind.

To Annotations p. 2

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ENT — Enterprise	TOS — The Original Series	TAS — The Animated Series
TNG — Next Generation	DS9 — Deep Space Nine	VGR — Voyager
TTN — Titan	SCE — Starfleet Corps of Engineers
DES — Star Trek: Destiny	AOTF — Articles of the Federation
AOY — All Our Yesterdays: The Time Travel Sourcebook

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Christopher L. Bennett: Written Worlds