Twelfth Brigade

One moment of life can lead to many different lifetimes filled with moments.

That had been the philosophy she'd grown up with, and, when she joined the Corps, it had been the creed tattooed into their minds. When they woke in the morning, as they staggered through the training courses, while they drifted each night towards sleep - the words were there, echoing above and around and underneath their thoughts. It was a mantra, and a warning, and their god, all rolled up into one.

One moment of life can lead to many different lifetimes filled with moments.

Eleanor stuffed her feet into her boots, smiling at how well they fit. She'd finally worn them in, and just in time, because today she made her first jump. Her team were arrayed along the benches beside and opposite her, pulling their own boots on, checking their equipment, closing their eyes as they muttered a little prayer - one moment of life - and then it was time to go.
"Twelfth Brigade, report to jump deck seventeen," the P.A. crackled. "Twelfth Brigade to deck seventeen, prepare to jump."

"Nervous?"
The man beside Eleanor was her only real friend in the brigade, the only person she'd felt comfortable talking to. He'd been the first person she'd met upon joining, the one to reassure her when she felt like quitting, and the one who held her hand at night when she cried with fear.
"What if I get this wrong?" She would sob. The pressure of the Corps was immense - any mistake could cause a paradox that changed the timeline irreperably, and even after years of intense physical and mental training many recruits dropped out before their first jump.
"You won't," he had assured her. "You kick my ass in all the tests, remember, and I've done this plenty of times."
The advice hovered on his tongue today too, she saw, and she was grateful that he held it back. She would not show that kind of weakness in front of her team, especially not the others whose first day this way.

----------


It was a long way down, but Eleanor was determined not to fall. That kind of humiliation would follow her through death, and haunt her forever.

One moment.

Yes, this was definitely one of those moments. If she made it across the gap, her life would be very different to her life if she turned back, or sat down and cried, or fell.
That was personal stress, which was bad enough, but worse was the impersonal stress that came with the risk of disrupting the timeline. It was very simple to change things without even intending to.
For example, as she crept along the ledge, a drop of sweat could fall from her brow and onto the face of a pedestrian on the street below. The person would stop, raise their hand to wipe it away - and maybe, if they wore a watch, or a bracelet, the sun would reflect from it. The sudden flash of light could catch the eye of a passing motorist, who then might not notice the small child that chased a ball into the street. If the child was killed, everything they would have accomplished in their lifetime would be erased. It could be large, like a scientific discovery, or as small as convincing one person to take a sick day at work - when, if they'd instead gone in and passed on the flu to their colleagues, one overworked father or mother could have taken the virus home with them and passed it, in turn, on to a child whose immune system was already dangerously low...

It made Eleanor's head ache to think about it, because at every turn, at every moment, another line of moments spun out into infinity. And within that line of moments was another infinite number of moments, and they had their own too. And when she remembered this she began to imagine then, except that there was too much to keep track of.
It made her dizzy, made her sweat all the harder. She wiped her face on her sleeve, and closed her eyes, and repeated the mantra until it went from terrifying to comforting.

One moment. One moment.

That was the beauty of the creed, even in it's simplified form. Once you learned the trick of it, you could train yourself to focus on different aspects of its meaning. When she was afraid, the words were a calm hand on her shoulder.
This is just one moment, they said. What are you afraid of? Let it pass.
She had to have that comfort, or she would spend every second of her life agonising over what move to make for fear of its consequences.