Microstory 1104: Hall Voss

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Lots of people with special temporal powers or patterns are given nicknames, based either on what they could do, or what they did with what they could do. Hall Voss possessed two nicknames, however. He was both The Navigator, and The Collector, but there was a good reason for that. There were actually two of him. He was just a regular ol’ time traveler, who generally operated across a single timeline, but he also had a penchant for history, and decided to do something about all those artifacts that were lost to history, for one reason or another. He would jump up and down the timestream, rescuing objects with important historical value—from fires, and looting, and other disasters—and donate them to a time museum, which was run by The Historian. Something he learned along the way was that one of his grandsons, and one of his granddaughters, were destined to become notable temporal manipulators as well. Camden was The Centurion, who lived around the turn of the 22nd century, but worked for an intelligence cooperative at the turn of the 21st century. His sister, Xearea was one of the last Saviors of Earth, which was a special class of teleporter, who zipped all over the globe, saving lives. Unfortunately, simply having discovered this truth about his family’s future was enough to prevent it from coming to pass. Xearea was erased from the future, and Camden from both the future, and the past. Such is oft the price of time travel. He had to fix this. So he went back in time, and met up with his younger self. He sought the aid of a choosing one with the power to manipulate people’s memories, who used this gift to place a permanent block on the younger Hall’s mind. He would not be able to learn anything about the future or past that could, in knowing, prevent it from actually happening. This set the timeline right once more, and restored the lives of his grandchildren, but it came at its own price. This older version of Hall was stuck in a separate reality, and could never return, even if he wanted to. So now there are two. The ignorant version—the one that will one day have children—is so ignorant, that he does not even recognize his alternate self. As The Collector, he works with The Navigator all the time, but interprets his face as someone entirely different. If someone were to try and convince him that he has a double, he will never be able to see it, since his mind has been permanently blind to it. But this is all okay, because together, they save history on a regular basis.