TILE 19

"What are we going to do about him (or her)?" is a familiar parental cry of despair when their offspring disrupt the normal peaceful state of affairs they like to delude themselves they would otherwise enjoy.

Star the feline mediator had to come to terms with the consequences of his decision to return Charles which had been carried out because off his sympathy with the parents predicament. His decision had been almost an impulsive kindly action that should balance the accidental transfer of the young inventor.

After all it had been his superiors that had initiated the matter transfer through a faulty detector registering an energy burst as a distress call.

Unfortunately Star's initial action which had also been meant to preserve the humans life, led him to request a replicant, Charles 2, which was currently living the memories of its original because it was necessary to keep the being alive. Humans or their duplicates did not last long in stasis unless their brains remained active.

It was the damned timeline warnings that had caused Star to put the human in stasis in the first instance. Normally the outcome would have been a distraught father finding the body of his son severely damaged from his own foolish experiment. Unkind but justified, solution easily done and dusted, end of story.

Timeline management came from the highest level of galactic control and was only initiated when considered to be unavoidable. The problem with timeline management is that futures cannot be viewed distinctly. The best that can be done is to be on the lookout for warning signs that signal potential disaster though not the nature of it.

The race known as Sensitive's are those that are responsible for warning sign detection. They are not an easy species to interact with nor do they offer advice on possible solutions. Its hard enough to get them to reluctantly suggest that timelines X and B might be the potential source of a future problem that might occur by such and such a date give or take a century. Maybe.

Star had ordered the replicant mainly to cover up the return of the original if it could be done without detection but also because he felt in his bones that the replicant might prove to be necessary in the future somewhere around about 2030 if he could trust his instincts.

Replicant's could always be euthanized if found to be unnecessary. Odd that he should feel protective towards the original yet be quite indifferent to the fate of a replicant, thought Star.