The Observer Effect

The Observer materialized in a parking lot behind a wooden picket fence. He carefully took in every detail, moving closer to the fence. Hearing the sound of cheering he saw people at the bottom of a short hill lined up along a road.

 The cheering got louder as a line of vehicles approached the waiting crowd.  A sharp crack sounded, causing people to fall to the ground screaming. The observer saw an uncovered vehicle with a driver and what appeared to be two couples. The man in the backseat seamed to be in distress, with his hands up near his neck. What the Observer saw next shocked him, despite his training and experience. The man holding his neck appeared to have the top of his head blown off.  

As the vehicle sped off down the road, the people who had fallen to the ground began to get up and run toward the picket fence. They streamed over and around it, their faces a mixture of grief and anger. Appearing confused they looked around.
“ I could have sworn one of them was up here” one said to another.

For a second the Observer thought that the natives could see him. But  the science of time travel said that shouldn’t be possible. He technically wasn’t in another time since he was in essence in a bubble of his own time. This allowed him to observe the past but not interact with it and definitely not be seen by natives of the past.

Suddenly the Observer’s vision began to shimmer and his view became a mixture of this time and his own. Slowly his time superimposed itself over the past until he was wholly in his own time.  

As soon as the observer stepped out of the displacement chamber he was met by Escorts. “the Scribes must be especially eager to hear my observations” thought the Observer. 

Since devices like cameras and other electronic devices didn’t function while being displaced through time, the Observer was the Scribes only link to the other point in time. 

 For this reason Observer’s were picked at a young age for their eidetic memory and then secluded to keep them a clean slate from historical knowledge and perceptions about historical events that could taint their observations.

The Scribes listened intently as he gave his report. They seemed confused when he told them there were no timeline natives in his vicinity during the event. During their questioning they asked him if there any signs of anyone being behind the fence before me. When the Scribes were finally assured of this fact the Observer could have sworn they looked troubled.

When the Observer had left the Scribes Chamber they all had the same thought: the historical record had been changed.  Before the Observer had gone to Dallas 1963 there had been no sightings of a shooter on the grassy knoll.  Somehow the observation of the event had changed it.

The Scribes all came to an an agreement, any evidence of this observer effect was to be destroyed.  All historical data of the event pre observation in the quantum computers unaffected by the change was to be purged. 

 It was the only way that the Observer program could be saved as no one would allow it to continue if they knew the observations could change events.