Was the Titanic Sunk On Purpose?

As I listen to him speak on events that shook the cosmos with the same casual tone my neighbor might describe his days of repair work, I am struck by the vast power difference that exists between myself and the man I was lucky enough to be interviewing.

"... Alright I've got the perfect example. Back in my early days here I heard about this Senior Analyst for the BTA, that's Bureau of Temporal Anomalies, one Roger Stevenson. Now, Stevenson's a company man, been working for the Bureau longer than I have, and he thought he had seen it all. That was until this particular doozy crossed his desk one fine afternoon. Good old Mr. Stevenson was lounging in his office, smoking a cigar and listening to a ball game that never happened, I think it was the Cubs winning the World Series in 89? In walks little miss Rutledge, bad news anytime she was on our floor, wearing her pencil skirt and touting a thick file with a red label.

Mind you, most of the files we got down on that floor were blues and greens at best. Those are all pretty normal run-of-the-mill anomalies. Somebody somewhere broke their script and the timeline flinched. Maybe they told their wife that dress wasn't all that flattering, or they took a wrong turn in New Mexico and wound up in Moscow, or they peered through their telescope and saw little green men kicking the American flag off the moon and planting one of their own. Easy fix. We usually blame it on drugs to be honest. Around there that was our go-to. Like 'have you tried turning it off and on again' is for the IT department.

Yellow files though, those are bigger news but still relatively low on the scale of potential collateral damage. Temporal shifts, timeline convergences, alternate realities bleeding through into one another, that kinda stuff. You close a couple of those and you're guaranteed a nice pension. One time I heard Amelia Earhart showed up during the construction of the Great Pyramids. That was a lot of paperwork. Guy who fixed that one got moved upstairs, corner office with a view.

I could have really used one or two good yellow files back then.

After that you got your oranges, and these ones are all-hands-on-deck kinds of cases. Everybody on the floor drops whatever they're doing, even the yellow files, and pitches in. Oranges are usually catastrophic. Alien invasion ahead of schedule. Zombie outbreaks. Extinction-level asteroids. Uh... oh yeah, this one time Mx. Delta Davies who used to work two cubicles down from me? They had to clean up an honest-to-dirt wizard insurrection while everyone else was on vacation in the Andromeda Galaxy. I'll let them tell it but that is one wild story that never gets old.

But nothing, not even that, beats a red file. Those are the money makers. Red means timelines are getting altered. History's getting rewritten.

And it always comes at a cost.

Now I was not supposed to be privy to all the specifics about this particular file, not back then at least, all I knew for sure is one day I come into work and Mr. Stevenson was in his office like usual, and the next day he'd been moved up three floors. Three! In one go. Wild.

But what I heard was; old Roger's red file had something to do with a ghost apocalypse. Hauntings at sea turned into shorelines disappearing into the underworld. No safe harbor meant no trade. Things got bad. Humans went the way of the dinosaurs. All because of an artifact held inside the RMS Olympic.

I had to do some digging through some very old files to find an unaltered timeline where whatever Roger did had not yet taken place, and here's what I found out. Originally, the Olympic was the first of three largest-of-their age ships all built by the same company. The Titanic and later the Britannic, her sister ships, would go on to serve an additional 21 years and 16 years respectively before being retired. But the Olympic tragically sunk early on in her career, I think it was 1913, maybe?

I suppose I could just look it up right now, but I sort of like the mystery of it all. Back then Roger Stevenson was like a mythical figure to me. I'd hate to spoil the magic by reading that file.

Anyway, back in that original timeline, one of the passengers aboard the Olympic brought with them a priceless artifact. It was classified of course, and like I said I never went back to dig into it too deeply after my curiosity ran its course, but my guess is it was a heavily cursed object stolen by some British or American socialite who wanted it hung up on a wall or placed in some museum instead of leaving well enough alone.

Whatever the case may have been, when the great big ship sank under the waves it dragged that ugly curse down along with it into the depths.

One of the first things you learn on this job is 'do not mess with the Oceans'. There's a whole chapter in our training manual with almost that exact title, actually. One word off but oh well. It does not matter which timeline we're dealing with, or which world, the Oceans always contain secrets which are not meant to be disturbed. As near as I can tell something dark and malevolent down there gobbled up that cursed object and unleashed a plague of ghosts under the sea. One thing led to another, and humanity was wiped out before it could see its next century.

Now, we can't act directly, we have to influence. Nudge. Change a few things here or there so that the timeline itself changes in time. Say two people get in a car crash. We can't possess one of the drivers and slam on the breaks right before they crash. We have to go back further. Change the tread on the tires in the factory so one of the drivers' tires pops a half mile before they were supposed to crash. Driver gets banged up but lives, and the timeline doesn't fight us off. But if we're too direct, the timeline snaps back into place. Those two drivers crash at the exact same time a day later, killing more people than the first time around. It's all very complicated and transactional, hence why we get analysts to calculate what solutions do and don't work.

So what does Mr. Stevenson do? He goes back in time and rigs the Titanic to sink instead, a year before the Olympic was set to sink. This forces the Olympic to undergo a retrofit which keeps it safe from whatever mechanical failure that led to its crash in the original timeline. And judging by the updated historical logs? Old Stevenson went a bit overboard trying to make that poor ship sink.

He tried to crash it before it even had passengers on it but that didn't work. He tried again when it was not yet even out of the harbor, but failed. He hid valuable tools the ship's crew needed to do their jobs, organized a coal strike in the weeks leading up to the launch, he was just trying anything he could to damage the ship and none of it was working. Or if it did work it had the wrong amount of influence on the timeline and failed to have the desired effect.

So what does old Roger Stevenson do when everything is going wrong?

The mad man opened a portal to hell inside of the ship's engine room, intentionally weakening it at the exact place he knew the ship would strike an iceberg. Just a small portal. Only open for a few minutes. But enough to weaken the metal of the ship's hull to the point where scientists assumed a coal fire had been burning for three weeks.

Absolutely insane. Using a hell portal to heat steel and crashing a ship into an iceberg to prevent the apocalypse. Mental. There were ramifications, of course, but he crunched the numbers and realized there were people in the timeline who could handle those ramifications, so all was well.

That's why they paid him the big bucks back when I was still stuck sorting out the blue files. He's one my top agents to this day."

The man in the crisp white suit leaned forward in his chair and took a sip from his glass resting on the table between us. He smiles when he is done and starts reminiscing about some other cases he and his coworkers have worked over the years. Outside his office window we can see galaxies unfurling across dozens of cosmos as agents of the Bureau depart for their various missions. I thank him for sharing some of his experience and politely shift my focus to the pivotal question I have been meaning to ask since we began our interview some time ago.

"As fascinating as all of these cases are, and I do mean that, I came here with one specific question in mind for the legendary Chief of Staff of the BTA."

"Well go on then, ask away."

"You say that this Senior Analyst Roger Stevens jumped three floors in one go for solving the Titanic paradox, and you've listed several others who received similar promotions for overcoming great obstacles. Do you remember what case file it was that you feel rocketed you all the way to the top of the food chain here?"

The easy, nostalgic smile he had been sporting since early on in our interview evaporated from his face like a candle being snuffed by a sudden cold draft. He shook his head vigorously and rose from his seat, pacing back and forth across his office like he was trying to shake his own shadow. He crossed to a cabinet, filled with some truly rare bottles of liquor one can only assume all come from different worlds and timelines that I can scarcely imagine, and poured himself a glass of something far stronger than the water he had hardly touched. He drained it in three gulps, and refilled it before returning to his seat.

I was at odds with myself here, unsure of whether I should be apologizing for bringing up a bad memory or doubling down and trying to get him to proceed with whatever story I could practically smell was in the works. My journalistic senses were tingling. I clicked my pen and prepared to write whatever words came next.

He paused for a such a long time that I considered perhaps he had forgotten I was there. But eventually he sighed and turned back to me, a grim expression on his face.

"I remember it like it was yesterday. The first black file that had ever crossed my desk. Black files are reserved for true paradoxes, of course. Multiverse-ending calamities. This one said 'Earth, 2020.'"