The blizzard exhibit was very popular, one of the favorites of all the museum-goers, and the absolute favorite of children who visited the Time Museum.
People of all ages loved to gather around these moments culled out of distant time, which were displayed under what appeared to be a glass bubble. You could watch these terrible moments from January 12th, 1888 unfold before your eyes again and again. All you had to do was push one of the large buttons located on the walls of the museum. One button was on the ground floor where the "time bubble" was located and the other plate-sized, red button was easy to find on the wall of the gallery walkway above. Guests could stand up there and get a bird's-eye view of the little one room schoolhouse surrounded and beset by the blizzard as it raged in a renewed "live-time". The visibility inside the time bubble itself was the same as the visibility during the blizzard of 1888 itself; it was a pitiless, white void. Museum visitors could watch it with the naked eye and try to see what they could see, but most used the special goggles provided by the museum, which would allow them a thermal view of the young schoolteacher and her beset charges.
Many times a day, Minnie Freeman was forced to face her imminent extinction and the deaths of all thirteen of her little charges. Each time, the resourceful woman marshaled her wits and tied her young pupils together with a rope and led the thirteen boys and girls into the screaming white void of the storm which had killed so many on that day in 1888. This was not a reenactment. These were the actual moments of time which had occurred, spliced together using the latest technology. Minnie and her thirteen young charges were indeed alive and again living those moments of terror each time a child or adult pushed either of those buttons on the museum walls. And push they did. It was considered a perfectly innocent form of entertainment by virtually all. It is true there was a vociferous minority which protested violently against exhibitions such as this one. But these temporal ethicists were mocked if not openly vilified.
It was just after noon and the exhibit was in full swing. Minnie had tethered the children together with the rope and they were wandering blindly in the blizzard, their hands held in front of them like sleepwalkers, hoping to touch something, anything, some structure which might mean safety, warmth, survival. Most of the children were crying. Their fingers, their hands hurt terribly already, though they had been in the blizzard only a few minutes. These were children of the Plains, so they knew what it would mean if they passed a certain point of frostbite. It would mean the loss of fingers, hands, possibly an arm itself. Their feet hurt too. They could lose their legs, they knew. They cried, but it hurt to cry because the tears burned their cheeks. They could hear their teacher praying aloud and some of them tried to follow the words of her prayer with her. Some were too young to know the words but tried anyway.
The people in the museum smiled and took holographic photos of the spectacle before and below them. Some had even seen this display before. It never got old. The drama was so vivid.
The saddest part of the exhibit is that Minnie never reached safety with the children. The exhibit, the time splice, showed only the few moments when she emerged from the schoolhouse to enter the blizzard with the children. She wandered to the edge of the time splice and then the vignette ended, right when the school teacher reached the curved face of the encapsulated bubble, which she could not sense in any way. Some museum-goers had complained over the years that the scene should be presented in its entirety. They argued that we should see the whole arc of the narrative, the full event. But it was a matter of expense. And it was very labor-intensive to sample a bit of the time stream and reproduce it in a sustainable manner. It had taken nearly seventy-five years just to code well enough to reproduce this series of moments.
It was a summer's day and museum-goers had just pushed the button to activate the blizzard display when something unusual happened. Nobody could know that Minnie Freeman and some of the children had been experiencing a profound sense of deja vu in their multiple shared afterlives. One of the children had even predicted some of the details of their march through the snow. For example, she "remembered" that her classmate Ada would lose her shoe and panic. She asked her teacher how she could remember something which had not yet happened. Minnie "remembered" this too.
This was not something which was supposed to be possible. The passivity of these actors in the time splice was taken for granted. The "time bubble" under which the time-splice played out was impermeable. It was one-way temporal glass. Nothing could get through to the fourteen human beings below who repeatedly lived out moments that were certainly among the worst moments in their lives, if not, as was probable, the absolute worst moments they had ever endured. But these players on a wintry stage were not supposed to ever realize the moments they were living were no longer singular moments, but were instead now "time samples." These players were sealed within their play. There was no "fourth wall" to break. So we had been told. It was philosophically argued that there was no ethical distinction to be made for the proliferation of pain in "hosting" this event from the past, in replaying it constantly. It was the same, singular event. The "players" did not know they were now trapped in these moments. It felt like the first time to them every time. It was innocent voyeurism. So it was explained and so it was believed.
It took many thousands of "playings" of this tragic blizzard scene before randomness had its say. But just as every recording ever made will eventually develop a glitch which compromises the fidelity of the recorded sounds, this scene too finally degenerated into the native chaos of which our time-stream is actually composed.
It was a very warm day in August and museum visitors were vicariously enjoying the cold contained in the time bubble when Minnie did something no one had foreseen. She led the schoolchildren the wrong direction. She changed time. Only one of the museum-goers assembled to watch realized what had happened. This was a middle-aged woman who had seen the exhibit several years before when she brought her young granddaughter to the Time Museum to see Minnie's resourceful heroism play out under the time bubble. Today she had come alone. She instantly realized the magnitude of this error.
"She's going the wrong way," she muttered at first. And then the hairs stood up on her neck. And she shouted it. "She's going the wrong way! That's not the direction she's supposed to go!" Because she was up on the gallery walkway, her voice carried very well.
The other museum visitors looked at her queerly. Was she ill? Was this some sort of prank? How could the school teacher go the wrong way? This moment of time was finished. It had been finished for centuries.
Then they saw the schoolteacher within the time bubble fall in the snow. The children, tied by the rope to her body, fell with her. They could see through their goggles that the snow was covering their bodies. Minnie got up and stumbled a bit more. Then fell again. This went on for a few moments. Then she apparently lost consciousness. The children struggled to free themselves of the rope but to no avail. They were all perishing. The two hundred and thirteen children who perished in the blizzard of January 12th, 1888 became two hundred and twenty-six children.
The code which set the parameters of the time splice for the blizzard were broken. The scene had been coded to end when the teacher's hand reached a certain point in the time-space frame which had been sampled. Because this did not happen, the boundaries of the time splice dissolved. The blizzard broke free of the time bubble.
The blizzard of January 12th, 1888 broke free into the space of the Time Museum on that August afternoon and instantly all visitors on all floors of the museum were snow-blind, freezing to death in their summer clothing. They were no different than Minnie Freeman. But there was no rope. There was no safe place to reach.
Security managed to push an alert button before freezing to death, but it was too late. The museum sealed itself at the moment that alert was sounded, condemning all museum patrons inside to certain death. It is true the museum was designed without windows as a security precaution and that the walls had been specially fortified, but the blizzard spread and an entire sky from another century was pouring into a single building. Winds soon built up such pressure that even these fortified walls began to buckle. All the tortured skies of the Nebraska of January 12th, 1888 were now pouring into one building the size of a city block. The walls of the museum were no match for this monstrous storm and they soon gave. The blizzard met the August streets of another century, where it froze many thousands more to death before finding its way heavenward where finally the hot skies could appease this storm with their warmth.
It took three days for time technicians coding furiously, actually an international effort, to close off the opening to the 1888 blizzard. This caused a temporary removal of all time splice displays, much to the chagrin of the public and the delight of the temporal ethicists. One initially bright note in this lugubrious story is that a family of three who had perished in the blizzard of '88 wandered out of the broken time splice into the streets of the new century and managed to survive. Many argued for the return of these unwanted "time immigrants" to 1888. Their memories, gentler hearts argued, could be swabbed clean. Needless to say, that was not something which could be allowed. The government voted to euthanize them the next year.
