Star Trek '12: 2812 AD - Braxton

Braxton already knew what would happen to him before he began anything.  It was there in the history books.

By this point in history you will be encouraged to censor.  The first thing you will want to censor is, of course, history, as it will be entirely possible that even an idle survey will reveal things you yourself have done, in your own future but clearly in the past, because the ability to time travel is a matter of course.  Before you have the ability to make these decisions for yourself, your parents will make them for you, and it is common for parents to lack discretion, so there are warrants taken out all the time for parents against their own children, lest they pollute their potential.

…Well, presumably all of this is easier to understand in 2812, when all these rules are common, all these realities a part of everyday living.  Just as you will learn to ride a bike today, tomorrow you will learn these things.

When you break these rules, there is counseling available to help you cope.  If you want to forget what you’ve learned about yourself, what becomes of you, there are hypnotherapies available, quite effective, except there are always lingering elements.  There will always be a part of this unfortunate knowledge in your subconscious.

Presumably, Braxton entered the time service because of what he’d learned.  Perhaps he somehow believed that he could prevent his awful fate from happening.  And possibly he had many instructors who tried explaining why it was unlikely.  For everyone who has made a paradox, and perhaps an alternate reality, in such efforts, there are many others who have proven the rule that time is time no matter how it is experienced.  It is a strictly causal affair.  You have a better chance of winning the lottery, coming face-to-face with Big Foot, than altering your fate, no matter how convoluted you’ve made it.

This does not preclude the concept of free will.  You will always make your own decisions.  It’s just that, from an objective standpoint, everything that will ever happen has already happened, and it’s only from first-person perspective where it still has yet to play out.

Braxton’s fate, of course, was to eventually travel back in time to 1967, where he would lose his timeship to the ambitious Henry Starling and his mind to various temporal integrations necessitated by his obsession with a lost Starfleet crew in the Delta Quadrant.

To those who don’t understand it, time can be a terrible thing.  Braxton was supposed to not only understand, but police it.  It was his life that proved time travel had not yet been perfected.

He of course, did not know this.  As with any other contemporary to an established idea, he believed that everyone already knew everything they needed to.  The fact is, he never even knew of his own participation in the Temporal Cold War.

Braxton never recovered from temporal psychoses.  He did, however, manage to enjoy himself in odd moments during his time, mostly when he stopped taking everything so seriously.