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He assumed it was part of some kind of brain scan, to see if he has seen the images and words before – what kind of associations he made with the combinations of inputs. A way of mapping out the could-haves, whens and whys of the mess they had made with time.

What was influencing, what, and from when? Is there some kind of chemical marker they can trace, something to facilitate the removal of certain memories? What if the method itself makes them a kind of Men in Black? Something that jars enough with the mind as it normally is that it's rejected outright?

He didn't mind being a guinea pig. He was rather sure time itself wouldn't collapse, even if everyone else seemed to have that fear.

Past time him would have to be Sherlock, and Future him would be Doctor Who.  If one had to put a quick tag on it.

 Sorting things into Input and Output, he waited for more translations to make themselves known. 

Project Chrysalis - Intro

The team resumed scanning the timeline for changes. Sometimes the quantum duplicates passed something back to the originals. A word or a phrase, something that differed from the archive placed near the beginning.

They were looking for people who were sensitive to such things. People who weren't interesting in winning the lottery, or becoming rich from stock tips or other temporary gains. Since the whole system would collapse and be rebuilt, such trivial things didn't matter. The point of studying this was to see the underlying science behind the simplistic fabric people people covered the universe with.

When they found someone, sometimes they were a bit too eager. The subjects minds were overwhelmed with the white noise of the quantum double.

For anyone in such a situation they would try and do their best and try to end the experiments. That decision didn't involve the subject, and some were eager to continue, if only they could communicate that to the future.

-

He blogged his request, to continue. But what was he looking for? Direct contact was seemingly out of the question, that he understood. Something innocuous, a hint, a trail to follow. Something to trigger the latent and out of place memories. Something to help him face the supposed paradoxes of such an endeavour. A test. Something to prove to them he didn't just have a hunch.

-

He followed Twitter and Youtube, also looking for things out of place. Hidden codes and patterns. He tried, in the past, to work out a kind of shorthand, but then he didn't have anything to communicate. Hashtags and rants from a mind under unique stresses. He wasn't going anywhere and didn't mind if the non-routine collapsed. Their were worse things than being displaced, or confused. Wouldn't his future self know this, or did he not make it? Was it double a blind or some other stringent process where what his future self knew was immaterial?

-

The codes started to make sense, he saw that there was more than a bit of disbelief at their end as well. He knew what kinds of videos he liked and they did as well, so the medium was rather easy to agree upon. Enough mispronounced that 'Google Translate' could say nearly anything, but simple enough to read between the lines. It was amusing at any rate.

Cracked, Wholock, that kind of thing was amusing in an of itself. Nothing to objectionable for future sensibility, as long as they didn't take themselves too seriously.

An air of hopeful optimism pervaded at his end. Now he just needed to find out some kind of schedule.

Project Chrysalis Prologue

Temporal Reconstruction had been around for about a decade. It wasn't strictly time travel, it was more like time duplication. Through super-string resonance, a boat load of calculations and enough raw material, they could make a quantum accurate mirror of any point in time.

Normally the lab worked from a test area about 15m to a side. It was sufficient to cover an average person's working area, at least as long as the quantum duplicate would last. Without an active connection to the original – during which time they did exactly as the target did, they would typically degrade after as little as half an hour. Even at their best, the facsimiles would be like talking to someone extremely distracted. Something about life made it more than the sum of it's parts.

Scans showed that what they recreated didn't have the ability to learn or adapt. It seemed that they were more like robots than people. While they could respond to questions it was found that it had much greater success if they person involved had be asked something similar before in their native time.

Except for one subject...

Temporal Double Slit Inteference

The double slit interference pattern lies at the center of timewave theory. It proposes that any experiment on temporal interaction creates a distortion pattern which by it's very nature – prevents paradoxes. Any action that would cause a negative feedback – grandfather paradox – would by it's nature create a resonance which would prevent the action from having an effect. Predestination paradox would also produce a similar self-destructive pattern. Only interaction that would produce a consistent outcome would be effective.

In essence, all out of time interaction would take place in a temporal 'wave pool' that – in most instances – would collapse back on itself as soon as the interference was taken away.

In the event that a change had a effect, it would propagate at /double/ the normal passage of time. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_xd9hUZ2AY

Something is There

It was a message from the future. Not much, nothing solid or indisputable, just a search that never happened. An acknowledgement of the postcard. A nod to the 'bogus' info on the iPod.

There were things that he remembered, but didn't. A kind of mental muscle memory that avoided conscious recall. Something that would reveal the paradox. It seemed that no-one from the 'future' wanted to break the 'present'. It seemed reasonable enough. If tiresome.

It was a glimmer of hope that something beyond the obvious existed. It was refreshing. Too long it seemed he was overly grounded in the plainest of circumstances. He dreamed of being surrounded by a cloud of force lines, illustrated on a whiteboard animation with a few primary marker colours.

Time Lattice

It was a shattered existence that he lived in. He was the only one truly living before the cataclysm, everyone else was just reflections. The him that was past that time was an echo of what he was. Now and then something rang back across the prisms of time. A word here, or a phrase, a glimpse into the larger picture.

It would be several hundred years before they started to see what he had already. The future him yawned. They started to see who he was, or rather who he wasn't. The days passed slowly in the Time Before, while After they sped ahead with a new energy.

One day they would come back for him, in doing so, the cataclysm would occur, and so the universe breaks and mends itself.

Speculation

People expected a return from the most recently deceased and backwards through time. It seemed to be based mostly on emotional reasoning. Having those that died be tied directly back to those that lived through the cataclysm was the emotional buoyancy that kept them going.

In practical terms, these people were of little use in the rebuilding. On the contrary, most of the time was spent recounting what little had transpired since they had passed away. What this time period needed was people that had subsisted on very little, and those that would bootstrap the re-organizing of the society.

To that end, a 'framework' of people from the entirety of human history were brought back in relatively short order. This allowed for a cohesive and balanced approach to problems. Major literature could be produced in all dialects from the beginning, rather than a staggered approach, as speakers became available.

It also diversified the talent pool, as blacksmiths, miners and carpenters of ancient times didn't require the tools that their modern equivalents did. Major scientists from history also got a earlier resurrection, so the moderns survivors, with their over reliance on technology, weren't left to be totally ignorant about the world around them.

Trouble in Paradise

Resources for things like houses were easy enough to obtain. Anything outside of that was a bit more difficult. The main group felt that metal supplies should be used for only listed items -nails and garden implements mostly- and couldn't see the point of anything else. There were even a few extremely conservative groups that thought any excess metals not immediately needed by the majority should be dumped in the 'garbage faults' that had opened in the earth.

A few enterprising souls raided the collection points that had been setup before an official decision would be reached. They sorted and melt down the various finds and stored them in bars at a not entirely public location.

It wasn't that the were against the majority, but rather that they didn't want to see other people's short-sightedness make things more difficult than they needed to be. The official decision was that it was something along the lines of 'out of sight, out of mind'. If it was the conservative group that dumped the metals and they were gone – there was nothing that could be done. On the other hand, if it was salvaged, there was an appeal that materials be made available to the public if there was determined to be a need for them.

The majority of people simply did without, as long as their basic needs were met, they didn't see it as a pressing issue. They seemed convinced that things buried in the earth were done so for a reason and settled for materials that were more readily available. Officially that was the stance of the ruling organization. Unofficially they knew where the resources were, and relied on the salvage teams whenever a need arose.

Those inclined to the sciences were eager to get back to where humans had been technologically before the cataclysm. They found that working openly spurned a lot of pointless debate, so they were generally a bit secretive about their work.

As it became harder to hide what they were doing, the officially word wrote a long overdue piece on the re-discovered technology, and suddenly it was acceptable, as it was officially sanctioned.

Never Changing

He closed his eyes. Time past. He opened them. Things were the same. Better in some respects, but still going nowhere. Projects had been planned, worked on and completed, but very little had been accomplished. A few more trees here, some plants and an over-abundance of flowers. It was all so superficial.

People still focused on the glaringly obvious and busied themselves in the same kinds of cyclical patterns. He couldn't see how people kept seeing something new in things that hadn't changed at all.

What was supposed to be a glorious time ended up being a drawn out sigh and a renewed clamouring at whatever new thing ended up being deemed 'urgent'.

The endless variety had been steam-rolled into a sea of conformity. It took a long time for them to rethink how things should be done.

Why

The future wasn't about knowing what would happen to who, or when major events would occur. The details were nothing. It wouldn't matter in a hundred years. For him it was knowing about the fundamental forces of the universe. To make sense of things in a larger framework, to get a glimpse of the underpinnings of everything.

He was still worried that the future would be a step backwards. Secure but not challenging, devoid of variation and too laid back for progress to occur.

It was difficult to condition himself to think outside the box. To question the unquestionable and disregard the assumptions. He looked around for a bit to nibble on mentally. What could be replaced? Changed? Where would he leave himself clues?

His life was an open book to anyone who wanted to look. Privacy seemed like a outdated concept, at least when dealing with the future. Assuming there was anything left to look into.

Status

He focused on the music again. Time was, difficult. He couldn't imagine it, not that he could picture much of anything anymore. Once he could. He felt that everything clicked. It was an odd state of mind. Like he was in a bubble and that bubble floated along, but it could be pushed in any direction. There was a thickness to things that was almost perceptible. But now he was burnt out.

It was if he was being corrected by several points at once. The later experiments fixing out the earlier ones. He was worried that the future was too conservative. World events being some sort of barrier between when they would and wouldn't interfere.

He hoped that something else was happening. Something more than appeared on the surface. It all seemed to plain. His choices seemed too limited, and in such an environment his mind shut down. There was no puzzle to fathom, no task to busy himself. No tide to get swept up in.

He amused himself in the most mundane ways, mindless clicking and waiting. But he felt relaxed, as if biding his time was simply the best thing to do at the moment. Despite some signals to the contrary, he was alright – even if he seemed to be in a void.

Discordant

He sought to find a new pattern. The basic weave was getting tiresome. As much as he tried to find a variation on it, it kept going back to a monotonous drone. He couldn't see what other people saw in it, but perhaps their own pattern was more sympathetic to the Purpose.

For him it seemed somehow clouding and deflating. It would sing on and on, speaking of it's own richness in a way that only caused a flat and dull echo inside of him. He couldn't play the lines himself – and perhaps that was the problem. He was out of step with the march and only saw other people walking in circles.

The fabric wouldn't give and it was ill fitting. It was an odd shaped tunic that he could barely get over his arms. He couldn't accomplish anything in that straight-jacket, and the lack of movement was getting infuriating.

The music swelled and seemed to be determined to play forward to it conclusion, but it only reversed back to it's opening bars. He was eager to play the next page, but no-one had bothered to look at it.

A picture was refusing to come into focus. The details seemed deliberately blurred, and fuzziness was making his mind grasp at straws. Everyone else marvelled at the colour and richness of the tapestry, but he saw only the frayed edges, the jarring shift in pattern.

He ran the program again. It came to the same conclusion and took the same amount of time. There was no further code to trim or optimize. He couldn't understand how the others kept busy. Unless their lines disintegrated as they were being used, they should be finished by now.

Meat

The room was a level four clean lab – thorough decontamination but only a basic filtering of the air. Of course, they were growing food, but the stuff their ancestors ate was brought up in much more unsanitary conditions.

The meat grew on sloped shelves on a rotating conveyor. Each day they would do a spot check on each slab every three hours, and a cell sample at noon and midnight. It was quite a feat to grow muscle and fat cells without any other organs, and every so often some extras growths appeared. They were never allowed to develop into anything – at least not in the main lab.

The Workshop, as the secondary lab was known as, housed meat that was less carefully pruned. One fellow had arranged a set of ribs into some kind of tree-like structure. Partial hearts, kidneys and lungs grew out of the chunks of meat, even though the framework supplied all the needed nutrients and waste removal.

Life wanted to live and that meant the cells wanted to differentiate into all the needed types. In a dark corner, a brain was growing, and it knew where it was.

Earth Station

The spacecraft docked with a shake and a crunch, one that was entirely superfluous – as the silent magnetic locks were more than sufficient to keep the craft in place. It was deemed necessary though, as most passengers were loath to even get out of their seats without some tactile reassurance that the craft was safely linked to the station.

One man sighed at the extra wear and tear that little exercise took, as he was already standing by the airlock waiting to disembark. He was thankful his trip to the Earth Station was an infrequent one, the routine he was used to was much more efficient – as it had to be in the outer planets. Soon he would be able to simply send the data via the communication channels, but currently the sheer volume of it made it impractical. Stray bits of comets and asteroids tended to corrupt the signal making the usual compression algorithms nearly useless.

It was also a requirement to visit the Earth Station at least every five years as the equipment and software upgrades were rolled out their first, then only later to the outlying stations.

The space tourist ship that picked him up was nearly empty of passengers now, only the equipment was left. He waited patiently, as he knew his stuff would be offloaded last – the belongings of the tourists would be priority. As they paid a premium for every kilogram of stuff they brought, his stuff was ferried basically free of charge. If they saw how much stuff he had, they would likely be quite upset.

Still, it was a symbiotic relationship. Their resource spending supplied the materials for the trip, but it was his equipment that made the trip less frivolous.

He had skimmed the 'patch notes' for the last few years of upgrades during the trip back to Earth, but failed to see any coherent pattern to them until he stepped into the main part of the station. “All the way back here for this?” he cursed to himself. The changes were, as he should have realized, mostly cosmetic in nature.

The wait times for the more obscure areas of the program were reduced, as the divergent parts were finally re-written to be part of a more cohesive whole, rather then a separate subroutine. He was pleased that nearly all of his suggestions were implemented, if not exactly how he imagined they would be.

Dark Lining of a Silver Cloud

He extrapolated the future, it didn't seem as bright to him as it did to others.

By all accounts they would regress back to an Iron Age agricultural society. Knowledge would be lost as things were deemed 'impractical' or 'unnecessary'. Disease would be cured, so there would be no further research into anything medical. Industry would collapse as mass production would be considered too polluting. Biological sciences would reduced to observation and basic interaction as any kind of experiment would be ruled out as cruel. Once basic needs were provided for – a logistical mess which no-one seemed to want to prepare for beforehand – there was no drive to accomplish anything more. Mass communication was also down as satellites and other infrastructure fell into disuse. Creative endeavours suffered from a lack of audience and basic supplies.

There was a cheery optimism among the more practical minded, as they felt this was the 'proper' was to live. The more esoteric and existential viewed this as more of a blank slate and saw no reason to continue in the current stagnation.

He felt it would be an uphill struggle to organize anything more elaborate. The majority felt that basic obedience was what was called for and they saw no reason to go off the page. It was an oppression by absence – one was strongly recommended to endorse the primary objectives so much that other activities were crowded out into oblivion.

Try as he might, he couldn't muster up the enthusiasm for what he reflected to be a half-built production. The ostensibly helpful suggestions gave no room for creative interpretation or meaningful deviation.