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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.

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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.

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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...