3D Time

Time in three dimensions takes a bit of getting used to. One temporarily suspends the normal movement and moves along the time axis instead.

A step to the side shows the past locations of a person as a line, skew slightly to see a keyframe-type still 'cells'. Moving backward along to the time line one can make changes, as long as you anticipate the end result and work backwards.

From a recovery position to a throw and a ball on the ground will jump into your hand. The logical progression of things ceases to be. The end result, a teardrop of time with the initial focus in an island in the middle, and all the acted possibilities in a swirling mass around them, waiting to be waded through again.

Foundations

Finally he turned off the noise that kept things from being interesting. Myriads of puzzles, quirks, and unusual happenings that had been glossed over. He scanned the room for what to tackle first.

So much had to be re-done, and it was worth doing correctly. Programming languages, Operating systems, addressing, transportation standards, measurements. Nothing much from the old system was worth keeping – but not many had given it much forethought. He wasn't sure if they expected everything handed to them, or if they would suddenly be infinitely more capable at making these decisions after the dust had settled.

Either way, there was a lot of work do to, and not many people to do it. Most had settled into the straightforward work. He couldn't help but feel somewhat disappointing. Still it had the advantage of things not being bogged down by committee. As a result, one could bake in some odd hidden 'treats' for obscure conversions or significant measurements.

Temporal Notation

Time Notes: Psydo German. Used to notate styles of temporal hiccups.

Lagen: Subject paused, Global time continuous

Schriben: Subject rewound, temporal overwrite

Hoiden: Subject split, random outcome used

Havadin: Subject normal, Global time looped

Gloopshven: Echo sent back, interference not countered

Moiden: Switch with future/past self

Kaidi: Interaction with future/self

Words are prefixs/suffixes depending on strenght of various effect. Additional symbol notation for order – if applicable.

Future Careers

He was a 'floater'. His job description was simple – everything and nothing. He moved around almost constantly – staying no longer than the current project. One day he was a composer, the next an architect, an animator, a mechanic, an actor. He never really studied any of these things, but was always 'gifted' the knowledge shortly before arriving at the site.

There were other 'floaters' and each had their own style they would bring to each project. Most were fairly generic, adapting their work to project at hand, almost experts at blending their contributions into the background. A few stood out – not seeking attention or praise, but inevitably their presence would change the direction of the work.

These 'keystones' as they were unofficially called, were usually brought in on special projects. Special buildings, media pilots, ground breaking technology prototypes and other one-off events.

Timeslip/Remembrance

It was the back yard of the house in town. Looking at the flowers, I saw them in depth. Immense detail and such profound thought that went into creating them. Someone mentioned something about marriage, and I saw a metaphor in the flowers. Looking deep into the seeds I thought about genetics and children, but then the darkness and the twisted misuse of procreation. The world was a little less bright. A bit further from the warm glow. The clarity of before was muddled.

A time later and I saw myself, younger, in a large bucket, dunking under. Someone from the not-then took my place in the bucket – but not waiting for younger me to exit first. Suddenly she was screaming – as she could sense my younger-self's thoughts. Then suddenly she was standing beside him, laughing. I went to take her place, but there was a look of concern in the crowd. I touched my thoughts and suddenly I was my younger-self again. The light-world was fading. I was to live my life again, having slipped in time.

The Past's Past

People always write time travel as something happening in the 'now' – as if the ragged edge of perception as meaning to the future. All the the past is past to the future, so what happens if time travel happens to you before what you consider 'now'? Will new memories drift into place? Will things shift without you knowing?

To wit, what is the past in the first place? Is it not just a shared memory of events and some physical evidence that suggest some agreement? If neither of these things are disturbed, how do we know the past as still and unchanged?

What if changes were made but some were isolated from them? Would their memories be different than the rest of us? What would the evidence point to?

One often imagines time travel as some wild, haphazard adventure, but really, would it not be something more controlled, even at a granular level? It could easily be imagined that scanning, detecting changes and managing outcomes be at an almost molecular capacity in scope.

When one considers the improvement in the human condition, lack of motivation by greed, anger and other such negative traits – would there be much chance at all for error or corruption? Would then all such actions have to be deliberate for all involved? If certain actions in the past were not allowed, would there ever be a chance for disobedience?

What circumstances were permit an exception?

Turbulance

Time travel is always going to be difficult. Not so much the location of Earth however long ago, as so many people feared. That was just a matter of making a jump, triangulating and making a second jump. The problem was turbulence. Every action, word and even movement made vortices. As was said on a Star Trek episode 'incursion factor'.

 Fortunately most things were swept up in whatever current was happening at the time. Also, there was a certain amount of excess energy required before changes in an event would 'leak' into the rest of the timestream. As well, enough energy in the opposite intent could contain the changes indefinitely. 

Do it too much, however, and memories would get blurry. Not that it was really a problem. Most people didn't have perfect recollection – and despite the selfie/social media buzz, most things still weren't recorded. Outside of a few areas under high surveillance, most of the world was unobserved and unremarkable.

Stretched in Time

His mind trailed out, forward. He could see himself at all points in time over the next few days. Not so much in detail as it was in intent and function. There was no way he could deal with non-linear time until he could process linear time in a more efficient way. Something just seemed right about it. It was like a montage in a movie, except from a first person perspective. At some point it seemed more likely to have some version of himself double back, and not have it seem like anything more than a normal conversation. He'd still be in control of 'both' of him, at least enough that he wouldn't be surprised, or in some kind of paradox.

The Room

One moment he was sitting at home, typing at his computer. Before he could react, he was in a near empty white room sitting in a chair similar to the one he left. For some reason he knew he was in a different time – despite the lack of physical evidence. He waited patiently for something to happen.

He looked at the chair more closely, it seemed to have sensors embedded in it. He made a point to be as calm as possible. Listening carefully he could hear a synthesized voice, reading out his vitals.

He heard a bit of an argument in the background. There seemed to be some debate as to whether to make more direct contact, as he seemed to be in little distress. The protocols were cited and it was decided that if he remembered anything of the experiment when back in his own time, next time would be different.

Just as suddenly he was back in his own time, and he began writing.

-Static-

Things were losing definition. Time, meaning, feelings – it was all replaced by a fuzzy buzz that was either more or less. That was all he could sense, all he could connect to. What was the point of anything?

Linear

He was the last one hanging onto linear time. It was hard to say when the others left. One day there were there, and the next, it was as if they had never been there at all. He remembered both viewpoints simultaneously.

There were echos of them, something his mind sorted into a narrative that fit Newtonian logic. When they didn't fit, he was still aware of them at another level – there, but only as a vague feeling, a message in an instant, or a waking dream.

For them, causality was an ocean to swim through, for him, it was a downward skydive. From their perspective, choices were of little consequence – it was all determined by intent. Multiple, sometimes conflicting, outcomes were within their awareness. Paradoxes were simply knots, a bit of rubble in the landscape. Something to avoid if one had little experience with, but eventually a source of amusement.

Still, he was an anchor. One that they thought they didn't need, but was still there underpinning everything. A point of reference that everything could refract through. He wasn't sure that he would ever 'catch up' to them. They were somewhen else. Consciousnesses that had shapes that ballooned through space-time like a dye in water.

What they didn't know, was the he had already been to the outermost limits. He was what helped provide definition to where they now resided. He didn't want to move, since, from his perspective – there was nowhere to move to.

Ticks Forward

For some reason he felt a glimmer of hope. It was an odd feeling. He had long resigned things to be a unending monotony, without change or stimulation. Not that there was any particular source or cause, at least not one he could define or quantify. It was as if everything suddenly shifted, like a reset button was pressed and things were finally allowed to progress again.

Once reflecting on that he felt like there was a glass ceiling before, confusion, a lack of a destination. Still, things weren't yet clear – but the door was definitely open. If he could muster up the focus and energy to progress, things might actually move.

Class / Future

The class began.

Brains were a construct of physical reality and therefore subject to the laws of such. The mind, he argued, was not. It had sympathetic structures in the physical world, but it was simultaneously the product of all of them, and none of them.

Therefore, he continued, that the mind was not subject to the same limitations of a standard computer, and that it could essentially reach beyond time.

The also meant that any mind was, to some extent, a product of the environment it has be accustomed to. Therefore the default structures in the mind would eventually fall back to a mechanism that would most suitably deal with the environment immediately around it.

Hence, while we have this discussion here, an 'earlier version' of my mind, which is still, in fact the same thing, is busy typing notes on a computer. In fact, let me pull up the archives. Here.

Now, you might argue that I'm simply recycling my own old notes, but the memory is locked away at the moment – due to the other experiments that I'm working on.

You see, that's why there's no reported incidents of time travel. The 'past' mind has always got the memory squirrelled away, since it is forced so often to deal with 'linear time'. When we return the subject to the time they left, down to the nanosecond, the physical brain has had no time to encode the memories into a physical shape.

Why don't you simply have the two meet? - asked someone in the back. We did, replied the teacher, and the memories cancelled each other out. I didn't remember it happening so I blanked out and he was extremely disoriented.

What we need, and why these classes are taking place, is a need to shift the group consciousness into form which is able to deal with non-linear time.

Is that the point of the SuperWhoLock? Laughter. Yes, in fact, because each of us has to deal with it in their own way. Some are deductive about it, as I was, most merely attached to the fun aspect of it, and others reflect that is a trait of God and thus has a place in the Universe itself.

Application and Purpose

It was a fine line, tampering with the past. Too little and nothing is noticeable, too much and people can question their sanity. Thankfully the technology was sufficiently advanced that manipulating variables was as simple as working on a spreadsheet. Overall the application was fairly conservative, which meant that actually changing anything was more exponentially more work than typical non-invasive 'observation only' operations. The cascade from changes could grow indefinitely, or collapse without warning. The question of what would be worth influencing came up rather often. With the changes in the world, erasing past disasters and mistakes was essentially pointless. Not many things survived the cataclysm, so material changes were also for naught. Still there was not specific rule against it, even if the necessity wasn't there.

The main obstacle was one of synchronization, if left unchecked, one would automatically be re-incorporated into linear, non-adjusted time. He started looking for some nonlinear tools to quantify the interactions.

Experimental Conditions

Direct communication is unlikely, undesired, or impossible. We need a target and initial location for a shunt. Some kind of stepping stone for a more meaningful connection. 5^th Cell protocol seems to be a flexible enough platform.

Creation of avatars that represent a number of initial conditions or desired future variables. Feedback via avatar with object creation abilities. Patterns of similar material and combined commonalities to be searched for. External targets based on secondary audio cues and communication windows from environment. To direct to publicly available videos and social media accounts at past location. To confirm bias of experimental success.

Assume undetectable basic monitoring software and equipment to record user interaction and images. Level 8 sharing – consistent with theocratic sharing template – activities recorded and shared with sufficient but not excruciating detail – minus desirable examples. Archival access to project leads for approximately 80% of material gathered.

Unstuck Trianglation

His life was a blank. It was always in flux. That's what happens when you sign up. The only way to see what was happening was to 'prod' someone else to poll the situation. A specific question, a few moments observation in a particular activity. If they could associate that with a set of his actions, they could collate the endless posts and interactions that generated from a life unstuck in time. Without that triangulation, they couldn't determine which eventualities sprang from what series of events. Each probe into the past deflected the situation into a different set of outcomes. Every so often they could detect collapses in timelines, smoothing out the possible paradoxes into a narrative that made a certain amount of sense. Between those times, things were – fuzzy, for lack of a better word. Any action could be influenced by any other future action, so on occasion, missions failed to have the intended effect, when something else was working at cross-purposes. When things like this happened, it pushed him to the ragged edge of reality. Static from the now unrelated actions and reactions hung over him until possibilities coalesced back into a regular pattern.

It was fortunate that his baseline was now fairly predictable, and very rarely was he directly in control of anything like a vehicle which could impact others in a severe way. Moderate, regular, medium influence interactions were preferred, that way any fallout could be on a manageable level.

Future Perfect

Every action was deliberate. More than simply calculated, each action was dependent on a huge, fluid reaction to countless variables. Someone less experienced might think every possible eventuality was planned for, but this was something much deeper. Once all the elements were known as thoroughly as they could be, and everything else was blocked out, it was easy to focus. It was true that certain contingencies had reactions already cued, but this was not out of panic or unreadiness, but out of pragmatism. It was a symphony of action, rehearsed a thousand times, but ready to change completely on a whim should the want arise. It was layered beyond what anyone could fathom, even watching multiple times, with the benefit of hindsight. Each decibel of sound, hue of image, element of movement was chosen with deliberate and clear forethought. The result was something that was enthralling, memorizing and sublime. Gripping, but at the same time so natural that it was effortless to swept up in the experience.

Dark Matter

Dark matter was more mysterious than it was originally thought. Apart from being WIMP – Weak Interacting Massive Particles, it was also unstuck in space-time. Once properly exited, it could open up corridors to other times. Since the dark matter interacted with the gravitational forces of the rest of the universe, they stayed linked to the same relative location of space, despite the movement of things that otherwise occurred across time.

The only downside was that it required a certain amount of intelligence to navigate. One couldn't simply send through objects – even the best drones were having a tough time making a successful trip – let alone ending up when and where they should.