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.