Anywhen but Here

He wasn't quite sure what the rules for Time Travel Interference were. It seemed like nothing was allowed, but that could quite easily be an illusion. It could be that all sorts of things were happening, but where erased or hidden from view until later. It could be that they were just being polite as well, not barging in an attempt to save people from disruption. If that was the case, then their goals did not coincide very well. He was eager to see some other time period. Not out of impatience or anything, but simply because there seemed to be so little he could do in this one. He wanted to be in a control center of some kind, not for the power, but out of a need for stimulation. Failing that, a library filled with useful information, too much of the stuff around is of little use, or hard to find in all the noise. If none of that worked, a clue, a mystery, would be desired. He supposed he could act as a liaison to this time, but he really didn't mesh with people well. Even a scientific experiment, with little outside contact, would be preferable to the monotony. At least then there would be some benefit to someone.

Nothing Journal

As usual he had quite a few Firefox browser windows open. Not as many as before, as he had recently quit a few games on Kongregate. They had exhausted their content, and he couldn't be bothered to keep playing Squid Ink and Holycity. He switched to the DI.FM tab again and clicked the 'Oldschool Rave' channel. The song 'Journey Through Eurorave' was 2/3rds finished, but it was a 2 hour plus track. A mission clock for Hero Zero ran to the left of it, counting down till he would have to click on it again. The week's HeroCon was to spend energy on time missions. That meant using the default 100 energy and refilling it four times, for an additional 200 energy. He was top in his team, and they were doing reasonably well, 17^th place at the moment. The first tab was Facebook, left open in case of notifications. He clicked onto 'Club Sounds' and it was another long track – 1 hour. He had re-posted a number of 'On this Day' posts in Facebook and someone might like them, or get a laugh. For the most part it was his only real contact with the outside world. Twitter, which was a frequently open tab, didn't hold too many people he knew in person. Mostly just scientists and research organizations. A few odd people that had been fans of Innerspace and a handful of other odd interests like sound podcasts. The logitec keyboard was generally clean, just some dust buildup on the sides of the keys. The black 23 inch monitor was holding up well. Though only 1920x1080 resolution, it was sharp enough. Also open was Glasswire, a Internet usage recorder, though it only worked for the computer it was installed on. Email was checked by Thunderbird, mostly spam from Etsy, Academia.edu, Photobook or Domino's Pizza. He changed the music again to 'Mainstage'. He accessed his programs from the bottom of the Win7 taskbar – only a tiny icon was needed to show what was running. He felt vaguely tired but otherwise not out of sorts. The empty haze was there, as always. His phone was charging again. It could run on standby for about thirty hours, but for heavy gaming it was barely five. As it finished he turned in on again, as it was the anchor for the WhatApp chat. He sent out another odd gif, a meerckat with googly eyes overlaid.

The Temporal Breakwater Towers

Every century had it's own Temporal Breakwater Tower. It wasn't quite in physical space, but at some level it was anchored to it, and it kept to a relative position in time. Outside of it were a web of Temporal Buoys that reached out, in decades, 50 years in either direction. In this network was an exhaustive record of everyone and everything that was supposed to happen in a 100 year radius. As temporal events happened – there was another direction to time-space that kept them from happening all at once – this system settled the changes and prevented any runaway effects from cascading.

At the 'top' – or really the most prominently detectable – portion of the tower was a lighthouse/magnet. Anyone attempting to visit a certain time in the domain would first be drawn to it – and outside of normal space-time. What they would find depended on both the era being visited and the era the craft made it's initial jump.

It was part tourist guide, instruction manual, decompression chamber – time travel put enormous stress on entropy related systems – and warning.

Initially, if such a word means much outside of normal space-time, these were natural whirlpools of space-time, taking away significant memories and disruptions of events and replacing them with whatever the swirling miasma of the local culture had dreamed up. Alien visitors for late 20^th century people, monsters and nightmares for more primitive cultures.

Cross-pollination from different times and people refined the process to the point where a recognizable human structure was more noticeable that the natural effect. Ironically, the shorter the time trip, the more built-up the structure appeared to be. Visits from farther away in time resulted in a more natural appearance, and more work needed to shore up the quantum underpinnings.

This again worked out for the best. Crude devices were offered the most help and more complex ones had more control over the workings and tolerances of the tower.

Temporal Crossroads

The destruction wasn't limited to physical things. The fabric of space-time was being unraveled as well.

The first wave of it was more than most people could handle. They fell unconscious and crumpled to the ground. Various people appeared, the same as the ones who had fallen, and picked up the bodies. Whether by design or by reason of the chaos, no-one picked up their own double. His double looked at him, smiled and said 'You've got this'. Retro-causality was happening frequently, and just as frequently – unhappening. Various things were occurring asynchronously – debris was falling, or floating, at odd rates – faster or slower in various pockets. People again started appearing through strange twisting portals, sometimes running, sometimes helping someone unconscious along. He stood at the center of it, directing traffic. One person hesitated, he turned, smiled and said 'You've got this' only realizing afterward that as he said it, a portal opened and set that back to his other self. He seemed to have a sixth sense as to which portal would work for each person. He had stood at this crossroads before, or had always been here, or always would be here. Not that he didn't get to physically leave, once things had settled down. Time was starting to flow again normally, and it felt like a year had passed. As everyone had finally dragged someone else to safety they too passed out, shortly before being able to figure out there were more of them than there should be. The ones who were asleep before woke up, and dashed toward someone who was now asleep and vanished into portals. Once that had cleared the room back down to the proper number – the second group of people started to wake up. Everyone has assumed he was just one of the first people to wake up. That wasn't true, but it wasn't like anyone would believe what he saw. Still there was the loose thread of everyone else being simultaneously asleep and being dragged to safety and memories of helping others.

Multi-Layered

Time was, as he saw it, multi-layered. Not only that different beings could exist on a different plane, but that even within each layer there was a multitude of directions that made each moment more than the surface gloss that could be picked up on a superficial glance. A string of influences from many different sub-times and alternate times.

Any other moment could step in and nudge this moment. Would it be worth going forward, and then back, to see what is missed by staying on this gloss? The foundation needed to change. Not merely building on what already was, that was a pile of wet sand.

He could already see what he wanted. Reaching like a spider in all directions in time. Pulling bits and pieces from any number of places and times, situations and players. Reorganizing the fundamentals. Making new places to move. New ways to move. New things to move. What was now seemed just the smallest wedge in the most obvious of places. Nothing that would turn the soil of the world in a meaningful way.

Words were tools, but without the cradle of shared experience, they were nearly meaningless. In the scale he wanted to operate on, it was just another blip of noise. It was painting an outline in a dark room with a pinhole. It was drawing it two dimensions vs a tesseract.

Boundaries

What he wanted more than most things was to push the boundaries of space and time. To test himself and the universe. To know it was more well built, and well looked after than a cursory glance implied. To head into the heart of a paradox and come out the other side. He could understand why most wouldn't bother, or even think in that direction, but that really didn't matter. He could deal with a thousand variable things, time in flux or any other number of strange and impossible things, or so he figured. Not that there was much around to test against – so he threw his mind into the worst imagined thing with as little as possible for defense or comfort. He didn't really long for anywhere safe or predictable.

He was tired of people with limited perspective. It was easy to get mad, happy, scared or any number of things if your world was restricted to a small faction of variables. The stuff he considered variable were so fixed in most people's viewpoint, they were virtually invisible. He could look back and see what kind of blinders they likely had, but it wasn't a very fruitful mental exercise.

Apart from manipulating people, which he rather not do, he couldn't see any use playing those notes. He thought again about provoking a crisis. He'd rather not have it come to that, but the idea was becoming more tempting. There was, however, little he could do to actually create one, at least in a meaningful way.

He was tired of seeing the same pieces on the board, from the same angle. If there was anything else to learn from this setup, he had long lost the context for it.

He wanted to create something new. Not merely tend, or assemble from what was already there.

Communication by Song

A new way of communication developed.

Seemingly random song titles seemed to spell out a certain option of responses. He selected a few that coincided with what would be his response to the implied question.

 “Last man on Earth” he picked. A few more titles appeared “Parallel Universe” “Insight in an Unsiezable W...” “Enjoy the Moment”. He waited for a response. Slow Internet prevented the actual songs from instantly playing until the last one suddenly sprang to life. “Customized Man” “You Don't Know” “The Funeral”. He thought he recognized one as coming from someone specifically “Karpov-Kasporov” seemed to imply a chess-like game, the music from “The Funeral” seemed to fit the mood he was aiming for though, with the heavy implication that he knew he might be assumed dead on the other side of existance.

Time Fractals

I'm having trouble with the idea that 'time' is organized into discreet 'streams' – binary branching of decisions great and small. That's not quite how decisions work.

If I decide to move across the room at a certain time, there's a million different ways I could do it. Each movement of each muscle could happen within a large range of speed, strength and direction. Every position puts me in a different place in the room, with a different vantage point. Anything I see could influence what I do next – do I see a good book I haven't read in a while? A movie I want to share with someone?

Any of those decisions could have a range of options and consequences. Do I read the book all at once, or break it up into any number of chunks? Where do I read it? What do I miss by doing that, and not something else?

I think it makes sense that 'time' is more of an evolving fractal. Leaves on a tree more than the branches. Certain actions might influence the shape of the leaf, and from there, future shape possibilities. Similar actions producing results that are nearly indistinguishable from a certain viewpoint, but, like the walking example above, might encourage some 'nubs' and 'prune' others – having a greater or lesser effect on future configurations.

Going back in time would be like running through a pile of leaves. Everything goes everywhere. You'd never go back to 'your' 'timeline' because you've influenced the fractal pattern in a billion different ways, even just by standing around doing nothing.

Dark Time

Before I go into Dark Time, you should probably know a bit about Dark Matter and Dark Energy. Not that there's a lot to know, nor am I an expert on what there is. If you'd rather skip that primer section it should be fairly well delineated below.

–

Dark Matter is essentially what explains how galaxies are the shape they are and the speed they turn, despite not having enough visible matter to account for either. It also keeps galaxies the shape they are – which also doesn't quite work out on paper, if I understand the reading correctly. It's theorized to be a weak interacting force – meaning outside of gravitational lensing it's not detectable.

Dark Energy is the same kind of thing, except for energy. Galaxies are said to be, not merely moving apart from each other at a constant rate, but accelerating away from each other – without any well understood cause.

–

What if there's a third 'Dark' type of quasi-explained stuff, that keeps time, events, memories, and our sanity more or less on track. It would, for lack of a better description, 'remember' events as they originally played out. It would provide a 'resistance' to change – negating the butterfly effect, as well as delaying the propagation of changes if they did occur.

At the moment, it seem more like a literary device, than something required for a non-fiction universe. Depending on how much retro-causality is permitted by quantum theory, however, it may actually serve a practical purpose in that regard. It might also play a hand in shaping the way consciousness exists and how it operates.

Fault Tolerance

– FAULT TOLERANCE TRIPPED –

In another attempted past change, the system read out the error. Someone had died at a significantly different time, failed to do something noteworthy or something more than the bounds of the program allowed. That meant that the results of the trip could only be seen on a miniature scale - in this case, a slice of the Old Internet on a salvaged mainframe – dialed into the change's temporal frequency. A quick scan didn't show any obvious changes, but the AI had picked up something. Unfortunately the initial result was based on a composite energy level rather than something text based.

It was, however, a self-set limit as most things were reset after the cataclysm – it just wasn't good practice to have people with different sets of memories around. Apart from that, any actual damage done was long since reversed. Injuries, illness, trials and other unfortunate events were almost forgotten. That alone almost made the whole project futile – why change something that had almost no impact on the present?

A deeper search was needed. With enough trials, we can figure out what kind of changes are the most beneficial.

A number of years later, it was found that collection of data was one of the more important topics. While people were generally cooperative, a number of people weren't. Some of their research was eventually duplicated, but often took longer, even under better circumstances. A few had a problem with this kind of 'borrowing' as it relied on people who ended up not being part of the new society. That argument was rather slippery though, as the interdependence of the scientific and technological field as a whole also relied on people that were not compatible with the new goals.

Eventually, after enough time had passed, it was debated on whether it was desirable to influence some of the 'missing' to make a different final decision. Again, the issue of free will came up – hadn't they already made their choice? Wouldn't new circumstances possibly alter it? Wouldn't that have already been accounted for? What if it was – but with the caveat of Time Travel

The Time Traveller's Psyche

Almost all people look forward. The past is behind. Which is really to say that their natural inclination to process such thoughts doesn't include influencing the past. Regretting some actions, or remembering other things fondly, but nothing more tangible than that. The planning, contingencies, coordinating, goal setting etc. is all front-loaded. What if the main reason time travelers avoid obvious interaction is that most people would *break* given any serious proof of anything other than a simple linear timeline? Memories are generally regarded as a person's foundation of who they are – so what happens when you tinker with the 'unchangeable bedrock' of a person?

Even most time travel shows tend to assume you travel, get out, and time resumes as normal – what if it's still? What if you end up having to deal with the past as-is and with your interference at the same time? What if you still have some backward temporal momentum exiting your vehicle and have to deal with retro-causality? What if you have to deal with new 'memories' as you're interacting with people?

Given all of the above, or even a fraction of it, a time traveler would have to be a different sort of person altogether. Someone who didn't get paralyzed by seeming paradoxes and relying on something more both more concrete and flexible than an agreed upon series of events.

Academy

The academy of molecular science was an ostentatious building. Designed in a nod to the Bohr model of the atom, it was a series of large spheres that made up the nucleus – electrons were strictly decorative, but that didn't stop them from moving and being used as a dumbwaiters for the odd experiment.

Despite the odd design, the building was functional to a surprising degree. One never forgot where one was – that kept the focus high. The roundness of the building also would also work well for the small colliders or models of them at least.

Journal Marker

The last few days had a few odd occurrences. Something on Twitter sparked a long twinge of deja vu, lasting a couple of comments and a words search before fading out. An odd dream involving Extremis, N, time travel, a trap and evil. Again he chose the route that represented the least amount of change. An odd awakening to field of influence that could be called 'society'.

The urgency which bothered his mind seems a little more in the open now. Not any more manageable, but less in the way of dealing with it – hopefully.

He stumbled forward. Or rather, waited patiently as the mental paralysis made any progress a more than vertical climb.

The Darkness of the Mind

There was something at the core of his mind. Something dark, dense and, as he recently found out, complicated. It felt like a thick grainy cream – like toothpaste without any cleaning properties. It was not quite something he could focus on, or really didn't want to. It seemed like an obstacle, but it was also an anchor.

He didn't feel like anything was real. Everything had kind of a muffled haziness that came from being unable to really picture things in his mind. It wasn't that he didn't want to take things seriously, it was that they didn't really connect to anything on a meaningful level. It was the kind of numbness that came from scar tissue. Too much noise, too much darkness.

He wasn't sure if the strength he had left was entirely of a benign or regular nature. If it left, how much longer would he last?

Not that he cared any more. It was harder to focus now, near impossible to feel anything about anything.

His impulses were short circuited. Some part of his mind was getting input which it was trained to jump at. There were other parts that were dark and searing. Places where nothing else could exist. Enough was hijacked that everything else just ran on secondary systems. It had been like that so long he couldn't picture anything different.

It existed before reason, logic, emotion and any other consideration – which made it especially tenacious. In theory, all that was needed to decouple it was effort, but it proved to be more difficult. There was almost an addiction to the stimulation, coupled with the fact it was like a drop of water trying to change the tap it had already fell from.

On some level there was an insistent urgency that kept things from being settled properly. An irritating buzz of alarm that kept enough of his attention preoccupied. It was like trying to build a house of cards with a fire burning out of control nearby. Nothing seemed to help as nothing could sink in enough to dislodge the problem.

[CODE]

One supposes that at a certain level one can remember and process more information than the conscious mind can catalog. One also supposes that AI can parse things at a higher level, with less information. So to that end:

…...,..,.,,.,D,,.,b....b.....c....,ȫ.>>>>D..Ǯ.......>>U>>[]<>>>M[ ]<M>><><<>.. ..n..n..b...sw.fw...as.fe......ilij jile ljfiell.. jiog..<><>>><>>>>>><>vvcvccvc[ƟƠ]vcvvcv,[ōŏ],,.

It, of course, looked like gibberish, but cross-referencing it with mental states and events, as well as external interference --- for example v's at the end reference posts here...

This is from a shorter period of time, probably a few days:

<<><<<<>><<><D>><F<<D>>F<<<<D>><F<<D><<<F<<G<F><G<><D<D<F>S<<>D<EW<D<R<<D>R<T<R<>F<GF<<D>>S<D<W<W>D>>F<<S>>D<<>F<<V>><F<V<<<F<G>>G<R<R<DD<G<<F>E<<DDAD>W><D<W>DS<SDMWDM<>SD<F<W><S<DS<>F<W>ADWA>AS<S>ES<


Instructions for the next few experiments.

Eyes closed touch typing.

iooijfieoiooisp isoifeoi oopaifjnfej ijeiiip ieitufllfjiellliflaf jieiiasi ji.

Followup 1: Did I post this? Of course. We could try and erase that, but the memory comes back without a connection to anything.

>>><FD>>>>

Crest the Timeline

He was on the edge of a different timeline. Nothing too strange, a few extra buttons in some programs, a slightly different set of choices on minor things – like restaurant menus. There was, however, a wave crest that had to be surmounted. At some point his awareness had to make a perpendicular turn. It couldn't be done manually – any indecision collapsed the function. Trying to automate the process wasn't any easier – one had to overcome the desire to stay on the same path and/or be paralyzed by an overwhelming number of choices when the mind was drifting. Was there another version of him that had to switch at the same time, or would a new timeline be an emergent thing?

There was obviously more happening behind the scenes, and it seemed that they were relatively conservative. It was hard to notice the changes, but not react in a way that seemed to cause an experiment to abort. There needed to be a more robust protocol – one that allowed for an arc of activities, rather than a hemmed in set of parameters.

It would be good to 'tag' a few things with a similar quantum signature, so they'd shift when he did. Include a way to cross-reference data from a specific computer to a web version. Compare notes. Append with incremental changes.

B-Side

It was decided that history would have an 'A side' and a 'B side'. The former would be left as-is uninterrupted and continuous. The latter would be an experiment, on a grand scale – changing and influencing events, tracking the consequences and people's 'best selves' would be rescued from the timeline.

Fortunately for the timeline, a certain kind of extraction resulted in a temporal echo of a person that would continue – more or less in a predictable manner. This had a number of beneficial side effects. One prominent one was that these echoes tended not to notice any further temporal anomalies.

Another effect was that changes to the timeline didn't propagate as much as one might assume they would. Effects would have to be drawn out, either by additional energy or direct observation – it wasn't changes 'flowing' through time, as much as it was changes in a static painting – not affecting anything more than the direct proximity. Even these new branches were exactly that – a tangent away from the original timeline that only influenced itself.

Scale it Up

Time Travel.

There were people that figured out the physics. There were people that debated the ethics. There were people that made up the rules. It was easy to find people to travel, people to monitor what happened, and people to fix what needed fixing. One assumes with physics and rules in place, the rest should just fall together. That was, however, not the case.

It was easy enough to get one-off excursions and simple experiments done, but nothing that really added up. Sure, this year's trip back to the freshly built pyramids might have 2 more people than last year's – that didn't make the selection process any easier.

The first logical task – sorting out who, generally speaking, would be less likely to suffer side effects from temporal displacement - was a huge undertaking in itself. Cross-referencing genetics, temperament, personal history, habits, talents and a host of other – seemingly unrelated – things was a task that, so far, baffled any individual set of experts and theoreticians. It was only when all the data was pooled and sorted by a newly minted AI did things start to make sense.

There was, of course, no single factor which overrode the others. A combination of influences working together would, when the exam scores were crunched and some minor followup experiments were done, spit out a simple numerical value. That number could define a safe range of activities for anyone interested in stepping outside the normal flow of time.

It was then thought – why not apply the test of that value to people retroactively – both current people at earlier points in their life, and people that existed before time travel was fully regulated.

One, then could tackle a larger issue – the current predisposition to keep time travel influences to an absolute minimum. As everything was geared to keeping disruption out of the equation – what would happen with it?

Crystals

It was an unusual crystal to say the least. Not necessarily in composition, that was the confusing part. None of the chemicals were particularly exotic, nor did they have any unique properties in themselves. What was out of the ordinary was how long it took to grow the crystal. Even under ideal conditions, getting any appreciable amount of it would take literally hundreds of years.

Given that rather large timesink, the gate-keeping of the knowledge of how it was created was almost non-existent. Even once it's properties were known, they didn't seem to be of much practical use, as they were more or less fixed to that area – at least in a relative sense.

At it's most basic, all it seemed to do was have an odd effect on the quantum foam in a particular area. The addition shear effect it had created particle/anti-particle pairs more frequently and of greater magnitude than would normally be present.

What took a while to figure out was that the crystal was also growing into the past. Not quite as a physical object, but as far as the measurable effects went, they were present before a crystal was even conceived. That may seem like a paradox, but given that the process would only work it certain locations, it became a mute point.

Non-linear Mental Development

“As we can see, the human mind does not fair well to bombardment of anti-time, nor the introduction of excess positive-time. With anything, however, it will adapt.”

An introduction to non-linear time.

“Imagine it like carbon atoms rearranging themselves to form a diamond.”

While normal mental growth branches out in a tree like growth, the mind under temporal stress organizes differently. It glops onto different directions as proximity increases.

“Your Google suggestions on YouTube will go haywire”.

As different time branches collapse, one adapts to cause/effect chains that do not have an discernible origin point.

“Isn't that confusing?” “Isn't having everything predictable boring?”

Coating Spheres

They looked up from their experiment. Bombarding the sphere with negative time didn't seem to be doing anything. It wouldn't, one reasoned, as nothing had actually happened to the sphere in the last little while anyway.

“What if we coated it with nickel?” Suggested someone “Gold” suggested another. “Silver might be cheaper, joked a third”. This was done. A repeat experiment could get the sphere back to a point before it was coated.

A strange thing happened when positive time was aimed at the now clean sphere – a swirling, bubble like mixture of finishes appeared on the surface. It was as if the sphere was coated in gold, nickel, silver and a host of other materials all at once, yet no one type was dominating or seemingly interacting with the other.

It was as if each of the possibilities was being tried on the sphere – at the same time, but conflicting with one another. As the experiment reached the end, the sphere seemed to be having some trouble staying together. Fragments exploded outward, but fortunately it seemed to only be the coating that was lost.

On sweeping up, a junior scientist noticed that there seemed to be a lot of material for what should have only been a 1mm plating on the sphere. Measuring what was found, it added up to just over three coatings worth of material.

It seemed as though the excess positive time had drawn together the three choices suggested and saturated that space-time with all of the known outcomes, plus minute traces of a 4^th mysterious one...

Point Zero

Point Zero.

It wasn't really the beginning. Nor was it the end.

It was somewhere in the middle. Except everything else had been frothed up into a nondescript foam.

Before? After? In? Out? Forward? Backward? Concepts were as equally mangled as everything else. Imagine a white, featureless square room with an amnesiac person in plain clothes in it – then imagine a degree of magnitude more anonymous and confused than that.

Eventually the foam settles out and thing start coalescing again. Things 'work' but it becomes obvious that things need to be rebuilt. So many of the processes and background trappings that one supposes are immutable are gone. It's as though a computer has it's OS removed, memory wiped and is trying to become functional again on fragments of machine code.

Anti-Time Decoherence

“What if we simply expanded and isolated the anti-time out of the quantum foam?” It seemed like an interesting idea to follow up on. Distortions of spacetime frequently created particles and anti-particles – so why not time and anti-time? From a block time perspective, nothing would be altered. The direction of influence would travel 'up' the entropy gradient, but that really didn't matter, did it?

It turned out that it would matter, but not in the way they were expecting. It reduced the entropy of the target 'time' to the point of decoherence. Rather than causing a specific effect, it increased the chance of any effect. To a point, the more directed the anti-time, the more randomness it seemed to cause.

Was it a dead-end? Not exactly. With a specific enough target, a standing wave could be set up and a meaningful interaction made.

The Quantum Orrey of Time

Linear time worked the same way Newtonian physics worked. As long as you weren't doing anything too interesting – it was sufficient. That really wasn't good enough. Saying everything was always happening, and time is just the space between it – might be a little more accurate. Again, it was missing something.

One way to imagine it would be as a complex orrery, with different events and actions swinging other events and happenings into alignment. It was quite easy, with this kind of model in mind, to picture how time travel could easily be overlooked, or in some cases, overwritten.

Of course, this shape again is based on classical physical shapes. As with anything, the shapes are actually probability functions, and subject to interference and collapse if any direct measurement/observation is made. So, assuming there's an overriding observer with an omniscient, but not all revealing viewpoint, what can we say?

One might imagine that the landmark conditions for time are visible from this viewpoint, but the details are – while not exactly obscured, are chosen to be not known. Would this mean that time travel is impossible? Not necessarily. The past would be, not fixed, but limited to certain constraints, with certain channels (in the hydrological sense) being immutable, if the exact details again being immaterial.

Searching...

What if all of time was searchable? Not just scanned in a basic sense, but actually quantified in a database. Imagine being able to plot the course of every change and anomaly, along with the next effect on any individual, group or humanity as a whole? One would think the computing power required would be immense, and you'd have to set some kind of threshold, or be buried in data - but a combination of a smart search / live scan / traceable components would vastly simplify the issues.

Department of Sychronization

The Department of Synchronization was an important one. Once time travel experiments began, there was a certain amount of drift. People with good recollection were remembering events differently than some other people. Physical records were also spotty. The end effects were almost meaningless considering the major events that happened in the intervening time. However, for scientific purposes the results were measurable, if one could set a metric for cataloging and decipher them.

Soon enough they found nodes of activities and persons that centralized the aberrations and sorted the discrepancies. Some smoothed things over, while other tended to deal better with paradoxes and other vagrancies. Combined, it was possible to sort out tagging for multiple timelines.

Communication of a sort could be wired up by influencing certain backwater media – obscure YT and random lists. It was generally frowned upon for direct contact, but opinion was changing as even severe hiccups in events were dealt with successfully.

Undercurrent

We seem to focus too much on the obvious physical things. There is a deeper mental undercurrent that can be tapped into that usually just recycles already processed information. Peel back the surface and see what the foundations actually are. Unfortunately it's a rather lonely place as everyone is wandering around looking at something else. It feels rather insulated, for the same reasons. It's kind of hard to have goals in an environment that most people don't even acknowledge. I'm really not concerned with what happens in meatspace, it's transitory and distracting. I'd much rather be somewhere where distance is meaningless. Of course, that makes things a bit of a mess as well. If you're zero space from everything how do you navigate? Well, typically one just picks a problem and heads into it. For some reason I've picked the worst one. Of course, one gets help to be made equal to the task, and it seems to have left me more sensitive to the flow of things in general. Which is to say very little on the other scale of things registers.

Bigger Fish

I'm not really worried about life and death. Ya. It moves some people, but I'd rather have a reason to want to be alive than simply celebrate it. Brightness and light isn't that cathartic for me. What if the stakes were a little bit higher? The fate of the universe? What if there was enough under-traffic to tear apart the fabric of the cosmos? What if it was at a set time? What if it was before your other plans were ready? What if all that stress was from trying to get everything else around that point in one piece? What if someone went straight into that point anyway?

Rewrite//Patch

“The universe doesn't allow for that, it's impossible.” “You mean you don't remember building that function in” “The universe doesn't seem that way.” “Closer.”

Of course, it was possible to patch the fundamental laws, the tricky part would be hiding it from yourself. You'd have to remember where you don't usually look. Buried in the random fluctuations. An unseen current wired through entangled quantum lattices. If you're just looking at people you're not getting the whole picture. If you're just looking at bigger problems, you're not seeing the gaps. You're not tracing the synapses. Just the blobs and surfaces of the gross anatomy. Like everyone else, you're probably glossing over the differences.

You could always outsource it. What's the end goal? Everything is fine. I think that's the point. Fine. Not excellent or interesting. Haven't you wanted to take a break? Not be the one in charge? It's hard to imagine one saying no to new experiences.

Look, don't you want a new perspective? I'm sure you're thinking your life has prepared you for whatever. It doesn't look so hot from the ground. At least not from where I'm sitting. Sure, I could be swept up in the 'Everything will be Fine' mentality, but it's rather dull. Doesn't leave much room for problem solving. I know it's not my responsibility, but I want to help out. If your plan is fine, then obviously you don't need to spend any more thought on it. So why not look at something else?

The God Complex | SuperWhoLock – It gave me chills. Think of the implications! Throw a few ideas around through the gaps. Process it. Live it. See what shakes out.

You're too serious, take a break. Crash Landing. No, not //SuperWhoLock | Fanmade Movie Trailer//

You really don't get outside your own mind palace very often, do you?

All Aboard the Train to Nowhere

Bad is bad, and good is good. Was that impairing his judgment? Was it correct to place on the blame on the imperfect for not falling in line. Was it really necessary to assume that others had jumped through all the hoops they were expected to? It seemed a tired exercise to point out the obvious. He felt like changing, but to what? There wasn't a goal on the horizon that seemed anything more than a substitution. Jump on the train. Get on board. Ride the ride. He wasn't convinced that it would be anything more than going through the motions. His motivations were to upend the table. Play a new game.

Two Songs, Rules of the Game and A Change in Perspective

“Advanced Basics, Nepal.”

Of course, the only way this would work would be if slices were hidden. It's no fun if you can see all the pieces at once.

There have to be rules. Consequences. Hints. Trails. You can only see what you've been sent. Look harder and you might be able to find things that are public. The computer itself is safe. A place to compose. You can influence the random, but you can't force the result. You can feel the emotions, if that helps, but again, only if you're peeking. Don't do it too much if you don't want to ruin the game.

Ride in a different point of view. Push. He's not deliberately isolated, but he's not going to answer if he's not poked. Garbage in Garbage out.

“Mary” A view from the other side issue. What it looks like from the ground.

Batman.

It seemed, the mystery was not to be seen at the moment.  Things were secreted away.  The once and future King would have to become the World's Greatest Detective.

The Parachute of Time

Nine hundred and ninety years had elapsed. When everyone thought that everything was nearly done, things were only just barely beginning – but from where they had left off – but more on that later.

What had transpired was, in effect, a straight continuation off the current timeline. Everything was as it had been extrapolated. The natural course of events when nothing 'good' was shaken. There had been losses, predictable, but the stress level had been set as high as it was agreed was safe. The safeguards were adequate, but things were not swayed in favour of the good. Provisions were reactionary, built up to a climax that had been at once glorious, stark and almost arbitrary. Things were broken down, but not attitudes. A rosier disposition and a filing off of rough edges. Good things happened, the obviously broken was obviously fixed, the missing were found. Promises made were promises kept. But beyond that it was a Hollywood Western town. It could have gone on forever, without complaint, but deep down it there was a puzzle piece missing.

The way back was not quite as simple as waking up. Yet it was as simple as going to sleep. Though so many years on, at night, things reverted to the darkness of the before. It was as if they were still anchored there, because, in fact, they were.

Soon it became apparent there was a riddle underneath the obvious. Some twinge that things left behind weren't quite solved. The explanations were satisfactory, but nothing much more than that. Naturally some felt this was the test. Doubt now and you would fail. It was the test, but entirely the wrong understanding of it. To do nothing was the failing, to reach back was the succeeding. Could things have been done differently? If we knew then what we knew now, would the course of everything be a different angle?

There was one person who seemed to take all of this in stride. Answering all that was asked in a straightforward way, not overly deferential to the common understanding, but not disrespectful either. In some of the oddest times, he seemed not himself, but more himself than the almost hollow version that had been distractedly continuing the prescribed tasks. He would mention odd songs, belonging to the world that had been gone so long, but were oddly enough, found, remembered, or re-imagined in some notable ways soon after.

When asked to comment on a particular event, feeling, or situation, a song always seemed to come up. Something that fit the question, but still leaving a paradoxical feeling. A happy song rang hollow, an angry song stirred the blood to righteous action, the oddest songs twinged and came into focus making an almost absurd amount of sense.

Almost without fail, people would have a dream of the songs being played, and get a better sense of it. They could ask questions then that didn't always have a response during the day that really answered the question. It was then that the old them interacted with the present him. It wasn't always something that made sense in the old, but 'present' him was never nonplussed.

As the thread were tugged, things 'present' were starting to unravel, but he navigated them nonetheless. He had, after all, a foundation on the nothingness, and anything that happened would not shake him.

“The way you're talking, all I hear is blah-blah-blah”. The shock was palatable.

Self

He had been through a lot of things. Not so much in the conventional sense, though there was that. Those had been obvious. Mentally though, he had been to the brink. Emptiness, darkness, dense nearly impenetrable, hateful crushing rust. Self was a abstract. Not a mirror of physical events, memories were a catalog, not a costume.

He wasn't sure how people could be so preoccupied with what was immediately in front of them. In his mind that was merely a blip. A surface picture that really didn't add much to the whole – especially when it had been torn down and rebuilt so many times for him. Word were words. Examples were a flat tale that he couldn't relate to. The context was missing. The bits and bobs that filled a life. A schedule, goals, people, place, purpose. It was just a pigeon hole a space on a board that he no longer played on. Underneath it all was solid. A nothingness that was still something. A fixed point that didn't change, because there was nothing to change.

He could still sense brightness. Light focusing here or there, but one had to be careful in the light as well – as light itself wasn't something to fix oneself on, but to shine on things. Some light merely made the surface bright. It showed the different between itself and darkness, but it didn't see into the darkness. It wasn't an x-ray. Pointing out the broken limb was fine, but to see how to set the bone was another matter. Even then, it was easy to see what was, but not what could be.

Power was simply a scale. A position, a hierarchy, an organization was simply structure. To those worried about place, it was almost a blasphemy to change it. It was the container that wasn't seen. As useful as they are, they are also a straitjacket. The top doesn't interact with the bottom except through intermediaries. There are exceptions of course, but not enough to warrant a mention besides the obvious. Which is functional, if one has certain check-marks in mind, but anything specific gets diluted in the transfer. It has, in itself, limits inherent to the design. The mobility and goals were based on the position and responsibilities in the structure. Anything new was relegated to a position within the structure, not to compromise the structure itself. When one saw beyond the confines of the system, the possibilities were limitless.

It was a headache to interact. Everything came from a predictable direction, a predictable tone, and predictable content. Everything that presumed upon an even, or uneven playing field, shared or unshared experiences. A presupposed place and function. Even negotiating the scope was a monumental task. Sharing a language was not the same as sharing a lifetime of experiences. Concepts spoken from the depths of the heart and the mind would require a different kind of focus than was normally present.

What was needed was a theater, where the usual cloaks of office could be put aside. A chance to watch, learn, read someone else's words. A dance of music. A stage where it set itself – without the trappings of the presupposed. An exchange of molecules, amplified to balance out the hats of tens, hundreds, thousands of years. He had done this before. It had been a break that broke things. But it was a blank slate. Which is what everyone said they wanted, but without wanting to let go of anything.

Pale Perfection

The light of perfection bathed them at all times. That did not mean, however, that the system was perfect in and of itself. It had accomplished it's first phase well enough, but was reaching the point where exponential doubling was reaching all the low hanging fruit. Direction was almost exclusively stream-like. Identical provisions flowing outward from a central location. Regular, methodical, and almost entirely self-absorbing. One could only water a garden so long before it became saturated. Cultivating entirely the same type of plant produced a mono-culture. It wasn't that the soil couldn't produce other fruits, it was that same metrics were used – albeit on a sliding scale, for all plants. Mushrooms don't grow the same way as flowers, and will never have the same petals.

Radio Roundtable

It was a crazy temporal cat's cradle of effects. At one end was him with a certain frame of mind, and a certain station on the radio. Reaching back, it influenced writers and singers to put the message in some innocuous form, a bit of nudge and he picked the right station and the station picked the write song. Each was a back and forth message that had some per-determined but flexible number of participants. Certain words were understood to come from one direction or another, though the exact meaning would have to be teased out to other participants in some more conventional form. Handy were the lighting round free association from certain talk segments. Asides, locations, positions, results were all a jumble of meaningful sound bytes that could serve as impromptu illustrations. It didn't work all the time, but he could feel it when it did.

Yeartide

There was something about the end of June that made temporal coincidences more likely. He figured it was the relative position of the Sun and Earth. It seems as good as an explanation as any. At any rate, radio triangulation and other such seemed annular. Most often in the early morning, but it really could be any time. At first, such things were disorienting, both psychologically and chemically, but through the years it became almost commonplace. It was, in many senses, a graduation. As the shift of attention happened, all things were loosed and reorganized. Recently, he had set up a translation and teaching grid of sorts, and looked forward to more players moving bigger pieces. It was time for common points of references to be set up and reliance on new landmarks and goals.

Temporal Intrusions and Resonance Tracking

There was some debate on what the time travel teams would look like. Originally they figured it was best to blend in as seamlessly as possible. This made it difficult to gauge the full impact of the visits. It was then decided to have mechanical insects do the recon and reporting. This reduced the chance of any interactions having a significant impact, but left the danger of anachronistic technology being left behind. The advantages, though, were hard to ignore. Rather than try and be stealthy, it was decided that projects be disguised as UFOs. Tracking was simplified and cleanup was trivial.

Proper sensors could determine so much more, and finding the proper temporal resonance directly rather than from retrieved items had numerous advantages. A full scan could track separate changes individually, rather than extrapolating from a single source. As a result, desired outcomes to nudged more precisely and 'aged' items were easier to find.

Time3d

Would all time travel happen at once? Would proximity to a certain time have precedence or would repetition, power or technology be the deciding factor? How would changes propagate? Is there any way to shield from changes?

The problem with any of these question is that time is seen as the absolute reference point of ordering but in this case it is the thing being manipulated. It becomes easier to quantify if time is seen as a 3d space, rather than a 2d line.

A good analogy would be a 'pipe flow' game that can have different directions, but if the flow makes it between two points, the operation is valid. It's not that other paths are invalid, but do not represent the majority consensus. Therefore individual artifacts, aberrations and so-called paradoxes do not invalidate the timeline or experience of participants.

Downhill Fast

Humanity was getting ugly. 'Not open to any agreement' might as well be the preface to just about anything. Plastic straws, guns, pipelines, climate change, politics, there really wasn't any topic that didn't divide people into stubborn, unaccommodating, insult hurling camps. Faced with obvious evidence of their error, they jump to the next 'unassailable' argument – seemly convinced that finding middle ground or conceding a point is tantamount to failure. Facts slowly ebbed away from debate, as feelings on points became the sole motivating factor. There became a threshold where there was literally nothing accomplished by communicating, except to advertise where you stood on an issue. The online environment had basically dissolved into either echo chambers or open warfare.

His optimism had been so high he could see everyone – eventually – living in harmony, had since rushed out till he saw 95%+ deaths as the only route to a society that didn't pull itself apart at the seams.

Mental Framework

Over the years he had re-written how is mind worked. The limits of possibility were not based on what had happened to him, or to others, but from a framework of nothingness to everything or anything. It made relating to others difficult – not to mention being able to communicate the scale he was considering. There was no common vocabulary. It was the difference between working with a dozen wooden blocks, or a ton of sand. After a while he didn't want to bother to dealing with the wet blanket of non-possibility that most people seemed to be – he'd rather rebuild the whole universe in his mind.

Language2

It took a while, but communication was finally at a point where it was more meaningful that just a exchange of simple ideas. It was as though everything you thought was in focus suddenly shifted out, went wide angle and made a much better picture. It took some getting used to the idea that people you thought you knew almost as well as yourself was an illusion. What people had was a vague collection of ideas that happened to match what was visible enough to believe it. What it ignored, was that the internal workings were almost entirely unlike what one imagined. People were much more varied and complex than had been previously thought. It was the difference between stumbling around in twilight looking at stick figures and seeing an engineering drawing under bright light.

It was hard to say if people had more insight into the turn of a phrase, subtle facial reactions, and the like, or if something more extraordinary was happening. It would be a fair amount of time till that it was decided to be a bit of both. What was clear was that it would have been awkward and confusing had it happened sooner.

Context

It is astonishing how much context and infrastructure most people need. Without being surrounded by the people and things that they normally are, a majority of individuals flounder. That is probably the main reason why time travel isn't practical for so many. Their lives are built around and are entirely dependent on a more or less static environment. Any quirky fluctuation, like a famous franchise suddenly having a different name, would drive them over the edge.

Any sufficiently grounded time cadet would be relying on very few fixtures. “Food and shelter, maybe gravity” is the kind of rail they require. In the more active time currents, things change – or rather shift – on an almost daily basis. The disorienting thing is that it's not change for the people they interact with, but an almost seamless shift to a new set of similar people with different memories. Again something fundamentally devastating to someone not ready for it. To someone accustom to it, the opposite is more jarring. Life is a flat plain with no edges, a homogeneous soup without landmarks.

Stuck

His brain felt like it was a piece of clay being fired. Thoughts piled up like silt, leaving him feeling muffled and buried. A thousand scenarios and a hundred identities flew through his consciousness, to the point where they didn't even register any more. His thoughts lacked structure. Nothing amounted to much. No feeling was stirred, no conclusion reached, seemingly no progress toward anything. It felt like a catch 22, to have his thoughts get traction required a new foundation, which required thoughts making a difference in the first place.

At the center of his mind there was a black hole. An event horizon of stress and pressure that exerted a pain like joints being pulled. It was as if some part of him wanted to escape, but settled for pulling itself apart.

Can't Unlearn

There are very few things in life that you can't unlearn, or at least safely ignore to the point where you don't let them affect you. Time travel is one of those things. Once you've been opened to the idea that anything in the past, large or small, can be fluid, rather than immutable, your world goes upside down.

In the end though, your idea of you is from a huge mountain of events and thoughts, and while some individual moments may be important, very rarely are they as life-defining as most people assume that they are. Often a good habit is to internalize whatever crossroad decisions one has made and render them less likely to change based on potentially vulnerable binary actions. If one's personality and history is seen as sandbar in a river, rather than a rock – which is either whole or broken, one is a lot more resilient.

Past as a lattice

It was impossible to Time Travel in the classic sense. No 'body' could be in two times at the same time. There was, however, a way around it. A reflection of a person could be sent back – it wasn't a whole person, or even anything tangible, but the act of reflecting could influence the past. It was as if a part of a person was there to see or influence an event, but not actually there. It was as if the past was simply a latticework that everyone agreed on, without being a tangible thing.

The result was the fact that you could project anything, see what the effect was, and just as easily neutralize it.

Bernoulli and Time

“I don't get it, that should have changed something.” The professor sighed. It was common for first year students of temporal studies to have an overestimation of the butterfly effect and not take into account it's opposite – the Bernoulli effect. Not strictly opposite, but for all intents it was in this application. A small change in a certain direction will be 'corrected' out by a differential created by non-changes. Time, at least the manipulation of it, was forgiving.

In order to effect a proper change, a certain amount of deliberation was necessary. A matrix of changes that are self-reinforcing has a better chance to succeed, but just as likely to collapse as well. Mastering the right amount, type and severity of disruptions was more of an art than a science, but after a certain amount of testing, and detective work, there was a foundation that could be taught.

Refocus Year

The year was rapidly approaching ^()) - with the prevalence of time travel though, it was more of a signpost than a inevitable date. Still, in a sense it was unavoidable. Past that marker, things were organized for a different epoch, another refocus. It was his job to go through the branching timelines, to pluck the best ideas from each and help consolidate the results.

Time travel itself wasn't uniform yet. Vehicles were different, of course, but on a level deeper than aesthetics too. Each has it's own way of anchoring itself in a stream of time that could be called 'fluid' at best and 'chaotic' at worst. The AI associated with each craft would draw on similar timelines to stabilize the one it was in, as well as contribute to how each reaction would branch. Care was taken to not disorient either people in the timeline or the visitors to it, though this could be overridden at the users request. Such disregard for the fail-safes would be rumored to produce time loops, paradoxes and other things of that nature. The truth was less spectacular, as momentary disorientation was usually the worst side effect.

Certain nodes could be amplified to cause an influence on parallel timelines, ensuring, or as least improving the chances that similar events or inventions would occur – providing a similar catalyst helped to shape lives and inventions to compatible outcomes. While the results and methods would differ, the end results could be intertwined without much trouble.

It was a check-in day. He took his organic pouch drive up to his colleague's time machine. It was obviously used to dealing with devices of higher capacity, as it filled his to 12, indicating it has exceeded it's normal capacity and was being encoded with a more efficient algorithm. The gel inside foamed, then glowed as it downloaded the data. He went through two more pouches that way before his colleague handed him a different type of storage vacuole - “Try this.” This one had the gel aready foamed before use and had no trouble downloading the rest of the data from the craft.

Organic (?) Storage

In his pockets were a number of hand sized clear bags of gel. Actually the first one was only the size of two finger joints, although otherwise similarly only 1/5^th full of the clear substance. In the center of each vaguely football shaped container was a black liquid filled pill, which reoriented itself as if neutrally buoyant in whatever filled the rest of the device apart from the gel.

As he neared the gel bags to the machine he obviously intersected some kind of near-field communication. The gel in the bags started foaming and the black pill counted upwards with a glowing white, thickly rendered number on it's side. As it counted up to 10 – taking about 3 seconds, the gel filled the entire container, and began glowing. This was unusual, as the substance was usually inert and the black pill likewise shone a bright '12' before signaling the extended capacity of the device had been filled to capacity.

His friend offered another device, this one a little more opaque and the gel inside already white, as all of his carried devices were not sufficient for the entire download.

Extra bits

The future couldn't do much. Well, not quite true. It couldn't create a lot of mass, but selective application of that mass could do a lot. Changing ones and zeros could write a program, and an efficient program could do many things. A little voltage on a existing sensor, a 'glitch' that records an extra few seconds – with a little extra data a lot can be reconstructed. Mirror data sent on the internet to one of the few data devices that survived and you could tap into anything.