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.