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...