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.

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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