Generated Dream Interface

If you try, you'll experience a series of choices that combine to form what looks like something very in between a word processor and a vase: tiny shapes with subtle gradations of color, multiple rows of just the right ones, thin blobs of colored water moving when the screen lifts a finger to the side, or a drawing of a flower and the color change that comes with it. Also, it reads characters with shift keys, so you have to stay where you put your feet.

Neural Network to the Future

He wasn’t sure how to embed the clues. He hoped that someone had the means to do so. There were more important things to do, of course, but when those were done – or someone needed a break, there should be something interesting to find. It was a project that was hard to define, but in essence it was a reflection on how he felt at the time, on a various number of seemly unrelated subjects.

Guest Starring...

Time is not experienced by all people in the same way – it only appears so. Not that people see things sooner or later, faster or slower – although that does happen, but something more mysterious and interesting. Rather, one can experience the lens of events through another medium, a different perspective – with the combination of experiences from future, past and present.

Lets say one person is watching a TV show, someone else is acting in it – but not the obvious person – rather someone wearing the digital appearance of them. The stage is set – within the rules of the show – relationships, history, scope, subject – but this is adjusted by the lens of what is to be reflected through the show – usually something unrelated – and the reactions of the watcher.

Sometimes the subject is aware of what they are – in terms of the character they are portraying and the setting – sometimes they are reacting as if it were happening to them. Ideally, this would be played out in dreams or dream-like states for people and then reviewed upon awakening or related back to them through other people’s dreams, or viewing experiences.

Shall we Begin?

He wasn’t sure how to embed the clues. He hoped that someone had the means to do so. There were more important things to do, of course, but when those were done – or someone needed a break, there should be something interesting to find. It was a project that was hard to define, but in essence it was a reflection on how he felt at the time, on a various number of seemly unrelated subjects. At some point, someone would dig deeper and realize how different people were from each other. His goal was to make it both subtle and obvious.

A primer would be needed, and a certain set of ‘House Rules’ to be followed.

Tent Poles and the Knife's Edge

The trouble with time travel was that it ends up being it's own tent pole. Sure you could go back into the past and change things, but they remained only as long as you were there to observe them. Even staying long enough to reach the time when you left was no solution either. It ended up that things simply shifted back to the old timeline – you were returned to where you left. That didn't mean that it was completely without consequences though. A small echo was left on the restored timeline – a bit of deja-vu, a simple message with no source, but rarely anything tangible.

Most of the time, these never really added up to much. Too few things in life were ever hinged on a single moment – and those that were, weren't likely to be influenced by a dying glimmer of another possibility.

There were a handful of people though that were on the knife's edge. People that could accept a paradox of things both happening and not – and act on it. Every so often such individuals would get a glimpse of a life not lived.

Octonions

Octonions were the key. To the uninitiated, it was describing particles in terms of pure, if high level, mathematics. Once all the particles were calculated out, their interactions became possible to predict without exhaustive and expensive experiments. In a combination no-one thought to try before, a certain combination of fields at specific magnitudes caused a translation in time. As with any scientific endeavor, progress was slow. First mainly quantum levels effects, then nano-scale, and finally up to macroscopic.

At first, it wasn't quite obvious what was happening, some objects were coming back 'younger' while others seemed to return 'older'. Careful examination found that some of the experiments reversing the age of the target – macroscopic processes such as rust were undone, while others seemed to send the object back in time – albeit to a non-obvious place. Wherever this place was, it was inaccessible until the experiment had finished, at which point it became detectable again on the equipment, and a field reversal was possible.

Or so one thought, until an accident caused a field reversal to be generated before the de-timing field was activated. What materialized was their standard experimental block, but now engraved – “If you've found this, you're a big step forward.”