The nature of Time is hard to imagine, let alone see. The trouble is that so many other measurements use time as a point of reference. How long light, or anything else, takes to travel a certain distance for speed. The number of peaks and troughs how often in a wave for a frequency.
However, if you go where everything to do with time is stopped, but you’re still using energy to be there, you can begin to map out time as a kind of 3d structure. In order to go somewhere faster than light, you have to take a different route. But it’s not quite as easy as that. Because if you go somewhere you can see yourself, or beam out a signal, it can be sent before you leave. The trouble with that is, you can always decide not to go – and then where did the signal come from?
But if you are getting a signal from the future, when is it from? How do all signals from the future, or past, not crash together all at once?
The answer is a bit counter intuitive. All decisions can be boiled down into a binary state. Yes or No. How long it takes to make a decision to do something doesn’t matter. If you send a signal back to a certain point in time, it either gets there, or not. You might have to use more energy if it’s from a longer distance in time away or a bolder signal, but not for the reason you might think.
Like space, time is filled with obstacles and shortcuts. In somewhere like the Time University, it’s low on obstacles and high on shortcuts. Moving through time is as simple as having a current location, destination and a means to connect the two – like a Time Gate.
The nice thing with Time Gates is that they can take you to times that don’t necessarily exist. That is, times that don’t have a specific past and future for them to go. Instead, they meander around a winding path that only really begins and ends when all the people in the same environment sort out when they came from and when they exit to. And not cause too big of a paradox.
Depending on what technology you have, and what space-time looks like around you, paradoxes can either be a funny joke, or a universe ending calamity, or anything in between.
If your space-time is fuzzy it’s more of the former. If it’s as solid and flat as ice, it’s more the latter.
The trouble with fuzzy time is that it takes a lot of work to organize anything. Events often spawn chain reactions that produce secondary effects that often cancel out both cause and effect – effectively setting time back to zero in that area, or at least last stable configuration. This effect can be harnessed with a Null Time pulse. In order to have a working paradox, you have to have a lot of things moving in a kind of harmony. Events that only enforce each other constructively, built on a framework of neutral events that provide filler and rest, so everything doesn’t happen all at once. It can be likened to building a house during a tornado. Your advantage is that stray paradoxes and large events can be likened to large magnets that help join pieces together.
Otherwise, in more flat and stable time, you have to follow local laws and regulations before you can build a house. Disruptions in time can produce side effects, when the natural structure is plain and unsuited to large pieces moving around. Here, the opposite is true. A framework of neutral events built from filler can provide structure for the larger pieces to fit. Doing something, like seeing yourself in person, or even farther away than your light cone allows is inherently unstable. Events start to collapse, as they begin to rely on binary decisions to support impossible things. Shifts occur to swallow up collapsed event chains and time becomes fractured, breaking into smaller chunks till it becomes uninhabitable.
In order to actually scan time, in something other than pictures and audio, you had to have some kind of reference point. Wearing a different colour shirt might would have almost no effect, but works as an illustration.
The fewer people who see the shirt, the less it matters. The less they react, the less it matters. If there is no record made of it, there isn’t anything to change but memories. Memories fade on their own naturally, and a lot of decisions don’t have a cascade of ripple effects – even if they do change.
It’s a kind of butterfly effect in reverse, where the larger pattern swallows up smaller differences and changes get buried in a mountain of sameness.
It’s said that any changes to the past actually cause a mini time loop, where the person or thing interacted with goes backward it time a bit and flow forward again with the time traveller or their influence present. The length of time going back and volume affected are up to the interfering party, and unless that change fits back into the larger map/puzzle of time, it’s influence doesn’t spread.
What constitutes a problem though? Some people are less reliant on having every memory correspond to everyone around them. Objects and information appearing without an obvious source may become old hat for people who are invested in Time Travel.
But anyway, this is getting too confusing. What’s easy to relate this to is music. If things are as they should be, you can hear it. If things aren’t you rehearse. With all the millions of variables of time travel, an AI is much better suited to seeing if everything is fine or not.
Most of the time, it’s own internal logic can sort out if a situation relies too much information from nowhere (Bootstrap Paradox) or relying on small decisions creating an exact effect later on (Predestination Paradox)
It can trace out cause and effect for interactions, whether or not memories vanish or reappear and a host of other things. While it can get caught up on exactness a little too much, it can call in a Time Scout who will ‘live’ the moment as a time echo and sort out outcomes that are a little too murky for a binary program to sort out. They can see what is going to happen, potentially, and nudge things into a resolution that’s more harmonious with the larger puzzle.
For any symphony of time though, there’s always a host of people doing things to keep the music on track. As the time scouts adjust the notes already in play, time pilots find more notes to add to the work. While others are simply content writing down the finished work, some want to conduct, or compose.
This story is about a little of everything.
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