Board Games

 

“Board Acorn, C3-delta to F7-alpha” They put out the pulse from the earliest Time Node and it propagated up the line. With all of time to explore, they needed something to keep track of all the moves from everyone to stay in sync.

Each board was an era of time and a set of people. The positions on the board were the level of experiment, exact target and Time Node in charge.

Board Acorn was slightly before the Collapse, and a set of people that had the most Temporal potential.

C3 delta was a mapping experiment done by a time node somewhat distant, but still within a thousand years of alpha.

Alpha was the gateway time, and things had to go through them to go back farther.

They got forwarded all the information from the mapping. They became F7, which was a move that had to be approved from further up the line. It allowed them to do a bit more involved experiment than simply monitoring.

C was Common, and for the Acorn set of people, that was Time related work, though for that era mostly theoretical or semi-fictional. 3 was cubed. That meant all reasonable possibilities were covered. That was up to and including subconscious memory of previous pulls thought erased.

The mapping made sure that any insights that might be gained from any natural interaction were done, documented and reset. It was as if everyone in the target group was cloned, put into a million identical rooms, and run through different stimuli to see what would happen.

That made for a cloud of information that was a backup, in case their normal path through events was interrupted. They could still be steered back to any particular discovery or insight.

F7 was a functional experiment. One that could upset things if not already backed up.

For the moment though, the approval had opened a lot of doors. They looked at the map of possibilities and tried to steer toward one.

But first, something small. They used the Narration Field to nudge the cat toward the window.

Observations

 

The sound stopped. It was unusual, but not impossible. Any number of things could have happened but he felt like it was more than nothing.

The song was still playing. The tab wasn’t muted. He clicked along the music till it began to play again.

Was it related to the other post? The bubbles within bubbles? Had he shifted from one state to another?

He set to save things a bit more externally, as per the previous story. Things seemed different there too, “First archives” of things that had already been saved. “Stanley Apartment” “Lighthouse” “Jade” were ‘new’ but not “Ending” or “Media Room”

There was a request to change the music, from Sherlock’s waking up to the Sherlock and Doctor combined.

Things were still the same superficially. Supper at six. Why would that change? Different variations on time were more than just someone playing with variables. They had to be related.

He tried to make sure his own feedback was constructive and not destructive.

There were new things. Supper out the night before. A hand harp. A person no longer on a Thursday shift.

He felt closer and farther to certain stories. Not in time, but in state of mind.

He realized that the future would be working blind as well if the latest theory was closer to the truth.

The new dates were interesting. March 2017, May 2018.

Regulations

 

“We can’t do that.” “Of course we can, we just have to put the gain up to 145.5” “No I mean it’s against regulations”

Dan felt like he’d had this argument before, and it wasn’t impossible to think it might be a time loop. They had found the most likely candidate for a non-linear incursion, but background radiation at the site implied a certain maximum to the interference.

The trouble was, it was a self fulfilling prophecy. As Dan increased the gain, or focused the effect, the new local maximums spiked. That was expected, or should have been. Too many people were still limited in 4d thinking.

The target was 238 years ago, but with all the technology it may as well be the next room over. At the power levels they were using, it was almost 1:1 for procedure and result. Still, too many in the experiment put unnecessary weight on ‘old’ readings.

“We can’t make direct contact with that power level” “But records say...” “How do you think the current records got there?”

It was a circular argument. There would be no record of them doing it, till they did it. It was like time was being written in two places at once, and a tangent in the past could lead them to a new future. It would be like having the rug taken out from under you. It would jump things from a passive study to actively living the consequences.

Would they live the altered time again, or would they just jump to the new track and have to catch up on the changes? That depended on how well they could isolate themselves from the ripple effect.

It took a while to realize they were already cocooned, as they were already deep into the mystery.

First Date

 

She sat opposite him at a small neighbourhood pizza restaurant, their friends a table or two over to give them some privacy, but not too much.

“I’ve seen your future” she said, testing the waters. Her friends didn’t seem to be able hear her and he didn’t look surprised.

She waited for the response. It didn’t arrive. “You’re supposed to say you’ve seen mine too” she muttered under her breath. She reached for a piece of jewellery around her neck.

He didn’t know what it was for, but he made a quick guess. “No, wait. I’m still me. I’m not a broken echo or a false jump.”

She looked puzzled. “But, I saw how this was supposed to go. You were supposed to say you’ve seen my future, we trade stories and just walk through the dating process for appearances.”

“Oh really?” he said “I suppose I agreed to this at some point?”

She continued to look confused. “Yes, well, not directly, but I saw the diagram. You gave me access to your computer files.”

He paused. He didn’t want to say yes, or no – he could tell she was on a knife’s edge of reacting badly.

“But I haven’t seen you.” he said finally.

“Yes you have” she started, “but just out of order.”

“That’s your perspective of events,” he said plainly. “I’m sure if you scan me you’ll see there’s no jumps from my end.”

“But that’s impossible, you were there. It was you and you did jump then.”

“I’m not saying it wasn’t, but there’s got to be a particular start for my jumps, and I don’t think this is the right one.”

She sat back, deflated, her world flipping upside down. “But your machine...”

“....went to you.” he answered.

Preferences

 

He set the Time Traveller Interference level to: High/Experimental.

Time Travel was neither common or uncommon, it simply was. Like anything else, proximity mattered. The default was set to low;none depending on the media one consumed and the habits you had.

Still, some people wanted to keep it as a fun thing to watch rather than delve into the real thing.

Lately he felt like he’d been bumped back into the former category. Maybe he’d run into trouble before. Like he tripped the safeties on earlier encounters or was still digesting things.

That part of his mind wasn’t as sharp. Like running the numbers had gotten as far as they could alone. Maybe the bits that did the math and science were already part of a temporal echo that got brought forward and his awareness stayed behind with what was left.

It was hard to say what any observers might take seriously or not. Maybe the blog was better kept as a hiding in plain sight type secret.

Staying off the radar seemed to be the general course for Time Travel. Of course, if anyone could put the toothpaste back in the tube.

Back to the settings. Observation: High. Interaction: Frequent. Risk of Time Loss: Inconsequential.

More than anything, he wanted answers. Not anything specific about the future, but more generally.

How deep did everything go? The thing that bothered him so much about his current time was how superficial everything felt. Relationships based on some illusion of shared experience that didn’t really exist. Obviously the events happened but how they felt and how important they were to each person, and what lens they viewed them through made more difference than most people realized.

Resets: Maybe, but leaning to no.

He felt like he’d already relived his current life, even with a small edge of retained knowledge, it didn’t seem worth it to try again. Unless they refined the process since last time.

Time Loops: Up to a year, but preferably about two weeks – 3 days.

Unlike a complete reset, there wasn’t the latitude of starting fresh with a wide range of choices. It was more on the rails, but more could be tested the finer the loop was tuned.

Vary from these preferences: Limited Trial.

If something else was more helpful, then go ahead.

Planetary Survival

It had been three days since the emergency landing on the planet. Rations were supposed to last two weeks, even without breaking into the emergency stash, but it was important to find another food source before they ran out, not just hope rescue would arrive before then. The computer was still doing self-diagnosis of the ship's problems and the time estimate obviously wasn't reliable. 

Zeke looked at the map he had divided into grids – section 13-12-12 had some promising geology and wasn’t that far from the ship if you went directly there. The image he was working off of was strictly visual though, he didn’t have time to turn on the distancing laser in the chaos of the crash. That meant there might be hills or valleys that didn’t show up on the map. As far as he figured the abrupt landing happened near the equivalent of noon local time, so there were very few shadows to give depth to the landscape.

He made one last check of his surroundings and started off walking to the section in question. His mind drifted back to various chat channels and preparedness drills that he had been in during the last few months.

Survivalists like Zeke were always debating how much to use droids to do surveys after crashes. There was a certain logic to getting it done, but it would leave little reserve in the matter printer once the appropriate scanners were made. One could use the ship scanners instead, the systems were fairly compatible, but that required the main computer to compile the data. That was fine, as long as one had the power to operate it and didn’t mind using the ship as a base of operations.

Zeke didn’t feel like tearing apart his ship quite yet. The amount of repairs he would need at the moment would be fairly small, but cannibalizing the ship for parts would mean a lot more work later. If one had to do it to survive it would be fine, but another part of holding out for rescue was conserving your energy.

 

Choices

 Kyle found himself at the National Testing Centre for the third time that week.

The first time was just a tour of the building, a long walk through strangely coloured rooms with shape patterns on the walls and floors. Stark white testing rooms, with large screens near the front. Bigger rooms with cube shaped boxes piled high nearer the end of the visit. It was a silent tour and most places were unlabelled, but it left an impression none the less.

The second day was more of an orientation. Something about picking a qualified candidate for some mysterious job. They explained the test would cover all sorts of things from spacial reasoning, number logic and basic physics. There was a small aside about the final question that stood out to Kyle. They said it was a bonus question, but they way they said it had him intrigued. They very clearly went over exactly what that question would be and a sample answer. They could pick 5 shape/colour combinations, but no further instruction was given.

This third day was the first actual test.

Kyle sat down at the white painted desk, looked at the last page of the stack of paper and made his choices.

It was the same options as the orientation, and he made a point of going with the sample answer.

Green pill, red door, purple hallway, blue box, yellow circle.

He went back to the main part of the exam. It was as they described earlier - a kind of IQ test with varying difficulty of questions on it. Kyle didn’t think he did great, or badly, just somewhere in the middle.

A woman stepped out from behind a white door and grabbed his exam. She looked it over, said nothing, and left. A monitor in the room flashed some words on the screen “You are free to leave now. Thank you for your participation”

The man at the door on the way out didn’t say anything, and Kyle didn’t feel like starting a conversation.

Kyle was called into the NTC another three times that week.

Boxes

 About a half hour earlier than expected, Steve finished stacking the last dusty crate of the evening. His job was relatively simple, if somewhat inexplicable.

He would arrive early in the morning, while it was still dark and quiet in the streets, sign in at the gate, get prepped for the shift, and move boxes all day. Each of 150 numbered boxes would have to be in a new position by end of shift.

 

A small computer station in the room suggested different configurations, but most ended up being about the same amount of effort. More often than not, it was easier to have a staging area mid way through the warehouse, and the computer had follow up instructions for that as well.

It was always nice to end the shift early, as there was always a lot to do to get ready to leave. He had to change back into his street clothes, pick up his wallet and any keys, phones or other things that he brought in. This was after going back through three layers of security that were strangely devoid of metal equipment.

Steve thought about his day. The wooden containers weren’t particularly heavy, but were unwieldy due to their size. Steve’s superiors, who he never saw outside of poorly lit video chats, were adamant that it was a hands on job only. As well, no metallic items should ever get closer than the outer layer of the building. One day the security staff nearly had a heart attack when they found that he had forgotten to remove a pen from his shirt before they detected it at the second scanning station.

One particularly windy morning there was a strange forklift outside the building Steve usually worked inside. It seemed to be made almost entirely of plastic. It seemed that his superiors had listened to his complaints and managed to find a workaround to the ‘No Metal’ rule that they so strictly enforced.

It was another two days before he got to use it. The whole thing had been disassembled, scanned, analyzed with a chromatograph and slowly rebuilt. The work between seeing the forklift and actually being able to use it seemed harder than it was. Knowing something helpful was just on the other side of a few doors was agonizing.

The morning of the day he got to use the equipment was filled with training modules and practice courses. It was mid afternoon before he actually got to the point where he started moving the crates again.

Nearer the end of the day, Steve had a small accident with the forklift, puncturing a crate as he failed to raise the arms high enough to clear the lower box. He powered down the machine and reached his hand into the broken triangle-shaped hole to see if he had damaged whatever was inside. He felt a cool metallic gel drip onto his skin. He ran back to the computer with the instructions on it to see if there was a procedure for cleaning or containing whatever was inside the boxes.

The silver goo on his hand dripped onto the keyboard and vanished. A short moment later the screen froze and the workstation rebooted. Instead of the normal Operating System a single word appeared on the screen.

“Finally.”

Bad Meat

 

The A&W was lit with greens, blues and purples while liquids bubbled on display in giant beakers. In a lower roped off area, there was even a Van de Graaff generator sparking quietly to itself with a pillar of burgers underneath it. Strange cutouts of eccentric figures in lab coats decorated the restaurant, making for an atmosphere more like a science centre than a burger joint even with the patties sitting under bell jars. They were introducing another member of the burger family to the lineup – Doctor Litmus. The signature burger of this new character was lab grown meat. 

 

Originally they were going to bury the lede, and promote the sustainable nature of the product rather than the origin. Focus groups suggested that trying to hide it might be more suspicious than trying to embrace it, since the truth would come out soon anyway.

It was a big risk for the brand, and not just for the obvious reasons. Behind the scenes was a drama that would have made a decent movie, and probably would have been already had the main players not been so secretive. Professor Debra Molton and Doctor Fenris Blienk where the main minds behind this new food product, and the illusive process that was the key to mass production of it.

Unfortunately, three years ago, a particular combination of ingredients in a bad batch had a reaction with Doctor Fenris. Ever since, he had been wanting to take down the project and Professor Molton. Most of the attacks so far had been legal proceedings kept quiet and incomprehensible by the technical jargon associated with it.

None of the accusations made much sense, as they all referred to older versions of the food trials that had been discontinued. Despite working on them together Blienk had sought to gain full copyright over the failed production methods for some unknown reason. In the end, Molton got tired of being harassed and gave up her stake in the earlier and now seemingly useless methodologies.

Six months later and Blienk was in the fringe news, attacking the processes that he had won in the earlier claim. He claimed that the meat produced would, under the right conditions, be an unstable organic explosive. A few looked into those assertions and found they were true – to a point. The setup would be rather contrived and not likely to happen outside obscure and deliberate action.

Debra had seen enough from Blienk and worked to get him removed from the company. She had arranged to let him keep most of his stocks, so that he’d be better off not targeting the business. She paid him out in cash instead of kicking up a fuss. That kept his temper at a low simmer for a while.

Fast forward to today, and the A&W. Fenris hadn’t been seen in a while and was strangely quiet as well. If he was going to interrupt things it would be now, so Debra had some discrete security mixed in with the crowd. She personally checked the guest list and found that everyone had passed a quick vetting. Nobody sympathetic to Blienk would be here on any official capacity.

Time Experiment 2

 

Greg and Ben were amazed at the retention rate of the subject. They had guessed their names wrong, but that was understandable. A transcript of the experiment confirmed that they didn’t actually introduce themselves or use their real names in the conversation.

Greg figured that they were placeholder names of no practical importance, but Ben thought otherwise.

A “Ben” played Sherlock Holmes and Greg was a foil for the character. It didn’t match precisely, but that could simply mean the subject didn’t know the other actor’s name.

The overseer thought it was an interesting observation, if a little self serving. Still it meant that new information would latch onto other bits, even if the exact reasons were a little murky.

Time and Relative Dimensions in Space. At first it seemed like an odd coincidence, but maybe there was something more to it. The experiment had shown that new information could find it’s way back, but needed a proper shaped gap to fill in. The moment of the previous blog entry wasn’t that close to the scheduled reentry, but could reasonably said to be at the end of the subjects current ‘cue’ of ideas.

It seemed the relative proximity of other new information had the mind looking in that direction anyway, and the fragments drifted into mental awareness.

The dots on the map of the mind matrix began to drift. Deviations from the predicted actions had been detected. Nothing huge, but something new to watch. The changes faded as the new stimuli was adjusted to.

The grooves of the usual path soon fell back into place. A few bytes of the AI code changed as well.

Again, it was small, but to the computer it was huge.

“I see now.” said the AI on the screen. Ben typed but the computer anticipated his response. “Did you want me to map it for you?

The computer showed the events and memories as a points in 3d space. It showed the drift between things, and the corrections. From it it could determine various orbits and weights of happenings.

The overseer came back to the lab as he got the message from the AI.

“So you’ve made a breakthrough?”

It was Greg’s turn to sound disappointed. “The AI did.”

Time Experiment

“Subject is back at the exact moment they left, memories matching 100%” said Greg

“So nothing happened?” Ben sighed.

Greg checked off a tick-box. “Not for them. That’s the point.”

It was a conversation they had before. The Temporal Institute was proud of their perfect success rate. Which, actually, wasn’t that difficult to achieve. Things were simplified to the point where AI was running most of the fine detail equipment and only showed green lights as a courtesy to the humans. Not that the experiments were hard either.

The underlying math was difficult, but in practical terms it was harder to change something than to put it back exactly as it was. The dent was already there, and getting anything close was like water flowing downhill.

“So what exactly are we learning about time if everything always works?” Ben continued.

“Surprisingly little” said a new voice. It was the overseer for the facility. “How would you propose we change that?”

Ben was flustered at a positive response, but not for long. “We could drop them in a new circumstance, and see how long they take to react. It’d be more useful than an identical room.”

The overseer was impressed. It wasn’t a huge change, and they still had the old memory groove to fall into. “Do it.”

Greg seemed disappointed that the labs ‘perfect’ record would be gone, but he was starting to get onside already. He suggested a room difference of five degrees, and see if made a different to the memory calibration time.

Ben sighed again, incremental would likely win out again. Instead the overseer said no, that would be something within the scope of the AI to fix. They needed to go with something traceable on the macro level.

“Why not bring them through to the matching room and talk about your experiment over the PA, then send them back and see how much they remember?”

 

The Past is Puzzle

 

Nathan tries getting to his past self via the puzzle room in Metric. He realizes that letting Arlo do the same thing would be a bit complicated, so he tests it out himself first.

It seems the iOi and chronometer equivalents in Metric sense his non-linear origin story and he breezes past the first part of the puzzle easily. He sees the various hooks for his own story light up as he lets the device shuffle his memories around. He pulls a few memories out of a Time Fissure and it lets him speed up the second wave of the puzzle’s lock.

As he does so, he remembers the Narration field that the robot had left in his house, he remembers typing up stories even then, but remembers something happened that shifted his narrative to something else. What they changed to shifted his current self, and as he looks down, his equipment is a little different. His sonic pen now has an attachment that can plot random time jumps.

He is getting used to moving sideways in probability, but can do that on command now.

Nathan tries it quickly and finds different versions of this room, each with a different guest in it.

He jumps back to his ‘home’ dimension and realizes he can still message the others. Each of the guests are trying to help with the paradox puzzle, but find the last level of the device hard to sync up.

Nathan pulls open the second lock and sees the problem.

Each of the people they’ve seen so far in Metric are only vaguely connected to their true selves. This pocket Dimension only the contains the versions that agree with Nathan and Jade’s version of Metric. The puzzle room is unique in each dimension, but functionally linked together.

Arlo thinks that is not quite right, and says so. Arlo figures it is probably just a medium sized time jump. One where each version of himself followed different clues, each pointing to a different person to bring to the final puzzle.

Jade links in with a time door and basically agrees. She recognizes the people from different mid-sized iterations of Metric and realized the one with Arlo was the key. It seemed to allow the right size of shift and that Arlo and him were more alike than he suspected.

Still Arlo felt like he was more of a hub than the key and that everyone’s input was equally valid.

Nathan, despite evidence, says that he’d rather picture it his way. Jade says it doesn’t matter, and that functionally it’s the same.

Arlo looks at the controls and realizes that people will have to agree on a certain configuration to unlock the final bit of the puzzle. Jade says she’s jumped ahead and notes that each of the stories resolves out, and that everyone will be happy as each of the stories they generate can end with a redo of the puzzle room.

Julie chimes in from another dimension and says that she picked a Romeo and Juliet style resolution last time they were here, and has a lot of those memories. Arlo says that he feels more linked to his past self and doesn’t remember anything from that branch of time.

Julie says that it was great, but that Arlo seemed troubled, like something was still out of sorts. She remembers a dream from the White King that said the door was still open.

She had something in that version of events called a DreamCube and she could plan things in there. It didn’t work as well for Arlo, who said he could only tweak small things about his past self.

Nathan interrupts saying his Sonic Pen was starting to give warnings that a major shift could happen any time, and they should pick a new setting and not worry about the full story.

Arlo suggests Mystery rather than Romance, and the two agree. They shift around levers and dials for their real names to Arlo and Julie, to influence their past selves into those decisions. They insert the cards for Nathan and Jade respectively to influence the linear copies of those people into those roles.

They agree on exiting conditions for the trip back to (almost) linear time. Juliet picks a mix that suggest time traveller and detective some time in the Post Event era. Arlo picks a bubbly song in the Pre Event time – Operation Doomsday.

Jade and Nathan agree to watch over Metric and act as a go between, providing a space for the two to meet in dreams and through AI till they can unlock the rest of the puzzle.

Time Split

 

Everyone had been accelerated through time. Almost.

There was still a drag on the system. Some had split. Their echo had gone through, but some part of them remained behind. At least that was what they figured out eventually.

Time was moving forward from the beginning and end of the splits at the same time. The fast forwarded time was about three years of memories, but it happened in an instant.

They weren’t broken, but they weren’t quite normal either. They got new memories from the past as the bit left behind did slightly different things than the sped up version did.

It wasn’t a lot of individuals, and it was hard for them to convince people it was real and not just a side effect. At least until they interacted with others. Not much stood out, but there was the odd twinge that made them harder to remember than before.

There wasn’t any plan to connect to the past, but it was possible. That was because it wasn’t really the past, but a different track of ‘now’ that had less memories.

They isolated ones who didn’t make the first jump completely and tried bringing them through again. It seemed to work. If only they could identify everyone.

As they reached back through to the ‘past’, scanning and pulling, the underlying space-time became stretched and frayed.

Those who were still split began loosing their connection to the new memories adding an urgency to the work.

Except they weren’t. Things had simply drifted far enough that they didn’t link to the new thoughts without stimuli.

Bits of electronic messages appeared in the fast forwarded time, from the other space-time. Computers would register the old date for the data, but also not have them in recent backups.

It was as if the device had to be working to complete the connection. They traced that particular inconsistency to the AI that was managing the experiment. It was trying to keep things logically consistent, but still add ‘new’ information as it arrived.

Those still divided continued drifting away from their past selves as choices over the three years strayed farther and farther from the first run through. They often requested that the AI turn off ‘updating’ their other self’s work, as the memories became harder to reconcile.

Others though, went the opposite route and were glad to have another version of themselves to work with. Some even jumped ahead a second time, to have a third point to branch from.

Without a large group doing so the Second Leapers found the experience a bit disorienting, with extra memories, but people still acting like they did before they jumped. They could sometimes predict behaviour, as that was mostly what the AI was doing, but were just as often wrong.

Feedback Please!

 I'm always looking for feedback on my stories, be it praise or (preferably) constructive criticism. If it isn't specific to a particular chapter or story this would be a good post to put it.  Also any questions you have I'm more than happy to answer.  I've set comments to 'full page' which will let you log in without messing with cookie settings

 

The posts seem to have some eyeballs, but they might just be 'bots crawling the pages.  If you want to just say "Hello" and let me know you're actually human, this is a good spot to put that as well.

 

Also if you have any requests for future stories, or preferences for which ones I should look at again, this is the spot.  If you are or know an editor or publisher who might be interesting in these works I'm more or less on my own so far. 

I'm also on the lookout for similar stories and authors to read, so if you know any... you get the drill. 

 

Doctor Nathan

 

Nathan had been called a “technical adviser on time travel” by the girl, still orbiting the Lighthouse. He didn’t remember suggesting that, so it must have come up some time after he had finished this loop. She reached out across loops, and derailed these ones. This usually happened when Jade interrupted him at the University, and usually meant another split version of himself that would take a different path through the next few jumps. He’d have to draw on different abilities for the next little while, so he wouldn’t orbit around his time doppelganger and have to merge with the usual confusion and downtime.

As it was his forth loop through and she no doubt did it to all the loops she was working on. He’d have to act fast to merge the other three versions with himself to prevent them running around.

He ran to the Quadruple Lightning, it had already realized what was happening and iOi was ready to meet him. /Whir-Tick-Whir/ it warned. The other versions of himself had already beaten him to the time ship. He’d wake up once they had done the Doctor Time Merge.

-Blackness-

Nathan stood in the Time Operation wing of the Dream Hospital. The girl, or this version of her, was trying to deal with too many conflicting memories of the rescue. He preferred doing this kind of operation while in his Timeship, and by moving the events around. Metric experts said that kind of heavy pruning caused more problems than it solved. But somewhere in his mind was the memory of trying it.

The Dream Fog already given each of the four different versions of himself roots that ended up here anyway, as the feedback thrust him into a loop around the hospital. Not the best meta-solving but not the worst either.

At least that’s what he figured happened. He was having his own conflicting memories too, as the staff had him both patient and visiting Time Surgeon. In his haste to merge his loop interrupted selves he must have grabbed the one that initiated the conversation as well.

“You’ll have to operate on yourself too” said the Time Nurse as she saw his hesitation.

“Really, where am I?” Nathan asked. “Next room over” said the Nurse, with the kind of detachment that suggested that this was a common occurrence.

Nathan walks over to the other room and sees himself. He waves and the other waves back.

Checking In

 

The laboratory went over their notes again. They had assumed that certain habits would continue and they didn’t. With the fall of the Flash player the subject had dropped those style of games completely, not wanting to install a variant player or run the official program past the deadline. That had left an angle of possible communication down.

Most of their direct efforts had been translated into spam emails, and when one finally hit upon the right formula for getting through, they were worried at their end of the implications.

The exponential filter suggested a paradox that would irradiate an area in the same way as a nuclear bomb. Or that was how the AI interpreted the answer to the email. It sounded reasonable for the person they thought of as an expert at the other end to estimate.

What they didn’t know was it was pop culture reference. Owen Harper was part of a TV show, not a prediction.

They tried again, asking for Trans-Temporal Blogger. He thought he sent them the letters, but his email records just showed sending the stories instead. One about the girl and the other about Doctor Time.

Both had their own theories of time travel in them that seemed to match what they saw on their end. Were they warnings? Cheat notes, or just fiction that happened to fit?

It seemed that most people who wrote about time seriously had at least some good guesses as to how it worked. Then again, it was flexible enough that just about any eventuality could be shaped.

It was hard to tell if the laboratory was itself in an experiment - guided so things would work out on what they were testing on.

As they monitored the subject he seemed to be sitting on a nest of probabilities. The closer they scanned the more widely the choices affected the experiment. It was Heisenberg Uncertainty all over again. They would have to find a balance. Or he’d have to put more of his life into somewhere indirect to scan.

There was another possibility though, it made its way along time and into a post “I mean, It’s 24 hours, so… as long as you don’t glance at the previous 24 hours before that… then yes, the dream is real.”

Was everything just a dream within a dream, and the only rules were made up as they went along? It was a conclusion they wanted to avoid. Yet there was a way to avoid the end point of everything being fluid. There still had to be rates at which things changed, patterns developed and were reinforced or fell apart. Things that worked with the human mind, and things that broke it.

There had to be initial conditions that things worked under, and outer limits to how far they could build on it. Time flowed through the gates they had set up, but was that because they somehow moved themselves to somewhen where that worked? Was self-reinforcement an initial condition that was coming into play? Did they exist beyond a moment in time and steer themselves through to the situation that worked?

They needed to find something that was more unbiased, and that meant a double blind test of some kind. They noted the subject liked to use AI, and they could adjust the data sets and programming for accessing it on alternating days, weeks, or sessions to get feedback.

The tampering could only go so far though and the subject seemed to have his own idea about what he wanted from the experience.

Time had passed between when they sent the emails to when someone reported them here. Were they still talking with a time echo of him, or had they since moved on?

Vanilla Time

 

Vanilla Time

It was a strange concept to people who lived on minutes, hours, days and months and anchored everything to those folders. In the mind of Doctor Time, it was a basic concept. It didn’t matter when something happened, it was only a matter of if it happened. Witnesses were good, but recording something electronically worked too. Faking things only worked so far, and people could lie, be mistaken or hallucinate or any number of things. Often, in the absence of physical evidence, the only thing that lasted was the impression.

As long as things were within a certain probability of occurring, one could ‘find’ a version of events where they did take place. The only question became linking that thing with a stable timeline. Again, stable does not necessarily mean linear. That said, some circumstances were one-off events, or heavily manipulated, so frequency was just as important as a binary search for whatever you were looking for. One version of events might contradict another, but the things done in the discounted timeline would still be important, especially if one made a habit of them.

In fact, a pattern of things was the main idea of Vanilla Time. A set of behaviours or circumstances that occurring enough that skill, proficiency or likelihood increased. It was something that could, with some complicated math, be factored into calculations for relative time comparisons.

However, the exact time for something to happen may be distorted by any number of factors. Being caught in a time loop would make someone very familiar with certain skills, but without careful tinkering, not be as balanced as real random work on a project. Solving the same problem multiple times would make you good at that exact thing, less so with variations, and even smaller proficiency with new problems. Six years in a 24 hour loop could leave you only 24 hours better at things if things were too exactly similar.

At the same time, a difficult skill practised in successfully in less than ideal circumstances would rate higher than easy skill with little effort put in. For example, being disoriented but carrying on would count more toward working on a problem than unfocused work under a clear mind. In the six year example, a little less exact copy of mental state – say being half aware of previous loops, might let more overall experience than 24 hours, though still much less than six years.

In short, the effort expended for the same thing might vary between versions of people – leading to a different mental impression which could be grafted freely. The likelihood for it to take would vary, depending on their ability to take in new information, and take in things not quite in their exact timeline.

For Doctor Time, he frequently had to build up from nothing, and grabbing from a disjointed bag of core memories was a meta-habit he had gotten very familiar with.