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?
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