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.