Stretched in Time

His mind trailed out, forward. He could see himself at all points in time over the next few days. Not so much in detail as it was in intent and function. There was no way he could deal with non-linear time until he could process linear time in a more efficient way. Something just seemed right about it. It was like a montage in a movie, except from a first person perspective. At some point it seemed more likely to have some version of himself double back, and not have it seem like anything more than a normal conversation. He'd still be in control of 'both' of him, at least enough that he wouldn't be surprised, or in some kind of paradox.

The Room

One moment he was sitting at home, typing at his computer. Before he could react, he was in a near empty white room sitting in a chair similar to the one he left. For some reason he knew he was in a different time – despite the lack of physical evidence. He waited patiently for something to happen.

He looked at the chair more closely, it seemed to have sensors embedded in it. He made a point to be as calm as possible. Listening carefully he could hear a synthesized voice, reading out his vitals.

He heard a bit of an argument in the background. There seemed to be some debate as to whether to make more direct contact, as he seemed to be in little distress. The protocols were cited and it was decided that if he remembered anything of the experiment when back in his own time, next time would be different.

Just as suddenly he was back in his own time, and he began writing.

-Static-

Things were losing definition. Time, meaning, feelings – it was all replaced by a fuzzy buzz that was either more or less. That was all he could sense, all he could connect to. What was the point of anything?

Linear

He was the last one hanging onto linear time. It was hard to say when the others left. One day there were there, and the next, it was as if they had never been there at all. He remembered both viewpoints simultaneously.

There were echos of them, something his mind sorted into a narrative that fit Newtonian logic. When they didn't fit, he was still aware of them at another level – there, but only as a vague feeling, a message in an instant, or a waking dream.

For them, causality was an ocean to swim through, for him, it was a downward skydive. From their perspective, choices were of little consequence – it was all determined by intent. Multiple, sometimes conflicting, outcomes were within their awareness. Paradoxes were simply knots, a bit of rubble in the landscape. Something to avoid if one had little experience with, but eventually a source of amusement.

Still, he was an anchor. One that they thought they didn't need, but was still there underpinning everything. A point of reference that everything could refract through. He wasn't sure that he would ever 'catch up' to them. They were somewhen else. Consciousnesses that had shapes that ballooned through space-time like a dye in water.

What they didn't know, was the he had already been to the outermost limits. He was what helped provide definition to where they now resided. He didn't want to move, since, from his perspective – there was nowhere to move to.

Ticks Forward

For some reason he felt a glimmer of hope. It was an odd feeling. He had long resigned things to be a unending monotony, without change or stimulation. Not that there was any particular source or cause, at least not one he could define or quantify. It was as if everything suddenly shifted, like a reset button was pressed and things were finally allowed to progress again.

Once reflecting on that he felt like there was a glass ceiling before, confusion, a lack of a destination. Still, things weren't yet clear – but the door was definitely open. If he could muster up the focus and energy to progress, things might actually move.

Class / Future

The class began.

Brains were a construct of physical reality and therefore subject to the laws of such. The mind, he argued, was not. It had sympathetic structures in the physical world, but it was simultaneously the product of all of them, and none of them.

Therefore, he continued, that the mind was not subject to the same limitations of a standard computer, and that it could essentially reach beyond time.

The also meant that any mind was, to some extent, a product of the environment it has be accustomed to. Therefore the default structures in the mind would eventually fall back to a mechanism that would most suitably deal with the environment immediately around it.

Hence, while we have this discussion here, an 'earlier version' of my mind, which is still, in fact the same thing, is busy typing notes on a computer. In fact, let me pull up the archives. Here.

Now, you might argue that I'm simply recycling my own old notes, but the memory is locked away at the moment – due to the other experiments that I'm working on.

You see, that's why there's no reported incidents of time travel. The 'past' mind has always got the memory squirrelled away, since it is forced so often to deal with 'linear time'. When we return the subject to the time they left, down to the nanosecond, the physical brain has had no time to encode the memories into a physical shape.

Why don't you simply have the two meet? - asked someone in the back. We did, replied the teacher, and the memories cancelled each other out. I didn't remember it happening so I blanked out and he was extremely disoriented.

What we need, and why these classes are taking place, is a need to shift the group consciousness into form which is able to deal with non-linear time.

Is that the point of the SuperWhoLock? Laughter. Yes, in fact, because each of us has to deal with it in their own way. Some are deductive about it, as I was, most merely attached to the fun aspect of it, and others reflect that is a trait of God and thus has a place in the Universe itself.

Application and Purpose

It was a fine line, tampering with the past. Too little and nothing is noticeable, too much and people can question their sanity. Thankfully the technology was sufficiently advanced that manipulating variables was as simple as working on a spreadsheet. Overall the application was fairly conservative, which meant that actually changing anything was more exponentially more work than typical non-invasive 'observation only' operations. The cascade from changes could grow indefinitely, or collapse without warning. The question of what would be worth influencing came up rather often. With the changes in the world, erasing past disasters and mistakes was essentially pointless. Not many things survived the cataclysm, so material changes were also for naught. Still there was not specific rule against it, even if the necessity wasn't there.

The main obstacle was one of synchronization, if left unchecked, one would automatically be re-incorporated into linear, non-adjusted time. He started looking for some nonlinear tools to quantify the interactions.