Timeslip/Remembrance

It was the back yard of the house in town. Looking at the flowers, I saw them in depth. Immense detail and such profound thought that went into creating them. Someone mentioned something about marriage, and I saw a metaphor in the flowers. Looking deep into the seeds I thought about genetics and children, but then the darkness and the twisted misuse of procreation. The world was a little less bright. A bit further from the warm glow. The clarity of before was muddled.

A time later and I saw myself, younger, in a large bucket, dunking under. Someone from the not-then took my place in the bucket – but not waiting for younger me to exit first. Suddenly she was screaming – as she could sense my younger-self's thoughts. Then suddenly she was standing beside him, laughing. I went to take her place, but there was a look of concern in the crowd. I touched my thoughts and suddenly I was my younger-self again. The light-world was fading. I was to live my life again, having slipped in time.

The Past's Past

People always write time travel as something happening in the 'now' – as if the ragged edge of perception as meaning to the future. All the the past is past to the future, so what happens if time travel happens to you before what you consider 'now'? Will new memories drift into place? Will things shift without you knowing?

To wit, what is the past in the first place? Is it not just a shared memory of events and some physical evidence that suggest some agreement? If neither of these things are disturbed, how do we know the past as still and unchanged?

What if changes were made but some were isolated from them? Would their memories be different than the rest of us? What would the evidence point to?

One often imagines time travel as some wild, haphazard adventure, but really, would it not be something more controlled, even at a granular level? It could easily be imagined that scanning, detecting changes and managing outcomes be at an almost molecular capacity in scope.

When one considers the improvement in the human condition, lack of motivation by greed, anger and other such negative traits – would there be much chance at all for error or corruption? Would then all such actions have to be deliberate for all involved? If certain actions in the past were not allowed, would there ever be a chance for disobedience?

What circumstances were permit an exception?

Turbulance

Time travel is always going to be difficult. Not so much the location of Earth however long ago, as so many people feared. That was just a matter of making a jump, triangulating and making a second jump. The problem was turbulence. Every action, word and even movement made vortices. As was said on a Star Trek episode 'incursion factor'.

 Fortunately most things were swept up in whatever current was happening at the time. Also, there was a certain amount of excess energy required before changes in an event would 'leak' into the rest of the timestream. As well, enough energy in the opposite intent could contain the changes indefinitely. 

Do it too much, however, and memories would get blurry. Not that it was really a problem. Most people didn't have perfect recollection – and despite the selfie/social media buzz, most things still weren't recorded. Outside of a few areas under high surveillance, most of the world was unobserved and unremarkable.

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.