Chapter 90 — The Emotional Delta
The Curve of Time, Chapter 90 —— The Emotional Delta, in which the assignment of culpability for the circumstances in their current timeline is untangled.
Followed by the first real mention of bonus behind the scenes content.
Listen to full episode :
— 90 —
The Emotional Delta
Saskia was absorbing Sienna and Wassily’s blow-up theory of the world when Sienna stopped herself mid-sentence.
“Wait——if there are multiple people changing up the timeline, here and there——how does that work?”
“What do you mean?” Wassily asked.
“When I went back and thwarted my pickpocket,” Sienna started, her eyes lolling about as if in search of what she wanted to asks. “How could I be sure I was going back to the same point in time? As in, how could I be sure someone else hadn’t already changed the past?”
“Sure, there’s a risk that you blow up into another timeline when you turn about to go backwards, rather than when you turn around again to come forwards, but it seems pretty rare.”
Saskia nodded appreciation of Wassily’s explanation. “And if someone else went back further and ‘changed things’, then that amounts to them having blown up themselves, into a new timeline altogether.”
Mica squinted around the kitchen. “To be clear, though,” she needled Wassily and Sienna, “you can’t prove your blow up theory. It’s belief. Kind of like a religion: one just has to accept it.”
Saskia bobbed her head side-to-side conciliatorily. “But it does explain all the data we have.”
They all fell into silence, each digesting their own thoughts.
“Except maybe Zeno’s death,” Saskia offered as an olive leaf to Mica. “And Molly’s.”
Around the counter, everyone looked at Saskia, confused. But before she could explain, Mica’s phone chirped an interruption. It was Dalton calling.
Mica brought at finger to her lips and put him on speaker, and Dalton continued: “You know that oil exec you were talking to? Zeno Williams.” He paused for dramatic effect. “He’s dead.”
Again, everyone turned to Saskia.
Mica picked up her phone. “What do you mean, dead? How do you know?”
The presage of Zeno’s demise inside Saskia’s timeline shouldn’t have been a surprise, given splitting timelines shared the same pre-conditions prior to their split. It seemed obvious to Saskia, at least. And, when Mica hung up her call with Dalton, Saskia reminded her of the analogy that Mica herself had suggested back when they had first considered clutch moves: that baby birds with ill-equipped genes were always at risk of falling to the ground when they were ousted from the nest. Correspondingly, in the case of turning time about, where inept genes may not have been culled from the population yet: “Perhaps Zeno just couldn’t access the emotional delta required to find the extra dimension to avoid himself when he turned time around.”
“Makes sense.” Wassily nodded his head as if absorbing a fact. “It’s like F1 cars: cornering below 70 mph is fine, as is above 120 mph, but between 70 and 120, the ground effect hasn’t kicked in yet and you just go flying off the track.”
Saskia, herself, saw an analogy to nailing a dynamic move in climbing; if you didn’t fully commit, it never worked. Half hearted efforts never panned out, something her immediate double nodded agreement with. And her twin’s agreement gave Saskia a warm fuzzy feeling.
“What about your clothes?” Mica asked.
“We push them with us into the blow up dimension.” Saskia explained. “Just as we push them everywhere else.”
“So,” Native Saskia started, “blow ups solve the problem of turning time about: you blow up into another dimension, and then blow down to your original timeline when you start rolling forwards again,” she frowned as she framed her question. “But how do they explain splitting?”
It was Wassily who gave the matter-of-fact explanation: “You never come back down.”
“Rather than think of your life splitting at a decision point,” Sienna elaborated, “just realize that there are, or rather were——have always been——two you’s.”
Saskia looked from Sienna to her other twin and back again, as Wassily scribbled a picture on the back of another of Mica’s envelopes. “If you start with a singular curve that has a whole section of overlap . . . ”
“...it is resolved thus.” And with another flourish of the pen he drew a second image:
“And the dotted line is your path back through time?” Sienna asked rhetorically.
“Right.” Wassily nodded. “There have always been many you’s. It just looked like one you because you only ever see your timeline. When you jump to another you’s timeline, you realize they’re copies. It’s like looking from overhead and everything matches, up to a point.”
“Which explains why nobody just disappears in Back To The Future fashion.” Saskia let her eyes go wide as she spoke her epiphany out loud.
“There’s always been three of us.” Sienna pursed her lips together and turned to Saskia. “And you’re just in our timeline.”
“You’ve looped back and found another you.” The Saskia native to this timeline looked at her double too. “We think we’re unique, but we should probably just assume that there are infinitely many copies of each of us, it’s just that we never interact with our other selves. So, it feels like we’re unique.”
Sienna nodded. “Our understanding of reality is the shadow that it casts on our subspace, but we can’t tell which slice of reality it actually is.”
“About the only way you can tell that you’ve made a jump into a copy, is if you get back to yourself and you don’t recall the meeting you’re having.” Native Saskia looked at Sienna. “When you interfered with the pick-pocket, that was you jumping to another timeline. You didn’t duplicate yourself.”
“That you didn’t get your phone back, was evidence that you’d entered a parallel timeline,” Wassily drove the point home.
Saskia turned, slightly accusingly to Sienna. “And, though it was her timeline, it was your duplicate who died. Who the police found in Carmel.”
Sienna blanched. “I didn’t push my double under the car.”
“No. But, you’re still here and it was you who changed her path. Maybe if she hadn’t had her phone . . . ” Saskia let the alternative history hang in the air. “You changed my path too, back at the bathroom at Cleo’s.”
The Saskia native to this timeline held a finger up to Saskia. “Actually, you’re in our timeline. It was a copy of Sienna who altered your path.”
“I’m sorry,” Saskia apologized. Her recent effort to change the past did, indeed, make her the interloper. But, Sienna wasn’t without blame, she’d changed Native Saskia’s path in this timeline after all. The burden of culpability was complex, and accountability really did have many mothers. Looking about the room, she realized that the air in the kitchen had chilled. There was something disconcerting about the multiple layers of twinness that was bringing out an unsavory part of her personality.
Wassily let out a deep sigh, and in a transparent attempt at diverting from the frigid atmosphere, said to Mica: “As for this all being like religion, I’d prefer to call it a theory. And, when you think about it, it’s theories upon which progress is built,”——and he pointed at Mica’s cell phone on the kitchen counter——“mobile phones, for instance. Even Newton’s ‘laws’ are just a model, and not one that perfectly describes reality. But they’re pretty useful.”
Saskia marveled that Wassily had successfully switched topics, but, in doing so, introduced a new tension.
Happily, Mica’s phone chirped again. Perhaps some absent interlocutor was about to right the ship from afar. Mica glanced at the screen.
Native Saskia touched Mica’s arm and, glimpsing the device, asked her: “Dalton again?”
“Yeees,” Mica responded, as she scrolled through his message. Everyone else waited, eager for the conversation to shift.
Mica looked up and saw all eyes on her. “Apparently, a few doppelgangers have emptied their bank accounts, leaving their doubles in the lurch. And, the reporting on it has triggered a run on the banks.”
Sienna raised her hands defensively, “I cut my wallet up when I left.”
All eyes turned on Saskia again, but it was Native Saskia who put voice to their collective sentiment: “You came meddling into this timeline. It only seems fair that you surrender yours.”
That was chapter 90, Friends, I hope you enjoyed it!
As promised last episode, I’ve got a little bonus material for you today, courtesy of the paring back I did while on hiatus (did anyone notice the first week missed in two years?). By the way, I’m cautiously optimistic that I can now run through from here to the finish line.
Anyway, let’s talk bonus material. Essentially, while blow ups were introduced to solve the problem of the clutch move at cusp points——or more concretely the problem of bumping into yourself that turning time about naturally induces——I’ve always had it in my mind that it could be possible to jump to another timeline, even when not specifically turning your path through time about.
In fact, we saw an instance, way back, when Saskia first went to Dallas, and she had a weird experience with her pen after she set it on the dresser in her hotel. I had planned to have it come back later in some plot-significant way, but couldn’t find a home for the idea that had any real narrative consequence. So, here we are in the extras material.
My plan was to have Sienna notice that blowing up to another timeline was always a solution to an interference problem and that time travel might create other such instances (as it did in the hotel in Dallas), but at this point it’s kind of an orphan idea. This is your chance, though, to make this whole experience more interactive: if you think of a fun way to weave it in, send your idea along. I might even include it during my re-writes and polishes!
For what it’s worth, here’s the explanation that Saskia was going to give: “The temporary disappearance from my other me’s perspectives fits with the blow up model,” Saskia enthused. “When I placed it there, the pen that was sitting there disappeared for a moment because I went up into another dimension. But in that dimension, I put the pen where it was supposed to be, and when I came back down again, there it was. No self intersection problem as I did so.”
One of the interesting things about our blow up model for the way our time travelers avoid self-intersection is that, in a story sense, it sort of seems like our time travelers have recaptured free will in a way; they are free to change things as they like. On the other hand, an alternate reading notes that since the time traveler is not deciding whether or not to enter a new timeline it must be that the universe `knows’ when it needs to make that case, which is to say: the universe knows in advance, which is kind of the definition that free will does NOT exist. Curious, huh.
Until next week, be kind to someone and keep an eye out for the ripples of joy you’ve seeded.
Cheerio
Rufus
PS. If you think of someone who might enjoy joining us on this experiment, please forward them this email. And if you are one of those someone’s and you’d like to read more
