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missedtimemachine · 5 years

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The Rigid History of Lord Commander Josh

Maybe the lottery draw this week was a causal anchor in the linear universe we inhabit - an event upon which much depends, a pin that anchors the story of the universe. These come up sometimes. There’s an old poem:

For want of a nail the horseshoe was lost. For want of a shoe the horse was lost. For want of a horse the message was lost. For want of the message a battle was lost. For want of a battle the war was lost. For want of a war the funding was lost. For want of the funding an R&D department was lost. For want of an R&D department a time machine was lost. And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

Imagine that without our interference, the lottery jackpot would have been won by Bob. Bob would have pulled his kid out of a terrible school and sent it to medical school. Bob's kid would have become a doctors and one of the lives it saves is the mother of the man who ends a war (or some convoluted nonsense like that). Maybe by picking Bob’s numbers, we made the universe bend and twist to preserve the narrative and make sure Bob won anyway.

Bob was imaginary. Forget about Bob. Different numbers came up because we weren’t meant to win this lottery. Maybe someone else still did, even though we interfered. Does this preserve the timeline?

Is the rightful winner out there somewhere now celebrating, having previously bought a ticket for different numbers on a whim? Did they pick different numbers on a whim because something - or someone - knew that we would be arriving to mess up this intricate narrative? Is there anything with that power, and that kind of incredibly granular and petty focus? Why couldn’t the kids get into medical school some other way, or someone else save the life of the woman? Is the universe this inflexible but also this subtle??

Our lengthy research suggests so. I’ve studied this in great depth, had some of my smartest selves working on it. Something in the universe cares about us, and about preserving our history. We can either choose to work alongside that, or against it. I don’t presume that it needs our help (I’m not that arrogant) but I believe in leading by example. If the universe sets an example, we should follow it. This is why we work to preserve history, enforce the original events of a timeline, and limit time travel intrusion as much as possible.

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missedtimemachine · 5 years

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The Confusing Freedom of Pirate Josh

If anyone ever tries to tell you that we can’t win the lottery because someone else was destined to win it that week, they’re delusional. The idea that the universe is somehow sentient, and that it takes an interest in human affairs, is laughably insane. They’re the kind of people who would stand by and watch an asteroid hit a planet full of people just because they’re pre-industrial, and ‘maybe this is part of the natural order of things’. Fuck the Prime Directive.

The nature of the multiverse is such that all outcomes of all events are played out in parallel timelines, constantly branching out. Let’s do a thought experiment. I want you to imagine you are flipping a coin. For the sake of simplicity* let’s say this creates two parallel timelines (or dimensions if you want) - one where the coin comes up heads, and one where it comes up tails. So far as you can observe there is only one result. But when seen from outside time, there are now two of you, each with a different result, separated into different timelines. Let’s imagine one of you is unhappy about this and goes back in time to watch the coin flip again.

The two original timelines where you alone watch the coin flip still exist. They must, because you came from there**. But on your arrival a new dimension has been created in which you from the future arrived to watch***. The timelines diverge once again as the coin lands, and there are two new timelines, one where both future you and past you watch the coin land on heads and another where you both watch it come up tails****. That makes four timelines in total, now. Once again, from inside it looks like you didn’t get to pick which dimension’s timeline you are now hurtling down. For one version of you, the result was the same as last time. For the other, the result was different, and now you're experiencing a totally normal existential crisis*****. But from the outside, we can see that once again every possible outcome played out with the new addition of a time-travelling spectator.

Don’t worry if that doesn’t make sense. What it means is: keep notes on a map if you want to go home, but do what thou wilt.

The nature of randomness is confusing. Each outcome is a certainty in the multiverse. Observing it does not collapse the quantum waveform and reduce all the possible outcomes to one certainty, rendering history concrete, because the possible outcomes were already one infinite certainty. But we cannot comprehend infinity, and cannot naturally navigate it. We experience one timeline at a time. The odds against winning the lottery are always going to be 14 million to one even if you observe the same draw again and again. This is very frustrating.

However, this means there’s no such thing as altering history. No matter what we do in time, there will always also be an infinity of timelines where we never turned up. The only thing we ever do is create more parallel timelines. We can steal the Mona Lisa, sell it, get paid in cash, then take our money to the neighboring timeline where we never committed that crime and French police aren’t searching for an opportunistic thief aided by a mysterious passing plumber.

* Not just two universes. An infinite amount, depending on everything from the number of spins of the coin to the spins of the quarks inside it. Obviously most of these differences only matter in a mathematical sense

** Indeed, you can go back there. With the right coordinates you can keep arriving at the same point and never overlap with yourself because there’s always a version of the timeline in which you never arrived, and each time you do it creates a parallel timeline

*** Also dimensions where two of you arrived to watch due to confusion, with much hilarity. And everything else that might possibly happen too, obviously

**** In a smaller fraction of infinity, there are dimensions where the coin landed on the edge and both versions of you giggle nervously

***** If the universe is truly so random, is there any point to anything? Does our intention matter? If good people do good things won’t we live in a happier world? Isn’t our effort just as meaningful as the chaos we weave it from? The answer to all of the above is: probably not.

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missedtimemachine · 5 years

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The Terrible Crime of Evil Josh

The National Lottery is one of the longest-running, best-recorded, easily accessed probability experiments of the modern era. There are 14 million possible combinations each time you watch the numbers being drawn, even if you’re watching the same lottery draw over and over again - the results will always be different.

But just because you can’t cheat by going back and forth, it doesn’t mean you can’t cheat at all.

If you buy 14 million tickets then one of those numbers will certainly be drawn. Unfortunately if each ticket costs £1 this means you gotta spend £14,000,000 to win £14,000,000 which is madness. It’s more practical to spend £7,000,000, then the odds are 50/50. Except if someone spends that much money at once the National Lottery commission will certainly have questions, followed by the police. And you might still lose.

One option is to go back in time to the same draw again and again, buy a ticket with the same numbers each time, and wait for them to come up. But you’d have to do this 14 million times and still spend 14 million quid and there’s no guarantee the numbers drawn won’t repeat. You can’t buy a ticket and then find a dimension where those numbers won - those calculations need to be incredibly high-resolution, and besides the National Lottery keep a record of which numbers have been purchased in case someone tries to fake a winning ticket, and if you bought your ticket in a parallel dimension there’s no guarantee that anyone purchased those numbers in this one.

You could buy one ticket, and then go back in time over and over to watch the draw until the number on the ticket came up. If each time takes five minutes then watching the same draw over and over, even if you never sleep, will take over a century of your time. Trapped in the same 5 minutes over and over and over and over and over. People can go insane that way.

However we have access to an infinite army. If each of us puts in a pound, it’s a mathematical certainty that our syndicate will win eventually. I started by calling a thousand identical versions of me to one specific timeline - it was easy because they’d all had the same idea. There are lots of other divergent Joshs around but by using versions of me only different by the spin of a quark, we can cut down on all the tedious morality. We each walked into a shop and bought a ticket with prearranged numbers. None of us won. So I got another thousand of us, for the same draw, so there were two thousand versions of me walking into shops around the UK to buy lottery tickets. None of us won either. We kept going but I lost track of the maths. I think by the time we finally won, there were ten thousand of us with one shop each, all of us each paying cash for six hundred tickets over the course of 7 days. Assuming each shop was open from 9am to 5pm this was around 1 ticket every five minutes. Every five minutes for a week. It sucked.

But each transaction was small enough to avoid the attention of anyone who looked at the data on a screen. Each shop was tricked or bamboozled so that they didn’t realize it was always a Josh coming in for lottery tickets. I can barely imagine all the techniques and disguises other versions of myself used to make sure the cashiers didn’t realize it was us, 86 times a day. Personally I was buying mine from a big supermarket. I cut down on the number of trips by getting a handful of tickets at a time, once an hour. I made sure I got a different cashier each time as much as possible, wore glasses and different jumpers, got haircuts, etc etc. In the end, each of us must have spent at least a thousand quid. But in the end, one of us was a multi-millionaire.

One of our numbers was bound to come up eventually. The more tickets we bought, the more likely it became. In the end, it was one of our earliest tickets that won.

This left nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety nine losers. If we shared the winnings equally, each of us would have received a substantial amount of money. But receiving a HUGE amount of money was the whole point. We had each thought of this ahead of time, obviously, and agreed to a plan before we even started. As per our agreement, immediately after winning we started a deathmatch purge. Last one standing would receive the winnings. After 24 hours only 211 of us were left. I killed the last dozens myself. I’m rich.

Considering the expense - time, money, and murder - this scheme was barely worth it. But I proved it could be done, and now I’m a lottery winner. None of the other Joshs can say that. None of them would want to.

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missedtimemachine · 5 years

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The Secret Home of Good Josh

Listen, all this talk of an infinite multiverse can be very scary if you think about it.

Imagine this timeline is your home. Snuggled in bed one night you watch a lottery draw. Then you spend five years living normally, moving house several times, making friends, not time travelling. Then one day you travel back in time to just before that one lottery draw you watched. The lottery results are different but that isn’t what you’re here for and you don’t pay attention. It’s not just the lottery results though. Over the course of five years you might try to do everything the same so you can arrive at the same life you left ‘behind’, five years in the future. Except no matter your intentions, randomness and chaos will intrude. All the random events are still going to be random, from technology glitches to the fall of a feather, from weather to the genetic information in fresh zygote. The friends you made might not show up this time. Different babies are born. The houses you moved into last time might not even be for sale this time. Maybe even more different lottery numbers are drawn, and this timeline grows more and more divergent from the 5 years that you knew, even without knowing it. The far future in this new timeline might be vastly different to the far future in the timeline you left ‘behind’ (which will carry on without you).

The more time goes by, the further you are from the precise timeline you’d call home, and the calculations required to find it become more precise and complex. If you’re prepared to settle for somewhere just a bit similar then the calculations become easier. It’s home-ish. But is anyone ever happy with home-ish? If you lose the keys to your house, you’d be confused and dismayed if the emergency locksmith gets you into the house next door instead of your own. This is a bad metaphor but it’s the best we can do - there’s really no way to express how profoundly a time traveler can feel homesick.

That’s assuming you’re back-and-forth in the same timeline. If you cross dimensions then returning to your ‘home dimension’ can become a fuzzy prospect even if you return to the exact second ‘you’ left. Much like that TV show Sliders. Imagine in this nearly-identical timeline you have ‘returned to’, a different version of you also went dimension hopping the same time you did. Likely for the same reason you did too, given how similar this universe is. They left a life behind for you to slot into thinking it is your own. But there’s a difference you never realize. One certain difference is that someone else won the lottery that night, years ago. Your home universe had specific lottery numbers. 1 in 14 million. That’s as unlikely as... well.

And if one thing is different, what else might be? You might get home and your door is a different color. When did you last check? A broken window in the abandoned building opposite might no longer broken. Or did someone just fix it? Sometimes these differences go unnoticed for years. Maybe one day you’re hunting for a love letter you received as a teenager and kept in a box with your expensive perfumes, except in this timeline it was never written and you can’t find it. Was it just lost or are you in the wrong timeline? Maybe you thought your best wine glasses were broken in an earthquake ages ago except that earthquake never happened and one day you’re surprised to notice them. Or was that a dream? Maybe your childhood stamp collection is entirely different but you don’t realize until one day you’re showing it to your grandchildren. The only other explanation is that your mind is just playing tricks on you, which it does all the time anyway even from birth. Some differences are so irrelevant that you’ll never notice - maybe there are more flavors of KitKat in Japan than there used to be, or your jar of pennies might be fuller than it was before, or a scratch on your car might be missing, or there might have been less nuclear weapons tested in the 20th century.

Sometimes these differences are noticeable many years down the line, sometimes not. Maybe the version of you who left this timeline returns and the confusion is resolved, maybe not. You may never find out that you lived your entire life one dimension removed from the one you thought was ‘home’.

You can never be totally certain until you become totally obsessive. What are you going to do, start making sure each quark is spinning in the right direction? Please don’t do that.

The further across dimensions you jump, the more likely it is that you’ll ‘return’ to a divergent one. Everyone who crosses dimensions has to do a few ‘home jumps’ or whatever, to zero in on the one they left behind more precisely once they’re closer to it (like using the motorway for long-distance travel then taking smaller roads at slower speeds to actually park outside your house). But you can’t spend forever doing this. You must surrender such puritanical ideas or you will never be happy. If like Goldilocks you keep searching for the dimension that’s ‘just right’, it will drive you crazy. In this metaphor there’s an infinite number of bowls of porridge and some of them are only a fraction of a degree warmer or colder than the one which would be perfect. I’m not saying you should learn to settle for something that makes you unhappy, I’m just saying that perfection is the enemy of happiness. I think that’s why Lord Commander Josh is so... y’know.

Even with a time machine you can never truly return to exactly where you’ve been, because you will be different too. That’s okay. If you realize that home is a state of mind rather than a place, who cares what place you’re in? The universe is fluid. Learn to go with the flow and you won’t be scared anymore.

A home isn’t something you have, it’s something you feel for a building or a city or a planet. That feeling does not depend on external things - you can feel it anywhere, even somewhere new. Home-ness is something you realize within yourself. Home can be wherever you are. You are home.

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missedtimemachine · 6 years

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The Other 32

Waking up in goo. A tube in my throat. I can see in the goo. My own face reflected in the surface in front of me, goo swirling between us. My face again, looming out of the reflection. It says something. I discover I know many things - I am a Josh, but not the only Josh, and I know many more things than most Joshs. Most Joshs are not grown in tanks. I am a Clone Josh. I know this innately, just as I know my name and my maximum running speed and the minimum air mixture & pressure for human survival and Latin and how to distill hallucinogens from the skin of a tree frog and a million other things - including how to lip read. The face beyond the tank, a version of my own face, says,

“Cognitive function online. Memories downloading. Initiating Matrix-style pod-opening in three... two...”

NUMBER ONE

Exemplary service. A natural leader. Drowned in the Jurassic smuggling wars.

DEUCE

Field medic. Saved many Joshs. Died granting the wish of a friend.

CODE 3

Passionate boatswain. Bones eaten by bone-weevils.

CLONE FOUR

Patient monk. Choked on a turkey bone in 1602.

CLONE FIVE

Burned to death in a sacrificial blood harvest ceremony in 2612.

CLONE SIX

Last seen on a spaceship, current whereabouts unknown.

DOUBLE SIX

Buried by mobsters in 60s Vegas

CLONE SEVEN

Last seen holding back a wave of zombies.

CLONE EIGHT

Hanged for a pirate in 1765. Surprised this doesn’t happen more often really.

CLONE NINE

Surprising aberration in genetics caused glowing blood. Dissected in CIA lab in 1948.

CLONE 10

Seduced into the dark brotherhood and executed in the field by Clone Five.

CLONE 11

Retired to 50s Cuba, died of cancer in 1976.

CLONE 12

Died of oxygen deprivation on Moon in 2346.

CLONE 13

Whereabouts unknown. Last seen cavorting with ghosts, demons and witches on a Scottish hillside in 1321. Predictable really, given the number.

CLONE 14

Died at sea in 1545.

CLONE 15

Died of gunshot wounds and infection in the Somme, 1916.

CLONE 16

Died of gunshot wounds and infection in Electric Avenue, London, 1988.

CLONE 17

Fell off Machu Pichu in 2986.

CLONE 18

Fell into Pompeii.

CLONE 19

Lost in the Quantum Maze of the Great Pyramid, 2195.

CLONE 20

Went off-grid in Hiroshima 1945, evidence of his continued existence via letters but these might have been sent long before he disappeared.

CLONE 21

Swallowed by the gravity of Jupiter.

CLONE 22

Lost in the Nightmare Realm.

CLONE 23

Baked into bread by a giant.

CLONE 25

Eaten by a pack of terra-worms on Mars in 2456.

CLONE 26

Slain in a duel in 1804.

CLONE 27

Crushed under a Godzilla theme park ride, Moon, 2875.

CLONE 28

Eaten by alligators, Florida, 1976.

CLONE 29

Poisoned, shot, hanged and stabbed, Nepal, 1917.

CLONE 30

Vaporized in a laser arena battle, 2956.

CLONE 31

Absorbed into the Josh collective, no longer an entity expressible in terms of a single identity.

CLONE 32

Crushed by a tyrannosaurus rex.

CLONE 33

Whereabouts unknown.

“...onnneeeeeeWait. NO! Stop! Abort the process. Switch manual override on the goo pumps and freeze the download immediately,” comes the frantic voice from outside. Something is wrong. A red light is flashing outside. I feel the floor beneath me, softly cradling my feet in the weightlessness of the goo, suddenly give way. I’m sliding down a tunnel, a chute, a drain. It’s cold outside of the goo, and the walls of the chute are the first thing my fresh nerves have ever experienced.

Beneath me there is suddenly sky and I don’t understand why I’m flying upwards, but as I spiral around I realize I’m not falling upwards - I’m falling downwards into clouds, spat out of a flying metallic city, nothing beneath me but swirling vapors, odd patches of twilight melting into the shadow of denser clouds, the promise of lightning far below, the deafening roar of wind in my ears, and a far-off horizon of clouds tapering into the distant sun. I estimate my speed, the atmospheric density, the chemicals in the wind.

I grin.

The horizon is all I need.

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missedtimemachine · 6 years

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Moon Landings

One of my favourite things to do is to watch everyone’s moon landings. It’s a big multiverse and even simple humanity has thrown up an infinite collection of unlikely cultures and civilizations, some of which make it out of orbit and onto the moon. Some even go beyond that, but the first step onto the moon is always a giant leap for all people in any universe.

I grew up in a universe where the moon landing happened before I was born, victory in a propagandist display of military power during an arms race between a post-colonial United States of America and a slow-starting Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in Russia, fueled in part by the USA’s adoption of Nazi scientists after World War 2. In the universe-cluster a few mega-divergences over from my home, it was the USSR who stole the scientists, beat the USA to the moon, and propelled itself to terrifying world dominance.

It was hard to find a surviving copy of the footage in any format I could access - the USSR didn’t have the ability to broadcast the landing like my universe’s USA, so it was not an event witnessed on TV all over the world. Even by that point their video formats had started to become incompatible to anything I had. In the end I had to get close to the event and watch it live. Odd to see the bullet-shaped modernist soviet-style spacecraft, clearly descended from Sputnik, riddled with the same haphazard low-tech equipment that was a feature of my own universe’s first moon vehicle. Foil, mechanical legs, spiky with antenna, bolted on windows, etc. The USSR’s spacesuits were orange but you couldn’t tell over the black-and-white broadcast. While on the moon they did pretty much the same thing the USA’s astronauts did. Most people do.

There are further mega-divergences in universe-clusters far, far from any universe any of me were born in. The moon landing of a victorious Third Reich in 1955 was a horrifying reminder of how close Nazism came to conquering the world. Interesting side-note: in their space program, the first person in space was from Africa - they sent him up after the dog and the chimp. They never announce it officially but his name is whispered underground. By the 90s his face is on the badges on the jackets of the rebels. Benjamin Powell, more famous than Jesse Owens, conqueror of space, sent into space to die by god damn Berlin. I wish one of our parallel-universe neighbors wasn’t such a monstrous place.

There’s a universe where rebellions never broke up the British Empire, and it maintains a brutal rule across a realm on which the sun never sets. They land on the moon in 1997, in a shoddy thing that - I kid you not - is mostly tape under all the foil and flags. It’s all over the radio. The four men of the British Royal Navy are awarded a medal by the king upon their return.

There are lots of cultures that don’t exist in my timeline, but they’re recognizable in similar roots. The Holy Catholic Empire first lands an electric spacecraft on their moon in 2131. A kind of French Colonialist effort first touches down in a big ball in 1985 as part of an art film. The United States of Russia (a 20th century empire built out of fractured nations left behind by the centuries-old world-conquering Mongol Empire) first lands there in 1943 and leaves behind a shrine as well as their flag. They don’t call it 1943 though. An east-European anarchist collective first lands there in 1996. A coalition of caliphates in 1918.

There are universes where none of any of that happened, and where everything happened. In terms of my neighboring histories, most of the action happens around what I’d call the 20th century, but there are a few other moon landings peppered around via unlikely means - it’s a big multiverse. In one mega-cluster of universes the first people on the moon are a group of pirates whose warship is magically teleported there by accident.

In the 24th century a Holy Incan Empire bankrolls a union of the warring nations of America - loosely descended from the same American nations that existed in our timeline before the European colonists came - to defeat a socialist, fundamentalist alliance of the pacific island territories. My universe has two world wars so maybe I’m jaded, but their world war never amounts to much. Just another war like so many of the others, with more ritual. There are fierce skirmishes in the Pacific over the decades, but mainly the two superpowers watch each other across the ocean. Each develops incredible technology in their competition with the other, drawing resources from the sparsely populated Eurasia and Africa while paranoia and propaganda simmers between them. It’s the kind of global cold war that I’m so familiar with from my own history. One thing leads to another and the first person on the moon is a Cherokee woman, with two men orbiting overhead.

There are so many other human societies I can’t even begin to describe, descended from cultures that diverged before the Indus Valley, or the City of Ur - neighbors who grew apart from us millennia ago. They have calendars very different from ours, and they count the passage of time in different ways from different starting points. But each time they land on the moon for the first time, they all celebrate their triumph across the world, across empires or democracies, in churches, in families, in prisons, in ghettos, in brothels, in imperial squares. So many humans get there for the first time, moon-dust floating out from their first tentative step, by nuclear rockets or by antigrav, by balloon or by wishing, and the words of each one are immortalized across generations.

Speaking of the end of time, there’s one of the most outlying of our branches of history who are cultural neighbors, and I think you’d enjoy hearing about them. In a quiet area of our local universe-clusters, on versions of Earth peppered with struggling societies completely alien to ours, there are universes where Australia was never disturbed after the first humans arrived there in the dreamtime. They exist in a contiguous history, descended from the same people in our universe up to a point. Their calendar is completely different to ours, but so near as I can figure they first touch down on the moon around the 50th century. However they get there by inventing time travel first, which means they also land on the moon long before that too. But that was the moon’s first time, not theirs.

There are other sentient species that evolve on Earth. An empire of people we might unkindly call cave men, homo erectus untroubled by homo sapiens, first use ritual magic to land on the moon around the same time that, in our universe, Shakespeare is writing his first play. There are the smug super-genius dolphin-people, the reptiloids descended roughly from dinosaurs (but don’t call them that - they hate it), the nautiloid people with their decorated tentacles, the psychic flying jellyfish and their poisonous clouds, the bulbous and territorial lava-worms - each with hundreds of their own cultures just as diverse and horrifyingly violent as our own, their own wars and their own madness, their own moon landing.

It is generally considered incredibly rude for any time-traveler to mess with anyone’s first moon landing either directly or indirectly, but we’re allowed to go to the parties. The food is often incredible, and everyone around you is always super emotional.

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missedtimemachine · 6 years

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Neutron Nebula Galaxy

When a large star dies, millions of times bigger than your sun, it becomes a neutron star. It is only a few kilometers across, super-dense, and the process of dying means going supernova - an explosion that emits circles and spheres of radiation and fire bigger than your home solar system, light-years across. Neutron stars are rare. Imagine a whole galaxy of neutron stars, impossibly unlikely and riddled with ancient, leftover, deadly cosmic radiation. These swirls of explosion float together, forming nebula within the neutron star maelstrom. In terms of the celestial clockwork of galaxies, these neutron stars will only exist alongside each other for a comparatively brief time, and these nebulas will only swirl for a few aeons. The whole galaxy is an impossible storm. Impossibly beautiful too, but where planets do rarely form they will be scoured clean by cosmic storms every millennia or shattered by collision with rogue detritus hurtling through the chaos.

What reason would someone have to visit this place? What would living there be like?

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missedtimemachine · 6 years

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Romeo Jupiter

Fragments of love stories float through space and time like snowflakes, each prism a moment, each one a shard from a different ever-shattering whole.

The soft splash of an oar dipping into a lake. Sunlight glittering on the water, dancing across the shadows of her neck. I pull on the oars again while she grins with delight in watching me, sips sparkling wine, and playfully runs one foot up the inside of my leg.

At first he struggles by himself, then for the first time I help him from his bed to his wheelchair. He looks gaunt, and pale, and incredibly frustrated. But he pushes his wheelchair back and forth experimentally, and then looks at me with an excited madness dancing in his unexpected grin.

“I can be Professor X,” he says, and I laugh so hard with relief that tears run down my face.

Do you know what a Romeo-Jupiter event is? It’s named after a museum curator who fell in love with the daughter of the King of Jupiter. That wasn’t the only time they fell in love though. Versions of them peppered across time, across the multiverse, always end up meeting. All versions of them always fall in love. They never ever get together because circumstance forces them apart. They’re doomed lovers in every incarnation. Not everyone caught in a Romeo-Jupiter loop is so doomed, but the story is so sad that we named the phenomenon after them.

There are some Romeo-Jupiter couples that are so reliable we can use them as a base in our probability calculations.

Her face is a mad vision of joy in the flashing pink and white lights as we jump around giddily on the dancefloor. The smell of her overpowers the sweat of the club, especially when she opens her bottle of water and pours it over both of us. We laugh as we kiss soggily.

Tentacles blindly explore my face as the creature greets me, as polite as they can be under the circumstances. A high-pitched chittering from the back of its head means its trying to talk to me. I reach up and pat one tentacle reassuringly, and it snakes into my hand. We hold each others appendages tenderly, and suddenly this alien creature from across the stars feels very much like home.

In some lives they’re a stable-boy and landlady. In some lives they’re a baker and a village fair judge. Sometimes a factory-worker and the manager’s daughter. Sometimes they’re admirals on opposing space-fleets. Every version of them indulges briefly in romance, and then their lives force them apart - sometimes with violence or even death, but mostly due to the barriers of society.

If you’re lost in time and dimension, simply attune your scanners to detect the nearest Romeo-Jupiter loops.

Her breath in my ear as she wraps her arms around me and digs her nails into my shoulders. The muscles in her torso writhing and bucking beneath mine. A soft gasp, a slow release of breath across my neck, and she wraps her legs happily around my waist.

He looks very handsome in his furs, taught muscles fairly steaming in the cold dawn, his axe held in a fist like a stone as he marches into the snow. Before he disappears into the woods he turns to wave, knowing that I’m watching. Despite the cold my heart grows warm. I wave back frantically, and we wave at each other for several moments until finally he reluctantly turns and stomps into the woods. If he doesn’t return, or if he doesn’t return with medicine, then I will die with my baby still inside me.

A Romeo-Jupiter loop in a multiverse this big is rare. For every version of the couple that meet, there are versions who miss each other and live their whole lives alone. But through each probability-cluster runs their silvery thread.

Some Romeo-Juliet loops involve groups of three or more with increasing rarity as the number of people involved increases, sometimes for worse but mostly for better. Some involve various genders, some ignore gender completely, some are always the same genders, and some are sentient machine-minds from the far future who have never even heard of gender. Some connect across galaxies while others are born in the same village. What’s especially unusual is that lots of people aren’t involved in one - even in infinity.

When it happens to time-travelers it gets even more complicated.

He looks up from his newspaper at me, and smiles. I feel myself smile back, involuntarily, filled by the light of his eyes. He delicately picks up his coffee mug, and blows the steam across the kitchen. He takes a sip as I warn him it will be too hot. He grimaces, but laughs as I laugh.

It isn’t fair. Why didn’t I meet her when I was younger, and my body worked properly? Why did it have to be now, when we’re both so old and grey? I would love to see her like she looks in her photos from decades ago. In the albums she shows me, sometimes she’s so pretty that I could cry. Maybe I’m crying because I missed out on so much of her life, and now all we have is the stories we wish the other had been part of. Maybe I’m crying because even now she still glows like the girl in the photos. At least we get this last paragraph, as our chapter closes. Unfair, but it could be much worse.

For time-travelers, the classic confusion is when they meet each other for the first time at different occasions. For example, the first time Person A meets Person B (or C), it might not be the first time Person B meets Person A. Some of the most tragic time-travelling Romeo-Jupiter couples never manage to synchronize. There’s one couple who get really screwed over by time-travel. In a multiverse of constantly-changing history, each keeps falling in love with a slightly divergent version than the one who fell in love with them. This isn’t a Romeo-Jupiter loop. This is the multiverse’s only Romeo-Jupiter chain.

Betrayal is always surprising. If it wasn’t surprising, it wouldn’t be betrayal. Why didn’t I see this coming? Why didn’t I warn myself? Should I warn myself now?

I don’t understand why she did it. I thought we were happy. Somewhere there’s a divergent narrative in a parallel dimension where we’re still together, but that thought brings me no hope. Even in that parallel dimension she’s surely just waiting to break my heart.

He runs towards me across the deck, his long hair whipped by rain and wind. I don’t get to say goodbye before another wave crashes over the ship, and whisks us both into the green frothy darkness of the stormy ocean. I say his name with my last bubble of breath, but nobody will ever know.

The doctor’s words don’t make any sense. How can she be dead? She was alive just hours ago. We had plans. She would have told me if she wasn’t going to make it. How did she not know? She has a time machine.

Had. Had a time machine.

Later, her favorite sad song plays as her coffin is lowered into the ground. I have a speech for the funeral but everything feels tacky, I tried to tell at least one funny story for everyone to remember, and it make her death feel cheap. So afterwards I throw my black tie in a bin outside the graveyard.

The drugs make her eyes look amazing. They’re a kaleidoscope of color, and behind her iris in the darkness it looks like there are stars swimming in a spiral. She’s giggling as she looks into mine too, but for now I have no idea what she’s seeing. Maybe later we’ll compare notes but for now I’m content to wonder. To be fair I’ve never known what she’s seen in me, but we giggle together as we stare into each other’s eyes and the music builds to a climax.

Person A dies. Person B goes mad with grief and crosses dimensional barriers to seek out a parallel version of their lost love, who we’ll call Person A2. So Person A2 falls in love, and Person B dies, so Person A2 seeks out Person B2, who falls in love. But Person A2 dies so B2 seeks out A3. And so on, in a loop, forever. Like clockwork. You could set your watch by it.

I stare down at the lost stranger, my jetpack sputtering in the night air. I must take it to get the valves cleaned before the moonrise party in two weeks. As I patiently give him directions, I feel myself warming to his careful attention. He has manners like one of my father’s courtiers, and I can imagine him fitting in well around the space-palace. I like how he listens. I slowly land, switching off my jetpack, and introduce myself properly.

I've been hunting this man for weeks, tracking him, unraveling his tricks as he tries (and fails) to elude me. I’ve developed a begrudging respect for his tenacity. Anyone else would have turned back to the colony days ago, especially after the hurricane. Suddenly I feel my ankle yanked from under me, it hurts, I’m upside down, my other leg dangling, my arms waving madly, my jacket around my shoulders. I don’t make a sound. I swing back and forth, slowly building the strength to climb up my own body, and then I hear a voice from below.

Some people think the ever-churning romantic drama of the Romeo-Jupiter phenomenon is actually what drives the whole of existence, like if wind was actually caused by the trees moving.

There’s also a theory that even a single Romeo-Jupiter loop is so unlikely that it proves the existence of reincarnation, of spirituality, and possibly even a sentient, caring celestial presence. Others say this sounds even more unlikely than a Romeo-Jupiter in the first place.

Who knows? It’s a big world.

Some time-travelers use the Romeo-Jupiter loops to navigate the cosmos like ancient sailors used to use the stars to sail the sea.

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missedtimemachine · 6 years

Text

A Chat with Future Josh

Meeting myself in a pub seemed like such a good idea. I put the word out in letters and notes, then sat waiting in the pub at the time I'd arranged. Surely one of me would turn up.

I was reading a book and drinking a bottle of dark rum from a tumbler, in a booth at the back, away from all the windows. It was a quiet mid-afternoon. There were only three other drinkers and a barman washing glasses behind the bar. He had put an entire Uriah Heep album on the soundsystem. I looked up from my book to see him standing at the bar. He had a tray with three glasses of orange juice, walking over to my table. He was a much older version of me, and looked hardly like any of me that I had met before.

He was my height, but wider. His shoulders bulged under the long grey overcoat, a barrel torso strained against the leather and kevlar vest buckled over his chest, and he wore a wrinkled grey jumpsuit underneath it all. He strode with surprising agility in his boots. Around his waist he wore a tool belt - some of the tools I recognised, others were bulky devices of steel and black rubber. He wore black leather gloves and a black shirt beneath the jumpsuit. He squinted through a pair of delicate silver-framed spectacles. His face was more stoic than mine, lined and worn, patches of stoney dry skin under his greying stubble. His head was shaved, exposing many small scars and scratches, and what looked like a bullet hole scar in the cheek under his right eye.

“I've wondered my whole life which of us would turn up,” he says as he looks me over, “Turns out it was me all along.”

“Hi,” I said, “Take a seat.”

He put down the tray of drinks and sat down in the booth next to me, settling in so that we both looked out at the bar. I shuffled up to let him in. We made uncomfortable eye contact as we settled, then both glanced around the pub.

“Want to watch the room?” I said.

“You know the drill,” he said, and knocked back an entire glass of orange juice.

“What are you drinking?” I asked.

“Vodka and orange.”

“Vodka? In this decade?”

“The orange juice helps digest the pills, and it’s healthy, right? What goes with orange juice? Vodka. So here we are.”

“Pills? Am I sick?”

“No no,” he said quickly, earnestly, pulling out a packet of cigarettes, “Just vitamins and minerals. Guess how old I am.”

He offered me a Marlboro, and I pulled out a plastic lighter. He pushed it away and used a clunky metal lighter, flicking it expertly. He dragged the ashtray across the table towards us both. We exhaled together.

“Sixty?” I asked.

“I’m a hundred and fifty,” he said with a grunted half-laugh.

“And if you’ll believe that you’ll believe anything,” I said.

“The pills are really good. You’ll find them soon,” he said.

“I have questions,” I said.

“I know,” he said.

“Did we answer any of them, on the journey here?” I asked.

“Mostly no. Still no god, still no ghosts,” he said in a sad voice.

“But they must be somewhere,” I said, expressing more outrage than I intended.

“Maybe, but not yet,” he said.

“Alright, what else? Any apocalypses?” I asked, tapping the ash from my cigarette with a grumpy sigh.

“You know how it works. It’s the multiverse. There’s a version of reality where even now my words are being interrupted by some kind of armageddon,” he said, glancing around nervously for a few heartbeats before finishing, “I’m glad it wasn’t me though.”

“So my version of me might not turn into your version of me?”

“Sure. I’ve met dozens of myself who diverged at points you haven’t reached yet. But I’m the version of you who made it to this meeting.”

“I thought we’d be late,” I said.

“Most of the rest of me would be,” he said, “I’m the sensible one. There are apocalypses splintering off everywhere. Part of me thinks that’s why we all have dreams about dying.”

“You mean I’m picking up some kind of psychic death-scream across parallel dimensions from different versions of myself as we die violently again and again? Sure, I can believe that. What a nuisance,” I said, and blew smoke across the room.

“It goes away if you live healthily,” he said, “There’s no reason to think it’s because of cosmic ghosts. Maybe it’s just normal nightmares. You have to admit, what you just said sounds pretty crazy. Lots of us are crazy in a variety of ways. It wouldn’t surprise me if we were, too.”

“We’re not even allowed to turn our nightmares into ghosts, I guess. What’s the craziest me you’ve seen?” I asked.

“The hive mind,” he said.

“I’ve heard of those guys. They sound freaky,” I said.

“A few of them are pretty chill, though. A few of me join it sometimes, even now. And at least they’ve never declared war, eh?”

“True,” I said, and we both let out disapproving growls at the various warring sects of myself.

“Anything else you want to know?” he said, and finished another glass of vodka orange. He stubbed out his cigarette. I was only halfway through mine.

“You already know what I’m going to ask,” I said.

“Sure, I’m being polite,” he said, “And it’s more graceful if you don’t point it out.”

“I’m a noob,” I said by way of apology.

“No, you’re not,” he said, sternly, “Not by now.”

“You mean I’m already at my peak?” I asked, disappointed.

“Good lord, no. But you’re no noob. You’re a grown-ass adult. Ask what you want to ask.”

“Am… I don’t know how to say it. Am I doing okay? I mean, me myself? Nobody else knows,” I asked, my voice cracking with sudden emotion.

“Sure. You’re doing fine,” he said, and I realised it was the first time I’d seen him genuinely smile. His blue eyes twinkled suddenly. Mine were stinging with tears. I looked down at the bottle of rum, sniffed, and nodded slowly.

“Thanks,” I whimpered, “I just needed to hear it in person.”

“You’ll never believe it, I’m afraid,” he said quietly, “None of me ever did.”

I took a shuddering breath in, and let it out, then wiped my eyes. He gave me a few moments of silence to collect myself.

“And you? Is the journey hard?” I asked.

“Not so hard that I didn’t make it,” he said, and patted me on the shoulder.

“What are the rest of you like? What are my options?” I asked.

“You know how it works. It’s the multi-”

“Sure, sure,” I interrupted, “I don’t mean the statistics. I mean who you’ve met. Are the rest of you cool?”

“Most, yes,” he said, “Some are control freaks, and some are pretentious, and some get bitter. But a few of me are wizards, and others have space adventures. Some of me are women eventually, or other things. A lot of us have a lot of fun with each other, burying treasure for each other and leaving clues.”

“None of me go evil? Then which of us does?” I asked.

“Some of me is a monster, sure. But mostly I’m fine. Even after a hundred years, most of me still values life and respects other people.”

“And the evil versions of us? When did the divergence happen?”

“They won’t tell us what happened. It’s part of what makes them-”

“Evil. Right,” I said, finishing his sentence for him.

“How come I’m the one from the future but you know what I’m going to say?” he said, lighting another cigarette.

“Are you going to finish all of those?” I asked, gesturing at his drinks.

“Yes,” he said, “I shouldn’t stay too long. We’re a richer target when we’re together.”

“Yeah,” I sighed again, and finished my glass of rum, “I was hoping this would be more fun. But it looks like you have a lot of work to do? If you want to leave now, I’ll wait 20 minutes and head out the back?”

“Standard procedure, sure. But hey, it’s not all bad. Check out my robot hand,” he said, waving his gloved right hand. I heard something whirr and click beneath the glove.

“When?” I asked, nodding appreciatively.

“Surprise,” he said, shrugging, “Along with the tattoos, robot eye, and other cybernetic implants.”

“You’re a survivor,” I said.

“You have no idea. Earthquakes. Dinosaurs. Ninja. Most of my bigger toys are in the van outside,” he grinned and stood, “And the pranks are fucking epic.”

“What kind of toys?” I asked, remaining sitting.

“Bazooka. Grenades. Stalker-drones. Micro-scanners,” he said, and tapped the side of his glasses.

“You recorded this?” I asked.

“Sure. Other versions of me want to see this meeting too.”

“You’re keeping a bazooka in your van!?” I asked, my brain catching up to my ears.

“My spaceship would have attracted too much attention,” he said, and finished the last vodka orange with a satisfied gulp.

“Your spaceship?” I asked, unsure if he was joking or not.

“Spaceships are fucking awesome,” he said with a wink, then started striding away.

“Wait,” I said, only slightly loud, “Why don’t I ever see you at any of the parties?”

“They’re big parties,” he said over his shoulder. Then he suddenly smacked his own forehead with an open palm, span around, and strode back to the table.

“I almost bloody forgot,” he said, digging into one of the inside pockets in his long coat, “These are for you.”

He pulled out a collection of multicoloured envelopes, each covered in my handwriting - or handwriting very like mine, or printed letters cut out and rearranged, or alphabets I didn’t recognise.

“Anything for me?” I said.

“Maybe,” he said, with another mischievous grin, and turned away from the table again. He was across the nearly-empty pub in a matter of seconds, legs moving like he was somehow taller than he was.

“See you-” I began.

“-in time,” he finished with a laugh, pushed open the door, and swept out into the crisp sunlight of an afternoon in 1981, 5 years before any of me would be born.

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missedtimemachine · 6 years

Text

The Trap in the Yemen

Hooded figures are gathered, cringing, anxious, unsure, in the darkness of an underground tomb. Far above them a lonely peak watches the night sky, where the stars have reached the appointed places. This is the night that all the hooded figures have been waiting for.

It hasn’t been easy. For generations immemorial, since the pyramids were built, this secret cult has waited. Major religions have washed over this part of the mountains like coastal waves, very few of them making anything but superficial difference. Throughout them all, the secret cult has found survival. Sometimes power. Always complete secrecy.

In the underground tomb, in this era, not all of the hooded figures know each other. They are gathered from all corners of the mountains and beyond, propelled by ancient prophecy handed down across complicated generations. Not everyone who heard the prophecy has bothered to make the pilgrimage. Not everyone who made the pilgrimage understood the whispers of the villagers, or found the secret signs among the surrounding ruins, or happened upon the cave entrance by chance.

Not everyone who made the pilgrimage has heard the ancient prophecy from their grandparents.

But this is the story of how a link in the chain died, and not everyone there can tell the tale.

At the back nobody can see much in the darkness but it's like there's something animated in the air. The bare stone walls echo with chanting from the front row. At the center of the room there are several rock pools filled with pungent oils, set alight, and allowed to fill the gigantic ceiling with dark smoke. Shadows of firelight dance through the hooded figures. Dust-devils are whipping up across the sandy floor in the oddly excited air, whisking at the robes everyone had been given silently at the elaborate entrance ritual. The rock pools surround a triangle of stone, oddly colored and almost carved.

The hypnotic gases have harmonized with the chanting and the entire room is swaying. In the middle of the rock triangle, a weird seam of light appears like a lightning bolt splitting space. It pulses with regular blasts of energy then finally widens into a kind of triangular vault. Dozens mode hooded figures emerge from the light as though coalescing out of dust. The rock is vibrating with tension, growing more and more audible like a high-pitched crystalline whine.

Several of the figures stumble as they materialize. As more continue to emerge, they tumble over. A few are carrying others. Behind them the light starts to crackle and flair. A strange wind blows against the burning oil, and toxic smoky air is briefly replaced by a wet midnight muddy river farmland smell. The teeth-jarring whine of the rock starts to become a screech. Sparks fly out as a few more figures sprint into reality, but the rock finally fractures under the pressure and the triangle of light flickers briefly then vanishes with a deafening roar of earthquake as the rock splinters violently..

The monks are holding their breath. The smoke and flames are sputtering in the wake of the wind.

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missedtimemachine · 6 years

Text

Citadel Ideas

Possible Exterior Designs

A giant mechanical space-turtle

The nautilus but bigger

Big spooky castle adapted with sci-fi tech (ghosts vs holograms)

Moon base in a 1950′s pod style

A tropical island with secret mech-suits hidden beneath the cliffs and mountains

An pocket-universe eternal garden tended by armies of tree golems

An ancient underwater civilization adapted for air-breather use with glass tunnels and floating habitation pods

A desert temple to a tentacle god

Stonehenge but in the future, with tunnels underneath full of rituals and vaults

A tavern lost in a time storm

A gigantic ivory tower, wrapped inside and out by twisting staircases and tiny doors

No actual exterior, because the entire structure loops back on itself, dream-like, Escher painting. Found this image:

0 notes

missedtimemachine · 6 years

Text

Epilogue

Since I never actually got my time machine, I can’t go back and relive the amazing and magical festival, nor the time travel adventure. I hope this small blog and record of what happened (not even ALL of what happened) will be a way to revisit the magic until the time machine finally turns up.

Or... was the time machine here all along? I have a theory.

First, what is a tessareactor?

Image is the diagram again.

Every time travel story has its own time travel rules, including how it works. The ‘tessa’ part of the word obviously sounds like the tesseract from the Marvel films (and also from A Wrinkle in Time) which is just a fancy word for a 4-dimensional cube. It also sounds like tessellation, which is much more my jam. I’m gonna drop some made up science:

1) We can only know where/when an object exists in space/time by describing it’s location in relation to other objects 2) Space/time is actually an illusion created by our journey through it, and from certain perspectives all matter is in one place 3) In order to determine which matter interacts, the universe must have a way of ‘knowing’ which bit of the illusion is next to which other bits 3b) Any implication of a sentient universe ‘knowing’ anything is merely a quirk of the English language rather than a chance to talk about the nature of God, so please ignore that 4) These relational connections are a kind of ‘quantum tessellation’, which is an absolutely made up phrase so far as I know 5) If we alter the quantum meta-data of matter, we can change the way it tessellates with the rest of the universe 6) We’re not actually moving anything through space/time, we’re just changing its location on the map (this is a subtle but important distinction)

So clearly the tessareactor is an essential component for time travel. The neutron chamber on the diagram is probably just the power source. How do I build this? How do I find one?

Wait, what about the symbols?

For me, I’ve always thought portals were a better way of getting around - I’m always forgetting where I parked, and apparently the various versions of me are no better with our time machine. Using portals for time travel means we either need to have maps of where they are (a more useful map than an extreme close up of the coast of Yemen) or we need to be able to summon them (possibly with some kind of portal gun, or a magic key that knows where the TARDIS is).

Several of the letters have included a symbol that look very much like the diagram, but not EXACTLY like it:

Image is of three symbols. All are triangles, intersected with lines at various points. All of them feature 90-degree line on the right side which ends in a dot. The top of the triangle is crossed with two lines, sometimes not all the way across. Sometimes there are two lines in the bottom too, but on the symbol described as ‘safety’ there is only one. It looks a bit like an arrow.

Obviously most versions of me are going to be pretty lazy, so the streamlined symbol makes sense. I also know a fair amount about symbology. The triangle is definitely similar to the triangular symbol for the element of air, which makes sense because the letters keep referring to an ‘air portal’.

The air symbol has one line going through it. The symbol from the letters has two-ish. I don’t know if this has a larger significance but it’s certainly a connection.

I have a birthmark on my arm. My grandad used to say it was a map of where I was born, but he was just spreading some innocent grandparent mischief.

Image is of a brown patch of skin on my arm, with darker hair growing out of it

It’s a birth mark. I’ve had it my whole life, and OH MY GOD SO DO THE REST OF ME. We’ve ALL got one of these. It’s the perfect place to hide a clue. If I turn my arm around to a slightly awkward angle, and get busy with a marker...

Image is of my birthmark, with the symbol from the letter drawn over it

Ah-HA! Why would I leave a time machine lying around when I can just surgically implant it right into my own body, and never lose it again??

Before you worry, I am not going to explore beneath the surface of my skin to try and find the implant. For a start, I’m not a medical professional and it’s dangerous & unhealthy. Secondly, if this is designed by me then it will have fail-safes to prevent anyone from digging it out and messing with it - possibly some kind of self-destruct.

What I imagine happens is that I push the dot like it’s some kind of button, and a portal shoots out of my hand? Or it appears around my hand and I turn my hand like a key? I haven’t figured out yet which configuration of fingers is the one that works, like that one clip from Spiderman. With one hand I’m holding down the button and with the other I’m making shapes, and EVENTUALLY one of these will work. If it ever does, I’ll let you know.

I’ll see you in time.

Image is of Josh (me), wearing black clothes and a headlight shining onto my hairy face, sitting on a bench next to a fire, showing off the first letter to a late-night audience for the sixteen millionth time that day.

NO! STOP! WE STILL DIDN’T FIND OUT WHO DID ALL THIS?!?

Oh yeah, sorry.

I actually wrote a paragraph in my mind before I found out who it was:

Whoever you are, whatever reason you’re doing this, I just want to say thank you. This has been one of my favorite moments not just of the weekend, but also my year, and maybe my life. It’s entirely up to you whether you let me know who you are. I’m more than happy either way - I only wish I knew what I had done to deserve this, because I’ll make sure to do more of it. It has been an honor to be the subject of your whimsy. Whoever you are, it has been a privilege to be your plaything. You should definitely do this to somebody else one day. I hope it was as fun for you as it was for me, and for whoever you do it to next.

However. Since then I have found out who it was. They told me in the car, on the drive back. I asked lots of questions, and we’ll hopefully be talking about this for years to come. Out of respect for their privacy I’ll call them M. If you know M, make sure to tell them this was amazing. If you were there, then you probably already knew who it was before me. Thanks for not telling me. Apparently some people accidentally gave it away RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME, several times. I was too oblivious and over-excited to even notice.

Because of this, M is a proven trickster. Soooo do we really think it was them? Maybe that was just a cover, at the request of some inter-dimensional Josh...

The world is a more magical place than we think, because of the magical people in it.

Like I said, I’ll see you in time.

This is the prologue.

This is the first day, with the 4 original letters.

This is what happened on the next day.

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missedtimemachine · 6 years

Text

The Day of Madness

I didn’t meet my time machine.

I’m famously late for most things. I have to try really hard to be on time at work and even then I sometimes fail. I had stayed up too late then spent too long on coffee and showering in the morning. When I realised the time I hustled over to the chapel. I was far too late - none of me were there, no time machine, nothing. Honestly, this is so like me. I was furious with myself. What if I had missed my chance to get a time machine of my very own, at long long last?? Unlikely but possible-ish, and I’d ruined it.

However, the mysterious author (or authors?) had been busy in my absence. Throughout the day I received many more letters. Here’s just a FEW of the envelopes:

Image is of a half-dozen envelopes addressed to Josh and Pirate Josh.

Image is of a yellow envelope held shut by tape covered in pictures of kittens. It is addressed: TO ME (Josh, a pirate) FROM ME (Josh. A PIRATE)

Two images above: a purple envelope covered in dinosaur stickers. On one side is written “NOT FOR JOSH THE PIRATE” and on the other side is written “but give it to him. He will know what to do!”

Image is a yellow envelope, decorated, addressed: JOSH. DO NOT OPEN UNTIL 18:36

That last one is fucking mysterious, right? We’ll come back to it. I received the letter at like half 2 in the afternoon so if I had to wait 4 hours, you can also do some waiting. You best believe I was counting down the seconds towards the end. I took it very seriously. If I wrote that instruction to myself, I must have had a good reason, and I always listen to good reason. Especially from myself.*

*HA NOPE

I won’t spend much time on my side of the story here. The letters do it fine on their own. Just... just look.

Letter 5 reads: OUR COMMUNICATION HAS BEEN COMPROMISED. DON’T TRUST THE LETTERS. - Pirate Josh

Letter 6a reads: Josh! They’re after us! Please hurry. I can’t hold them off much longer! - Future Josh

This sounds like a different Future Josh than the one from before, right? How many Future Joshs are there?? The note above was contained in this folded card:

Letter 6b reads: Name: Josh. Occupation: Pirate. Skills: Pillaging. DIRECT ORDER FROM COMMAND: Capture the above mentioned JOSH on sight. There can be only one JOSH. From, Lord Commander Josh.

This implies that there are versions of Josh (me) that have banded together into an organisation of some kind. Is it like Rick & Morty, with the citadel of Ricks? I wouldn’t have a citadel though. I’d probably have a giant network of tunnels and rooms carved into the skull of a long-dead space titan, with magic sail-based spacecraft bustling and swarming in and out of the eyes. Or an abandoned and broken gigantic clocktower on a floating sky-island, covered with ivy and crumbling stone, drifting through a misty star-lit purgatory, the windows dimly lit with an eerie blue light. At the very least, a volcano island in the shape of a skull guarded by several King Kongs.

Why would an army of Joshs obey a Lord Commander that clearly wants to eventually eliminate all the other versions of me? That would include the army itself, right? Maybe there’s only a certain amount of divergence the Lord Commander will tolerate - maybe some Joshs satisfy a kind of... purity test? IS THIS JOSH A BIGOT???

Letter 7 reads: Dear Josh, We have been compromised. Thank you for standing by us, our brother in arms. We are escaping to the Yemen. The monks there will give us passage to Portal K1325. We will meet you in the Nebula Air Portal at 5.10pm. - Lord Commander Future Josh

Ohhhh pretty sneaky, Lord Commander Josh! But I’m not falling for that. Sure I was looking everywhere for a ‘Nebula Air Portal’ (?????) at 5.10pm but I suspect that Yemen* would have been some kind of trap. Most things seem to be...

*there will be more on Yemen later

Letter 8 reads: THE PORTALS ARE COMPROMISED. RUN!!!

No shit, Sherlock.

This next one, I withdrew it from the envelope so that this was the first side I saw:

Letter 9 reads: Yours sincerely, Good Josh. PS. Everything will be okay.

That’s so nice of me. Maybe Good Josh has a plan? Or maybe he’s just confident in our skills and luck? He knows that I worry, and he knows what kind of effect that exact phrase has on us. Maybe this time, for the first time in a long time, everything really WILL be okay? If we can play with time, manipulate events, twist the path of history, then we can prevent wars from breaking out. Whenever anyone is sad, lonely, scared, or feels trapped, wherever or whenever they are, one of me can turn up to help. We can revisit every loved one we’ve ever lost, enjoy even more time with them, and make sure to say goodbye properly. Everything will be okay. With so many of me I can finally relax a little, maybe release a little of my worry, no longer feeling the weight of the world on my shoulders. Is this what it feels like to be free of worry? It feels like there’s a wide blue sky inside my chest, no more tangled web of thorns covered in scraps of ragged pirate flags.

With that good feeling powering and protecting me, I might as well unfold the letter and see what the rest of it says...

Letter 9 reads: Dearest of Joshes, It’s a TRAP. Yours sincerely, Good Josh. PS. Everything will be okay.

... Oh. Forget I said anything.

Letter 10 reads: Dear Josh, I know you must have many questions for me. But you must trust me. I will tell you all in time. YOU MUST GO THROUGH THE PORTAL. DO NOT bring the medallions. The metal will cause havoc and destroy the portal, and who carries it! - Me

There are medallions involved now?? Where did they come from??

Letter 11 reads: Josh, I HAVE THE OTHER JOSHS. Bring 3 medallions to the Barn. - Evil Josh

Is this the same evil Josh as the Lord Commander Josh? Is it a different evil Josh? Why does he want the medallions? I checked in the barn when I received the letter, obvy. No sign of me. Maybe the other Joshs resolved the issue before I even got there? Am I getting mail intended for the other Joshs, like a shipwrecked survivor on an island accidentally receiving radio transmissions during WW2? WHO THE FUCK IS SENDING ME ALL THESE LETTERS?? THEY MUST HAVE WORKED REALLY HARD.

Image is a paper map, unfolded, with several small Xs linked to a skull and crossbones with a dotted line, and a sticker in one corner on which is written ‘Godspeed Josh! Godspeed!!’

Upon very close inspection I figured out this is maybe a naval map of Yemen? In French?

Image is a close-up of the map. The word ‘Yemen’ can just about be seen amongst the other tiny writing.

See?

At least the final X is on land! Immediately upon receiving this, I realised I knew nothing about Yemen. That’s changed now obviously. The Republic of Yemen is coastal nation on the Arabian peninsula, sharing a border with Saudi Arabia and Oman. The human rights violations of the government there include human trafficking and slavery, they have compulsory military service, they’re big on petrol and oil, and water is so scarce that the whole nation lives in perpetual fear of running out completely.

None of that helps me. I’m not going to Yemen though.

This one is more complicated:

Letter 12a reads: JOSH, I found this letter from her. I loved her too. I know. I know. I know everything. The rest of the text is obscured by a folded piece of paper, taped to the card.

Letter 12b is paper taped to the card. It unfolds to reveal a poem:

My Love, Josh from the Neutron Nebula Galaxy, He waited for 14 hours in his taxi, Going home he was, until he was not. Don’t get into that car, but listen he did not. - Your love

The second part of Letter 12a reads: I’m waiting by the time machine. I moved it to the pool house. Look for this sign. - Good Josh. A strange triangular symbol is also included.

I mean, right?? So it looks like Good Josh found a letter from....? I don’t know who we loved. Or who he loved? I didn’t love whoever it was. I don’t know them. It also sounds like whoever she was, she was writing a poem about me like I died? It sounds like she might have died too, from the past-tense use of the word ‘love’? It makes sense that versions of me have died. I’m very lucky but sometimes I’ve been very reckless and probably lots of versions of me have died already. This is so sad.

Needless to say, I also checked the pool house. There was no time machine in there. One of me must have taken it already.

Let’s talk about the symbol later. In theory it looks similar to this one but it’s not identical...

Image is a diagram of some kind, involving triangles. There is some kinda timecode in the corner saying ‘12:33:12:49′. Parts are labelled ‘Neutron chamber’ and ‘Tessareactor’. There is a list on the left titled ‘Need’, which lists: 1. Split atoms 2. Hydrogen (whole) 3. Magensium chloride (a pinch) 4. 16 baby carrots

There’s a lot to unpack here. First up, this is clearly the Josh version of a flux capacitor. I assumed it was all being done by portals, but I guess every portal needs a generator? I’m gonna talk more about whatever a “tessareactor” might be in the epilogue. For some reason the recipe calls for baby carrots. Maybe I only included that in the instructions so that I would have a healthy snack? That doesn’t sound like me. Maybe it’s like, potato or lemon batteries, except carrots?

No idea about Magnesium Chloride. Apparently it’s a fairly common chemical compound extracted from salt water and used to thicken some Japanese sauces, a bit like gelatin. That doesn’t help me either.

Maybe there’s portals AND a time machine...?

Meanwhile, remember that letter from earlier which said not to open it until half 6? As the seconds ticked past at 18:35:50 I was poised and ready to open it. Would it be a confession finally?

No.

Letter 13 reads: Dear Josh. Follow the symbol to safety. She’s waiting for you. She never betrayed you. It was a lie by Evil Josh! She’ll be at the Air Portal. She’s been there all this time. She loves you. Get in the car! - Lord Commander Future Josh

Okay, Lord Commander Josh. You’re up to mischief again, I see? But Lord Commander Josh is apparently a different Josh to Evil Josh? Is this when the Lord Commander finally abdicated from his role, becoming Future Josh? Is this one of the first letters?

Who IS this ‘she’ that everyone keeps talking about? Is this the same ‘she’ from the previous letter? Oh my god. IS SHE ALIVE?? What kind of twisted cross-time death-defying relationship have we gotten ourselves involved in? How many versions of me have loved how many versions of her??

In the epilogue, exactly zero of these questions will be answered. Literally none of my many, many questions. Make your peace with this now: much like life, this whole experience has no tidy ending where we learn a lesson and our unresolved emotions are satisfied.

This is the prologue.

This is the first day, with the 4 original letters.

This is the epilogue.

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missedtimemachine · 6 years

Text

The Four Original Letters (+1 other one)

The first day, I was innocently rolling a cigarette and enjoying a chamomile tea when the post-delivering person delivered me an envelope saying “Josh, the pirate, drunk”. This is unfair because I was being good, but I was also intrigued. This is the letter I received:

Letter 1 reads: Josh, I don’t have much time. DO NOT TRUST FUTURE JOSH! From past Josh

Brilliant, right? More kept arriving.

Letter 2 reads: Dear JOSH (solar system C36J1), I’m writing to you from the Neutron Nebula galaxy! The time machine you are looking for is here. There is a portal in the chapel! Hurry, we don’t have much time. You’re in danger! HURRY! From Josh (Neutron Nebula galaxy)

The chapel was one of the buildings on the site. I looked. There was a door halfway up the interior wall, behind some candles and some speakers. I tracked it down to the other side, where it led onto a wooden stairway overgrown with ivy, rusted and chipped. The door was nailed shut. Clearly this portal was broken.

Letter 3 reads: Past Josh! I write to you from the future. THE END TIMES ARE FUCKING COMING. ONLY YOU can stop it! My time machine is broken. Find it & fix it. We can never meet because we’ll die!!! Save me Josh! From JOSH!

This sounds like the future version of myself that I shouldn’t trust for some reason, right? He’s being a little bossy in this letter, and vague on details, but also that’s exactly how I talk to myself all the time anyway. Whoever was doing this, they know me really well. ARE THESE LETTERS ACTUALLY COMING FROM FUTURE JOSH???

Yes, they kept coming.

Letter 4 reads: ORIGINAL JOSH, DO NOT TRUST THE OTHER JOSHS. They know everything! From Clone 33 Josh

There’s clones involved now? Apparently up to 33 of them? Also I never trust a letter that says to distrust other letters. At this point I didn’t trust ANY of the letters, nor any of the people I was telling about them.

I became more and more excited about the letters, running around showing everyone what was happening like a giddy child who is also confused. My masterful investigative technique to find the author involved going up to people, showing them the letters, and seeing when they laughed.

I found one friend who started laughing before I even opened the envelopes, all addressed to ‘Josh the pirate’ and variations on that theme. Was she the author? She said no, and I believed her, but she DID know who it was though. She said she was there when the author was writing the letters. She wouldn’t tell me who it was, but another very good friend gave me an idea: send a letter back.

I don’t have a picture of the letter but when I finally get one I’ll include it here. This is basically what the letter I wrote said:

“Dear time-travelling Josh,

Please get better at parking our time machine. The portal in the chapel is broken. I’ll be outside the chapel tomorrow at 10:30am though, so pick me up then (or else somehow make contact).

From, Josh

PS: NEXT TIME INCLUDE LOTTERY NUMBERS DICKHEAD, WE’VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT THIS FOR YEARS. We know what to do.”

Whoever it was obviously became encouraged by my sincere and noisome enjoyment, because on the next day... well, click the link and take a look. We have an appointment to keep!

This is the prologue.

This is what happened on the next day.

This is the epilogue.

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missedtimemachine · 6 years

Text

Prologue

Hello. My name is Josh. Shortly you’ll have heard that word so often that it will lose all meaning.

I was at a micro-festival over the weekend. It had workshops and talks and cabaret rather than music, so it wasn’t really a ‘festival’ as such. Whatever. One of the many, many delightful things happening over the weekend was the ‘post office’. That means in one of the rooms there was a table with bits of card, stickers, gummy sweets, envelopes, pens, scissors, tape, etc etc and people could write letters to each other. Whoever felt like it could get the letters from the fabric ‘post box’, put on a cute red postie-style hat, and wander around delivering the post, mingling with people, exploring the site, and so forth. It was fun and cute. Some people sent letters to their secret crushes, some people sent motivational phrases or memes, some people sent their friends cards saying general nice things. Lots of people don’t bother with it, and lots of people don’t get letters, and that’s all fine too obviously.

That’s not what happened to me.

I’m presenting the letters I received. They’re in roughly the same order that they were delivered to me. Due to the nature of the amateur post service, obviously the deliveries were pretty patchy and unpredictable. However, this is about time travel. There’s no reason to think that the order I received the letters is the order in which the letters set out from their various sources. You can and should browse around idly, read them in whatever order you want. Each is an awesome standalone artifact from what might be an extinct timeline.

While reading them, imagine my mounting confusion. If you don’t know me, imagine a burned-out hippy got trapped in a costume box and decided he wanted to be a pirate as much as possible. I was enjoying myself responsibly (just on the beers and some rum) but my connection to reality is... cloudy at best, with a chance of rain. Every day I’m very prepared to be surprised by the world, and every day I’m rewarded. Lots of things puzzle me, and this was a straight up bamboozle. What follows is exactly the kind of thing I would try doing to someone else, but somehow mess it up.

I can absolutely promise that I didn’t do this to myself. It crossed my mind that maybe this was a Fight Club situation, and I had written the letters and then somehow wiped my own memory of doing so. For days and days I had no idea who was doing it. Now I know, and we’ll get to that later, but I suspected EVERYBODY. I know far too many mischievous geniuses.

I was also delivered other letters. Some people seized on the theme, and others just wanted to say something nice. I haven’t included those in this blog. They’re just for me. Don’t worry though - I will also treasure them too.

I was SO pleased and proud to receive so many letters, obviously. It was so much fun. Every time I saw someone wandering around with the post hat and a bundle of envelopes in their hand, I experienced an adrenaline spike. Would there be a letter for me? Would it be a confession from the author of the main letters? Would it resolve any of the storylines? Would it have more clues?

In answer to those questions: usually yes, no, no, and yes.

This is the first day, with the 4 original letters.

This is what happened on the next day.

This is the epilogue.

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