Monday, March 20, 2006

Chapter 9: Apropos and the Time Traveler

The unseemly thing about time travel is that it forces one to be boorish. There are only a few laws of thermodynamics, and most of them are quite reasonable (if you ask me) and yet we must violate them like insensitive louts turning the elegant universe into our romper rooms merely to escape our circumstances. Those rules we snub being that matter cannot be created or destroyed. Upon hearing this God declared, "I HAVE NEVER MADE THAT A HARD RULE." But His statement was quickly dismissed by the Lesser Scientific Community as Author Intrusion.

History should note that Quantum Mechanics revealed matter being created and destroyed constantly on a very small level but thus far no attempt has been made at an apology to God by the LSC. In fact I am told that lately they have taken the stance that He probably doesn't exist and therefore it is likely that no apology is necessary. It is therefore a corollary that any mention of the breaking of that one law of thermodynamics is considered uncouth and actually doing it is just rubbing salt in an old wound and can't we get just past it all with no more awkwardness?

A painstaking pan-planar census gave us the controversial evidence that 9 out of 11 people who claim that they were born in the wrong time period would not have survived in the period they pine for. The remaining 2 of 11 were found to be justified in their complaint, but had been kicked out of their correct time by the severely annoyed.

One Mr. Tim Phillips of the United States maintained that his sensibilities were far better suited to the pioneer days only to find through the research of the census that he was correct! Or rather, he was correct in his malaise of temporal displacement, but he had grossly underestimated the scope. Earlier on several cave dwellers from Pangaea finally admitted to sending Tim into the 20th century for two reasons. 1. He incessantly complained about circumstances beyond his control, and 2. It was really funny when you thought about it.

Now Gronk and Crudma's actions are not on trial here, but you have to realize that though Mr. Tim Phillips was their victim he should still be considered as rude, for he inadvertently broke those few, reasonable laws by:
1. Destroying his own matter in his own time
2. Creating his own matter in ours
3. Not being able to take a joke

The problems arising from time travel largely have to do with one's perception of it. For example there is a culture I have never been told of who have an interesting belief on the nature of time. Naturally since I have no prior knowledge of them I am not sure where they exist in the galaxy or on what plane of existence they feel most comfortable but I was only interested in their theory at first. There has been no account of their fascinating belief that all of existence is rimming a follicle. The phenomena we experience as time is merely the growing of a hair from that same follicle. Naturally they believe that the only possible time travel is backwards as we attempt to "climb the hair." Further study into their possible attempts at time travel has not surfaced to indicate that every person they sent into the past never returned to the present. To further complicate the matter the scientists who have not been reported to be studying the phenomena have become "one with the hair" as their people are not reported to call dying. It would be very difficult to extrapolate that their take on future travel claims it is impossible, as the future has not yet emerged from the follicle. This reality kills the dreams that all of their people have for the future and it may have been speculated (we have no indication) that this very death of the dreams of the future is what produces the dead cellular matter that pushes the present (in fact the whole hair) out of the follicle. Thus the present is the remains of the death of the dreams of the future, or something, and stuff.

Had I heard of this society I could have easily explained why their chrononauts were never heard from again. The future being fluid, it is the past that is set and that is why there is a destination when they "climb the hair." However that setness of the past is the very thing that did their chrononauts in! You see it is not enough to simply travel to the past, but having arrived there one must start traveling toward the future again at the same rate as one's new surroundings to be included. This explains why on occasion we start and yell when it seems someone has popped into existence right before us only to disappear just as quick. This was not an hallucination and you have no need to feel shame at your startlement. Someone merely arrived at their target moment. When you were in that moment you saw them, then as you moved past that moment and they didn't, reality snubbed them because they were being boorish towards poor thermodynamics and also because they just didn't fit in. Unfortunately they have been crystallized into that moment and will only travel upward (but not backward) with the lengthening of the hair.

3 comments:

Jonny10 said...

Spinner McBlam III's cousin informs me that he has also never heard of the hair people but that he completely disagrees with their theory.

"Who ever heard of such a thing?" he proclaimed. To which I answered, "Certainly not me."

Ted M. Gossard said...

I thought upon a star when the coming was only yesterday. But then the dog barked and that settled it.

Ted M. Gossard said...

Mere hallucinations. That's what my comment was about.