Time Montages

“[. . .] This is an experiment in mental monism, you know, along the time-space continuum that forms material totality.”
I looked at Nicholas and, despite all my conversatons with him, I did not comprehend.

It is the same in all we do. Our houses grow new and we dismantle them and stow the materials inconspicuously away, in mine and quarry, forest and field. Our clothes grow new and we put them off. And we grow new and forget and blindly seek a mother.

You will be tampering with tremendous natural forces, Don! It is dangerous! You may unleash some awful catastrophe!

I’ll marry you, Everest! But first may I go on a short time-vacation?

We helped the wrong army. We put a skunk on the throne of Ithaca.

Is it all ready? Right. Come on then. Back to creation. We mustn’t waste any more time. They’ll think I’ve lost control again and put it all down to evolution.

He knew very little about himself, but he knew that he was not one of them. That he knew. He knew that his name was Charles Phillips and that before he had come to live among these people he had lived in the year 1984, when there had been such things as computers and television sets and baseball and jet planes, and the world was full of cities, not merely five but thousands of them, New York and London and Johannesburg and Parks and Liverpool and Bangkok and San Francisco and Buenos Ares and a multitude of others, all at the same time.

. . . мы сможем в будущем, и не таком, господа-товарищи, далеком, заснять всю жизнь Пушкина скрытой камерой, записать его гол . . . представляете, какое это будет счастье, когда каждый школьник сможет услышать, как Пушкин читает собственные стихи!

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. . . we will be able in the future, and, gentlemen-comrades, not such a distant one, to photograph Pushkin’s entire life with a hidden camera, record his voice . . . imagine how wonderful it will be when every schoolboy will be able to hear Pushkin read his own poetry!

I’m from the future and the past and other temporalities that you can’t comprehend. But all you need to know is that yiou must not write this Hemingway story. If you do, I or someone like me will have to kill you.

This is now my new favorite moment in human history.

Ten percent may not seem like much, but it’s a lot if you look at all we’ve done with it.

Wells: Yes, it’s possible, but problematic. Assuming you could create the conditions necessary to take that journey, that journey would then be fraught with potential pitfalls: the Novikov Principle of Self-Consistency, for example.

Joe: Wait—the what, now?

Barry: If you travel back in time to change something, then you end up being the causal factor of that event.

Cisco: Like . . . Terminator.

Joe: Ah!

Wells: Or is time plastic? Is it mutable, whereby any changes in the continuum could create an alternate timeline?

Cisco: Back to the Future.

Joe: Ah, saw that one, too.

So, Lou was killed in our present, which means that here in the future, he should still be dead. Well, clearly he’s not fucking dead, because he’s sitting here, still bothering me. So what that tells me is we’re in a completely different future on a completely different timeline. [. . .] Anyway, the repairman said that the past is actually the future of the present that we’re in right now. So I think what that means is the killer is from the future. So clearly, someone from 2025 will go back in time and shoot Lou.

No, that’s not how it works. In our timeline, Barry’s mother’s already dead, and her death is a fixed point. And nothing can change that.

And that, fellow members of St. Paul’s, is how our Fellowship Hall got sucked through time and space and why today’s potluck will be held in the basement instead.

He told me all the horrible things that would happen if I broke any Time Laws. Worlds would collapse. I would turn inside out. Important people would die and important things wouldn’t happen.

Appears to be a standard sequence violation. Branches growing at a stable rate and slope. Variant identified.