Diary (December 2, 2020)

Online diary of Karl Jones for Wednesday December 2, 2020.

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Diary

Tribbles for Icheumon

"Tribbles for Ichneumon".

"Tribbles for Ichneumon" is one of the Forbidden Episodes of Star Trek.

Joseph diGenova

Joseph diGenova infographic. 2 December 2020.

Joseph diGenova (nonfiction) infographic

Time travellers

I talk a lot about time travellers. But how to portray time travel? I'm not interested in time machines. If there is such a thing as time travel, I don't think machines will make it happen. Other fictional approaches are more interesting.

Several of my characters have their own special relationships with time:

• Alice Beta exists as infinite versions of herself who can communicate via mathematics. We follow the story of "our" Alice, in "our" universe. We she "does the math" (meditates, basically), Alice can communicate with her "sisters" - other versions of herself, some more similar, some more different. This amounts to time travel, because the sisters live in different universes made up of different events, and if Alice computes hard enough, she can find a sister like herself but in the past, etc.

• Niles Cartouchian exists as multiple (not infinite) versions of himself, scattered in time, approximately one Niles per century over thousands, perhaps millions of years. Perhaps there is one "Niles Cartouchian" in the future who got caught in a time storm and replicated across the eaons. Doesn't matter, keep it mysterious. The important thing is, they never overlap - no two Niles Cartouchians can exist at the same time. The can, however, communicate with each other by "doing the math" (sitting and thinking). So a Niles in the past and a Niles in the future can coordinate their actions.

Alice and Niles

Alice Beta and Niles Cartouchian have a great a tragic love story.

They are true lovers, made for each other, and they are together and happy — in every universe except ours.

In our universe, Alice is single and childless. She knows that something is terribly wrong, because all of her most immediate Sisters — the "nearby" Alice Beta universes, most like ours — all of those sisters have happy lifelong marriages with their Niles.

But in *our* universe, Niles Cartouchian is a stranger to her — he is very similar, but they don't know each other, they lead separate lives.

The reason "our" Alice doesn't have a Niles is that her Niles is in the past, in the 1900s and the 1800s and the 1700s and so on. They all want to get back to their own time, to her, but ... tragedy demands that not happen.

Animals

• Flying bison - needs animation

Fiction cross-reference

• Gnomon algorithm
• Gnomon Chronicles