conversations with a time traveller from another universe where time has more than one dimension

Okay, seems like a pretty stable connection I think. Good to be talking to you.

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So how it works … I guess I'd describe it like big creatures in an ocean. I don't wanna be too specific, I don't know if we have the same kinds of creatures. From what I can tell our homeworlds are almost identical but you never know. Anyway, we can kind of move through it, but we’re also part of it you know. The ways we move might stick around and affect what's there the next time we pass through.

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I don't quite know if it's like building a city. We leave marks in the same way on the world. Spikes that the rest of the world, the bits that aren't us, try to smooth out. But the balance is different. A bad city can poison the ground for many human lifetimes. The scale can only be as big as the earth is, and as long as it has existed for. We're talking about the whole of spacetime that's available to us here.

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Oh no, we can definitely fuck it up. It's surprisingly delicate, sometimes. Sturdy in other placetimes. Sort of like the body, I guess.

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Yeah. Like you can heal wounds, right? You can go in somewhere, fuck with events and there's a discontinuity. It rips. But eventually things settle down into something smooth. But only so far. You get little jagged parts. Maybe your timeline is the one that couldn't quite get fixed. And if you pick at the same bit too much it destabilises, like cancer. But spacetime doesn't have organs or discreteness, really. Otherwise I'd compare us to white blood cells, but that's too ordered. Sorry, that's probably a lot to process.

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Well, you know what a black hole is right?

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Yeah, so when it destabilises it's … kind of like that, in that everything around it starts to fall in. But event horizons don't work the same way, I'm guessing. I'm not sure I could explain in a way you would understand.

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Well, I do things pretty by-the-book, so my timeline’s mostly okay. A little fucked up from some of my grandparents’ antics, mind you. Oh god, how do I even begin to explain genetics? Don't worry about that. But when you break your own timeline it's kind of like a brain injury, I guess. Your own sense of when and where your life has taken you is changed, fundamentally. It might be different to someone else’s memories, and both of them are true.

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Yeah, I guess in some ways it's not that different. But again I suspect the experience of it happening isn't something I could really communicate very well in concepts we both understand. I mean I'm sure if you tried to explain how age works for you I would just be lost.

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Oh, how do you think it works for us?

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You're not miles off, actually. So you're saying that both twins thinking they're younger is a misunderstanding of the parameters in your world? Because to me that's like, well yeah of course. It just depends which timeline you're tuned into.

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Wow, that's so interesting. Anyway yeah, having a discontinuity in your timeline is weird for sure like. Let's say you end up giving a friend a little scar on their arm by accident, in their past before they met you. You'll remember them always having it but also that they didn't until you gave it to them. And they'll have a similar multi-memory. Like you’ve always had both, but also you haven’t until recently. Both are true.

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There isn't an original memory before that, not one you can meaningfully refer to anyway. But it's quite possible that something like that will cause something else to change. Usually it's just the shortest distance to smooth things out again, basic energy cost stuff. You met for the first time as adults, and you met for the first time when you travelled to when they were five.

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Yeah, I'm sure our brains probably do work differently. I'm honestly fascinated that we can communicate this well.

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Well that's the question, isn't it? Maybe we have some kind of shared understanding here, some exchange of our experiences. Or maybe it's just so different that I can only read from your words a world I can already imagine, if I really try. And all you have is a version of me that you can imagine. But there's no way to solve that problem.

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People don't straight up vanish often. I mean, it can absolutely happen but we’re talking like miniscule chance. And there's always a discontinuity left behind. So the person never existed to the people who never knew them. But they did to people who did. Does that make sense?

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Well I assume in your version of things, that principle doesn't apply to say, paintings someone did. Like, I went to school with someone who has a family heirloom that only exists for her family. The person got blinked like, five hundred years ago, but he carved this stone pendant that his relatives still have in their timelines. But in mine he never existed, and neither does the pendant. Obviously his descendant exists for me to tell me about it though. That's a residual discontinuity, doesn't really affect much when it's far enough away from you.

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Well, people with that in their family history are generally discouraged from travelling. You wouldn't let someone with bad asthma do extreme mountain climbing, right? It's a very controlled form of travel. You can only leave from the same spatial location a certain number of times, to avoid too much rupture. And areas of high discontinuity are really hard to even get into. It's not like you could fuck with a major war even if you wanted to. 99% chance you vanish yourself somewhere in the process.

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Mostly controlled by access to the resources to do it, laws, permits, that sort of stuff. I'm a scientist so, work dispensation, but it's all monitored. Obviously there's black market equipment, which does work but higher chance for you to get it wrong and crash. Crash as in end up somewhere you didn't mean to, but also very physically like crash into a building or a mountain. Anyway, my turn on the questions. So what can you do? Like, how much of the universe do you know?

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Oh okay, not much then. I guess the differences might also make space travel harder for you too… yeah I think I can see how that might work. I’m amazed nobody else has found you yet though. Your universe sounds plenty old enough.

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… I hadn’t even thought of that. I guess it’s not a given that there’s other complex life out there. Maybe our homeworlds aren’t so similar, it’s just the whole imagining what I already know thing again. Like, you have the whole two arms and two legs build right?

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Three eyes?!

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You had me there for a fucking second, wow. I mean, how can we even know that we both think two and three are the same?

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Yeah I know we did the base checks and confirmed parity. But I mean, our laws of physics work differently here. How do we know the checks matched the things we both think we did?

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Yeah, you’re right. This isn’t the time for an existential crisis. We’ve just confirmed there’s another universe, and somehow, we can communicate.

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I don’t wanna tell my boss yet, we haven’t even talked about any fun stuff.

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Yeah, I wanted to talk about how sex works too. Although I can’t stop wondering about how I can know this is real.

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Yeah, the machines say it’s real, our measurements say it’s real, my gut says it’s real. But at the end of the day, I made these things. Or if I didn’t, some other person did. And we know how to make them and how things work because of things that other people came up with. We could have just made this all up, together. Maybe you’re just telling me things that would make me think it’s worked because that’s what this machine was actually designed to do.

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Exactly. Same for you. If you are, well, you. We ‘discovered’ how things work but at the end of the day, it would make sense if we ended up staring ourselves in the face at the end of it all.

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Didn’t think of it that way, but it’s a fair point. I can’t exactly think of something my brain can’t understand. Maybe it doesn’t make a difference.

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We’re going to have to report this pretty soon. And then they’ll check, or we’ll check, and it’ll get verified as real. Or it won’t. We’ll talk again though, I imagine.

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I hope so too. But we still have some time now before we have to go tell all the people in charge. I reckon I have maybe five more minutes, you?

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Okay, cool. So how do you like to fuck?