Time traveller types
Jun. 16th, 2017 05:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI realise it is unproductive to yet again get stuck wondering
which butterfly got stepped on
but I have spent the day reading so much on fire safety (so much. the Guardian coverage alone is extensive, and I found myself checking other papers, as if there were secret nicer timeline news out there instead)
and it's equally unproductive in the end, but worse for my mental health.
so, butterflies, and time travel.
But given how many predictions turn out to be accurate already, a time traveller would just be another voice in the chorus, and how loud does it have to be? So thinking on time travel just makes me depressed and angry, because humans set up systems where the feedback loops split the good results off to the few, and the negatives get felt by everyone else. Then things have to get so awful before the ones in charge notice it's a bad idea.
Time Masters living at the Banishing Point would be the absolute worst to guard or guide the timeline, simply because they don't ever have to live in the results. Raised apart and never supposed to even marry, they're trained to lack empathy. Terrible plan.
If you want to collect people to use time travel, you'd want to start with ones who understand the reality of consequences, who feel a connection to everyone who'll pay for their mistakes. Who had to live with consequences already. Time aberrations and remnants would be a good start, since you can't leave them in regular time, and they understand they've been screwed over. Whole different set of failure modes there of course.
And you'd want to use your edge to rescue ghosts, people history records as dead right then and there, who can't go back into history until after the time traveller's data ends. But then you'd look at every death as a rescue in progress, and it'd be terrible hard on the heart. Failure mode of over investment is burn out. Need people who can take it slow and go home in between.
You need cool heads and calm calculation, but you need... gardeners who do coffee mornings and charity collections and maybe run a thrift store and have a regular community meeting, like a congregation but not necessarily religious. People who share childcare and try to get schools the best kit and have had to phone and phone and campaign for support for themselves and their children and everyone. People who already spent their lives devoted to the principle that small daily caretaking can make a difference. Because you very seldom need a Rip Hunter, let alone want him, swanking around thinking he's the hero for nipping in and breaking shit and going away again. Time travel's going to be like anything else, routine maintenance and hard work and understanding people well enough to even know what they need, preservation and protection and prevention counting for far more than single point interventions.
And you'd want a community of people of different ages, because they have a different shape to their regrets, and to what they think even can be done, let alone should. And people who'd survived different sorts of damage, so you'd see along more fronts. You'd want old ladies looking for something to do with their twilight and fully aware anyone's time is finite and well practiced at living with that. You'd want abuse survivors who got over it and got on with their lives to the point they honestly wouldn't bother trying to change their beginnings. You'd want people who lived through the dark nights and got up and went to school the next day. Fiction dramatises, so it starts with the ones who see something and have to make it change, but that doesn't have to mean the ones so focused backwards they can't move forwards. You'd want a solid base of people who understand about After, and how even grief ends, and that you can't put the world on pause however much you want to, and it will keep turning, and it's up to us to move it forwards.
I mean fiction keeps taking characters in theory along those routes, but it's often not very good at it. Learning to move on because partner turns out to be secretly more evil than even makes sense just isn't a generally applicable life skill. Let alone what we wanted.
Time travellers though, they'd have to come in all shapes and sizes, and colors and ages, and abilities. If you only collect able bodied white men who think every problem looks like a nail and they've got the muscle to pound it, well, shit is going to shatter sometimes. Sometimes you need Sharpe, but sometimes you need Miss Marple, and an understanding of the right words in the right ears. Can't approach the whole of time as if one size fits all.
So you'd collect your diverse approaches, and then station them all kinds of everywhere, learning their ground. And if something happened they would have a network in place, instead of having to work around or against everyone local. And you'd put people where they couldn't be working directly for their children's betterment or anything simples to make selfish, but you'd let them get connected, because you can use the kind of possessive that can get. Like Pratchett and Tiffany Aching, say it's Mine and you shan't have it.
But not on thewhole by using the kind of peoplewho are monsters and assuming they'll be your monster. Vandal Savage doesn't make any sense at all. That sort never rises, they just grind others down until their anthill self is towering. No, not anthill, that's made by the efforts of many together, that's more like the world they want to stand on. Their way gets the few who don't break, and a whole lot of shards, with sharp edges, that know exactly where the threat came from. Bind that all together, even by playing the saviour, and you've still got something so much less than the best civilisation can be.
You can't cream resources off for the few and expect to get a spectacular result for it with no ceiling. Humans got limits. A particularly well trained one might do the work of, well, probably not ten, but however many it is, when inequality tips too far they still get more resources going in than they can actually do anything with. You need storehouses, but they're hardly any use if stuff only goes in to them. And you can't raise someone up that way and get a giant, you just get a person on a pedestal, or a ridiculous throne.
So what you need is someone who knows how small they are, knows their limits, and their worth - and concentrates on bringing people together and giving the most value added to the work they do together.
Hunter started out promisingly, but was really quite bad at teams. And one team just can't cover the stretch needed. And everywhere they went they pretty much needed the help of the locals.
So concentrate on people who have skills that can swiftly and efficiently enhance the actions of the locals.
Yes, if time is so fragile it has to be time travellers pulling out all traces of other time travellers, you need a more inwardly focused team. But you still need a team. Or a crew. And on the whole if time is so fragile you break it when you break masquerade, it's screwed.
So you need people woven in to the background who can give time a nudge, make the smallest possible interventions at the right times, and do it all for their community and legacy, not themselves.
I'm kind of seeing time traveller retired ladies, pillars of the bake sale and horticultural society, always ready with a quiet word, and knowing who to speak it to for most relevant effect.
But maybe time traveller little old ladies who used to be space marines. So they can train local forces, if something too outre turns up.
... and maybe can still fit into the power armour, on special occasion...
Trouble with writing this stuff is I maybe might be able to pull off time travel as heists, working around the eyes of history to improve the timeline nobody sees, but I'm woefully uninformed on how... actual people work? So all this stuff with being part of a community, I'd not know where to start with that. I mean, I watch films where people hit problems until they go away, I'm just reasonably certain it's no damn use in the vast majority of circumstances. Cathartic though. So I keep defaulting to that.
But what you really need are good planners who can get people organised and moving, and even more, people that know how to listen.
These movie sorts that charge in reckoning they know best are dramatic, but the ability to listen to the right warnings and learn from other people's plans is the only way to be better than one single human in a wilderness.
Sometimes I feel I should get more involved in actual politics. Try and get real things done. But that would involve talking or otherwise communicating with real people, and working in groups, and people wanting to choose me to work in their group, and just being able to work in the first place. And even fulfilling all those conditions, the worse the problem is, the harder I bounce off into talking science fiction, because there's only so much I can even.
So then I think I should just write up the fiction. Get people moving that way.
... and then I see my recent word count and just kind of feel bad.
But. Butterflies.
Small maybe works, for to start.
which butterfly got stepped on
but I have spent the day reading so much on fire safety (so much. the Guardian coverage alone is extensive, and I found myself checking other papers, as if there were secret nicer timeline news out there instead)
and it's equally unproductive in the end, but worse for my mental health.
so, butterflies, and time travel.
But given how many predictions turn out to be accurate already, a time traveller would just be another voice in the chorus, and how loud does it have to be? So thinking on time travel just makes me depressed and angry, because humans set up systems where the feedback loops split the good results off to the few, and the negatives get felt by everyone else. Then things have to get so awful before the ones in charge notice it's a bad idea.
Time Masters living at the Banishing Point would be the absolute worst to guard or guide the timeline, simply because they don't ever have to live in the results. Raised apart and never supposed to even marry, they're trained to lack empathy. Terrible plan.
If you want to collect people to use time travel, you'd want to start with ones who understand the reality of consequences, who feel a connection to everyone who'll pay for their mistakes. Who had to live with consequences already. Time aberrations and remnants would be a good start, since you can't leave them in regular time, and they understand they've been screwed over. Whole different set of failure modes there of course.
And you'd want to use your edge to rescue ghosts, people history records as dead right then and there, who can't go back into history until after the time traveller's data ends. But then you'd look at every death as a rescue in progress, and it'd be terrible hard on the heart. Failure mode of over investment is burn out. Need people who can take it slow and go home in between.
You need cool heads and calm calculation, but you need... gardeners who do coffee mornings and charity collections and maybe run a thrift store and have a regular community meeting, like a congregation but not necessarily religious. People who share childcare and try to get schools the best kit and have had to phone and phone and campaign for support for themselves and their children and everyone. People who already spent their lives devoted to the principle that small daily caretaking can make a difference. Because you very seldom need a Rip Hunter, let alone want him, swanking around thinking he's the hero for nipping in and breaking shit and going away again. Time travel's going to be like anything else, routine maintenance and hard work and understanding people well enough to even know what they need, preservation and protection and prevention counting for far more than single point interventions.
And you'd want a community of people of different ages, because they have a different shape to their regrets, and to what they think even can be done, let alone should. And people who'd survived different sorts of damage, so you'd see along more fronts. You'd want old ladies looking for something to do with their twilight and fully aware anyone's time is finite and well practiced at living with that. You'd want abuse survivors who got over it and got on with their lives to the point they honestly wouldn't bother trying to change their beginnings. You'd want people who lived through the dark nights and got up and went to school the next day. Fiction dramatises, so it starts with the ones who see something and have to make it change, but that doesn't have to mean the ones so focused backwards they can't move forwards. You'd want a solid base of people who understand about After, and how even grief ends, and that you can't put the world on pause however much you want to, and it will keep turning, and it's up to us to move it forwards.
I mean fiction keeps taking characters in theory along those routes, but it's often not very good at it. Learning to move on because partner turns out to be secretly more evil than even makes sense just isn't a generally applicable life skill. Let alone what we wanted.
Time travellers though, they'd have to come in all shapes and sizes, and colors and ages, and abilities. If you only collect able bodied white men who think every problem looks like a nail and they've got the muscle to pound it, well, shit is going to shatter sometimes. Sometimes you need Sharpe, but sometimes you need Miss Marple, and an understanding of the right words in the right ears. Can't approach the whole of time as if one size fits all.
So you'd collect your diverse approaches, and then station them all kinds of everywhere, learning their ground. And if something happened they would have a network in place, instead of having to work around or against everyone local. And you'd put people where they couldn't be working directly for their children's betterment or anything simples to make selfish, but you'd let them get connected, because you can use the kind of possessive that can get. Like Pratchett and Tiffany Aching, say it's Mine and you shan't have it.
But not on thewhole by using the kind of peoplewho are monsters and assuming they'll be your monster. Vandal Savage doesn't make any sense at all. That sort never rises, they just grind others down until their anthill self is towering. No, not anthill, that's made by the efforts of many together, that's more like the world they want to stand on. Their way gets the few who don't break, and a whole lot of shards, with sharp edges, that know exactly where the threat came from. Bind that all together, even by playing the saviour, and you've still got something so much less than the best civilisation can be.
You can't cream resources off for the few and expect to get a spectacular result for it with no ceiling. Humans got limits. A particularly well trained one might do the work of, well, probably not ten, but however many it is, when inequality tips too far they still get more resources going in than they can actually do anything with. You need storehouses, but they're hardly any use if stuff only goes in to them. And you can't raise someone up that way and get a giant, you just get a person on a pedestal, or a ridiculous throne.
So what you need is someone who knows how small they are, knows their limits, and their worth - and concentrates on bringing people together and giving the most value added to the work they do together.
Hunter started out promisingly, but was really quite bad at teams. And one team just can't cover the stretch needed. And everywhere they went they pretty much needed the help of the locals.
So concentrate on people who have skills that can swiftly and efficiently enhance the actions of the locals.
Yes, if time is so fragile it has to be time travellers pulling out all traces of other time travellers, you need a more inwardly focused team. But you still need a team. Or a crew. And on the whole if time is so fragile you break it when you break masquerade, it's screwed.
So you need people woven in to the background who can give time a nudge, make the smallest possible interventions at the right times, and do it all for their community and legacy, not themselves.
I'm kind of seeing time traveller retired ladies, pillars of the bake sale and horticultural society, always ready with a quiet word, and knowing who to speak it to for most relevant effect.
But maybe time traveller little old ladies who used to be space marines. So they can train local forces, if something too outre turns up.
... and maybe can still fit into the power armour, on special occasion...
Trouble with writing this stuff is I maybe might be able to pull off time travel as heists, working around the eyes of history to improve the timeline nobody sees, but I'm woefully uninformed on how... actual people work? So all this stuff with being part of a community, I'd not know where to start with that. I mean, I watch films where people hit problems until they go away, I'm just reasonably certain it's no damn use in the vast majority of circumstances. Cathartic though. So I keep defaulting to that.
But what you really need are good planners who can get people organised and moving, and even more, people that know how to listen.
These movie sorts that charge in reckoning they know best are dramatic, but the ability to listen to the right warnings and learn from other people's plans is the only way to be better than one single human in a wilderness.
Sometimes I feel I should get more involved in actual politics. Try and get real things done. But that would involve talking or otherwise communicating with real people, and working in groups, and people wanting to choose me to work in their group, and just being able to work in the first place. And even fulfilling all those conditions, the worse the problem is, the harder I bounce off into talking science fiction, because there's only so much I can even.
So then I think I should just write up the fiction. Get people moving that way.
... and then I see my recent word count and just kind of feel bad.
But. Butterflies.
Small maybe works, for to start.
no subject
Date: 2017-06-17 08:22 am (UTC)It's best to develop systems where people can do whatever they want and it ends up benefiting everyone. If your system has to rely on people always being good and doing the right thing, it will go wrong. People have their own needs, and only they understand those needs, and they will always, always find a way to get around any system that tries to stop them. So the system has to let them do their own thing and still work. Then the Sharpes can do just as much good as the Tiffany Achings and everyone gets to enjoy themselves more along the way.