How Time Works
Mar. 13th, 2018 05:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethSo the basic problem of time travel stories is we don't know how time works.
Our current best understanding of physics is still a work in progress that leaves some relevant details unanswered, and, also, I do not have a physics degree, and last time I wrested a basic understanding of very limited bits of physics from a For Dummies book I ... mostly ignored it to make a pretty plot.
And the reader, setting out, does not know how time works.
I mean you can have fun with that, you can use film or book framing to set up flashbacks that are assumed to be for the reader only, then read as memories, then turn out to be flash forwards as time and life and memory turn out to work differently than you may expect, and then do really artistic things with it
but
at some point the reader has to understand what you're doing
and let's face it, no matter how you write it, there'll be someone who don't.
I mean I've seen Highlander blurbed as a time travel story so many times, and they only travel at the same second per second rate as the rest of us. Someone will miss the point always.
So, time travel? Builds on fuzzy unknowns of physics to bend the rules into a probable impossibility - there's stories and editorials that argue time travel is by definition fantasy because science will never be able to do it - and from these impossibilities create a story where the possibilities and ethics utterly depend on how time travel works
but
next to nobody wants to sit through the introductory lecture.
I mean there's those that happily will, I buy game rule books for fun, I'm not alone in that, some of us like seeing the rules.
But it's a minority interest.
And framing each story in a time travel lesson isn't likely to gain followers.
Just like every story is an argument in ethics but not many stories sit down and cite their sources and put their theoretical base on display.
So some people write time travel stories without deciding on rules. Or with saying explicitly there are no rules, you just make up what seems drama at the time.
... Doctor Who and the DCU have many good points, but they also throw out their own continuity pretty routinely, including the level where the laws of physics live.
And I've said before that makes the ethics damn near impossible to judge.
https://beccaelizabeth.dreamwidth.org/3304726.html
can turn your bad guys into puppet victims
https://beccaelizabeth.dreamwidth.org/3368408.html
And with the settings wrong story ends up limited to boring tragedy.
https://beccaelizabeth.dreamwidth.org/3278349.html
... and having reread how much I've written on the topic I kind of stalled, because do I have new thoughts?
Okay, one thought, that is supposed to be a big cliffhanger revelation in the time travel story I may someday build...
So I was reading nirejseki's "Countless Roads", and at one point her character bumped into a teenage background Time Master named Ted, and my whole brain filled with all the possibilities
because
suddenly you can't kill Time Masters
not just because they're kids
not just because we know them (Kord!)
but because they are all the temporal theorists you've never heard of.
... the fic went in a different direction and seemed to imply selective breeding of significant family lines, or a kind of superhero adjacent aristocracy, but.
In another fanfic I read about a Gordon-Kord hypothesis... where did it go...
https://archiveofourown.org/works/600432
It's a good story, time travel Shenanigans extraordinaire.
So I have no idea if canon gave us a Gordon-Kord paradox, but from what happened to Booster in canon when he tried to help Gordon and Kord, you get two different versions of 'cannot'. Really, a cannot and a must not. Cannot is trying to help Gordon but bouncing off hard, unable to change a damn thing, however unlikely that seems. Cannot is losing every fight even when it means the equivalent of you rolling all ones while your opponent rolls straight 20s. Or 18s and 3s. However long the odds, if it is physically possible to stop you, you just fail. That's cannot.
Must not is Kord. Where saving him meant they ended up the last two humans on Earth, incidentally grandfather paradoxing the time traveller on a massive scale, which stated to cause him to fade out of existence, since he'd never been born. Kord fixed that by volunteering to go back and try again, even knowing he died. Heroic sacrifice with just a glimmer of hope in it.
... I miss Ted. We have Rebirth Ted but ... *sigh*.
Okay, so, pardoxes are times you couldn't go back and cause those things in the first place but only if you had gone back and caused them.
Grandfather paradox, one of biological origins.
Gordon-Kord, one of technological origins, though the theoretical underpinnings would be very much included. Gordon and Kord would need to live the lives that brought them to have this theory, if it then underpins time travel tech.
Eobard Thawne very nearly managed the double, since he knocked the Flash off course, erasing the metahuman biotech and probably the AI he used to travel, but since that simply stranded him he had time to fix it. He wouldn't have if Barry had died as planned, there'd be no fixing the paradox then without more time travel, which you couldn't have, because paradox. So one Gordon-Kord paradox but with a long run up to the crucial day. Barry could be brought to arrive at it by a different route, and smooth things out again. As long as the two key days happened at some point, gaining his powers and using them on the day Thawne kept checking.
Which probably had to do with future plot point and another epic scale grandfather paradox where a destroyed universe can't make time travellers, but, we don't know yet.
And then Thawne did an actual biology grandfather paradox. Destroying his lineage gave him time to restore it, but destroying his biological ancestor gave him only moments between shot and being past saving medically, and then...
big hole in the sky.
In any story with a reasonable continuity the big hole in the sky needs some EXPLAINING. Like, is it a temporal phenomenon? Is it like timequakes and timestorms, respectively kinetic and electrical discharges caused by temporal stress caused by paradox? Is it a side effect of an ongoing process?
They just handwaved all the likely necessary effects with 'Speed Force' and it drives me nuts because it takes the consequences and ETHICS right out of everything.
... I sidetracked me.
Paradox. By Time Masters. That means you can't just blow up the Time Masters.
If you remove from their original timeline any theoretician or technologist or engineer or key player in temporal physics and technology, you get a Gordon-Kord paradox. You change their lives, you have changed the tech that allowed you to change their lives.
But you can remedy this by bringing them to the same key actions at the relevant point, like with Eobard and Barry.
So, Time Masters cold steal those minds that are the keys to time, as long as those minds still at some point did what they need to do.
And that would give them an absolute monopoly on the production of timeships, since they'd steal anyone who could ever imagine how to do it.
Leaving piracy - stealing ships of Time Master production - literally the only other way to travel. Well, aside from speed.
They can't mess with speedsters because they can't duplicate those conditions, speedforce has to choose them. But they can duplicate the education that leads up to whichever key realisation those minds made.
Or, they can just feed it to them. If they don't mind a huge great ontological paradox.
... whether or not Time minds an ontological paradox is a question not yet definitely answered in the DC universes, to my knowledge.
But if they stole those theorists and engineers early, if they got them as kids to be indoctrinated in the Time Master way, then they leave time massively under tension, as they all have to be raised to their discoveries in peace, or at least in one piece.
Even more so if they use the technique they got the Legends under control with, by sending the Pilgrim to scare them into bringing their own child selves in.
... the Pilgrim's methods make no sense for her stated purpose. She's not an assassin, or a weapon of war. She's a weapon of terror, and a sheep dog.
The whole Time Master thing with nested layers of knowledge, different levels of ideas of what Time can do, would in some senses be necessary until al the accumulated Time Masters figure out the actual rules as they age. Otherwise ontological paradox happens whether they like it or not.
But they'd necessarily stifle their own understanding of time if all the physicists were raised as one cohort. No shoulders of giants. And nobody in the timeline except those starting from scratch. Whenever the Time Masters decided to do this they'd either be in competition with more advanced Time Masters from a further future or they'd stop their understanding of time right there until the par1dox resolves.
And if they keep using the Vanishing Point, where they're all outside time and not subject to the usual aging, then it might never get around to resolving. They've got forever, why rush? Cause the other thing the really smart temporal technicians might do is look at all the theory they came up with and start getting new ideas.
And all of this I thought in a flash from one teenage Time Master's first name, so a character could do that. One who, like me, had been looking out for their time travelling heroes.
If they break into the enemy base and find the tech needed to build *or* destroy it hasn't been invented yet? If everyone who should invent it is hanging out being young Time Masters?
They can't kill them.
Not *any* of them.
They have no idea who they used to be, but their younger selves might be as vulnerable as Rip's. Or might be right there.
No big kaboom, big kaboom BIG paradox.
Including the classic grandfather or in Rip's case father paradox. ... if Booster and Ted married. ... there's a whole sidetrack idea where Booster and his sister started out as identical twins and got mistaken for each other a lot and he renamed himself Michael in her honor. Because it's possible parents could name kids Michael and Michelle but really.
... I just looked up the Carters and (a) there are real life athletes with those names now and (b) I saw on a wiki what they've been doing with Goldstar and ugh.
The bit where your identical twin ends up much younger because of time travel is interesting though. Like it gives you a marker for how much you've changed.
*rereads self*
... okay, try again, without the rambling digressions:
A time traveller fan of time travellers goes looking for Names that seem to have disappeared from the timeline, and catches a lift with a rebel Time MAster by revealing she knows his proper name. This puts her at odds with the increasingly controlling Time Masters. She ends up in the Time Master fortress, intending to steal all their ships and blow up their base. But! Suddenly! A genetic scan she left running in the background finally pings, and she finds the rebel captain's father! Well, one of them. And in an instant she realises how all the clues shake together - the Names were taken and raised by the Time Masters. The ones they're fighting are the ones she's there to save! Suddenly the raid on the Death Star is a rescue mission, for Stormtroopers, all of them.
Last minute cliffhanger twist!
... setting it up without sliding it into the Legends plot would take a lot of do.
But once it works...
well if you combine the 'explosion' at the Vanishing Point, the way it didn't destroy anything but the people, and Rip's little emergency exit into film school... canon already gives you a way that everyone who 'died' at the Vanishing Point secretly made it out
fobwatched.
And maybe only Rip had a backup brain, or maybe it's common Time Master practice...
but there's so much mileage in the idea tht a temporal explosion only destroys your existing timeline, and bumps you into an alternative life, wherever it drops you off.
You can get the same basic personality traits dropped in different eras learning different attitudes.
It's the AU generator to end all.
And so much soulmates goodness possible!
And! Then! You'd have an ethical dilemma, like with Rip and Phil, but making it a lot more clear they'e both real.
Like I know why Legends used George Lucas, but what if the director whose work inspired the crew was actually fobwatched Rip? They'd in some sense love hum in both personas.
And if the backup copies were all the Time Master versions, the people that were recently the enemy, there's such a temptation to drop their tapes in the disposal. But that's everyone Rip ever cared about.
An for some of them they might know if they'd actually got dumped back into near enough their original lives, but for others they'd have no idea.
And what would they want from them? Temporal theory? Heroics? Or just living a long good life?
And what would it make them, to look at that many lives and just decide what would happen to them?
(Time Masters)(again)
And then there'd be Len. In another life entirely, no more Leonard Snart than Leo was, but in some senses a continuation of Len's life. They know where to find Len to copy paste his mind back in, or they might have scanned him well enough when he was crew. They could find this guy who is in some ways his future and just... swap him. For their guy.
Ethics.
Though if they'e properly fobwatched with only their minds erased then their genetics would match and one could prove the connection to his sister. So what would she mean to him, with only that between them?
So many stories.
And they're time travel stories, where you swap someone's past for a different one, but much more controllable in scale and outcomes. You wouldn't have to change the whole world for it, just change them, from that point in their lives forwards.
And if backup copies are possible it would even be reversible.
Once mindwipe is in play though it's a whole multifaceted story driving tech on its own. Like the Winter Soldier or the one story in one of the magazines I subscribe to, where the soldier keeps realising he's on the wrong side, but the owners can wipe him back to his last day as many times as they like. Memory as time travel, storing the most convenient version of someone, and just reverting and having another go if they ever go off course.
Combining that with time travel gets... convoluted.
... as do my ideas here.
... I'll post this and try and think which bits are Story as I want to write them.
Because what I sat down to write about is:
we don't know how time travel works, so you need to sit down and decide what kind of Story you want to get out of it, and set up the physics accordingly.
And a degree of Cannot ups the difficulty, like gravity makes it harder to fly, but it's very boring if Cannot is all the deciding and every consequence.
Must Not is a lot more interesting, because it's about how some things come at too high a cost.
And however you set it, it's implicitly about free will and the power of choice
which is why mindwipe and slavery gets mixed up in it
because if you're not careful then the only choices that matter are those of time travellers
and if you're too far into tragedy not even those.
and then what's the point?
so
there's always a way out.
it's just a bit of a different story if that way out is Bill and Ted keys.
Our current best understanding of physics is still a work in progress that leaves some relevant details unanswered, and, also, I do not have a physics degree, and last time I wrested a basic understanding of very limited bits of physics from a For Dummies book I ... mostly ignored it to make a pretty plot.
And the reader, setting out, does not know how time works.
I mean you can have fun with that, you can use film or book framing to set up flashbacks that are assumed to be for the reader only, then read as memories, then turn out to be flash forwards as time and life and memory turn out to work differently than you may expect, and then do really artistic things with it
but
at some point the reader has to understand what you're doing
and let's face it, no matter how you write it, there'll be someone who don't.
I mean I've seen Highlander blurbed as a time travel story so many times, and they only travel at the same second per second rate as the rest of us. Someone will miss the point always.
So, time travel? Builds on fuzzy unknowns of physics to bend the rules into a probable impossibility - there's stories and editorials that argue time travel is by definition fantasy because science will never be able to do it - and from these impossibilities create a story where the possibilities and ethics utterly depend on how time travel works
but
next to nobody wants to sit through the introductory lecture.
I mean there's those that happily will, I buy game rule books for fun, I'm not alone in that, some of us like seeing the rules.
But it's a minority interest.
And framing each story in a time travel lesson isn't likely to gain followers.
Just like every story is an argument in ethics but not many stories sit down and cite their sources and put their theoretical base on display.
So some people write time travel stories without deciding on rules. Or with saying explicitly there are no rules, you just make up what seems drama at the time.
... Doctor Who and the DCU have many good points, but they also throw out their own continuity pretty routinely, including the level where the laws of physics live.
And I've said before that makes the ethics damn near impossible to judge.
https://beccaelizabeth.dreamwidth.org/3304726.html
can turn your bad guys into puppet victims
https://beccaelizabeth.dreamwidth.org/3368408.html
And with the settings wrong story ends up limited to boring tragedy.
https://beccaelizabeth.dreamwidth.org/3278349.html
... and having reread how much I've written on the topic I kind of stalled, because do I have new thoughts?
Okay, one thought, that is supposed to be a big cliffhanger revelation in the time travel story I may someday build...
So I was reading nirejseki's "Countless Roads", and at one point her character bumped into a teenage background Time Master named Ted, and my whole brain filled with all the possibilities
because
suddenly you can't kill Time Masters
not just because they're kids
not just because we know them (Kord!)
but because they are all the temporal theorists you've never heard of.
... the fic went in a different direction and seemed to imply selective breeding of significant family lines, or a kind of superhero adjacent aristocracy, but.
In another fanfic I read about a Gordon-Kord hypothesis... where did it go...
https://archiveofourown.org/works/600432
“The Gordon-Kord Paradox,” Rani said. “Solidified time is the idea that there are moments in time that can’t be tampered with. The Gordon-Kord Paradox explains that those moments aren’t chosen at random. You can’t tamper with any event that allows you to time travel. For example, if I give you a time sphere, you can’t go back in time to stop me from giving you a time sphere, because then you would never be able to stop me from giving you a time sphere. Understand?”
“Sort of,” Milagro said. “But why is it called the Gordon-Kord Paradox?”
“Because the theory was developed out of the research of the ancient scholars Barbara Gordon and Theodore…oh my God,” Rani said, staring. “I never thought about it before! I’m so used to the name ‘Gordon-Kord’ that I never thought that it was that Kord!”
It's a good story, time travel Shenanigans extraordinaire.
So I have no idea if canon gave us a Gordon-Kord paradox, but from what happened to Booster in canon when he tried to help Gordon and Kord, you get two different versions of 'cannot'. Really, a cannot and a must not. Cannot is trying to help Gordon but bouncing off hard, unable to change a damn thing, however unlikely that seems. Cannot is losing every fight even when it means the equivalent of you rolling all ones while your opponent rolls straight 20s. Or 18s and 3s. However long the odds, if it is physically possible to stop you, you just fail. That's cannot.
Must not is Kord. Where saving him meant they ended up the last two humans on Earth, incidentally grandfather paradoxing the time traveller on a massive scale, which stated to cause him to fade out of existence, since he'd never been born. Kord fixed that by volunteering to go back and try again, even knowing he died. Heroic sacrifice with just a glimmer of hope in it.
... I miss Ted. We have Rebirth Ted but ... *sigh*.
Okay, so, pardoxes are times you couldn't go back and cause those things in the first place but only if you had gone back and caused them.
Grandfather paradox, one of biological origins.
Gordon-Kord, one of technological origins, though the theoretical underpinnings would be very much included. Gordon and Kord would need to live the lives that brought them to have this theory, if it then underpins time travel tech.
Eobard Thawne very nearly managed the double, since he knocked the Flash off course, erasing the metahuman biotech and probably the AI he used to travel, but since that simply stranded him he had time to fix it. He wouldn't have if Barry had died as planned, there'd be no fixing the paradox then without more time travel, which you couldn't have, because paradox. So one Gordon-Kord paradox but with a long run up to the crucial day. Barry could be brought to arrive at it by a different route, and smooth things out again. As long as the two key days happened at some point, gaining his powers and using them on the day Thawne kept checking.
Which probably had to do with future plot point and another epic scale grandfather paradox where a destroyed universe can't make time travellers, but, we don't know yet.
And then Thawne did an actual biology grandfather paradox. Destroying his lineage gave him time to restore it, but destroying his biological ancestor gave him only moments between shot and being past saving medically, and then...
big hole in the sky.
In any story with a reasonable continuity the big hole in the sky needs some EXPLAINING. Like, is it a temporal phenomenon? Is it like timequakes and timestorms, respectively kinetic and electrical discharges caused by temporal stress caused by paradox? Is it a side effect of an ongoing process?
They just handwaved all the likely necessary effects with 'Speed Force' and it drives me nuts because it takes the consequences and ETHICS right out of everything.
... I sidetracked me.
Paradox. By Time Masters. That means you can't just blow up the Time Masters.
If you remove from their original timeline any theoretician or technologist or engineer or key player in temporal physics and technology, you get a Gordon-Kord paradox. You change their lives, you have changed the tech that allowed you to change their lives.
But you can remedy this by bringing them to the same key actions at the relevant point, like with Eobard and Barry.
So, Time Masters cold steal those minds that are the keys to time, as long as those minds still at some point did what they need to do.
And that would give them an absolute monopoly on the production of timeships, since they'd steal anyone who could ever imagine how to do it.
Leaving piracy - stealing ships of Time Master production - literally the only other way to travel. Well, aside from speed.
They can't mess with speedsters because they can't duplicate those conditions, speedforce has to choose them. But they can duplicate the education that leads up to whichever key realisation those minds made.
Or, they can just feed it to them. If they don't mind a huge great ontological paradox.
... whether or not Time minds an ontological paradox is a question not yet definitely answered in the DC universes, to my knowledge.
But if they stole those theorists and engineers early, if they got them as kids to be indoctrinated in the Time Master way, then they leave time massively under tension, as they all have to be raised to their discoveries in peace, or at least in one piece.
Even more so if they use the technique they got the Legends under control with, by sending the Pilgrim to scare them into bringing their own child selves in.
... the Pilgrim's methods make no sense for her stated purpose. She's not an assassin, or a weapon of war. She's a weapon of terror, and a sheep dog.
The whole Time Master thing with nested layers of knowledge, different levels of ideas of what Time can do, would in some senses be necessary until al the accumulated Time Masters figure out the actual rules as they age. Otherwise ontological paradox happens whether they like it or not.
But they'd necessarily stifle their own understanding of time if all the physicists were raised as one cohort. No shoulders of giants. And nobody in the timeline except those starting from scratch. Whenever the Time Masters decided to do this they'd either be in competition with more advanced Time Masters from a further future or they'd stop their understanding of time right there until the par1dox resolves.
And if they keep using the Vanishing Point, where they're all outside time and not subject to the usual aging, then it might never get around to resolving. They've got forever, why rush? Cause the other thing the really smart temporal technicians might do is look at all the theory they came up with and start getting new ideas.
And all of this I thought in a flash from one teenage Time Master's first name, so a character could do that. One who, like me, had been looking out for their time travelling heroes.
If they break into the enemy base and find the tech needed to build *or* destroy it hasn't been invented yet? If everyone who should invent it is hanging out being young Time Masters?
They can't kill them.
Not *any* of them.
They have no idea who they used to be, but their younger selves might be as vulnerable as Rip's. Or might be right there.
No big kaboom, big kaboom BIG paradox.
Including the classic grandfather or in Rip's case father paradox. ... if Booster and Ted married. ... there's a whole sidetrack idea where Booster and his sister started out as identical twins and got mistaken for each other a lot and he renamed himself Michael in her honor. Because it's possible parents could name kids Michael and Michelle but really.
... I just looked up the Carters and (a) there are real life athletes with those names now and (b) I saw on a wiki what they've been doing with Goldstar and ugh.
The bit where your identical twin ends up much younger because of time travel is interesting though. Like it gives you a marker for how much you've changed.
*rereads self*
... okay, try again, without the rambling digressions:
A time traveller fan of time travellers goes looking for Names that seem to have disappeared from the timeline, and catches a lift with a rebel Time MAster by revealing she knows his proper name. This puts her at odds with the increasingly controlling Time Masters. She ends up in the Time Master fortress, intending to steal all their ships and blow up their base. But! Suddenly! A genetic scan she left running in the background finally pings, and she finds the rebel captain's father! Well, one of them. And in an instant she realises how all the clues shake together - the Names were taken and raised by the Time Masters. The ones they're fighting are the ones she's there to save! Suddenly the raid on the Death Star is a rescue mission, for Stormtroopers, all of them.
Last minute cliffhanger twist!
... setting it up without sliding it into the Legends plot would take a lot of do.
But once it works...
well if you combine the 'explosion' at the Vanishing Point, the way it didn't destroy anything but the people, and Rip's little emergency exit into film school... canon already gives you a way that everyone who 'died' at the Vanishing Point secretly made it out
fobwatched.
And maybe only Rip had a backup brain, or maybe it's common Time Master practice...
but there's so much mileage in the idea tht a temporal explosion only destroys your existing timeline, and bumps you into an alternative life, wherever it drops you off.
You can get the same basic personality traits dropped in different eras learning different attitudes.
It's the AU generator to end all.
And so much soulmates goodness possible!
And! Then! You'd have an ethical dilemma, like with Rip and Phil, but making it a lot more clear they'e both real.
Like I know why Legends used George Lucas, but what if the director whose work inspired the crew was actually fobwatched Rip? They'd in some sense love hum in both personas.
And if the backup copies were all the Time Master versions, the people that were recently the enemy, there's such a temptation to drop their tapes in the disposal. But that's everyone Rip ever cared about.
An for some of them they might know if they'd actually got dumped back into near enough their original lives, but for others they'd have no idea.
And what would they want from them? Temporal theory? Heroics? Or just living a long good life?
And what would it make them, to look at that many lives and just decide what would happen to them?
(Time Masters)(again)
And then there'd be Len. In another life entirely, no more Leonard Snart than Leo was, but in some senses a continuation of Len's life. They know where to find Len to copy paste his mind back in, or they might have scanned him well enough when he was crew. They could find this guy who is in some ways his future and just... swap him. For their guy.
Ethics.
Though if they'e properly fobwatched with only their minds erased then their genetics would match and one could prove the connection to his sister. So what would she mean to him, with only that between them?
So many stories.
And they're time travel stories, where you swap someone's past for a different one, but much more controllable in scale and outcomes. You wouldn't have to change the whole world for it, just change them, from that point in their lives forwards.
And if backup copies are possible it would even be reversible.
Once mindwipe is in play though it's a whole multifaceted story driving tech on its own. Like the Winter Soldier or the one story in one of the magazines I subscribe to, where the soldier keeps realising he's on the wrong side, but the owners can wipe him back to his last day as many times as they like. Memory as time travel, storing the most convenient version of someone, and just reverting and having another go if they ever go off course.
Combining that with time travel gets... convoluted.
... as do my ideas here.
... I'll post this and try and think which bits are Story as I want to write them.
Because what I sat down to write about is:
we don't know how time travel works, so you need to sit down and decide what kind of Story you want to get out of it, and set up the physics accordingly.
And a degree of Cannot ups the difficulty, like gravity makes it harder to fly, but it's very boring if Cannot is all the deciding and every consequence.
Must Not is a lot more interesting, because it's about how some things come at too high a cost.
And however you set it, it's implicitly about free will and the power of choice
which is why mindwipe and slavery gets mixed up in it
because if you're not careful then the only choices that matter are those of time travellers
and if you're too far into tragedy not even those.
and then what's the point?
so
there's always a way out.
it's just a bit of a different story if that way out is Bill and Ted keys.
no subject
Date: 2018-03-14 05:24 am (UTC)So this could be a butterfly effect of changes that ripple through the timeline, but
if there's a photo but literally everyone in it except Tina (only supervising the tachyon work, not herself doing that work) is either missing or reshuffled
it segues into the fobwatch theory
if everyone got an overload of temporal power then whoosh, other lives in other places, reshuffling the whole of history.
the missing turn up at the Vanishing Point being trained as Time Masters
but the others introduce the concept we'll need for the big finish.
and then there's the husband...
... and the tendency of humans to lose memories as time changes out from under them.
So what if she only knows she told that story, she no longer remembers a husband
and obvs nobody remembers her
so
she could just be a fangirl who used the word unwisely and is now stuck trying to make it happen
nobody including her actually knows.
it'd be predestination vs choice the soulmates edition.
or it could be a conscious experiment in the difference between history and what actually happened
like
can you change actual events by rewriting the story
with improvements?
He'd be so pissed at her for shutting him in AGAIN like the museum did
but
it actually frees him if she can prove it's a rewrite and it happens anyway.
ish.
Also, keep Tina McGee, but write Jesse Quick into this universe. Don't kill off Tess Morgan. Keep Harry's wife and my first impression, that his dedication to work and 'work voice' broke them up. Keep Caitlin and Linda and Iris and Dr Light as a seperate scientist who is not the same asian lady. Just go through canon and keep all the women, but don't keep Earth 2. Multiverse and time travel together raises questions about how time travel works and answers them with a branching multiverse
or with different solutions to string theory making different law of physics
I dont know
just, it complicates thingw to have two independent timelines and a ack up unaltered copy, and yet they did so little with it
and it ought to be a paradox
but somehow isnt?
or causality would work between niverses
which
woah.
Keep all the women though.
it wont look like the same universe.
and if the time traveller scientist turns out to have replaced your dad
issues!
... multiverse could same...
ugh, got to decide the temporal physics first, again.
if multiverse then one set of possibilities, but DCU doesnt play it that way.
if only evidence of singular timeline, high stakes, risk everything in existence.
... how close to all women can I get the plot?
without genderflipping I mean.
Miranda sets out to save her husband and son?
What connotations do we get ith Miranda as a chosen name? How does she see herself?
And who is her mother?
can't keep using Ted and Michael, they're her sons grandparents but not her parents.
important though, different sort of grandfather paradox. set out to save grandchild, dont know his grandparents, accidentally erase them. removes cause for trave but leaves traveller available to fix things. if they remember. and if that's even possible.
time wants to happen?
but the odds against any one geneset being born are astronomical.