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Info
XX title here
"One-Way Mirror"?
"One-Way Glass"?
"Tachyonic Antitelephone"?
"Tachyonic Antitelephones"?
"Antitelephone"?
"Self-study"?
"Autodidacticism"?Author:
aismallard (Author Page)
% IDK, needs a substantial rewrite
% make into a massive interlinking story with snippets all over
% Megaera (Meg)
% start date: SEPT 29
% catch date: OCT 15
% "who even am i?"
September 29th, 2024. 3:37 PM
% GOOD_END
In retrospect, she shouldn't have been surprised. Nevertheless, Meg jolted. She had spent the day assembling her prototype, and it had scarcely been ten seconds since plugging it in before the machine had beeped, indicating that a transmission had been received.
It was a tachyonic anti-telephone. A speculative device which, in theory, allowed one to send messages into their own past. And after a weekend of tinkering, this was her "final draft".
No. Not in theory. In practice.
No, wait. It had to be a fluke, right?
She opened the message as a text file on her laptop, and her eyes widened as she carefully read through the long message.
September 29th, 2024. 3:42 PM
% BLUE
12b DISCONNECT BLUE WIRE POWER SURGE OVER TIME DANGEROUS
She puzzled over the message. It seemed strange that she would send herself something like this instead of something more obvious. And shorter. "TEST" was what she had in mind.
After a bit of debating with herself (the machine did immediately receive a transmission on power-up, after all), she unplugged it and began trying to debug the issue. There was in fact, a blue wire, though it was only that color since it was lying around during assembly and happened to work.
Over the next few hours, she carefully studied her machine plans. She hypothesized that the issue being hinted at was a miscalculation of hers involving time. After all, one generally assumes all processes in a system flow forward, but near the receiver there was one element which flows backwards. Perhaps the energy level decreasing over time, played backwards, meant that there was excess power building up with nowhere to go? Some of her measurements suggested a rupture point was at 14, maybe 15? Maybe "12" was a safe level.
She looked at the message again. Sent today, at 5:15.
The "sent from" timestamp was a courtesy, of course. The system she created didn't have any means of validating that the timestamp was in any way accurate, as the universe did not have an absolute frame of reference when it comes to time, or some means of validating the value provided. But it didn't really matter, after all it's not like she'd lie to herself, so her local system clock (synchronized via NTP) worked fine. And she had no intentions of showing this machine to anyone else, at least not in the first year or so, when she was still experimenting with it. So no worries.
Thus, the timestamp listed was probably accurate. This meant the device, after having been powered on, built up excess charge over an hour-ish, then fried the board. Maybe she built a replica, as a backup. Or "will build". She had the materials for it, she reckoned.
Regardless, she solved the issue with extra grounding for the receiver plate. She turned the device back on, crossing her fingers that she hadn't overlooked anything.
She took some measurements and it all seemed to be correct. She sighed in relief.
There was still the matter of testing it. Sure, it did work, that much was clear. But proper testing. To understand how it worked.
But she had to be careful. Can't introduce paradoxes, can't rely on "knowing" what message you'll send, when receiving it again first could change your mind. The whole weekend she had been theorizing about this, and now it was time to put her ideas into practice.
The goal was to prove a violation of causality. This meant that she had to receive a message, then "randomly" generate the same value after, and have it agree. In essence, the received message had to predict the roll of the dice.
She thought about this problem, and then wrote up a script with her solution. It was a simple, really. Two laptops. One would print any received messages and do nothing else. The other would sleep for one minute, generate a psuedorandom number, and then send that back in time. Both would be disconnected from the network, and them being dumb computers, there were no unconscious effects to worry about.
But the key was to verify that the "randomly-generated data" was correctly "predicted" ahead of time, and this wasn't a case of just copying whatever the output said. When the message was received, Meg would, just to be safe, copy it onto a piece of physical paper. Then after the second computer sent its message, it would print it out. Then all she had to do was to make sure all three values agreed.
She started the script. Immediately, the machine beeped. Right, of course. So far so good. She began copying down the number.
Meg sat anxiously waiting for the minute (she realized it could have been any period of time, say ten seconds, and still worked the same), and then the script would generate a random integer between 1 and 1,000,000,000,000.
The script finished, printing its result.
TEST RAND 262094332721
It matched.
That's it. Causality was broken.
September 29th, 2024. 11:02 PM
% BLUE
After spending nearly five minutes basking in the glow of her success, she got herself a cookie (as a treat) and began working on repeated tests. She shortened the delay and ran the test multiple times. Every time it passed.
Meg grinned.
Her smile vanished when she suddenly remembered her initial distraction. The blue wire message! It was now past 5:15, and she had never sent it!
She briefly considered sending it now, with a spoofed timestamp matching the original message, but she paused. The very fact that she had the option of electing not to send it meant that symmetry was already broken. This timeline was not in sync with her previous one.
Meg had accidentally narrowed down the model of time travel this universe uses.
Grandfather-style paradoxes, thus, were impossible. Once you affected the past, nothing that happened from there on out could affect you in the present. After all, this was clearly the intent behind the blue wire message to begin with, her experiment had gotten spoiled, somehow, and she wanted the next version of her to not fall into the same trap.
So this is what, one-way communication? Except instead of leaving notes for your future self, you're going the other way.
Actually, what exactly happened, or would have happened, had the blue wire message not been sent? Would it have just burnt out the board? She, meaning her alternate self, clearly still had the means of sending messages. Did she have some other information that led to sending that message being an obvious decision? Maybe previous-Meg already knew symmetry was broken, and so didn't care much about letting current-Meg know?
She shook her head.
This was all still too much to take in. And a bit spooky. But it was real! She proved it! She needed to try and wind down for the night and get some rest, and not go off on more wild goose chases.
September 30th, 2024. 8:11 PM
% BLUE
Meg regretted not going to bed earlier. Though honestly, given what happened, who could blame her? In fact why was she here, hearing about casta paintings instead of, I don't know, being sung as a hero and a genius?
No, no. That would make her feel anxious as hell.
But spending more time tinkering with it, or planning, or figuring out what to do with her new powers, she just, she felt invincible. What couldn't she do now, with the right wording?
She had tested it. Her device, as originally constructed, could take seemingly-arbitrarily long messages. It beeped like hell while it processed long ones, but the signal was crisp and clear. No data errors, the Huffman code making sure any noise during transmission was taken care of.
Well, maybe it only received well because the tachyons didn't actually have to travel anywhere. It's the same location! At least relative to the Earth anyways.
I should try a remote test, transmit in one place and receive in another, she thought.
%
?
% BLUE
% begins "journalling"
October 15th, 2024. 9:21 PM
% BLUE
Meg had just exited her Art History lecture hall when she saw a crowd of law enforcement. There were a handful of campus police, one or two actual city cops, and a huge team of FBI agents, if the vests were to be believed. Why so many? They were just standing there.
She felt on edge from the unusual situation, when one of the cops called out.
"Mr. █████ Greer?"
Meg froze. What. No no no no. It can't be, right?
The FBI agents immediately surrounded her. One handcuffed her wrist to theirs, but with a kind of restraint she had never seen before. It was thick and had strange indicator lights on it. Others took her bag and began looking through it, still others patted her down, or scanned her with unusual instruments. They identified and removed her phone, laptop, and wallet. Within it they found her driver's license and student ID. (After seeing the latter, one of the agents gave a quick apology.)
They skipped Mirandizing and brought her to their van. Inside, the agents unholstered their weapons, just as a little reminder. The one still handcuffed to her explained they found some suspicious materials in her apartment. Meg refused to respond, both out of a fear of law enforcement, and because her throat was clamming up. They explained it exhibited behavior which violated natural law. They said that they wanted to talk to her.
Megaera Greer was not held in a jail, nor was she formally arrested. Instead she was taken to a private airstrip a few miles outside town, where a small chartered plane took her and her equipment to Site-17.
October 14th, 2024. 8:07 AM
% ALPHA
Meg frowned. Where was it? She always scheduled her journal entries to arrive at 8 exactly, and here it was, several minutes later, and nothing had arrived. It couldn't be a matter of clock sync. Was her antitelephone broken?
No, a few 10 second causality loop tests showed otherwise. Both sending and receiving were fully operational.
%
September 29th, 2024. 3:37 PM
% ZETA_EARLY
In retrospect, she shouldn't have been surprised. Nevertheless, Meg jolted. She had spent the day assembling her prototype, and it had scarcely been ten seconds since plugging it in before the machine had beeped, indicating that a transmission had been received.
She stared at the message in disbelief. Then in horror.
The girl never to call herself ZETA smashed the machine. She read through the lengthy message several more times, and eventually burned it.
This would be her first and last exposure to the anomalous. No men in suits would ever knock on her door. She took this secret to her grave.
November 16th, 2024. 8:30 AM
% ALPHA_END
Meg had since given up on resistance. Yet she was strapped excessively to this chair, and on this occasion, two armed guards accompanied the medical personnel. The screen in front was currently blank, but soon would be displaying bizarre shapes and colors, a representation of the history of a girl's life. Whether it was the same girl is a matter for the philosphers.
Meg grimaced when she saw one nurse take a syringe, and closed her eyes as it was injected into her body. If she had kept them open, she may have noticed the small "C" printed on the vial from which the medicine was extracted.
Within a few hours, the girl who had once called herself ALPHA was no more.
September 29th, 2024. 5:15 PM
% PREBLUE
Meg was bleeding badly. The alterations she had made to the device, at the recommendation of her future self, were clearly mistaken. Or perhaps she had in some way misconfigured it.
Regardless, it was now broken. The shards of not-crystal were embedded in her ears, face, and left eye.
But a determination drove her. She wasn't going to let herself face this fate again, she would send an addendum to those future recommendations, a follow-up message, which would correct the incorrect specifications in section 12-b of the design document. Or at least her misinterpretation of section 12-b, which her past self was sure to repeat without a change in input. She had the power to fix this.
A full machine was unnecessary. She assembled the portions for a transmitter only, scheduling the quick fix message for eight seconds after the first one was received.
After it was sent, she leaned back. The pain returned when the focus dissipated. She wished in that moment that something would knock her unconscious, never to awake again.
Unbeknownst to her, her makeshift transmitter had subtracted the eight second offset, not added it.
September 29th, 2024. 9:18 PM
% GOOD_END
Meg had reread the message at least three times. She scrutinized every word. Did this all really happen? Could it happen?
But it was all there. The thoughts only she could have, the mistakes only she could make, subtle details from the depths of her mind that nobody else knew about.
It was authentic. She knew what she had to do. There were, it turns out, ways of being yourself beyond even her wildest dreams. Worlds beyond imagining, wonders and horrors beyond what science could explain. It wasn't obsolete, just incomplete.
She felt changed. It was as if, just by reading this document, she was already enlightened. In retrospect, she shouldn't have been surprised by this either. If time travel is possible in the first place, then something this complicated surely is the inevitable result.
Meg took a deep breath.
She gathered her belongings, and began one of her many first journeys to the Library.