Reality
He walked into the lecture room and eyed the group of eager young apprentices looking expectantly towards him.
‘My name is Jarod Xu. I am here to tell you something about our work so that you can decide if you want to join us and also for us to see if you are suitable for the work. Our duty is to keep the maximum number of humans from harm and to allow them to live happily in their Reality without them becoming aware of our existence.
I am a time technician in the Chrono Corps; as you can see by the emblem on my top with two capital ‘C’s with the arrow of time passing through them. My job is to apply the corrections in Reality as they are planned by the Temporal Planning Committee. I generally cover about 100,000 years backwhen and forwardwhen from what we casually call ‘Now’ - although, of course, ‘Now’ doesn’t have a separate existence from the past or present. As Einstein once said, ‘"people like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between Past, Present and Future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” Sometimes we have to work out of our areas when a major correction is required to be carried out.
We operate backwhen to the start of the Cambrian period some 540 million years ago when life was just starting on the Earth and forwardwhen to what you would call the 30th century. Further forwardwhen from that it gets a bit speculative as we have no results of corrections to work with.
Yes, Apprentice, you have a question?’
‘Yes, Sir. Isn’t implementing these corrections interfering with the human freedom of choice?’
‘Don’t call me Sir, I work for a living and yes, it does interfere but consider the fact that, if we never did corrections, the human race wouldn’t exist. You will understand this if you allow me to get on and tell you the story of two corrections, one large and one small.
I was sent for by the TPC some time ago. They told me that the human race was in danger of not existing as the dinosaurs were starting to dominate the Earth so that there was no room for mammals to evolve. Their plan was to change the orbit of a bolide that was in the asteroid belt such that it moved into a trans-Earth orbit and so would eventually collide with the Earth. It impacted in the Cretaceous at Chixulub, caused a lot of damage and threw up dust clouds into the atmosphere that lasted for several years. Most plants died off and the dinos starved to death as a species. A few small shrew-like animals survived and the mammals started to evolve from these as the Earth slowly recovered from the impact.
The second correction I want to talk about is Professor Susan Whitemore who worked as a quantum physicist and was on the verge of creating a device that could see outside Reality and so expose and threaten all the work we had been doing. I gently steered her, whilst a student at Bristol, away from physics towards biology and the quantum effects of evolution and photosynthesis.
Another question, apprentice?’ sighed Jared.
‘What relevance has the old paradox idea of going back in time and killing your own grandfather?’
‘Reality is very resistant to change, rather like honey in a jar. If you dip in a spoon and take out a spoonful of honey, a depression will be left in the surface. This depression will then fill in over time until the flat surface is restored. Reality is similar in that it will always try to restore the previously existing Reality. We take this effect into account during the design of the correction.
As I said earlier on, there is really no such thing as ‘Now’ in Reality because it is squeezed between Past and Present, Humans can only live in the ‘Now’, but we can travel into the Past and Future - we call them Backwhen and Forwardthen. It can be summed up by an old poem:
*
What is Now ?
A three second line, said poet
Depends where you are, said astronomer
What you want it to be, said philosopher
The moment you are living, said spiritualist
That little part of life, which he now lives, said emperor
Whatever man, said the skunk smoker
What future brings, said Past
What past hides, will say Future
Me, always, says Now
*
You could also ask the question, ‘What is now?’
Send a person to stand on the sun, OK, be kind, give him asbestos boots, with instructions to shout ‘Now’ at the same time as you. Stand in your garden on a cloudless day and look at the sun through smoked glass. Can you see him? Are you ready? Shout ‘Now’ and wait. 18 minutes later you see him shout back ‘Now’. The question is, ‘why did he wait so long? Look at it from his point of view, your now is when you shouted and his is 18 minutes later. We now (!) have three ‘Now’s. Which one is the real ‘Now’?
It depends on your point of view and which Reality you are in.
*
‘Always remember the motto of the Time Techs, “Reality is only for those with no imagination.”’
‘I hope that is of some help to you and I am happy to try to answer any questions you may have.’
‘What would happen if the humans became aware of our existence and our corrections?’
‘That has happened many times over the history of the humans so we invented the ideas of faeries, ghosts. apparitions, poltergeists, gods etc. The humans have generally accepted this but as education improves we may have a problem in Reality in the Forwardthen, which we will have to deal with by designing a suitable correction.’
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