treehat

This is …

My gods, this is different. Such archaic devices you use! Strange, very strange indeed.

I suppose I should introduce myself. Or I would, had I a name understandable by your meager senses. I am … a visitor of sorts. My existance is not constrained to you four dimensions - three of space and one of time. Rather, I exist in what can roughly be called Seveice, a "space" comprised of seven dimensions - four of space and three of time. I will admit, however, that the fourth dimension of space is a bit of a tease, even to us, as we cannot move within it much unless we are aided by landscape or machine, much as you cannot much change your position in height unless the ground slopes upward or you hop in an aeroplane.

We are also victims of the landscape of time, but not slaves to it as you are. Blindly, almost arrogantly, you percieve time as a constant, when it is in fact a dimension. Even the dumbest of our idiots know better than that. You even have "timelines," for crying out loud! That almost screams temporal incompetence!

I apologize. That was rude of me. Now, about time. You see, time does not flow, nor march, nor even drag along. It does not move at all. It is, in fact, a landscape. But I'm getting ahead of myself. You must see in two dimensions before you can imagine a third. Imagine, if you will, a flat surface stretching to infinity, much like one of your Cartesian planes. But this is a plane in time, not space. Now, the "horizontal" axis (I will, for simplicity call it the X-axis) represents your perception of time. Highlighted on that line are segments and points, signifying events that have happened, are happening, or will happen. (More on the branching of possible futures later. Just follow along for now.) But look beyond the line, above and below it, and you will see that the points and segments are but the areas where the axis intersects strange yet organic-seeming blotches. (For your sanity, assume the blotches are static. I'm not sure you're ready to think about Multireal Timestates. At least, not without a heavy amount of substances of questionable legality in your bloodstream.) Those blotches are also the events, on all the different possible timelines. This is the timeplane.

I know that look. You think I'm mad, don't you. If so, then I think you're nuts for not being able to grasp this, so the feeling's roughly mutual.

Still not convinced? Alright, then. Imagine a sheet of white fabric. A design is drawn on the fabric in dark red ink. Were you to seperate a single string from the fabric, you would have a white line with red segments on it. Thus, the string is your timeline and the fabric as a whole is the timeplane.

Now toss away that fabric so we can continue. What? Oh, don't worry. I've got a million more of 'em in my backpack.

So, you may now be wondering what all those other timelines are doing. (Literally, they're not doing much at all. Just sittin' there.) In fact, they represent all the alternate realities possible for a one-dimensional time-being (such as yourself) to exist in. The exact nature of timeplanes is, in the simplest terms, really bloody complex. That's like a child asking why the sky is blue: they aren't likely to get an answer, and if they do, they're likely to tilt their head and say "what?" after a hour-long lecture on the atmosphere. That said, I'll talk more about this later. Why? Perhaps because I enjoy suffering. That right there is a true mystery.