Ha-ha! DIAGRAMS!
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This is the discussion related to the wiki page Exit History.
Yeah… I imagine he's had a lot of practice coming up with these.
Neutral vote on my end, but it's close to an upvote. There are a couple problems that are preventing me from upvoting. One is that I flat out do not understand what connection 664 has to the article. I do not understand what escape attempt Ambridge and Thaddeus are discussing. Is Ambridge even…relevant? Or does he just serve as somebody introducing 664 and the whole white plain into the story, because the d-class that Ambridge coached never got to use the white plain? I still don't understand how Ambridge was planning to escape. I also feel that Ambridge's characterization and the Foundation's relationship to him are at odds with the actual 664 article. He's not a petty old man who crosses his arms and snarls when he's beaten.
fuck it, i'm rereading the interview with the JR, and I still don't get it. I was under the impression that the time travel rules for this story were "one timeline only" but I guess not because if McDougal dies in March, in what universe is he working for the Foundation in April? What temporal relation does the car accident have to anything?
…well, rereading it, I guess I have a better understanding of the 664 relation now. You use 664 to get into 2400 without having to use the door, and then you use the door to get out? Something like that? But in the end the JR just seems to be conventionally time-traveled; I don't see what influence 2400 had on him, unless we're talking about the "causal isolation" thing. But that doesn't make sense, because even if the JR is causally isolated while going through 2400, I don't see how this prevents him from getting killed in a car accident. It's not like the car accident is analogous to the murderer in the stick figure scenario, unless it was a time travelling car accident.
also, this didn't influence my decision at all, but a time travel model where the future is retroactively wiped doesn't seem to make sense. it permits paradoxes. event A causes time travel event B, which travels backwards in time and prevents event A from happening. The future worldline "changes instantaneously" but that doesn't matter, because event B has already been completed by the time the worldine has changed. Event A doesn't happen so time travel event B can't happen. You have a universe in which event B both happens and does not happen.
…whatever.
regardless of time travel bullshit, I would still probably neutral vote because the prose is kind of clunky in a few places. The dialogue tag use isn't that elegant, adjectival phrases are kind of just sewn onto the tags here and there, and I'm never a fan of more than, like, two non-said/asked tags in any given work. On the other hand, the dialogue itself is serviceable, and the Keter scene was amusing. And I have to give props for complicated time travel stories even if I don't think they make sense. So it's a neutral vote.
I originally had this upvoted because there's definitely some cool stuff here, particularly the diagrams, but… after rereading, I don't think I understand most of the key plot points.
if your reading this your gay
Basically, all of the issues Chubert mentioned. Maybe I'm just not set up to understand the time travel stuff used here, but I'm not following the logical progression of the story.
if your reading this your gay
It might help if I told you that the white plain itself isn't a place unto its own so much as it is the space between places and times. Some points of entry have a stable relationship to this time-like "hub", and some do not. 2400 has a stable point of entry. 664 has an unstable one which comes and goes. With a little bit of foreknowledge, you can use the hub to navigate around the timeline, so long as you know where/when you're going in, and where/when you're coming out.
Hope that helps :/
This ending, Xyank's request, I did not see it coming, although in retrospect it makes perfect sense and I should have seen it as soon as Xyank brought up causal isolation. It's very clever, and even time dilation is not a problem because you can just TempEx yourself into when you where still in 2400 as soon as you come out of it. Or establish the base before the Foundation secured 2400 by TempExing from within 2400. Either way, the base is now causally isolated from history and you can just erase yourself, just like Xyank just now erased McDougal, and then erase the whole Δ-t, directly leading to 1780. It all fits together very nicely. Oh, right, and now I get the title.
Timeline-A progresses the same way as in this tale, up to Xyank talking about a third frame of reference (third paragraph after the last diagram). The subsequent events, primarily McDougal appearing from 2400, never happen in this timeline. 3 days after his talk with Anborough, Xyank instructs McDougal to use 664 to travel into 2400, in order to test the theory of them being connected. McDougal successfully does so, thereby creating Timeline-B.
In Timeline-B, McDougal's presence is not yet a paradox, but merely a stable loop. As long as the original McDougal still enters 664 three days later, the loop is closed and everything is fine. However, the existence of the second McDougal causes some unknown chain of events that would eventually lead to the death of the first McDougal the year before. This could be as simple as Xyank traveling back and killing him to test 2400's causal isolation, although I think that would be somewhat OOC for Xyank. It could as well be a butterfly-effect type of thing, with small changes occurring centuries before and after the events of the tale, eventually accumulating and causing the death of McDougal-1. Either way, now he is dead and Timeline-C is created.
The events of the tale take place entirely in Timeline-C. This timeline is paradoxical, as it contains elements from two mutually exclusive sets of events: McDougal-1 entering 664 and exiting 2400 three days before; and McDougal-1 dying a year before those events, and McDougal-2 never having existed. In Timeline-C, McDougal-1 is long dead, but McDougal-2 still exists, which is a paradox, and paradoxes are bad.
At least that's how I understood it.
+1
Not quite. No reason to kill him if you can prevent him from ever being known to anyone in the Foundation simply by cutting him out of the hiring process right before the interview.
Much more ethical that way. That he died was an unfortunate coincidence.
Further more, you only need two iterations of history for it to work. If you want me to draw it out for you, I can.
All images used in this tale are my own creations, and are released with the rest of the work under CC/BY/SA/3.0.
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page revision: 7, last edited: 17 Nov 2020 06:16
