The Future They Made Us Forget, chapter 13

Chapter Thirteen: if you stop the bad guys, then you never existed / time travel is so easy, you could have done it in the Iron Age

[all (Kayla Marvin Reggie Simon Ethel) are gathered in the conference room. Previous chapter ended by having them ask what’s going on, and agreeing to bring Ontoh up on the main screen so that they can be debriefed. Stowaway explains:] [Okay so the most important thing for you to know is how to duplicate yourself using time travel, so that you can multiply your resources and have any chance to do anything about Nochli.] [No, you don’t tell us what to do, you have to tell us what’s going on.] [Fine, I can tell you the history.] [Nochli found a time machine from 3000 years ago – wait, Time Machine from 3000 years ago?? Yes, it is very easy to make Time Machine’s! Your Time Machine is absurdly, unnecessarily complicated, because of how the huvith were interfering with your brains. All you need is a spherical vessel made of certain alloys, the simplest being iron and Argon –

“wait a minute. Argon? I only took basic chemistry, but even I know the noble gases don’t react with anything!”

[Of course you would think that! You need to start getting used to have everything you know is wrong because it was interfered with by the huvith! It’s astonishing that your culture was even able to learn chemistry, when such a basic fact was suppressed.

Anyway, it’s literally that simple; nowadays it is extremely easy because you have distillation of argon from the atmosphere, but it could even be done in ancient times, just by repeatedly heating and pounding an iron vessel in a forge while blowing air over it using a bellows, and the argon affixes itself out of the air. The first such vessel was made by accident, and was then buried in an avalanche, and stayed undisturbed underground for thousands of years before Nochli discovered it. And that brings us to where we are now.]

[Wait, how did Nochli bring giant blimps if it was just a little metal vessel that was buried? You don’t remotely understand our technology. They only brought embryos of the blimps and then grew them on-site, but anyway, you can easily bring larger objects in smaller time machines, just by using a vessel that can expand and contract. You [Ontoh tries to explain the process of putting one time machine inside another to do this, but now’s not the time yet, everyone is confused]] [In the original timeline, it was another 1200 years before people learned how to _activate_ such a vessel, but once they did, it was not so long before they learned its full potential: people began [attitude: the obvious thing you would do, the only sensible thing] duplicating themselves, and soon [positive connotations] conquered and developed the entire world. Our timeline has a population of [trillions] and the Earth’s entire surface is densely packed with time machines, unlike you pathetically limited culture, and we used it to breed much better biological organisms, human and otherwise] [Main characters outraged by human breeding here? Possibly a good time to learn more about how evil Ontoh is] [Millions of subjective years of human breeding; they did it because there was nothing stopping them, just like we do with animals [in our world, humans can fight back but animals can’t; in their world, non-time travelling humans couldn’t fight back either]] [was this the inevitable future of humanity, if the ability to duplicate yourself became publicly known?] [Ontoh says it’s inevitable that the broadly accepted morality will be collective self-interest of those who can fight back (“just like how your society accepts breeding and slaughter of animals”); Kayla could relate collective self-interest to the Ring of Gyges story, but objects to the idea that morality is about the ability to fight back, and says [the powerful should do the right thing to the helpless]. Narrator remarks on this (“someone who was able to truly believe that you should do the right thing even if there would be no consequences… someone who had the [mental fortitude] to advocate for animals even in our society”)] [Here or later: how should we think of Ontoh, who is essentially a slaveowner who grew up in a society of slaveowners? Ontoh believes it’s the inevitable order of the world, and trying to stop slavery from happening is foolish (in Huvinthu it was only banned because of worries about rebellions). Marvin(?) agonizes about whether they’re a product of their society; Kayla insists that they are Evil (“you can just look at what’s happening and figure out what’s good and evil! I can tell that my own society is evil [in the treatment of prisoners, children, animals, etc.], so they can tell that their society is evil, they just choose not to”)] [Anyway, Nochli have a silly/wasteful hobby of studying history, and that’s only discovered this Time Machine. They did loads of engineering to be able to actually repeat 3000 years of heistory, using this as basically a social experiment, and preventing anyone else from learning time travel because of course they would blow the budget.] [But they became unreasonably lucky with their stupid plan, because your society somehow managed to discover technology we didn’t, like computers, nuclear weapons, and space travel. What’s going to happen is that at the conclusion of this little experiment, Nochli will return from this timeline to theirs, and then possess all the technology of both worlds; your world will cease to exist, and ours will be conquered by Nochli, because they get first access to your world’s technology.] [We need a better word than calling it “the main timeline”. What’s it called in your language? “It’s just the main timeline! Why would we have a word for the only world that existed, as opposed to one that didn’t? If you must, call it by our word for ‘main timeline’: Salnthu. Now, YOUR timeline has a name. Nochli gave it one while they were planning its existence; this timeline’s great work is the ‘huvith’, named after Nochli’s word for a fence to keep livestock from wandering out of the field. And when they referred to the timeline they were creating, they called it ‘huvinthu’, which basically means ‘huvith world’.” ’the fenced-in world’.] [M: so we’re basically sheep, then?] [But how do we know Nochli are evil? They are just hanging around in the sky, we only have Ontoh’s word for it that they are evil] [As before, Kayla thinks their inaction makes them evil] [Marvin’s theory: What if they understood that their world was evil, and concluded that they would inevitably end up with a world like that as long as time travel was possible? So when they got the opportunity to replace their world, they decided to give humanity a new history, where they got to develop however they would have developed without time travel, and Nochli oversee it? Remember, Ontoh didn’t understand Nochli. And Ontoh isn’t trustworthy, they have every reason to convince us that Nochli is evil] [Anyway you only have a few months to do something about Nochli, because the present time in Salnthu was only a few months from now, so when we reach that time, this world won’t be able to continue existing.]

Our entire world was going to cease to exist??

Yeah and even if you could kill all Nochli, it’s Nochli’s own time machines that are making this world continue to exist, so you would instantly and permanently cease to exist

[How the heck are we going to do anything against Nochli? Anything we do in this world will just get reverted. Well, the only access we have is that Nochli possesses time machines that go back to Salnthu. – Only intended to be big enough for written messages. MARVIN: well, let’s see, they made resizable time machines before, right? What if we made a resizable time machine that was even more miniaturized, using Huvinthu technology, and snuck it into their messages? The time machine could even contain us, like, secret agents, to infiltrate Salnthu. ONTOH: Huvinthese secret agents, absurd. what are you planning to do? If you jump out on the other side, they will just revert you that way anyway; I have plenty of Ontohs in their base already, but the only way I’d be able to do anything is if we can exfiltrate the Huvinthu technology to Ontoh before Nochli get to use it; maybe you could build an extremely fast message delivery system? ...allowing Ontoh to get there first doesn’t seem any better, since they are evil, and our world still gets destroyed...

KAYLA: Bomb Salnthu. “What?” Do miniaturized time machines like you said, but have them expand to contain loads of bombs, and blow up the entire world. If they all die at once, they can’t time travel to prevent it, right?

But then our world will still be destroyed too!

[Kayla had recognized how evil Salnthu was; she was much better able to picture of the scale of the evil, and now her top priority was to bring it to an end, at all costs]

Kayla: No matter what we do, our entire world is going to be erased in a few months. At the very least, we shouldn’t let Salnthu continue to exist either. Destroying all time machines, and all living things, is better than letting Salnthu continue to exist for so much as a nanosecond.

[Wait, we were talking about destroying Ontoh too, what if Ontoh heard?

ONTOH [even if the main characters muted them, Ontoh figures out what they were talking about]: what you don’t understand is that I’m going to support you 100% because there is no other hope for me. If Nochli get the technology, it is an absolute certainty that all Ontoh will be eliminated; Nochli have been clear that they want to eliminate all Ontoh rather than even keep them as takir. So it is in our interest to gamble on your ability to achieve anything at all; if you attempt to bomb our world been maybe there’s a tiny chance that you only manage to bomb Nochli’s territory, and that’s a better chance than we’ll have without you. You might as well be fully open with me so that I can help.

[Come on, there has to be a way for Huvinthu cultures to continue existing! [two Earths plan]] [Marvin: Okay so hear me out, if we can duplicate ourselves and do lots of time travel, we can basically spend loads of time engineering the perfect solution, right? So… How big a time machine can you make?

Ontoh: a very large Time Machine would be a waste of space, but there’s no technical upper limit, it’s actually more stable the larger you get, because the argonian bubble has lower curvature

[maybe Chapter title: just put the entire earth in a time machine, what’s the problem?]

Marvin: so. We can just build a time machine around the entire Earth. And then uhhhh somehow make the bubble contract, I mean, the time machine with already seen has a hole in the side, right? So we could pull the time machine off the earth, then contracted to a small size, then put it inside a smaller Time Machine. Then put that smaller Time Machine in another smaller Time Machine, and so on, until the earth is inside a grain of sand. Then sneak the grain of sand into Nochli’s Time Machine and send it back to Salnthu, and they won’t know that the earth is in it. Then… Well I guess it also has to be a nanobot. We’ve almost invented nanobots, right? With infinite resources for research,, maybe we can get there. So than the nanobot flies up into the sky, maybe it floats into the sky, and then when it’s too high up to see, it unfolds into a larger Time Machine, and then another larger one, until it’s a rocket, which flies to a different place in the arts orbit, so we can put the earth there, in addition to Salnthu’s earth. Put it on the other side of the sun, so they won’t discover it until long after we’ve had time to tell Huvinthu humans about the probable coming war with the other planet

[Everyone impressed and/or “that’s crazy” about this idea. But the obvious thing is that they can’t get started on it right away, and so they need to figure out practical next steps] [Also, what are we going to do with the rest of the evil scientists?] [Kayla to Ethel: [the co-author], do you need him for the physics?] [Ethel, dignified: “if I say I don’t need him, are you going to kill him?”] [Reginald: of course not, we’re not going to kill anybody. Meanwhile,] [Kayla: kill [all the evil ones we don’t need to keep]. Argument about this proceeds, until Aster says:]

“How many times?” said a voice.

[Took me a little while to realize it was Aster, since they’d spoken from Reginald mouth but the sound was different. [Or move this paragraph earlier, if they speak earlier.] Anyway, ] [“How many times do you want to kill them? We could save them up in the past so that you can kill them as many times as you want. You could even kill me a few times, since I think you haven’t gotten to do that in your current body?”] [Reginald wrestling back control over the mouth, “I will not allow any such thing, how dare you even consider such monstrous acts of cruelty –”] [But Reginald had missed the point Aster was making, while Kayla had understood. Defensively, “it’s not about that! We need to kill them because [rationalizations!]” but basically she was backpedaling. Rationalizations are probably about: we can’t risk having them try anything, and what if they leak to Nochli?] [But from the outside world’s perspective you’re talking about making them “missing persons”, won’t that attract attention as well? Most pragmatic thing is to make it as unremarkable from the outside world as possible] [Doctor Wright provided the solution. "Phrehibican-55 wears off after a week if you don’t repeat the dose, as we found out to our chagrin with [oblique reference to back story]. If we hold them for a week, we can send them home with no memory of the specifics of recent months.] [... What about Fuller?] [Hell no, we are not messing with the paradoxes again!] [Ontoh deliberately doesn’t mention how they could bring him back later if they wanted, but maybe they figure it out on their own]