The Future They Made Us Forget, chapter 9

Chapter Nine: first_time

title: What Happened the First Time (That We Knew About (Yet))

[Our divergence point was when/everything was the same for them until: when we got the message from them, and they didn’t. Marvin-Zero and Kayla-Zero didn’t have instructions about what to do, so they had to figure everything out themselves, while they were terrified of when the bad guys were going to find them out

“Why are they calling themselves Marvin Zero?” asked the Kayla next to me.

“It’s a programmer thing. In programming, you usually start counting from zero. It makes sense for this because they’re the ones who’ve used the time machine zero times.”

[They argued about what to do, but then They had a smart idea. If they locked themselves IN the time machine room, then it was safe for them to spend more time deciding what to do, because if anything bad started to happen, they could just go back in time] [So they turned the cameras back on and checked all the cameras to find a route to the time machine room that no one was watching. A completely understandable choice, but it was their first mistake. [Note: do I explain the reasons here, or below? Probably below. But still hook that it was a mistake]] [They waited in the time machine room, Marvin made a script to notify them if anyone logged in to the security console – their second mistake. ~~and put Tape over the security camera (“the lights were off before, they won’t be able to tell the difference”)~~ They spent hours discussing what to do, ]

But when you don’t know what to do, and you have plenty of time to argue, you will inevitably argue until time forces your hand. At 4:06 PM, [Marvin’s script finally notified them. Marvin checked the records, and that’s how they found the meeting room; he started watching the meeting, where the scientists were actively discussing what to do about their missing test subject having seen that, Marvin and Kayla].

[Luckily for us, Dr. Fuller had completely misjudged the situation. As he saw it, the situation was:] His test subject had escaped, which was an inconvenience at worst. But worse, someone had deleted the critical footage. And who had access to the security system? Only the six people in that very room. By the time Marvin-Zero opened the camera, Fuller was angrily interrogating them, not letting any of them leave. He rounded on each of them in turn, accusing them of insubordination. [He had failed not only at the physical security, but also at threat modeling: He never considered that the escaped Kayla could be dangerous to him. [He was certain that one of them had betrayed him.]]

And that meant Zeroes had more time. They knew they had to escape into the past – but they didn’t need to escape immediately. They could wait until the argument stopped and the scientists started actually looking for them. So Marvin kept one eye on the meeting while also studying the time machine, making sure they wouldn’t make any mistakes. Critically, it was a full 48 minutes before they actually departed – although they had no idea how important that would be.

Just like us, their first trip took them to the earliest possible time, 3:06 AM. [Which made them Kayla-One and Marvin-One] Like us, they hid in the time machine room until [the night worker] passed by. There, shivering in the stark [environment], they hatched a plan:

• Watch every camera, to see exactly when everyone came and went.
• Sneak into Dr. Fuller’s office and steal the gun which Kayla had seen him keep there.
• Wait outside the meeting room until 5:04, the moment Zeroes were no longer watching.
• Kill every single one of the monsters who were in charge of this place.

When Kayla-One had said that last point, Marvin-One hadn’t questioned it. He was still reeling from what he’d heard during the meeting, the callous way the scientists had talked about the human beings they were holding prisoner. He agreed: They had to die.

But once Kayla-One and Marvin-One thought about the details of the plan, they started to realize their mistakes. Maybe they could sneak through the building without being seen by the scientists… but what if Kayla-Zero and Marvin-Zero saw them, on the cameras? Then Ones would be changing their own past, causing a paradox. If Zeroes saw something different than the first time, then they’d make different choices, and it wouldn’t be the same people who got into the time machine to become Ones.

As the Marvin in the video (Marvin-Five, apparently) explained this, he commented, “Marvin’s going to be wondering about the butterfly effect.”

I had been too absorbed to think of it, but as soon as he said “butterfly effect”, I saw the problem. It should have been impossible for Marvin-One to not change Marvin-Zero. Even in stories with pretentious narration about the butterfly effect, they usually underestimate how powerful it is. Every footstep, every breath of air, would cause tiny ripples that spread throughout the building, and beyond. And tiny changes lead to big changes. At the human scale, it’s familiar: A lucky accident leads to a scientific discovery, a chance encounter decides the fate of nations, a tossed cigarette starts a fire that burns down an entire forest. At the molecular scale, it’s even more so. Disturb a single atom, and it disturbs its neighbors, and they disturb their neighbors, until everything is different.

People like to ask hypothetical questions about how their lives would be different, if society had been different in the past. But the physicist’s answer is, if a single atom had been different a year before you were born, you would never have been born. Your parents might not conceive a child; if they did, a different sperm would unite with the egg, making the child your sibling instead of your self. By the time the child was grown up, society would be unrecognizable. There would be a different president, different slang, different new inventions.

“With these time machines, it doesn’t work out that way,” explained Marvin. “For Ones, it was all guesswork, but they were, uh, basically right, I guess. Aster’s notes call it the ‘impressioning effect’, like if you draw something on a piece of paper, then erase it. You can redraw something completely different if you want to – but if you start drawing almost the same thing as before, your pencil settles into the groove it left in the paper the first time. The time machine ‘remembers’ what happened the first time, and guides us into the groove we left. It’s too small to notice, but it’s enough to keep the butterfly effect from breaking everything.”

[But Ones still had to avoid making changes that were big enough for Zeros to notice. So they spent their first loop starting to make the map, amount of exactly where everyone was at every time – a map that they had given to us in the zip file. This time, they had the sense to not repeat their mistake: Marvin-One only checked the cameras in places where he already knew he wasn’t planning to go. He even wrote a script to download the camera history only at exact times, without accidentally looking at other times. And While Marvin-Zero was using the security cameras to find their route to the time machine room, Marvin-One was watching the security server logs, checking the exact times and cameras where Marvin-Zero accessed the footage. [And then, in order to go back in time again, they had to get into the time machine room. But Zeros had been in the time machine room for hours, so Ones had to sneak in right after they left, etc.] [And then they had to sleep? Although I imagine they didn’t sleep very well. And they kept having to locate more food that they could steal without drawing attention. They didn’t dare leave the building to go shopping, as they recommended for us to do, because they’d be changing the history of anyone who saw them outside the building, and if any of THOSE people posted anything online that anyone inside the building was going to see, it could disturb k+m past] [[No, they should START saying this, then get interrupted by Ontoh inducing fear in them: “it was odd, they were suddenly terrified by the idea of leaving the building” (they both agreed on it and didn’t discuss why much)] “But you can get away with it, because your past doesn’t extend beyond around noon yet. If you leave the building right after the time you got in the time machine, then none of your side effects will interfere with your own past. As long as you get back, and get in the time machine again, before 4 PM, you’ll be pretty much safe. The side effects may make our map less reliable for you, but they won’t cause a paradox for YOU”] [At some point: “yeah, you’re going to need a different numbering system”] [Anyway, they searched the building; after Twos slept, hunger caught up with them, and that’s when they found Simon’s break room; they spent the rest of that cycle taking care of themselves, ish] [Next loop they made the map even better. They followed everyone around using the cameras, getting the locations of all the PEOPLE in the building, so that every OTHER location was fair game (no one could be there except for Marvins/Kaylas, but Marvins/Kaylas COULD be there because it was undecided). And as for the gap when the cameras were off… Zeros hadn’t actually _observed_ that they were still off, so the moment Marvin-Zero turned off the security cameras, Marvin-Three turned them on again.] [After some number of loops, they were ready to execute their plan. They were going to steal Fuller’s gun, get into position, then wait until the exact moment Zeros stopped looking at the scientists, then move in and shoot them.] [Marvin didn’t think he could go through with pulling the trigger himself, but he was willing to teach Kayla. I had grown up around guns – my father, before his passing, took me and my brothers to a shooting range every week, and taught us to respect the power and danger of the weapon. Unlike my brothers, I had never gotten a kick out of waving guns around ... Kayla was a good student and took it seriously (Marvin to Marvin: “don’t let her general anger fool you, she DOES NOT lose her temper; every time she held the gun, she kept complete situational awareness at all times”)]

“I’m so glad I kept doing the physical therapy exercises even when I was in the [holding room], otherwise I would never have been able to lift the gun and pull the trigger. I never realized how much force it takes to pull a trigger”

[Possible section break with big hook (“but the plan went all wrong” ish?)? But at 4:06 , when they took their positions in the hallway outside the meeting room, Simon thought he heard a noise [which was actually Ontoh; (“we were really quiet! and we were waiting fifty feet down the hall! there’s no way they could have heard us!”)] and came out to look in the hall, which hadn’t happened any of the previous times. Simon saw them and shouted a warning [he knew we were time travelers because they’d just seen us on cams?], Kayla shot him, and then shot the other scientists as they tried to escape and/or cower.] [As Kayla-Five described her she’d killed the scientists, the Kayla next to me ????? An expression of unmistakable pride ????? The revelation, already somewhat expected due to the gun and blood, that the Kayla in the video had killed real, living people. I felt disturbed by it/dissociated, feeling at a distance from things. But the Kayla crouching next to me was watching with rapt attention. In awe/admiration of the version of herself who had succeeded (?). The promise that killing those people – the ones who had held her captive – was within her power.] [But one of the scientists hadn’t been like the others. Reggie, who, before being shot, stayed seated and calmly wrote down something on a scrap of paper.]

“Reggie, I thought he was evil like the rest of them, but maybe it’s more complicated. The last thing he did before he died – literally while I was shooting all of them – he wrote… well, you can look at it.” Video-Kayla held something up to the camera – a slightly crumpled sticky note, with some gibberish hastily scrawled across it in ballpoint pen. And under the gibberish, it said, “LAPTOP PASSWORD – TIME TRAVELERS YOU NEED THIS”.

[And in the room full of bodies, once the shooting was over, they had time to panic about the other thing: the time travel issue. They had started their attack too early, [and they knew knew Zeros had been watching this exact room, meaning that Zeros would now be seeing them – One of the monitors in the meeting room was even open onto the security cameras in the time machine room, so they could see themselves watching themselves [wait, maybe that was blacked out?] – so they had changed their own past. / Or is it that they interrupted the meeting BEFORE the scientists checked the cameras, meaning that Zeroes would still be arguing (also a paradox)?] What did that mean for them? Why did they still exist?]

Desperate for answers, [they looked at the note Reggie had left, as it made him sound like someone who knew what needed to be done]. [They opened his laptop and found a document called Aster’s Notes.]

[Maybe put PoV Marvin reading asters notes here: "Aster’s notes were also included in the zip file they’d sent us. They were… [Move some of the description from next chapter to here?: Asters notes are extremely disorganized, lots of half formed sentences, using scientific terms that don’t exist anywhere on the Internet. The scribblings of a genius, incomprehensible to us normal people.]] [And what Fours had learned from the notes, just in time to not ruin everything… The delay of 48 minutes had been lucky. Because [partial explanation]. Now they needed to go back in time AGAIN, before the time when their original selves would fail to go back. They hurried to do that, convinced Zeros to let them past (invited Zeros along with them? “It’s a paradox anyway, it won’t matter either way” – no, they were too much in a hurry, probably)] [K: “... So anyway, it’s going to be over for us soon [which is a relief], now it’s you two’s chance to do it without a paradox”] [M: demoralized uhhhh] [K: what?] [M: we don’t even know why Simon came out the door. They’ll only be able to fix the mistakes that we know about. How do we know how many more bugs there are? What if they’re doomed too?] [What did he hear, anyway? (We were in a hurry and couldn’t get the recording) Wait, could we just watch it again _now_? No, how do we know we wouldn’t cause another paradox? We’d better just stick to the plan / (or, instead:) wouldn’t it be in our recording? holy heck, I probably never even turned that recording off, the device is still on! [They don’t hear Ontoh scratching the door, (" yeah I don’t know what Simon heard, but we’ll give it to PoV’s in case they can figure it out) but PoV characters do hear it]]

“I trust Marvin with my life. [Little pause] He works best if you get him talking about ‘threat modeling’. He’ll know what that means.”

[End of chapter (the below is a canceled approach, although we may still use bits and pieces of it]

?????

“We went back in time, just like you’re about to do,” she said. “We went back in time over and over. And we were careful. We made sure not to let our own past selves see us, or do anything that would change what happened to them. We didn’t let anyone use the time machines except for us. And we – I – killed the scientists who created them.”

[????? An expression of unmistakable pride ????? The revelation, already somewhat expected due to the gun and blood, that the Kayla in the video had killed real, living people. I felt disturbed by it/dissociated, feeling at a distance from things. But the Kayla crouching next to me was watching with rapt attention. In awe/admiration of the version of herself who had succeeded (?). The promise that killing those people – the ones who had held her captive – was within her power.]

“But somehow, we must have made a mistake. [????? When we were done killing them, we noticed that the original Kayla and Marvin hadn’t gone back in time the way we had. Somehow, they must have seen one of the changes we made. And so they made different choices. They were still arguing about what to do. They were supposed to go back in time to become us, but if we let them go back in time ?????, they would become a new version of us. They would do different things than we did. And everything we did would be forgotten by history.

“And worse, they would meet the same fate we did. Because in the new timeline, with them instead of us, the first Kayla and Marvin wouldn’t see the same changes we made. They’d be different again. It would be an endless loop of them almost winning, then having it all wiped away again.

“But there’s a way to fix it. Reggie had some notes on his computer – God damn Reggie, I thought he was evil like the rest of them, but maybe it’s more complicated. The last thing he did before he died – literally while I was shooting all of them – he wrote… well, you can look at it.” Video-Kayla held something up to the camera – a slightly crumpled sticky note, with some gibberish hastily scrawled across it in ballpoint pen. And under the gibberish, it said, “LAPTOP PASSWORD – TIME TRAVELERS YOU NEED THIS”.

“So we looked on his laptop. We found a file full of notes. And the notes, they said how you could make a stable loop. So that’s what we’re trying to do now. That’s where you come in. We’ve gone back in time again, and we’re going to send you this video, and the notes, and some other files. And then after you go back in time, you can send the same files again, to yourself. Marvin made a script that you can use, to send them at the exact same time we’re sending them. And then things will be the same for the next version of you – the same as they are for the first version of you. We’ll be gone – we might be already gone when you hear this – but you don’t have to disappear.”

[????? “So the first thing you need to keep in mind – you don’t want to change your past, but right now, you ARE the past version. So that means you don’t want to BE changed. Which basically means, don’t look at anything you don’t have to. If you look at something, and then you go back and change it, that’s a problem. But if you didn’t look at it, it’s fine to change it. Of course, after you’ve gone back in time once, you’ll be the future for one version of you, but the past for others. The rule is – you can always look at what your past selves are doing, but you don’t want to look at anywhere you think your future selves might be.]