Happening Again
“Choke on that, causality!” shouted Minuette as she disappeared into an all too familiar time portal over the cutie map, laughing maniacally all the while.
“What.” Twilight stood open-mouthed in the doorway of the map room, staring in shock as the portal disappeared. The book she had been carrying as she entered fell forgotten to the floor.
“No, no, no!” She looked frantically around the room for the spell parchment which had dropped out of the portal when Starlight had tried this. “Not again!” she protested. “I just got finished with this stuff!”
And why Minuette, of all ponies? Since reconnecting with her old school friends, she’d found Minuette to be much like a saner version of Pinkie Pie. A sweet, happy-go-lucky pony who cared for her friends. Practically the opposite of Starlight. This just didn’t make any sense.
And where was that scroll? After several minutes of searching, Twilight realised with a sinking feeling that there wasn’t one this time. Starlight had told her she dropped it on purpose when she did it, hadn’t she? There wasn’t actually any reason there had to be a way to follow Minuette.
Not only that, but as she looked around the room, she could see that nothing appeared to have changed. Shouldn’t things have changed if Minuette went back in time? Not even her memories seemed to have changed. Maybe her memories were protected by having used the spell before, when she dueled with Starlight? Or would she not even notice if her memories had changed? Or… surely being able to remember Minuette’s time travel meant her memories couldn’t have changed? Ugh. Time travel hurt her head.
With those panic-inducing thoughts in mind, Twilight left the map room to make a whirlwind tour of the castle. Her bedroom was exactly as she’d left it, and her bedtime reading was bookmarked in exactly the spot she expected. The library was still in the partially-reshelved state she’d last seen it in, and again the book she was currently studying lay open to the last page she remembered reading. In the kitchen, she did discover that the case of doughnuts she had been saving had disappeared, but that seemed more likely to be Spike-related than time travel-related.
With the evidence of the castle search inconclusive of any changes, Twilight made her way to the front door, intending to expand her search to Ponyville, and to her friends in particular. Opening the door, however, she was greeted by the smiling face of Minuette, paused in the act of knocking on the door.
“Aaah!” Twilight yelled. Reacting with the instincts of a pony who didn’t want to end up encased in crystal yet again, Twilight instantly cast a spell. Minuette made no effort to dodge, and in short order found herself floating in front of Twilight in a pink bubble of magic.
“Are you mad that I’m late for lunch, Twilight?” Minuette’s normal irrepressible good humour didn’t seem affected in the slightest by being held in a force bubble, or by Twilight’s somewhat less stable than usual demeanour. “You know, a very wise pony once said that time is an illusion, and lunchtime doubly so.” She nodded sagely to herself.
Twilight felt a twitch in her right eye. She had, in fact, been expecting Minuette an hour ago. She might have expected though to find her at the front door instead of in the map room, in the process of disappearing into a time portal. Of course that was where she had found… um... this Minuette.
Were the two Minuettes separate ponies? If history had been changed, this Minuette mightn’t even remember having done it. Or… could that have been, say, a changeling she’d seen pretending to be Minuette? This was getting way too complicated. Maybe the best course of action was just to ask directly?
“Alright,” said Twilight, “this might sound weird, but I’ve just seen somepony who looks just like you vanish into a time portal.”
“Oooooh,” replied Minuette, “I don’t think I’ve done that yet.”
“Yet?” repeated Twilight, with growing alarm. “No! No ‘yet’! No travelling in time! We’ve had enough changing history already this week!”
“You’ve already seen me there,” Minuette pointed out happily. “If I don’t travel back now so that you can have seen the real me there, the best case is that you saw something else that looked convincingly like me travelling through time. Is it really a good idea to leave what you actually saw there to chance?”
“What?” asked Twilight sharply. There seemed to be an unspoken assumption in that train of thought that she wasn’t seeing. “It’s already happened. How could making sure you don’t time travel to cause it make it worse?”
“Ah, ah, ah,” Minuette corrected, waving one hoof in the air as she spoke, and somehow contriving to use that motion to set the force bubble she was held in spinning gently. “You’ve seen something already, but you don’t actually know what it is! If you specifically stop it from being me that you saw, you don’t change anything else about what you saw. Because of Star Swirl’s self-consistency principle, anything that happens, happens. That means if it wasn’t me… Hey Twilight, what’s the worst possible thing you can imagine causing what you saw?”
The wide smile on Minuette’s face as she said that was completely incongruous with her question, and she started giggling softly to herself as the bubble’s rotation began to point her away from Twilight.
Visions of a time-travelling changeling queen disguised as Minuette flashed through Twilight’s mind. That didn’t even make sense, though. Why would she have been disguised as Minuette? And she couldn’t have actually caused any problems in the past either, since nothing seemed to have changed.
More importantly, “I’ve just recently fought a time-travel battle with a unicorn named Starlight Glimmer,” Twilight declared, “during which she changed history several times, and I was forced to try to prevent her from doing so! I saw the resultant changed timelines every time she did so! Doesn’t that disprove Star Swirl’s principle?”
“Eh, really?” asked Minuette, the smile finally wiped off her face. She even started making a vigorous attempt to set the force bubble spinning back the other direction to face Twilight again.
Twilight decided restraining Minuette probably wasn’t necessary any longer, and brought her gently down to the ground. “Yes. That was actually part of why I invited you to visit today. I know you’ve been published several times in Brief Histories of Time, and I was hoping you’d be interested in a collaboration to help me edit the story down to something readable.”
Brief Histories of Time was a kind of combined speculative fiction anthology and magical science journal dealing with the subject of time travel. Twilight had previously published her experiences with time travel as an account titled ‘It’s About Time’ (and hadn’t she been pleased with herself for coming up with that name!), but that had been a pretty straight-forward (if annoying) predestination paradox.
By comparison, the thing with Starlight was just ridiculously complicated. Being honest about it, she wasn’t actually all that sure how it had all worked, not to mention how to write an account of it that worked as something approaching literature.
Minuette quickly regained her trademark grin and laughed, “Ha! Yeah, you kind of need to do a better job anonymising your stories!” Turning serious again, she added, “But really, if you’ve actually seen evidence that this Starlight succeeded in changing history, we should probably be looking into a way to spoof that as well so that it never actually happened!”
“You just said time can’t change, but you want to make it so something never happened?” Twilight asked, somewhat bemused by the apparent contradiction.
“I want to spoof it, not change it!” Minuette insisted. “Look, can you tell me the whole story first, so that we’re on the same page?”
Still not quite seeing the difference, but realising that the conversation would go easier if Minuette knew everything, Twilight sighed and agreed. “Alright, we might as well sit down. It’s a long and confusing story.” From the confident way Minuette talked about time, Twilight was also beginning to suspect she was exactly the right pony to talk to about this whole subject anyway.
She led Minuette through the castle while explaining very briefly her first encounter with Starlight. Without really thinking about it, her steps brought her back to the map room. Twilight felt a niggling little worry at the back of her mind as she led Minuette inside, but dismissed it, continuing instead to the tale of her second meeting with Starlight.
“And then a few days ago, I found her sitting in here waiting for me,” she explained. “She had a copy of one of Star Swirl’s time travel spells that she had modified to use with the map to extend its effect.”
Twilight took her seat at the map and gestured for Minuette to take a look. Minuette slipped into a seat opposite her, examining the map with open curiosity as Twilight continued her tale. She listened politely as Twilight explained how Starlight had opened a portal and vanished into it, and how she had used the scroll to follow her. It was only when she mentioned Starlight preventing Rainbow’s race that she interrupted with a question.
“You’re sure the race she prevented happened in the normal timeline?”
Something about the incisive manner of the question made Twilight actually stop to think before answering.
“Definitely,” she replied after she had properly considered. “You were at the talk on cutie mark magic I gave last week, right? It was definitely the race where Rainbow performed the rainboom that ended up linking the Element Bearers. When I fixed the timeline, I saw her perform the rainboom again, and that was the only time she performed it as a filly.”
Minuette nodded thoughtfully to herself and Twilight continued with the story. She seemed thoroughly shocked at the description of the depressing crystal war timeline, but her next question was reserved instead for the second return to the past.
“When you went back the second time, you didn’t see yourself or Starlight from the previous time you went back?”
That actually had been one of the things that had struck Twilight as odd about the whole thing - when she had travelled through time previously she had actually met her time-divergent self, so it had seemed strange that it had worked out differently this time.
“Actually… no,” she admitted. “The previous versions of us weren’t present any time we went back there. And we should have been able to see them easily if they were there.” Flashy magic battles sufficient to distract foals from their racing weren’t exactly something you could just fail to spot happening around you, after all.
Minuette listened carefully to the rest of the story without further interruption, and with an appropriately horrified reaction to the various timelines Twilight had seen. Unlike everypony else who had been told the full story though, she didn’t seem to be overly comforted by the successful mending of the timeline and Starlight’s remorse for what she had done.
“Wow,” she said at last, still sounding pretty stunned. In an uncharacteristically serious tone, she continued, “That’s quite a story Twilight. I can’t recommend heavily enough that we try to spoof that so it never happened.”
“Alright, so now can you explain what you mean by ‘spoofing’ it?” asked Twilight. “And are the stories you’ve published in Brief Histories of Time based on real events? Because your questions really seem less and less like those of a speculative-fiction author and more like those of an experienced time traveller!”
“Do you actually read the journal articles, Twilight?” Minuette asked, not quite managing to hide her amusement at the embarrassed stuttering the question elicited.
Not waiting for an answer, she explained, “In a time travel story where actually changing history is impossible, ‘spoofing’ history is when you make a change to the known history in such a way that everypony present still remembers the same things happening as before you made your change.” She watched Twilight carefully as she spoke to be sure she was following the explanation.
“The classic literary example,” she continued, “is the time traveller who falls in love with a famous historical figure with a recorded date of death, which they overcome by faking their lover’s death to match history, and bringing them back to the future with them. It works because the changed history you’re working towards was always the way history went even though nopony knew that at the time. That means that there’s no actual change to the timeline, only an apparent change.”
Twilight nodded slowly. “So… the idea is that you can change an event that you thought happened, so long as you can convincingly fake it so that it looks to everypony who witnessed it as if it still happened the same way?”
She pondered for another moment and then added, “Simple example then. There was a case of doughnuts missing from the kitchen earlier. Spike probably just ate them, but I could, technically, go back in time an hour and take them myself?”
Even for such an apparently trivial and ridiculous example, Minuette seemed to treat the idea seriously. “Possibly!” she replied. “Though since I’m guessing you don’t know if they were really still there an hour ago or not, you might also arrive to find them already gone. If Spike actually ate them, they’re eaten. Nothing to be done about it. If he didn’t, you can certainly spoof history to look like what past-you saw just by taking them before you observed them being gone.”
Twilight pondered that again. It didn’t seem all that useful an idea in general. It wasn’t possible to change anything you knew happened, and her mind rebelled at the thought that lack of knowledge could be more useful than knowledge in some cases, where it would allow more changes to be made to history. It occurred to her that Minuette had avoided an important part of that question as well.
“I admit it, I didn’t read a lot of the other articles in the journal,” Twilight said with a shrug. “They mostly seemed to be just stories, so I only read the ones that looked like real science rather than fiction. Are you seriously telling me they were all true stories? Including yours?”
“Real science, Twi?” Minuette had a sparkle in her eyes as she replied that didn’t bode well for that line of thought.
“Well, yes,” Twilight replied, attempting to ignore the teasing tone of voice. “For instance, there was an interesting paper by Professor Azimuth Asymptote on The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline. It wasn’t just a story like most of the others. It was full of numbers and tables and the diagrams for a new device he called an ‘Endochronometer’, and it had a large bibliography at the end! Real science!”
Minuette burst into peals of laughter. “Professor Azimuth is an alchemist, Twilight! He’s not a time travel specialist at all! He wrote that piece half as a clever parody of the alchemy papers he normally writes, and half as a clever thought experiment. Most of the articles in Brief Histories are thought experiments like that, of different ways time travel could work. The story just helps illustrate the points or the implications of different ideas.”
She paused for a moment, then added, “And yeah, some are accounts of real events, like yours was.” Closing her eyes and presenting her best expression of false modesty, Minuette continued with an airy wave of a hoof, “Mine are a little from column A, a little from column B.” Struggling to keep a grin off her face, she opened one eye to peek over at Twilight to see her reaction.
That wasn’t too much of a surprise with the way Minuette had been speaking about time, but Twilight’s mind balked at trying to work out the mechanics of ending up discussing time travel with Minuette because she had seen what was presumably a future version of her travel into the past. Was this another predestination paradox like the first time she’d seen Star Swirl’s spell?
Twilight sighed and admitted, “This time travel stuff is really starting to hurt my head.”
“Well, “ Minuette suggested, “it’s not exactly true, of course, but you might find it helps if you think of things just happening one after another.”
“That is how time works!” Twilight insisted, though she looked less sure of herself than usual. “Right? Surely?”
Minuette just grinned hugely at her. “Ooooh, you’re good at this!”
Twilight groaned. “I give up then. How does it work?”
“Alright,” said Minuette, turning more serious again, “there’s an interesting example of how the self-consistency principle is supposed to work.” She swept a hoof around in a horizontal circle in front of her. “Imagine I have a time portal here. Objects that enter it exit just a second before and just above it.” She swept her hoof around in another circle slightly closer to her and just above the first one.
Twilight stared at the empty spaces she had indicated, imagining two linked time portals hovering there. “Go on,” she said.
“Now, imagine I throw a rock into the bottom one,” Minuette continued, as she mimed doing exactly that, “in such a way that when it falls out of the top one, it prevents its one-second-earlier version from falling into the portal.” She now mimed the two rocks colliding in mid-air and spinning away from the portals, complete with exaggerated sound effects. With a big grin, she turned back to Twilight and asked, “So, what happens?”
Twilight frowned and continued staring at the imaginary portals. If the rock coming out of the portal knocked the earlier one away, it wouldn’t be there to knock itself away. But if it wasn’t there to knock itself away, the earlier one would enter the portal, so it would be there to knock itself away. Hmm...
That time travel headache was starting to get worse, but maybe the answer was just to take a third option. “Maybe you end up not throwing it just right, and it doesn’t work as you expect?”
Minuette shook her head, though her grin remained unchanged. “Good guess, but for the sake of argument, imagine I threw it just right. We’ll say I used a spell with an exact amount of pre-calculated force to throw it exactly where I intended.”
“Then… it’s a paradox?” Twilight asked, confusion evident in her voice. “It doesn’t seem like either the stone going through the portal or not going through the portal works.”
“Better guess!” Minuette exclaimed, clapping her hooves together in appreciation. “But the answer is even weirder. The self-consistency principle suggests that the stone in fact falls out of the top portal at just the right angle to push its earlier self into the portal in such a way that it falls out of the top portal at that perfect angle!”
“That’s…” Twilight began, only to trail off into confused thought. “No, that doesn’t make any sense at all! How could it work out like that? The thing that’s causing the change would be caused by itself! Before it happened!”
“This,” Minuette said, putting emphasis on the word and leaning forward in her seat, “is one of the times when it doesn’t make sense to think of time as things just happening one after another.”
Twilight’s mind rebelled at the very idea, but nevertheless she pressed on. “How could that work for more complicated loops? With any loop that involved a pony’s free will, say?”
“Exactly the same.” Minuette’s normal grin had returned. “Things settle into a loop that’ll cause itself to repeat, which might be what happened with the me you saw in the past.”
“You’re suggesting,” Twilight said half-heartedly, hardly even able to believe she was saying it out loud, “that you’re going to travel back into the past so that I can have seen you there, and the reason you’re going to go back is because I saw you there, even though if I hadn’t seen you there you’d never have gone back?” It sounded like the predestination paradox that happened the first time she’d used Star Swirl’s spell, but at least then she’d been unaware of what was happening. Could that really still work out when both she and Minuette were aware of the ongoing paradox?
“Yep,” Minuette agreed. “Though in the hypothetical time when you didn’t meet time-displaced me, I think if you’d just told me the story of Starlight, as you were already planning to, that I’d still have suggested spoofing that. You’d probably have demanded proof of what I was talking about, and we could have ended up with this loop that way.”
She mimed throwing a rock into the imaginary portal again and continued explaining. “Like throwing the rock into the portal not being able to let it go through in such a way that it would prevent its own history, I couldn’t travel back to prove myself to you if I hadn’t already proved it to you, so we end up with this acausal loop.”
Twilight sat blinking across at Minuette for a few moments as she tried to process all that.
“I’m... not entirely sure I’m convinced, but strangely enough that would kind of match what the other you said just before vanishing into the time portal,” Twilight mused. “You said…”
“Oh, wait! Wait! Don’t tell me!” Minuette interrupted excitedly. “I can prove that it was me you saw. If I commit to saying when I travel back in time exactly what I guess it was before I tell you, you’ll know it was really me when I guess correctly!”
Twilight attempted to parse Minuette’s excited babble, but the tenses seemed all mixed up. “Uh. Once more? Slowly?” she asked.
“I’m going to guess what the me you saw before said,” Minuette explained. She paused with a big smile on her face as Twilight nodded to show she was following so far.
“I promise before I say what my guess is, that if I do end up going back to that time, that what I guess now is what I’m going to say to you then, whether or not you agree now that my guess is correct here,” she continued. “So, if I’m wrong it wasn’t me you saw, and if I’m right it was.”
Twilight took a moment before answering to think that statement through to make sure she really understood it. If Minuette correctly guessed the words she had heard before, it could mean that she was going to have been the same pony who said those words the first time, sure.
But couldn’t it also mean that she had just set up a joke in poor taste so that she knew what had been said? Though… that seemed a lot of work, and really seemed a bit too mean-spirited to be Minuette’s style. Hmm… and there didn’t seem to be anything stopping Twilight from claiming she was wrong even if she guessed right. Wouldn’t that stop her from wanting to go back and thereby break the loop?
It wasn’t really a particularly foolproof plan, but Twilight nodded for Minuette to go ahead anyway. Getting what she had said wrong would at least demonstrate something, so it was worth listening to as a possible way of ruling it out as an explanation.
Minuette paused for a moment to think, and then declared, “When I go back, I’ll say ‘Choke on that, causality!’” Unprompted, she added exactly the kind of slightly unhinged laughter Twilight had heard from her earlier.
Knowing that any hesitation would ruin what she was about to attempt, Twilight immediately answered, “Wrong! Guess it must not have been you then.” She offered a conciliatory smile, and added, “I suppose we’ll have to think of a different answer!”
Minuette merely laughed at her. “You’re a terrible liar, Twilight!” she said between bouts of giggling. “You should try to take this seriously though. You know I got it right, so what would you have done if I’d believed you and you caused a paradox? Rule one of time travel experiments: if a possible result of your experiment would break the universe, don’t experiment!”
A shudder ran down Twilight’s spine. That sounded worse than what Starlight had done! Wait…
“Hang on,” said Twilight accusingly, “I thought you told me that ‘Star Swirl’s self-consistency principle means whatever happens, happens’? Doesn’t that mean you don’t believe paradoxes are even possible?”
“Very good, Twilight,” Minuette agreed appreciatively. “That’s almost right. I’m pretty sure paradoxes shouldn’t happen, but any experiment where the possible results are either in agreement with the self-consistency principle and nothing new is learned, or else you cause a paradox with unknown, possibly catastrophic results is an experiment that’s too dangerous to perform.”
She stared intently into Twilight’s eyes, as if she wanted to convince her of the seriousness of the idea by gaze alone. “Time travel isn’t like the other magical sciences. If you prove an exception to Clover’s Zeroth Law or something, it only improves our knowledge of how the universe works. If you prove an exception to the self-consistency principle, it actually breaks causality!”
“But I’ve seen Starlight cause paradoxes by changing history,” Twilight protested. “It made the world horrible, but it didn’t break the universe!”
“It broke causality,” Minuette insisted again. “Look, in all the altered histories, you never hatched Spike, right? But he was with you throughout the whole thing. So, where did he come from? For that matter, where did the Twilight and Starlight who remembered the original history come from? All of you were cut adrift from your past - from the events that caused you to be who you are.”
Twilight shook her head, still not really following. That just didn’t sound quite right. Surely whether you knew how particular laws of the universe worked or not, it was either already true or it wasn’t? “Still, why are you more focused on that than the actual changes she made?”
“Because if we can go back and spoof what you and Starlight experienced, then Star Swirl’s self-consistency principle is maintained, and if you strip away the fancy arguments for it, the principle itself pretty much amounts to ‘history can’t change and no other timelines can interfere with this one’.” Minuette once again wore that uncharacteristically serious expression. “Which means we don’t have to worry about, say, Tirek from that universe where he had stolen all of Equestria’s magic appearing out of nowhere to destroy everything.”
Twilight hadn’t really thought of those problem timelines following her home, and she paled as she considered it now. Minuette was saying… what? That if Twilight had remained in existence absent a cause during those other timelines, along with Spike and Starlight, that those other timelines would do the same after she left? That the victorious villains she’d seen could turn up ready for a fight? Oh. That put a somewhat different spin on the importance of the principle.
“Uh, what does spoofing imply specifically in this case again?” she asked nervously.
Following Minuette’s logic, it sounded as though if Twilight, Spike and Starlight had been merely fooled into believing they had fought a time travel battle, those other timelines didn’t actually necessarily exist as places that could in any way interact with this one. In which case, the villains from those timelines couldn’t just pop into existence to wreck this timeline.
“I dunno,” Minuette answered with a shrug. “Maybe a spell to make the three of you hallucinate or dream the events you thought you experienced? Or outright alter your memories? There’s time to think of that once we’ve agreed to do it though.”
Twilight stared off into the distance, thinking it through aloud anyway. “Replacing Starlight’s scroll with one that induces a shared dream might work. She wouldn’t have paid close attention during the first casting since she’d have been concerned with me interrupting her before she could complete it. She’d have relied entirely on the scroll. Then, once inside the dream, any time either of us used it, it would have been a scroll created by the dream to look like she expected it to.”
She tapped a hoof thoughtfully on the table in front of her and looked over at Minuette doubtfully. “Though I would have expected Princess Luna to spot it if something like that happened.”
“Got it,” Minuette said, nodding agreeably. “When I go back to replace her scroll, I also have to get a message to Princess Luna telling her what we’re doing and asking her not to talk to you about it until we say it’s safe. Does that mean you’re in agreement that we should do it?”
Twilight remained silent, thinking it over again. After a while, she said, “I’m getting close, but I think I’d still like to see some proof…” She trailed off again, and then turned a sharp look on Minuette. “Which brings us back to the idea of you going back to meet me only because we know you already went back. You even guessed that you probably went back specifically to give me proof of the way you say time works! Do I actually have any free will in all this? Do I just have to do what I know is going to happen?”
“You always have free will,” Minuette confirmed. “But, you know, you also have free will to banish me to the moon for laughing at you, or to decide not to try to stop the next major threat to Equestria. Does the fact that you wouldn’t ever do those things remove your free will?”
Twilight tentatively shook her head, admitting it didn’t.
“Then how is it any different that you’re going to do this because you would never choose to put the world at risk of problems caused by time travel just to prove to yourself that you have free will?”
It somehow felt like it should be different, but on reflection Twilight had to admit, “I guess it’s not really any different.”
She sighed deeply and tried to set that aside for now. “Alright then. How are you going to go about proving it? Going back to scare the living daylights out of me isn’t enough. I’ve already experienced it, so even if you disappear into the past here in front of me, it doesn’t really add any new facts to the argument. I’d only be taking your word for it that that’s actually where you went.”
“This is where you saw me?” Minuette immediately started examining the whole room with a more discerning eye. “I can think of two obvious solutions. One, I rescue your missing doughnuts and hide them under the table!”
Twilight almost instinctively leaned back in her seat to get a look under the table, only to be interrupted.
“Don’t look yet!” Minuette insisted. “If I know if it’s there or not before I go back, it’ll interfere with the test.” Twilight reluctantly averted her eyes as Minuette continued, “Like I said earlier, it’s also possible they were actually eaten, so I’ll also take that book with me as a fallback boring proof.”
The book Twilight had dropped by the door in her shock at seeing Minuette time-travelling earlier on now flew across the room enclosed in Minuette’s aura to land in front of Twilight.
“I’ll put the book under the table in the past, and if I can rescue them, the doughnuts too. Will that be enough proof for you?”
Twilight made a brief inspection of the book which presumably had a duplicate sitting waiting to be discovered under the table right at this very moment. Once she was sure it was the same book she had been carrying earlier, she passed it over to Minuette.
“That will do, I think,” Twilight confirmed. “Do you have a spell that’ll take you back?” Twilight’s eyes flicked momentarily to Minuette’s hourglass cutie mark. She hadn’t really taken much note of what her friends’ marks were actually for when she was a filly, and it had been too awkward to ask about when they had reunited since she should really have known. Minuette’s was time magic, then?
“Alright!” Minuette said cheerily. “Operation Doughnut Rescue is go!”
Spotting Twilight’s unamused expression, she quickly amended, “And all that other stuff we’re doing too, I guess!”
With an awkward cough to cover the change in subject, she continued, “And yeah, I can manage the spell myself.”
There was a brief over-and-back discussion as they worked out exactly what the plan was going to be, but eventually they decided they were ready to proceed.
Minuette cast her spell and vanished into the time portal with a cheery wave. As soon as she disappeared, Twilight immediately got up and began pacing nervously around the room. Should she look under the table? It wouldn’t interfere with Minuette’s test now, and she decided that a little peek wouldn’t hurt.
Sure enough, waiting under the table was a case of Sugarcube Corner doughnuts, sitting on top of a perfect copy of the book Minuette had just taken with her.
There would still be some work to be done preparing a suitable spell scroll and a plan to replace the one held by Starlight with it, but it looked as though Star Swirl’s self-consistency principle would see to it that everything worked out just right. Starlight’s misadventure would soon all have been just a dream.
She had barely returned to her pacing, somewhat more assured of success now, when the time portal opened again. Just before Minuette reappeared, Twilight was relieved to hear the sounds that showed that part A of the plan had worked.
Through the portal came a wild cackling and the sounds of Minuette shouting.
“Choke on that, causality!”
Also LikedSimilarAuthor
- Doppler Effect · 3.6k words · 162 3 · 3.8k views
- MyHobby · 6.2k words · 221 0 · 2.4k views
- Between Lines · 3.5k words · 137 4 · 2.4k views
- Miller Minus · 6.4k words · 112 3 · 2.2k views
- The Cyan Recluse · 1k words · 179 1 · 1.7k views
- Rambling Writer · 4.2k words · 90 1 · 2.6k views
- Amit · 983 words · 141 7 · 2.4k views
- Metool Bard · 2.2k words · 83 2 · 1.9k views
Stats
Page generated in 0.072 seconds
Total duration
629 users online
954,302 hits today, 2,623,277 yesterday
FIMFiction
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
Designed and coded by knighty & Xaquseg - © 2011-2024
Follow & Support Us
Support us
SubStar
Chat!
Discord
Follow us
Twitter
MLP: Friendship is Magic® - © 2024 Hasbro Inc.®
Fimfiction is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro Inc.®
A fun look at the science of time travel through ponies, though I admit that it did feel a bit, well... misguided, I guess? I mean, between the movies and the comics, there are already documented cases of Equestria interacting with parallel timelines. Still, a very fun presentatio of canon Minuette as a chronomancer. I've seen very few of those.
Holy moly i love this kind of stuff! Time travel stories are my absolute favorite
inb4 Steven Hawking
This is one amazing discussion of time travel theory. Well done!
Oohoohoo! A fic going in depth about time travel and it's nuances! I love tales like these!
Like Minuette, apparently I have a good head for this sort of thing, because I've noticed I can more readily follow along to discussions such as this than most others on average. For example, the moment Minuette asked about whether or not the race actually had happened in the normal timeline, it immediately clicked where she was going with this.
Anyway, excellent explanation for the temporal mechanics of "The Cutie Re-Mark"...although it does start to break down a little when you consider MLP's visitation of parallel universes, which then brings up the questions of how such parallel universes come about if not through divergences in time (unless the self-consistency principle still permits for the existence of parallel universes that I don't know about, but I had always been under the impression the principle ruled such things out), and does kind of cheapen the episode for downgrading it all down to what is basically a shared hallucination.
But still a fun read, and that's what's important.
And I like the idea that Minuette's career/talent of choice is basically the study of time and the travel through it thereof.
"Actually… no,”"
Missing opening quotation mark?
"is, that if I do end up going back to that time, that what"
Is that one too many thats? I'm not sure.
"Twilight, Spike and Starlight"
I know that this can be a matter of style, but, just in case, did you mean to omit the Oxford Comma there?
"to do it though"
"it, though"?
A nice and interesting story. :)
7018463
7018983
I'm generally of the opinion that stuff that happens in the comics can be used or ignored as necessary for a story.
I'd argue though that the type of interdimensional travel in the movies isn't the same type my story disallows. It's travel between splitting/changing timelines as seen in The Cutie Re-mark that I'm disallowing. For my purposes, Equestria+EqGirls would count as a single timeline, and there would have presumably been a changed EqGirls world as well within the new timelines we saw when Starlight altered their own past.
Admittedly, there isn't anything in the story itself making that distinction, so it's my own fault that didn't come through.
I'm glad you enjoyed it anyway.
7019438
Thanks for the corrections. I'm not sure how I missed that opening quotation mark, but the other suggestions are either already correct or allowable variations. Glad you liked it though.
7020233
I am of similar opinion with the comics, helped by the fact that Hasbro's own approach to the comics is that they're completely canon...until the show says otherwise, meaning that the show will always take precedence. But I've found that, where possible, it helps to take it all into consideration when writing fanfics, as it generally results in a stronger portrayal of the universe, at least in the eyes of the readers, and that was largely why I personally brought it up. I wasn't actually going to hold you to it, though.
That said, though, if at least the EqG "realm," we'll call it, is no alternate timeline, at least for the confines of this fic, then one must wonder just what it is then, and more importantly, how it came to exist with such close ties to the pony "realm". Just waving it aside as "interdimensional" doesn't really fly for me, especially as using the term "interdimensional" is technically a misnomer as it's really supposed to refer to principles of depth or width, e.g. 2D vs. 3D space, and not so much what is popularly portrayed as parallel universes. I guess the long and short of it is that if it can't be a parallel universe or alternate timeline, then how did it come to exist? How could it exist?
But then again maybe it would really just be easier to assume that, for the purposes of this fanfic, EqG doesn't exist. Which works for me, as I spend most of my time assuming that myself (the first film was okay, but the two that have since followed have been rather meh at best).
7020233
You're welcome. And yeah, I thought that they might be, hence part of the reason for the question marks, but better to check, I think.
Well, that gave me a lot to think about - time travel is always so hard to pin down in fiction, there's always something that doesn't make intuitive sense.
A particular scenario I'm wondering about: If spoofing Starlight Glimmer's temporal excursion was a good idea and worked as expected, why don't the Mane 6 go back and spoof every major disaster they've encountered? Say, Tirek never actually escaped from Tartarus - it was all faked retroactively. You could un-do all the destruction his rampage caused!
Anyway, love the Asimov reference. And it's funny to see Twilight struggling to grasp a concept while Minuette is the one trying to teach her.
7021800
Twilight's good at a lot of things, but she doesn't seem that used to thinking about time travel in the episodes it happens. It does rather make a change to have someone else be the expert lecturing her though.
The problem with spoofing something like Tirek's rampage is that under the system in this story, you still can't actually change anything that happened in the past.
What that means, in effect, is that to spoof Tirek's rampage, every pony who remembers encountering him has to have their memories changed to reflect that, everything destroyed by Tirek has to be either actually destroyed or the memories of ponies altered so that they remember it being destroyed and rebuilt... and so on.
It rapidly becomes a huge project affecting huge numbers of ponies, which might require months worth of memory alterations if something particularly big needs to be rebuilt (a lot more morally questionable than a few hours worth as in this case) or still destroying everything that got destroyed (negating much of the point), it doesn't remove any psychological effects on the ponies in question from remembering something vs. actually experiencing it, etc.
Starlight Glimmer, Spike and Twilight, by contrast, were the only ones who actually experienced the events being spoofed in this story. Not only that, but since the action took place elsewhere (elsewhen?), there are no physical reminders of them. Only the memories of the three exist as evidence that they took place at all. It's a much smaller task to spoof.
In addition, the reason Minuette was so keen on doing it at all was that the story told by Twilight contradicted the way she thought time worked, in a way that might turn out to be dangerous for the whole world at a later date.
Since everything had already worked out for the best, Minuette was much less interested in the actual battle itself, and much more interested in spoofing what happened so that the way she thought time worked could continue to be correct. Spoofing Tirek's escape or not wouldn't change that one way or the other.
People assume that time is a straight line from cause to effect but actually from a non linear nonsubjective viewpoint it's more like big ball of Wibbly-Wobbly Timey-Wimey stuff. According to the Doctor at least.
That was a nice little read.
If I wanted to listen to two nerds discuss time travel theory, I'd go to my local comic shop. At least then I could maybe play a card game at the same time or something. :/
After reading this story a second time, I now understand the rock-principal a little better. But only a little.
7178322
It is a pretty confusing idea. It's called the Polchinski Paradox, and you could read a little more here if you were interested.
7179591 Thank you! I love time travel, and have been thinking about different types/ways it could work. Personally, I prefer the alternate timelines version, but all types are fascinating!
As a buffoon once so elegantly put it: "Time travel. It's a cornucopia of disturbing concepts."
FWIW, I always thought that the spell scroll was a Heisenberg Compensator that prevented any of the changes to the time-line from affecting anyone immediately around it. Literally a paradox shield. I also suspect that the start of each loop was Twilight returning to the original point where Starlight had just arrived and was attempting to alter the time-line.
7212333 I pretty much had to view it that way or go mad from the nonsense.
7020519
Incorporating IDW Comics as canon does not result in a stronger portrayal of the universe, because the comics introduce inconsistencies which cannot be reconciled with the animated show.
How could the EQG world even be an alternate timeline? They're not even ponies!
As for how it can exist, the eternal inflation theory already answers that question.
Your opinion of the EQG movies is the exact opposite of almost the entirety of informed opinion. I'm not rendering judgement, I'm just letting you know.
7212406
How could it not be? Pony or not, the EqG realm has numerous parallels with it's pony-based cousin and is very interrelated, what with similar people, characteristics, naming, even the odd historical event. That suggests to me the two are somehow interconnected (albeit distantly) in order to cause such strong parallels. It's clearly more parallel universe to the Ponyverse than anything else. And it could easily be an alternate timeline, as such timelines are, as the theory goes, created when an event causes a single timeline to "branch" off where one timeline has one event taking place, but the other has a different event, or the event did not take place at all. Thus, theoretically, EqG could be explained as being created when some event early in the "father" timeline's history sparked a branch in the evolutionary history resulting in one timeline that created the pony body-type, and the other created the more human body-type, and resulted in the respective universes as they stand now.
Yes and no. The eternal inflation multiverse predicts universes that have formed separate and independent of its neighbors. This means it would not have to be dictated by the same sort of rules as our universe would be and could be ruled on a set of physics entirely unique from it. In fact, the odds suggest that would probably happen more often than not, and assuming such a universe could even be built to support life (at least as we understand it), the odds of it having any parallels with a neighboring universe, especially as many as EqG has with the Ponyverse, starts becoming increasingly slimmer. It is still theoretically possible, yes, but in reading up on the theory, I'm finding the odds of it don't support it quite as well as a traditional parallel universe/alternate timeline would, nor quite as easily. It would make the instance of two universes having that much in common with each other that much more astounding. For storytelling reasons, I would find sticking with the alternate timeline explanation a little more plausible and a little simpler to justify.
Either way, the author of the story didn't really write the story with consideration of EqG as a separate anything anyway:
...so in some ways going into this sort of depth about the nature of EqG in relation to this particular fanfic is a bit of a moot point, really. The only reason it got brought up at all was because I found the details the fanfic presented could potentially break down when one considered the inclusion of EqG, and I was really inquiring as to how the author fit it into the puzzle. The above quote was basically my answer, which basically is saying to not worry about how EqG fits into the matter; it's not really relevant to the story, and it really isn't when you get right down to it. Just added details that were fun to consider for a little while after the fact. The only reason the discussion is still continuing is because I already opened the can of worms, and once you pop, you just can't stop, I suppose.
That would be why it's a personal opinion. I certainly wasn't speaking for the whole of the fanbase when I said that, just for myself.
And anyway, I'm finding there seems to be an increasingly growing number of bronies that are becoming increasingly more and more disenchanted with it the further it goes on, to the point that I'd say it's more half and half right now. One side is still for it, the other is less optimistic about it and it's future. Either way, assuming this pattern continues, it's clear to me that EqG as a whole is probably going to run out of steam before too much longer unless Hasbro finds a way to breathe new life into the idea, and only time will tell on that. If they do, I'm certainly not so closed-minded to not be open to reassessing it.
7212723 Just glancing at this thread I'm reminded of a text-based RPG I played in high school where we constantly derailed our gameplay with discussions on quantum physics.
7213350
Sounds like any time me and my family at home sit and watch a movie (doesn't matter which one) in which most of the time we spend watching it, we're pointing out various technical problems, logical fallacies, or speculating about unspoken motives or what might have happened had the story gone a different direction.
My theory was that basically time travel has to eventually stabilize, even if it takes multiple loops like in Cutie Remark, because all the ones where it doesn't have already died off and/or God prevents it, but this is consistent too.
I actually had an idea for a story in which Twilight recruits a lot of her friends from the alternate timelines to help her stop Starlight, and when they succeed they all pop up in the main timeline along with their canon counterparts. I wonder how Minuette would take that?
7212723
Correlation of this type doesn't imply causation. What I mean is, in order to get to this point where they share city and personal names, life first had to evolve into completely separate sapient species. With a divergence like that, the two worlds are already completely different. Any similarities later on down the road is either coincidence or later influences coming into play.
As an analogy, it's as if an alien thinks oranges and basketballs must have evolved from the same ancestor.
Inflation theory offers infinite universes, in which case having a world with curious convergence is only a matter of probability. And it's no less probable than a world which by dint of probability exactly mirrors our own. In the Vedic oneness of the multiverse, everything you have imagined or can possibly ever imagine, already exists.
As for the "traditional parallel universe/ alternate timeline" interpretation, you are talking about the quantum mechanics many-worlds interpretation which seeks to explain quantum decoherence of a universal wave function. That is fine, but it cannot apply to EQG, because EQG cannot be an "alternate timeline" of Pony Planet. The worlds are completely different; the similarities existing in a local point in time (Canterlot High in MLP seasons 4-5) is worldline convergence rather than common worldline ancestry.
The author's POV does not contradict mine above, hence why I never mentioned him. I assume he already understands what I understand.
Actually, it's saying to not worry about how EQG fits into the matter because of what I said above. Eternal inflation and the MWI are two separate things which are not mutually exclusive.
Actually, bronies loved EQG #2. Even film critics said on record that it's much better than EQG #1. #3 is somewhat acknowledged as not as good as #2 but still way better than #1. There is disagreement on #3, but mainly about whether it matches up to #2.
That's a lot of us here; we're on a fanfic website.
This battle is about SCIENCE!
7214377
I'm starting to wonder if you're not letting yourself consider all the possibilities that could transverse from one or more alternate timeline. Regarding it a little too linearly, see. I mean, we can agree that all a timeline really is, is a set chain of events that take place, one after of another until something stops it. Suppose now that we could go all the way back to the very beginning of a universe's timeline, say at the moment of it's very creation, and change any of the events that could then take place thereafter. The variables are, theoretically, infinite from that point on. And if the possibilities are infinite, and I really don't see how they wouldn't be, then you certainly can get EqG out of it as an alternate timeline.
Hmm...yeah, okay, I see that now, it really doesn't...although that would assume that "time" for one universe is not the same as the "time" of another universe, and that messing with history of one has absolutely no effect, no matter what you do, for the history of the other. Which then begs the question then of how does "time" work on the whole scale of the multiverse, if it's really not still universal for all of the multiverse then? But there's really no way to know until we can actually observe one of these things, assuming they even exist in real life in the first place. It's not really here nor there in the grand scheme of things, though.
Well then, speaking in terms of probability, it'd be the same for "traditional parallel universe/ alternate timeline" because the possibilities are literally just as infinite, so I don't see how it'd be any less likely than the inflation theory with that line of thinking. Theoretically, anything is possible with either one, and thus theoretically either one could produce the specific universes desired, it's just their point of origin that's different. In fact, beyond that, we're really still talking about the same sort of thing in the end, because either way, they're ultimately still parallel universes, are they not?
But in the end, I think the only thing we're really getting established here is that EqG, as presently portrayed at least, is a bit of an oddball, and if we're to truly stick with just the science on the matter, it's hard to use it to completely explain away all the oddities that is EqG. At this point, I'm really getting to the point that we should probably just acknowledge that it's just there, however it came to be, and just leave it at that.
Good for the film critics! But honestly that doesn't mean as much as it once did, back in the day. In this day of the Internet, where anyone has an opinion, it's becoming a common instance where a critic will say one thing about something, but the public consumers will average together to agree on something different. In simple terms, critics could hate a film, but viewers love it in general, or vice versa. Not to say that's the case with EqG, just that it's not necessarily an actual reflection of public opinion anymore. One should still consider the words of the critics, but still keep an open mind, because you might still like what they didn't.
But not all bronies. Not this brony. And I know of plenty of others who didn't either. It appears to depend on what circles in the fanbase one frequents, it seems. But from what I observed is that EqG 1 was fairly well liked in the end, yes. EqG 2, however, was liked by some, but there were others who did not. With EqG 3, the number of those who did not seemed to grow. Basically, I sense a growing and underlying sense of skepticism that is growing in the fanbase in regards to EqG. It's possible I've overestimated it's size, but nonetheless, that reasonably does still suggest a pattern, which if it continues, could mean EqG giving out in the end. It depends on whether or not future EqGs do anything to try and shake up the formula, to try and break the pattern, a possibility that's certainly not out of the running, but for the moment I personally don't see it happening.
My real point on all of this though is that one shouldn't automatically assume it's all sunshine and daisies with EqG universally. There are those that aren't all good with it, and they exist too, and shouldn't be ignored. And it's okay to agree to disagree, too. You clearly liked EqG, and that's fine. I and others are personally more indifferent to it, and that's fine too.
At any rate, we should probably stop flooding this poor fanfic's comments section with discussion on this, because we've reached the point where we're discussing pretty much zilch about the fanfic anymore, which didn't even address the subject of EqG.
7215368
Considering that a wordline's definition is literally causation as defined by time, then yeah, I am "regarding it linearly." Obviously.
But ok, I agree that you can say that EQG-verse could be an alternate worldline of MLP-verse, where it diverged in an ancient epoch and evolution took a different turn. And in that sense, it is a "parallel world". But your reasoning for it has always been the main thing that spurred me to protest.
You reasoned that it should be a "parallel world" because the two share similar contemporary individuals and a city name (nothing else about the city is actually the same). That's not how causation works: If the 2 worldlines had already split so widely, hundreds of millions of years ago, then any similarity now is a matter of coincidence or external influences. It would not be because the 2 worlds used to be the same hundreds of millions of years ago, and therefore now would try to be the same again in places where there are no causation.
Parallel worlds, by definition, are parallel (or share similarities) because of causation. If you visit a parallel world where the Native Americans repelled all European colonists, for example, it may still have smartphones by Apple, but the reason would not be because "Our world has Apple smartphones therefore that world also should." It would be because with or without the USA, humans still already discovered electricity and industrialization, etc.
You're the one who is unclear regarding how parallel universes work, why assume others are similarly confused?
Scientifically this is exactly right, whether we're talking about MWI or inflation multiverse.
Time is not universal, not even for a single universe. Not even between you and me and another person. Causation is the only universal yardstick, but only in this universe and worldline.
Remember I keep saying "unless by external influences"? I don't need theoretical physics to explain EQG's oddities; I can use canon plot devices which are already there.
Don't move goalposts. I'm not here to debate whether critics are king. I'm letting you know that your opinion on the 3 movies are not widely shared. Critics/ reviewers are 1 example, but most EQG fans are of the same opinion. There is no battle between critics and fans, in this case.
Hence why I was speaking in terms of the broader demographic. Maybe you should just check viewership stats and cinema earnings. It's not a matter of "let's agree to disagree". I have seen all the above; you're going by what you "sense".
There is, in fact, a criticism/ observation regarding the direction of EQG. However, it's not for the reasons you think (your opinions on EQG1-3).
About EQG, sure. But why should I stop discussing time and alternate worlds, in a fanfic about time and alternate worlds?
Keep in mind, I'm not giving you my literary opinion/ genre preference. This is theoretical physics (as well as provable physics) as I understand it.
7216277
At this point, it's going to have to be, because we're getting nowhere with this, and I don't want to continue to spam this poor fanfic's comments with an argument that's only getting more heated, and I don't think this is worth that.
7216402
Suit yourself. Unfortunately, I dont think you internalized anything I said, treating it as a contest in sophistry rather than a clarification of reality. You'll just end up making the same mistakes in the future.
As the man says, you previously had my attention. Now you have my interest. Watched, just for that reference.
I wish I could read this now, but it's midnight and time travel hurts my head at this time of night.
7216509
Now, now, don't go abandoning all hope for me just yet, or sell yourself short on your ability to get your points across to me or others. I actually have been reading up on all of the subjects we've discussed throughout our little discussion, and through it have already learned that I wasn't nearly as well versed in theories of cosmic inflation, of any sort, as I had previously thought, so I have learned a fair deal about that at least through all of this. And I am currently in the middle of reviewing many-worlds theories because now you've gotten me wondering if there is some detail to it that I'm misunderstanding or overlooked, and if so, it certainly can't hurt to double check. Basically, my approach to this whole discussion was really because it was initially fun to speculate, and I thought there was something all parties might learn from it.
The real reason I'm cutting it short is that we've reached a point I was no longer confident we could continue to keep it civil and not allow it to get too heated, and I generally make it a point to try and not contribute to the many flame wars that are already so rampant on the internet, and I've found that often the best tactic to take at that point is often to just make a tactical retreat and drop the subject. So that's what I'm doing here.
It was also due to the fact that, as previously stated, I was becoming increasing aware that having this "discussion" here was neither the right time or place for it, and was potentially spoiling it for other readers, and I didn't want that.
7217689
If I wrote a 1-chapter-and-done story speculating on time travel shenanigans, I'd friggin' love it if I had readers start long-form debates about theoretical physics in the comments section. You should attend an Iron Will seminar.
7217714
Yes, I'm happy to see the story generate discussion, and there's no need to worry about annoying me with a civil debate like you've been having here.
If you would change IAT to p 47, it would be cooler because of the joke about 47 being 42 adjusted for inflation:
47
Quite amusing. Have a like.
So what Minuette is saying is, "don't try to make logical facts out of what changes in timelines, as logic is potentially not applicable to processing of such sequence of perception"?..
7353884
More that "cause and effect" doesn't have to line up in a way that common sense suggests it should.
What she's saying doesn't break logic though. It just appears that the "effect" is preceding the "cause" and causing itself to happen in the first place. There's nothing about the procession of events that doesn't proceed logically, but it's still weird that the event wouldn't have happened if it hadn't caused itself to happen.
7353961
Let's call a timeline close enough to original timeline in cutie re-mark A-ish, one close to Nightmare Moon timeline from there B-ish.
For example, if to assume that B-ish Dash and A-ish Dash want to meet.
Given that after solving everything, Twilight returns to one A-ish timeline; maybe it's possible to make a switch in the past that can with significant likelihood make the future similar to A or B.
Then, if Twilight goes from A to the past with A Dash and switches it to B, returns back to the past with B Dash, and switches to A, what happens to those Dash?
Given that A Twilight, who was a passenger in the spell, didn't disappear after Starlight cancelled the rainboom, it's likely that none will disappear. So they can talk there in the past then return to corresponding timelines. A Dash will be a passenger in Starlight's spell just like Twilight and she can even go to B with that.
Looks convenient in theory. Strategically organize switches in the past and enjoy the multiverse... Nevermind how the future blinks in and out of existence each time...
7354125
There are different ways time travel could work, so just to be clear, I'm only speaking here about the way that Minuette thinks of time travel working in this story. Your scenario might be possible in some other versions of time travel, but isn't possible under the conditions seen here.
In this story, Minuette thinks of the timeline as unchangeable - she expects something like the stable time loop Twilight caused the first time she travelled in time to be the only way time travel should work.
She's seriously freaked out by Twilight's story of repeatedly changing the timeline, since she thinks it could lead to disaster. Because of that, she convinces Twilight to help her fake what Twilight saw Starlight doing by going back and making Twilight, Spike and Starlight hallucinate/dream/whatever what they thought they experienced. This doesn't actually change the past, since she's assuming that's already the reason they experienced it in the past (this is where the out of sequence cause and effect stuff comes into play).
Basically, in your scenario, there would only be Dash from the normal timeline, and "Nightmare Moon timeline Dash" would have been a figment of Twilight, Spike and Starlight's shared hallucination/dream/whatever.
Yeah, it's a little complicated. I hope that explanation helped somewhat.
7354394 The Tree of Harmony and/or the map might have been trolling Starlight into thinking that she's changing something by showing lucid illusions of the past... that would explain why it kept bringing up worse worlds despite they were changing just the rainboom episode, and why it destroyed the scroll (otherwise, the scroll could be explained by a spell on it that prevents it from being used again when there's not much magic energy left stored in it). It's better for Equestria if it was an illusion as there's fewer ways to destroy reality by just using one spell with energy of one unicorn.
I reviewed this story as part of Read It Later Reviews #54.
My review can be found here.
7511520
I don't have anything specific to say about that, so I guess I'll just say thanks for taking the time to review it.
I've meant to read this for two years now and finally got around to having read it back then.
It will be just as good as I don't remember.
There shall have been a green thumb.
Fruit loop.
9326721
Heh. I was very tempted to edit a reply to you into a previous comment, so it looked like it had always been there...
I'm glad to hear you will have enjoyed it.
It seems that spoofing the event is only actually important if Minuette is wrong.
If the self-consistency principle is true, then whatever really happened has already really happened, whether they try to spoof it or not. The universe will not be in any less or more danger either way, because the original sequence of events does not change, only their perspective on it. The only purpose this serves is to make Minuette feel better about the whole thing.
It's only if the self-consistency principle is false that spoofing the event might actually change the original sequence of events, replacing the sequence of "personally visiting a series of increasingly unpleasant realities" with "elaborate bad dreams", and potentially disconnecting from those unpleasant realities.
It feels important to recognize that beneath the confident certainty Minuette is basically saying, "I am actually kind of terrified that everything I have ever learned about time travel is wrong please make it go away."