The Limitations of Time Travel
Hansi Hansianu looked out over the plinth off Honshu-IV of Tokyo-VI, all in front of her was the was the vast ever-all-green sea, that sprouted small archipelagos that dotted the planet. The sky was a white with whispers of blue on this clear day with just two small pink clouds in the corner of the horizon. Although she felt a tie to the planet the desalination complex behind her reminded her that there was not enough fresh water on the colony planet to support human life, and that technology was a necessity of life here. Honshu-I through III had been beautiful failures now abandoned sites, there had been other Tokyo’s countless this was just the sixth on the Green Sea.
The plinth top was synthetic but had a naturalistic-religious aesthetic, seeming a solid mass of weathered sandstone wave worn, although water had never crossed the surface. There was a black boarder at the circumference appearing to be dried sea lichen and groves of quasi-geometric-pseudo-characters pockmarked it surface. This surface scribed an imperfect circle and part of the sand path cut a small partial ellipse into the stone-like surface. Hansi knew as she if crossed of the boundary of the black edge would annihilate organic tissue, and on could only enter on the sandy edge where there was no black boarder. She had seen failures use this suicide to escape the mission.
She was average height, and frail framed, delicate, petite. Her hair cropped short matched her darkest brown eyes. Below her chin hidden under her jaw were two small tattoos, one of Green Sea, the other her Clan-Nomen Designation, Hansianu -Hansi in old Chinese script. No bar codes on her throat, or worker status below her name. She had never seen anyone with less script than her. She was considered unmarked, maybe the least marked person on her planet. She knew this meant she had been excluded nothing in her path forward, she was of one five that lived on Green Sea that had not seen a bar code by her 14 OTSY, she was now 22. She had passed the MB-Turing test at 8, a year before most got their first aptitude bar code. The AI and the elders never knew what to do with her.
Her education was at the Spartan-Jesuit-Lyceum, where else to put an MB-T-97. She was excelled at Latin, Greek and French and Sino-English and American languages. She surpassed linguistics in Bhom-logic and Bokken-probability structure. She was retested with a Bhom-Logic handy cap and passed the MB-T-143-BLC test, again what to do with her. She was never tested again, the AI had extrapolated that she was without a doubt, classically human and the test after thirteenth year had caused deaths. They did not know what to do with her but risking her death her was not considered worth proving that the M-Turing test had gone beyond its proscribed predictive abilities.
The Elders at the AI recommendation also gave her a musical education starting at age 8. She knew the strictures against music and had become Laconic even for the Spartan school when she found out this was a privilege and considered an unnecessity. She had asked the AI, “Why poetry but no songs?”, the AI warned the elders that she may be trying to reverse test the AI, the Elders overruled the AI on investigation of this.
She seemed more put off about a world musicless world than the advancement of the AI toward humanity. She never, even with many AI trainers, very curious about AI, as if she had realized a mistake and was being polite to mention the obvious. She was confused why the AI recommend Finnish when she studied Sebelius, she had wanted to study the eighth symphony instead, and was saddened he had only written seven. It was the only time she had investigate the AI in any detail, since she could not fathom that there was not more. “Could an AI lie?” The AI requested a monitor, which the Elders allowed, the monitor found nothing to report that was a danger to the AI, or Green Sea, but ended his report, “She would be capable of hiding subversion from me at her choosing.”
She looked at the path onto the plinths surface and whispered, “There are no bar code for Time Travelers.” She knew that the groves on the surface were not groves but artifacts of those who passed through. “I will pass through and leave a mark; will it mark me?”
She stepped over the sand boundary onto the plinth, and as she contacted the plinth her flesh seems to stretch out horizontally across the surface as if she was becoming part of the orthogonal surface, she became like one falling into the surface alone her body moving forward and as her body fell face first into the horizontal. Yet she felt like she was walking across a flat surface she knew she was disappearing into the surface but there was no physical manifestation of this in her senses. Her whole body in a geometric cubist rendering was left in stone tones. Then this faded and except for some small artifacts like groves she was gone. The black boarder extended over the opening. As long as this time traveler was alive, the portal was barred to all others.
The hill was yellow stone and with many yellow flowered shrub beside the ruts of an ancient two wheel road. She was for the first time in her life in a place where the air was not saturated by moisture. A place that was not city or sea. She could not see completely through the blur but the clouds were white and the sky was blue as was the water that stretched behind her. She did a quick Bokken qualitative and felt it was safe to assume, she was not on Green Sea any longer. She saw that the sphere was imperfect she knew that it was a Kriegshauser probability projection geometry, that the space dimension of space time she had traveled had an error bar and that the AI had estimated that part of the KPPG would be above the solid space surface of this world. She knew that if the error was smaller that more of the KPPG would be above ground and that the it would be much smaller. She realized as an after thought that she could have also traveled far back in time since she could be traveling somewhere closer than a space only travel event because the multiple body estimates would have higher error with respect to time.
Chapter 2 — Blur Space
Her transition through the plinth complete, she immediately felt she was climbing up a steep grade. She walked saw a halo of light. Her head and shoulders emerged from a floral shaped structure; she moved upwards though there were no steps. The aperture was not organic, she felt an atmosphere of fluid, while it appeared solid underfoot. She sensed a cold plasma leaking trough a force field. What she imagined as incense combined with what she knew to be ozone and peroxides which overwhelmed her olfactory. The aperture emitted a purple light it was not reflecting the sun light being her. She continued to step up and out of the floral riser and upon a curved surface, a long orchid petal that moved towards the ground, and she stepped with surprisingly sure footing as she stepped off onto a long old, rutted road that lead up a hill and at the top an iron gate she could not see the top flat surface of the hill.
A dome reached just beyond the gate and as she scanned around the dome reached 100 m a top quarter of a misshapen spheroid, its surface a quasi-transparent blur. She looked around the parameter a second time orchid was gone. At the foot of the hill beside the road stood sentinel robot, its surface a haze, not a holographic, again a contained plasma, fuzzy, but reflected and refracted light from the blurred sun behind her.
The hill was yellow stone and with many yellow flowered shrubs beside the ruts of an ancient two-wheel road. She named it the golden hill, without thought. For first time she was where the air was not saturated by moisture. She partially saw through the blur, the clouds were white, and the sky was blue as was the water that stretched behind her.
With a quick Bokken qualitative and felt it was safe to assume, she was not on Green Sea. Blur space was the irregularity of a Kriegshauser Probability Projection Geometry, that the space dimension of space time she had traveled had an error bar and that the AI had estimated that part of the KPPG would be above the solid space surface of this world. It was a landing zone set up for her arrival via the Plinth/Orchid. She knew that if the error was smaller, then more of the KPPG would have been above ground and it would be smaller.
An afterthought, this was not accurate that she could have also traveled far back in time since she could be traveling somewhere closer in a space. The multiple body interference estimates of Bhom-Bokken error with respect to time was power law dependent, the exponents guess work.
Bhom logic at first was not much of a help other than Ketter’s Paradox: you could travel forward in time within the rules of Ketter’s relativity, but this limited forward speed of emergent time, so this meant practical time machines could not break forward relativity rules, but Ketter found asymmetry in travel to the past you could travel far and with great acceleration through space and time in reversed time.
Ketter had a corollary that concluded no violation of the first three laws of thermodynamics in time travel. This trip had increased the entropy of the universe and energy had been conserved. You could change events, but you could never make them reversible with time travel. She was there to influence events, even if she knew not where or when, her goal was irreversible and entropic or at least that was what the elders or AI wanted. Her trip if she did nothing more would change the future. This was helpful.
A simple deduction was that a large error based KPPG meant a grand expenditure for her to be in this spacetime, cities on Green Sea would be doomed to fail because of this trip. She had a second level Bokken qualitative the KPPG being in this position with so little of the dome above ground did not rule out several failed KPPGs.
She realized that the only course would be to move towards the sentinel. As she approached, he seemed to be more solid as if he had conserved energy in a blurred form until need for solidity as she approached. The foreignness of this planet struck her she inhaled the scent of dust and stone for the first time.
She said, “ I would like to see the city, if it not to late, I know a quiet path we can talk.” “ I’d like that.” “What is the city called?” He answered with a quizzical look, “ Cagliari.” She repeated it, “Cagliari.” And then she asked what is your name, “ Ketter Bhom.” “I am Hansi, I think we will have a lot to discuss ”