#hypertime

I have a whole series of #pitchposting posts about stories that I'm interested in but don't want to write myself, but within the specific bounds of this question ...

qntm has a post on hypertime that has always fascinated me. In the naïve form, it's not that much different from stable time loops, but if you introduce some irregularity (by, for example, having a "top" timeline), then there are all kinds of interesting ramifications.

To my knowledge, no one has actually written a hypertime story. Actually, to my knowledge, I'm the only person who has so much as started writing a hypertime story, and I didn't get very far, because I felt like I needed a better way to visualize the paths of the characters through hypertime.

Assuming that you've read that post, the thing I find most interesting about "cascading hypertime" is that you can go back in time and wind up in a timeline that appears, to you, like an alternate timeline caused by someone traveling to the past (because this is exactly what happened). So you could go back to 1965, and wind up in a timeline where someone has killed Hitler and averted WWII, and to a character who doesn't know they're in a hypertime story, this is a real "wait, what" moment.

So this is what I would have someone write, if I could: it would be a hypertime story where our protagonist thinks they're in a stable time loop for maybe ten chapters, then (from their internal perspective) it feels as thought the rules of time travel have fundamentally changed, and ... maybe they're in a branching timelines model? And we do that for another ten chapters. But then they start traveling through time and winding up in timelines where causality seems broken, where they "go back in time" and are in divergent branches that break the rules they thought they had figured out. Real psychotic break territory, until someone explains hypertime to them, and maybe that feels like more of a psychotic break, because even if you can understand the system, you cannot understand what actually happened in a given timeline to make it look the way it does, and you cannot know what kind of timeline you'll end up in you time travel. Causality has been preserved, the universe is still ordered, it all makes sense ... but from the inside, causality is opaque, meaning has been destroyed, our protagonist is adrift in a world that is meaningfully beyond their comprehension.

Anyway, that's the novel that I would like someone to write. It doesn't need to be long, and might be better if it's not, but it needs to follow this progression of hypotheses being peeled back until we're at cosmic horror.

(ooc: binged through several months worth of this blog this morning, fantastic work!)

*Curses under my breath because I LITERALLY asked for this*

Ok, SO. Multiversal Dynamics is REALLY cutting edge science. Like STAR Labs level cutting edge. We are learning new things about it every tick of the clock and the more I try to explain it to you in words the more wrong I am going to be but we're at the level of things where making it UNDERSTANDABLE to a lay audience means simplifying it to the point of becoming incorrect in that simplication. But we're also at the level where I don't understand how it works either so at least we're on the same level.

For clarity's sake, when I was in college. The basic, 1 dimensional explanation of the multiverse was given to me as a series of ever increasing sphere from what is most tangible to us to what is least.

(A crappy diagram I made showing the 4 broad LAYERS of the multiverse as we understand it)

(1) UNIVERSE: In the first layer of the multiverse is just, the universe as we know it. You, me, everyone we've ever known, the moon, the stars, the planets out in the firmament to the edge of space and time. Our universe, our home, where events and history have played out in the order that we currently understand them. The people we know are as we know them, we have made the choices we have made and the consequences have followed that choice. From the big bang to the big crunch it is EVERYTHING we can see, touch, taste, feel, hear and smell.

(2) MULTIVERSE: In the next layer out is the Multiverse, within every world of the multiverse things are more or less recognizable to us. Black is black and white is white, up is up and down is down. But, in each world within the Multiverse ONE (1) decision was made differently at some point in the timeline between the beginning and end of time. This can be everything as major as the KP Mass Extinction never occurring to you tripping on air walking out the door at 8 AM on March 19th, 1994 rather than March 20th. You could spend lifetimes looking for the difference, or lifetimes looking for the similarity. But it is still OUR universe altered by the forks in OUR history. *(Put a pin here because its where Hypertime comes in but I'm just explaining the whole thing for the moment)

(3) OMNIVERSE: In the 3rd layer is what is termed either "The Observable Multiverse" or "The Omniverse". Here there is again an infinite number of worlds as deep and rich and complicated as ours but they are not based upon our history. Basic fundamental facts can be different. We can have a recognizable human society that contains NO one you've ever heard of going back to the dawn of civilization. Worlds where basic scientific concepts, while they work in a similar fashion do not work in the SAME fashion. In this sphere is every idea that has ever been had, or not been had. Media, stories, books, movies, games, that one little creature you doodled on your notepad in 6th grade. ALL worlds as we understand them exist upon this layer. From this height, EVERYTHING is true.

(4) THE UNKNOWN: Beyond the sphere where all ideas we can image are true. Lies the sphere where all the ideas we CANNOT image are true. The illogical, the nonsensical, the surreal. And I mean beyond even the human ability to understand those words. All of the things you CANNOT imagine live here. Worlds where every single definition becomes useless. Worlds where our 3 dimensional forms and linear thinking would be as eldrich and alien to them and they would be to us. This realm cannot be reached, it cannot be studied, it cannot be crossed because LITERALLY all of those concepts do not apply. Don't think about it too hard you WILL hurt yourself.

*Picking up the pin, back to Layer (2)

Like,, he was traveling the entirety of hypertime, combating Black Zero for a long time (at least I think it was a long time, it’s been a sec since l read the comic). And we really don’t know much about him.

Opinion: We need a Codified DC Multiverse post- Dark Crisis “Big Bang”

I haven’t been reading Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths as event fatigue has been strong for a long time.  A very long time.  Still, I’ve been keeping up with some of the news spinning out of the event.  Reading that Pariah was brining back the original Multiverse did get my attention.  I’ve taken a wait and see approach, however. This week’s Dark Crisis: Big Bang #1 got me thinking when I saw the…