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eve11Main Post and Chapter Index
**
Time did not exist in lines. It was neither a matrix, nor a web, nor a tapestry. It was not a fabric whose strength of strand was measured in likelihood, nor whose complexity was revealed in the topology of its folds or in the interwoven patterns of its paradoxes and schisms. In her most linear, constrained states of consciousness, the TARDIS still recognized these simple lies, even as she accepted them as inevitable and necessary mechanisms for communication. She once had tried to show her Pilot directly, exactly, the nature of Time; when his brainwaves had finally recovered enough for cogent perception, the only lasting impression she could sense in his mind was a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey . . . stuff.
Fundamentally, she understood compression, translation, information loss. It took intertwining with her Pilot--those subjective centuries of psychic communion--in order for her to grasp the finer points of metaphor.
For a timeless being, learning was the realization of a random process: a fixed point coalescing from the solid rules of potential to instantaneous, inescapable fact. She did not synthesize. She did not discover. She simply remembered--and in that way, she was learning, always and never. Linked so delicately to her Pilot, she remembered that the tiny sparklines of sentience in her continuum were not only receptive but innovative. Limited as they were, they reconstructed all perception from meager information and imperfect comparisons. More than that, they did so instinctively, and optimally from their frame of reference. To the extent it was possible, the eleven-dimensional mind boggled.
(Some would say that a TARDIS communicated in riddles wrapped around nanoseconds that took her Pilot lifetimes to decipher. Rarely would anyone stop to consider that the truth may, in fact, have been the other way around.)
When their link was broken, metaphor remained. It was the anomaly for which she could find no dominating frame of reference. She could remember every configuration of every fact and potential that ever is or was or would be, but nothing across that entire continuum could explain to her why that knowledge was inadequate. Metaphor was a limit, undefined in an incomplete space. Its absent cause was dense and unavoidable, depleting the expectation of every possible moment she could experience, and it ached.
(Are all people like this? she once will have asked, and oh, his face, his hilarious face! Everything so new, new sight, new sound, new people so . . . so much bigger on the inside.)
The TARDIS shifted her focus to a six-dimensional manifold, and began searching for a particular symmetry. She knew it was there; she had already encountered its necessary and sufficient presuppositions. She murmured unrequited metaphors with each path integral spun across this surface, each one reminding her that something was missing. Something was lost.
The full phenomenon she was searching for could not be experienced in anything lower than six dimensions, but that didn't stop her Pilot's people from recognizing its existence. Bound by empiricism, they could only categorize the concept insofar as their inadequate mathematics could express it--a precise series of postulates, predictions and observations that so narrowly defined the limits of what could be known. They called it superposition.
Diverting temporal energy into low-likelihood configurations built up a potential that needed to be conserved across the continuum, they would explain. Enforcing rigidity in order to maintain mutual exclusion meant that, at the endpoints, the affected timelines would be forced in turn to oscillate across all possibilities simultaneously, with amplitude proportional to their importance weights. The resulting temporal echoes could be unpredictable, unpleasant experiences, when projected to a four-dimensional frame of reference.
The TARDIS would never see what she knew as superposition in this crude, piecewise approximation, no more than a poet would see love in a study of chemical signals. She offered her own imperfect metaphor into the void--a plucked string, invisible, dances a dissonant chord--and waited patiently for a response until she remembered she was alone.
The raveling wave struck, battering her conditional stabilizers, and her cloister bell tolled again in constrained space. The predicted symmetry drew her into tighter and tighter focus, but it brought only black, terrible silence surrounding agitated time that she couldn't grasp, couldn't calm or control. A half-formed thought shot across all measure: What have they done to us?
With timelines re-knitting all around her, the TARDIS clung to her integrations, her temporal psyche resonating sympathetically with the echoes that crossed her paths.
. . . Penny in the air . . .
. . . Stand aside! . . .
. . . What a trip . . .
And in six dimensions, she remembered.
**
Part 7 | Part 8
**
Time did not exist in lines. It was neither a matrix, nor a web, nor a tapestry. It was not a fabric whose strength of strand was measured in likelihood, nor whose complexity was revealed in the topology of its folds or in the interwoven patterns of its paradoxes and schisms. In her most linear, constrained states of consciousness, the TARDIS still recognized these simple lies, even as she accepted them as inevitable and necessary mechanisms for communication. She once had tried to show her Pilot directly, exactly, the nature of Time; when his brainwaves had finally recovered enough for cogent perception, the only lasting impression she could sense in his mind was a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey . . . stuff.
Fundamentally, she understood compression, translation, information loss. It took intertwining with her Pilot--those subjective centuries of psychic communion--in order for her to grasp the finer points of metaphor.
For a timeless being, learning was the realization of a random process: a fixed point coalescing from the solid rules of potential to instantaneous, inescapable fact. She did not synthesize. She did not discover. She simply remembered--and in that way, she was learning, always and never. Linked so delicately to her Pilot, she remembered that the tiny sparklines of sentience in her continuum were not only receptive but innovative. Limited as they were, they reconstructed all perception from meager information and imperfect comparisons. More than that, they did so instinctively, and optimally from their frame of reference. To the extent it was possible, the eleven-dimensional mind boggled.
(Some would say that a TARDIS communicated in riddles wrapped around nanoseconds that took her Pilot lifetimes to decipher. Rarely would anyone stop to consider that the truth may, in fact, have been the other way around.)
When their link was broken, metaphor remained. It was the anomaly for which she could find no dominating frame of reference. She could remember every configuration of every fact and potential that ever is or was or would be, but nothing across that entire continuum could explain to her why that knowledge was inadequate. Metaphor was a limit, undefined in an incomplete space. Its absent cause was dense and unavoidable, depleting the expectation of every possible moment she could experience, and it ached.
(Are all people like this? she once will have asked, and oh, his face, his hilarious face! Everything so new, new sight, new sound, new people so . . . so much bigger on the inside.)
The TARDIS shifted her focus to a six-dimensional manifold, and began searching for a particular symmetry. She knew it was there; she had already encountered its necessary and sufficient presuppositions. She murmured unrequited metaphors with each path integral spun across this surface, each one reminding her that something was missing. Something was lost.
The full phenomenon she was searching for could not be experienced in anything lower than six dimensions, but that didn't stop her Pilot's people from recognizing its existence. Bound by empiricism, they could only categorize the concept insofar as their inadequate mathematics could express it--a precise series of postulates, predictions and observations that so narrowly defined the limits of what could be known. They called it superposition.
Diverting temporal energy into low-likelihood configurations built up a potential that needed to be conserved across the continuum, they would explain. Enforcing rigidity in order to maintain mutual exclusion meant that, at the endpoints, the affected timelines would be forced in turn to oscillate across all possibilities simultaneously, with amplitude proportional to their importance weights. The resulting temporal echoes could be unpredictable, unpleasant experiences, when projected to a four-dimensional frame of reference.
The TARDIS would never see what she knew as superposition in this crude, piecewise approximation, no more than a poet would see love in a study of chemical signals. She offered her own imperfect metaphor into the void--a plucked string, invisible, dances a dissonant chord--and waited patiently for a response until she remembered she was alone.
The raveling wave struck, battering her conditional stabilizers, and her cloister bell tolled again in constrained space. The predicted symmetry drew her into tighter and tighter focus, but it brought only black, terrible silence surrounding agitated time that she couldn't grasp, couldn't calm or control. A half-formed thought shot across all measure: What have they done to us?
With timelines re-knitting all around her, the TARDIS clung to her integrations, her temporal psyche resonating sympathetically with the echoes that crossed her paths.
. . . Penny in the air . . .
. . . Stand aside! . . .
. . . What a trip . . .
And in six dimensions, she remembered.
**
Part 7 | Part 8
