4 Tips for Tackling Time Loops — Friday Four
- May 31st, 2018
- Posted in Genre Savvy Survival Lists . Lists . Tropes and Writing
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Ever get the feeling that you’ve been through all this once before? Maybe it was more familiar than you thought–trapped in a time loop, reliving the same period of time over and over again with barely anyone even realizing it. You can’t just tell people about it; they’ll think you’re crazy, after all, even when they’ve experienced far more bizarre things in the past. But it can’t be left alone, either, and you just happen to be the unlucky fool that’s aware of it enough to do something. Besides, if you aren’t crazy at the start of time loop, you might be after a few hundred repetitions. So let’s save a little time and get down to business breaking it, eh?
4. Prove the Loop
First things first: we have to make sure that you’re actually in a loop, and not just cursed with a monotonous life. How perfectly is everything repeating? Calendars and such can be helpful, but they’re hardly foolproof evidence. The same breakfast, or wake up call, or meeting could easily be part of an elaborate prank. It may be necessary to look deeper, and keep an eye out for events that would be hard to replicate day after day–a car crash, for an extreme example, but lesser events like spotting patterns in animal behavior or the weather could be just as crucial. People’s reactions are commonly used, although that’s very tricky…
This isn’t to say that every loop will be exactly the same–you can still have a time loop where events begin to play out differently each time while starting off with the same initial conditions, meaning it may vary even if no one is in control. In such a situation, these hard to change aspects will be the most important evidence of a time loop you can get. If you need to convince people who aren’t capable of noticing the loop, a “trust password” is typically the best way to establish that ASAP: convince them to tell you something you would have no way of knowing otherwise, and then repeat that to them in the next iteration. An instant ally can really help to end this.
3. Find Others
Let’s face it–odds are, you probably aren’t a temporal physicist, and you’re going to have no idea what’s going on aside from an aggravating sense of deja vu. Sometimes the answer is as simple as destroying the device responsible, but on other occasions doing so can result in the end of the universe, so maybe it’s best not to start smashing things. It’s quite likely that you don’t possess the knowledge needed to break the loop, even if you can isolate the cause. No, what you need is help, so identifying any other people who seem to be aware of the loop is going to be important. Even if they’re no better educated than you are, it’ll help stave off the madness, at minimum, and enable more information to be retained and relayed between loops. Plus, two or more people claiming to be trapped in a time loop will be way more convincing to those unaware of it than just a lone person ranting.
One thing to keep in mind: your new friends are likely to reset to where they were at the moment time began looping when each iteration comes to an end, so you will need to be able to find each other quickly to get back to work. While it rarely comes up in most time loops, the internet and phones will be crucial in minimizing your time apart. Public postings about the loop online may be seen by strangers far away who’ve also noticed what’s up, and creating a community that everyone aware of the loop knows to join. It won’t save your info between loops, of course, but it’s a platform to brainstorm.
2. Watch for Decay
As the loop continues, iteration after iteration, there are some other things you have to be wary of. Some loops are fairly stable; you could be fine for thousands of repetitions, if needed, but you can’t just assume that’s the case. Others cause serious damage to the fabric of spacetime, such that dangerous extra-universal beings are attracted to it, or that the fate of the entire universe is at risk as the ruptures spread. Since this has a direct impact on how much time you have to solve the problem (so to speak), it’s critical to watch for signs that the loop is wearing thin.
Symptoms of universal decay from time loops could include “cracks” or other visible distortions beginning to form, at earlier stages, up to the complete erasure of parts of the world on the edge of the affected area as the looped spacetime begins to collapse in on itself. These are particularly devastating because the resources available to come up with a solution will begin dwindling with each repetition, but it isn’t always bad. A potentially beneficial effect is the feeling of deja vu beginning to spread to people who weren’t aware of the loop in prior iterations. This can get you a little bit more help, but don’t get complacent; the overlapping of memories can occasionally cause serious problems with people’s minds.
4. Investigate Unusual Occurrences
While time may be a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey, it generally doesn’t just loop back in on itself infinitely by accident. Something caused this, and it caused it to happen to this day rather than yesterday or tomorrow (adjust as needed for the duration of your particular loop). The key to stopping the loop is fixing the cause, naturally, so as you go through this iteration, be sure to look for anything out of the ordinary. Are you passing through an area of unstable space? Perhaps it’s more than just the spatial dimensions that are twisted. Scientists experimenting with some sort of device, even if it seems like it couldn’t be related, are also highly likely to have played a role in this.
This, of course, assumes that your time loop is in effect for a relatively small area; if, say, the loop encompasses an entire planet, then literally any one of the 7 billion people on Earth could be responsible and it may not even be possible for you to reach the culpable party before the loop resets. Sorry, but you’re kinda screwed in that case, so hopefully someone else will take notice… eventually.
Well, that’s all for this week…
Ever get the feeling that you’ve been through all this once before? Maybe it was more familiar than you thought–trapped in a time loop, reliving the same period of time over and over again with barely anyone even realizing it. You can’t just tell people about it; they’ll think you’re crazy, after all, even when they’ve experienced far more bizarre things in the past. But it can’t be left alone, either, and you just happen to be the unlucky fool that’s aware of it enough to do something. Besides, if you aren’t crazy at the start of time loop, you might be after a few hundred repetitions. So let’s save a little time and get down to business breaking it, eh?
“This, of course, assumes that your time loop is in effect for a relatively small area…” I hadn’t thought about this before but is it even possible for a time effect to only be in effect for one area? Wouldn’t it have to be all of time (everywhere) at once? If I am on the Enterprise and realize I’m in a time loop and I beam to another ship\planet\etc they’d have to be in one too, right? Otherwise I’d escape the loop just from that. Maybe I’m missing something obvious here.
Speaking of obvious things, Starfleet finds itself in so many time loops that there should be a specialized training for it at the academy. They should know exactly what to try if it happens to them, starting with something like your great article here. If there were protocols put in place even though it’s such an unlikely event, it would be pretty beneficial — like with the Omega Particle — to be prepared. Think of how much easier it would be to attain the help of your fellow officers when you didn’t have to convince them over and over at every start! Instead get them instantly on-side with a special predetermined process and codewords instead of the trust password =).
There have definitely been some cases where you see time loops that only affect small regions of space. That’s how the USS Bozeman was trapped for 90 years until encountering the Enterprise-D, after all. I suspect Mudd’s device in Discovery works over similarly confined spaces. Time loops are a little ridiculous in general, but it’s theoretically possible for time to be bent back on itself under extreme conditions in much the same way as spacial dimensions near a black hole. The math really breaks down at that point, though, so there’s no way to even guess what might really happen.
And yeah, you’d think they’d have some standard procedures for time loops in place if they have things like the Temporal Prime Directive ready to go in the event of accidental time travel.