July 3
[I'll get to say goodbye, right?] Maris asks.
[Of course,] I say. [Right?] The cop nods, and I turn my attention to the notebook.
So obviously, I need to get the Order agent to pose as a mall cop. But the biggest problem is that he’s already here. There’s a paradox here already in that I’ve already called him, but now I need to call him. No matter what I write, therefore, it logically must create the situations that led up to this point. Peter called this kind of situation a “Predestination Scenario, Variation Delta”. The first bit is self-evident. The second bit is the important part.
According to Peter, time loops are a bitch to set up and an even worse hassle to unravel. First off, it’s illegal under the future laws to interact directly with yourself. Thanks to the fact that causality has been told to “go screw itself” and has actually accomplished this, that makes it illegal now even if the law’s not going to be written for hundreds, or maybe thousands, of years. Just because something’s illegal, though, doesn’t mean it isn’t done.
The problem is that self-tampering is illegal for the fantastically good reason that there’s only a very narrow window for monkeying around with your own past that won’t result in a Steamer from forming on you and erasing you from existence, past present and future. Technically it’s called a Localized Anti-Tachyon Correction Hazard, but I suppose I influence future history somehow because Peter only called it that once, referring to them as Steamers after that. Unless you’re careful enough to act in exactly the right way in the past, you will set up your own eradication from the timestream. The only way you will be careful enough to set up a time loop is if you have an understanding of eight-dimensional chaos theory and fourth-order polynomial fractal mathematics, more commonly known as “omniscience”.
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