July 4
Obviously, I’m not in danger of erasing myself right now, since if I was, the Steamer would have popped onto me once the notebook had disappeared. However, this is still considered a “Delta” variation because, at this moment in time, I’m in sole control of maintaining the loop or breaking it.
Time loops don’t function like how fiction tells you. Creating a time loop does not doom someone to repeat the same situations over and over again until the end of the world. That sort of a loop is impossible because of the concept of relative time. No matter what you are, you always have your own perception of the flow of time. If you spend thirty years of your life in the present, then one year in the past, and come back at exactly the same time you left, you’re still thirty-one years old at the point you come back, because you have lived for thirty-one years. If you were somehow stuck in time so that you looped over the same period over and over again, you would eventually break out once enough relative time had passed, from your perspective, that you died of natural causes. If you didn’t go insane and commit suicide first.
The biggest reason is, though, that going back in time works like rewinding a tape that you’ve recorded on. If you then go back to the point you looped into, there would then be two of you. If you then looped back, there would be three, then four, and so on and so on. By virtue of the loop, you’d already be interfering with your past self, creating a paradox, and insta-Steamering yourself. There’s no record of who managed to make the most copies of himself because he was erased from history immediately afterwards. I’d place my bets on a hundred and eight, just because that’s such an ironic number for that to happen.
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