Short Story: Flattime

This, in essence, is supposed to allude to Flatland, except in explaining the many dimensions of time. This time elements in the story was inspired by a Facebook discussion, but the whole of it is a true story. The reference to the girls and a conference in the story was what prompted me to my fascination of time travel, and actually happened seven years ago. It is implied that the author believes them to be time travelers for some odd reason or another.

And I seriously did believe they were.

I can make things go backwards.

The steam from my coffee this morning coalesced back to its liquid.

That isn't supposed to happen. Steam goes up and scatters like all gases, not collect back to its source. Or at least gases that are not heavier than the earth's atmosphere.

I shake my head. It is rising out, not coalescing. Am I dreaming?

No, it isn't a dream. I pinch myself. My mind probably just wanted to rewind it. Maybe it's those memory supplements I've been taking? Is this almost video-like feedback the side effect?

Cool.

Huh, not really appear and disappear, it's more like rewinding time and remaining conscious. Interesting. Oh, my imaginations!

I saw three of them look at me interestingly. Three girls. They looked at me quizically. They looked eerily familiar and not familiar.

Even though they did not look out of place in this conference, they were striking. To me, at least.

Not attraction, no. A little bit of it, yes. Deja vu, perhaps? Probably rather my self-consciousness.

The feeling disturbed me enough to get out of my seat and go elsewhere.

The future is a the gravity of time.

You know how that if you jump, you fall back down? Gravity pulls us down to the Earth's core, unless impeded.

Time travel is like that. Even if you go backwards in time, once you arrive, time will automatically go forward.

Like gravity, the future affects those with more mass. We know at the speed of light, photons practically have no mass, and time is still for the photon.

So even though you can rewind to an extent, you will eventually have to go forward again.

The question is though, how do you jump?

Oh, everyone can rewind time and traverse through it. But only a few can remember, and even fewer, less than a handful, are conscious of doing so. Our memories, too, are held by time.

For example, if you rewound time for yourself, would you remember the future? Of course not, those memory of the future never existed, because they didn't happen for you to remember yet. Make sense?

Though, rarely, the imprint of energy is strong enough that they leave traces.

You know, dreams of days past? Of days never materializing? That is the trace of semi-conscious time travel. Most time travel is unconscious. Or rather, instantly forgotten as it rewinds.

After a couple hours wandering the conference, I chanced upon those three girls again. One of them asked me something. I think it was the blondish one.

I shrugged it off. I  muttered something about going to my friends. I don't know why I was feeling this way toward them. They're just girls. Of course, I have to impress them a little.

Yet, time, as we experience it is only a ray, not even a line. The ray points to the direction of the gravity. It is still only one dimensional, even if we go backwards.

But time also has more than one dimension, as space as three.

Some call it alternate universes. The branching universe theory. The reality, actually, is not made up of branches, but a width. If time is a line with length, it's width are the alternate choices we could have made at every given moment.

We too could traverse the width. Every choice we make, we could make. And we remember. And we see what could have been. Will I sip my coffee? Will I not? Will I have tea instead? That is the width of time in the moment.

You could see your reflection in this house of mirrors of yourself, making different choices. The farther you look at the horizon of time, the more radical and improbable your choice were. Width can be measured!

However, interestingly, the gravity of time affects our choices, and our choices in turn affect it. While we can ponder the choices we could have made, we are still dragged along the same ray, never completely getting out of the stream. Our free will is intact; not that we could change it, but it is we that made the change. We don't make all possible choices at the same time.

The rest of the day was inconsequential.

I left the conference a bit mellow. We boarded on a bus back to our school. I don't think I will see those girls ever again. Who are they? Why do they look so familiar?

What is the height of time, then? What is the third dimension of the temporality? Are we on a sort-of timesphere as humans are on a sphere called Earth in space?

Total alternate universes with different preconditions. A radically different time plane.

While the universe in the second dimension of time, more or less, have the same preconditions, the third does not.

This is the plane of stories. Universes with varying creation myths, alternate histories, revisionist histories, future histories of those histories, and whatnot. They all exist in the planes apart from this objective reality plane.
So if the future is the gravity of time, and if time is a sphere like Earth is in space, what is the core of this sphere? The end of time?

So if the drive to the future is the gravity of time, and time is like a sphere as Earth is a sphere in space, then what is the core of this timesphere? The end of time?

No.

God. Eternity.