Who Am I?
Seems perfectly self-consistent. It will certainly help keep your story-plots straightforward with few complications (and will keep a certain type of reader from complaining so much). The only thing I might mention is that "time travel" forward in time doesnt require that the traveler move ahead of the present moment, only that they experience time much more slowly than the rest of the universe. They still exist at every point in time when the rest of the universe experiences it, but they are locked inside some sort of "slow bubble" where sub-atomic particles decay much more slowly.
"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."
Yes, time-dilating oneself to give oneself the illusion of fast-forwarding in time works just like in reality. It also doesn't break the system since as you point out, they don't technically leave the present.
I watch Doctor Who and Sapphire And Steel. amitakartok, your setup more or less makes sense to me (or to put it another way, it doesn't even begin to approach their levels of 'doesn't make sense'). I'm also rather tired, so bear with me here as I ramble a bit...
I'm not sure how time travel backwards is possible here (or rather, what the mechanics and/or technology are that allow it), and it's not clear to me how time travel forwards works either. 'Accelerating to 'c' around the gravity well of a wormhole, ????, time travel', by the sound of it, but I don't see how this allows a relative being to travel back through objective time to any useful degree. You'd have to dump a seriously large amount of resources into it... by real-world rules, of course.
Then there's the third point. Is complete relative time stasis (a la Red Dwarf - that is, objective time continues on while relative time is at a total standstill) theoretically possible under the limitations these rules impose? Or actually done in the setting, for that matter? And not just a 99.999999%-approaches-but-never-reaches-100 thing, but actual stasis. I ask because it seems like the only way to travel through time is the 'slow' way (sorta), so excessively taking advantage of it somehow will still require some aging.
There's also the thing with bringing the 'present' back to the 'past', in a way that does not immediately cause a paradox as far as the 'present' is concerned (a smartphone where Gene Roddenberry can see it, for example, in a newly-created stable loop, when he originally came up with the tricorder on his own).
Say an idea is given to someone who cannot possible 'use' it, for example - is there a possibility that this could violate causality at a 'future' date after the 'present' where the idea originated? A 'causality bomb', if you will. (Better example: Under Amita-verse time rules, does the plot of Back To The Future Part II only work because Young!Biff never realizes it was his older self, Old!Biff, that gave him the Almanac?)
I would set some sort of limitation on how much objective time any and all relative matter (living creatures, spaceships, stars, houseplants, and all the etc. matter that comprises them) can skip over, before consequences start to happen, rather than rely on the threat of precursors and any direct action they could take. A cold and hard rule of the universe seems more worrying than a NPC - to me, anyway.
It's not acceleration around the wormhole; rather, causing time to flow differently between the two exit points of the wormhole (whether by gravity, acceleration or anything else) causes it to "auto-correct" in the wrong direction. It's an accidental physics loophole left in by the precursors who close with an Obvious Rule Patch after the Big Bad abuses it.
That's precisely why deliberate time travel is beyond humanity's reach for the foreseeable future in the story.
I think it's better if I show you.
There are two time travels in the story. In the first, the traveler is sent back from 2058 to 2042 against his will to participate in a certain battle. This turns out to be a Stable Time Loop because by doing so, he saves the lives of his parents. All said parents see is that a Mysterious Protector came out of nowhere, curbstomped the Monster of the Week then disappeared, all without saying a word. Since they can't figure out what happened, the matter is quietly dropped and forgot about for sixteen years, when they realize that the Super Prototype Humongous Mecha their son was last seen Gundamjacking is visually identical to the Mysterious Protector caught on gun camera footage sixteen years before. In fact, it's implied but not outright confirmed that the mecha's designer was inspired by said footage when he designed it.
The reason why the traveler didn't reveal his identity is two-fold. First, saying that he doesn't get along well with his parents is an understatement. Second, his cousin tagged along and is Genre Savvy about time travel and the potential consequences of altering the past (albeit not all of it), so she tells him not to - which doesn't prevent her almost messing everything up herself by observing her future mommy from afar and mommy, being psychic, picks up her also-psychic daughter's presence nearby (and as it eventually turns out, was the one who deliberately left the traveler's mecha unguarded and booted up so that he can stroll into the hangar and hijack it just before going back in time).
Those NPCs are just as cold and hard, believe me. They can create and destroy entire universes at will and have done so an unknown number of times before (to justify all the various fanfics in the verse).
Why they are doing this? For the same reason human scientists cultivate bacteria and run computer simulations. There's absolutely no difference: to these guys, we are the bacteria and the universe is the simulation. That they are twitchy about time travel fucking up the universe is fundamentally the same as a bacteriologist being twitchy about his cell cultures getting contaminated; there's no altruism or benevolence here whatsoever, just pure pragmatism.
...Okay, gotcha. Yeah, that scenario sounds plausible enough - the bit with the psychic mother is what I was wondering about. The 'Mysterious Protector comes back at a later date' sounds like a darker version of the 'North Pole Lion' by way of 0 Gundam, and that's not something I recall seeing before. (I seem to recall Kamen Rider Kabuto coming close to it, under completely different circumstances.)
Though I still think there's a difference between cold emotions and a block of ice. The problem I see is that, by making the precursors so relatable that you can describe their actions with such a basic metaphor, you strip them of some horror. I wouldn't do it, but I'm interested to see how you work it out.
Incidentally, who explains these rules in the story?
She's a prototype of a genetically engineered Super-Soldier - or rather, she was, until the project was aborted when the head scientist (and her genetic donor) realized that they went too far with ignoring the moral issues of such a project, pulled the plug and legally adopted the test subject.
The psychic powers weren't part of the design, they're just the result of the gene-engineering process accidentally activating a couple of genetic markers that would've already manifested via natural evolution in a few thousand years - and indeed, after a specific event in the story, quite a few children conceived beyond that point are born psychic, although they're nowhere near the gene-engineered prototypes' descendantsnote . The reasons behind this are not completely understood but its genetic nature means that it can be passed on/inherited without further gene-engineering, plus there are social implications as well. Children's powers actually develop better if they spend their fetal stage in a similarly psychic mother and psychics in general tend to form deeper emotional bonds, especially with loved ones.
Don't know yet. The only character in the cast who is aware of every single rule there is in the universe is a friendly precursor masquerading as a lesser entity because she's sick of how the rest of her kind treat sentient life as lab rats... not that she's really forthcoming with that information, seeing as she's also a childish Great Gazoo who talks back to and fucks around with her fellow lesser entities seemingly for the sheer lulz. She's also the one who sets up and executes the Stable Time Loop by sending the time traveler to the past then sending him back to the present once his job is done and on one occasion, sends God into silent terror when He realizes that He doesn't remember ever recruiting her as a minion...
...huh. That's a pretty good Cosmic Horror.
Consider this: God has many minions, He created them all himself and remembers creating them. Out of nowhere comes this living Portable Hole with internal space the size of a solar system plus the ability to instantaneously appear anywhere in the universe no matter the distance. He doesn't remember creating this thing. So then, where exactly did she come from?
I think you can see where His Fridge Horror comes from, especially once He considers the full extent of her powers: while His minions use her as a glorified private taxi, anything inside her cannot interact with the outside, nor can the outside interact with the interior, until she lets it out. So it could also be used to swallow Him up without Him being able to do anything about it... fortunately, He doesn't know that she's not allowed to do that.
Is 'God' here (nominally, and/or delegating) in charge of maintaining these time travel rules, or is that a separate ...er, 'department'?
For that matter, does this assume that 'God' has created everything in the universe, or merely runs it/relevant sections of it, or...? The specific thing that pops out at me with that 'internal space the size of a solar system' is, why not just force her to nom on a local solar system no matter where she appears, and keep her busy/unable to nom on anything else that way?
(Or, alternately, just prop the door open. "Here, bite down on this for a second. Well, a few minutes. Actually, could you keep that there for all eternity? ...because it's safer than smoking?")
God's only responsibility is to seed the universe with life, and is one of seven entities of His class. In fact, calling Him 'God' is misleading because He's no deity, just an autonomous organic terraforming entity with free will. Even his minions call Him the Eternal; I'm just referring to Him as God because He's the central figure in quite a few religions, including the Abrahamic ones.
A small pocket universe is the only thing that was truly created by God. His minions are all "converted" from existing lifeforms, in the same was God Himself was elevated from a lesser lifeform by the precursors. That means He's not fulfilling the task what He was created for, which is why the aforementioned precursor-masquerading-as-minion was assigned to keep an eye on Him.
(Or, alternately, just prop the door open. "Here, bite down on this for a second. Well, a few minutes. Actually, could you keep that there for all eternity? ...because it's safer than smoking?")
I don't think she'd fall for that. She is far older than the universe, after all, and not the least bit senile.
In a fic I'm writing, I'd like to use the following rules regarding time travel but I don't know if it makes sense.
First, there are limitations concerning time travel. It is possible to time travel via a wormhole by altering the flow of time around the entrance but the required amount of energy makes it prohibitively difficult to achieve.
Second, traveling backwards in time is possible with one limitation. You may not carry out any action whose consequences violate the Novikov self-consistency principle
ie. you may not, under any circumstances, create a paradox because reality has a Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: causing the universe to contradict itself is a really bad thing of reality-wiping proportions (plus if you try to go for it anyway, the Precursors will make you Ret-Gone). The only time it happens in-storynote , it requires a Deus ex Machina to save the universe by shunting the source of the paradox to a newly-created second universe that's basically the original reverted to an earlier revision (and the changes applied only to the copy, neatly giving an excuse for having an Alternate Timeline). Stable Time Loops that cause no paradoxes are permitted but are still pushing it.
Third, traveling forwards in time is problematic. There are two kinds of present: the relative present which everyone experiences in real-time and is the present we usually talk about - and the absolute present which is the point time itself is currently at. Just like how you cannot currently attend tomorrow's concert because it hasn't happened yet, you cannot travel beyond the absolute present for the simple reason that the future beyond it doesn't exist yet: it's being created in real-time by the natural passage of time. This ensures that the past/present won't contradict the future because there is no future to contradict yet and when it comes into existence, it will be fully consistent with the past.
Fourth, there are entities - mostly the Precursors who created and currently operate the universe - that perceive time non-linearly. What this means is that if you meet with one in the present for the first time then travel 20 million years into the past, the entity will recognize you as if the two of you had just met because you already met it in the future.
Does this make sense?