My left eye twitched. I managed to grandfather paradox myself on Twitter last night.
It's always been a favorite of pop culture. The idea that a simple thought experiment 'proves' that backwards time travel and free will cannot simultaneously exist in the same Universe is science-fiction dynamite, with some wonderful workarounds. Philip J. Fry is his own grandfather in Futurama. Characters can comfortably assassinate their former selves in Ashes To Ashes. The expert on the subject says it's not as simple as that; it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff. And, yes, it's always been a favorite of mine, as well. You can guarantee after a dose of Red Dwarf or Doctor Who my son and I will get into a session of shooting the breeze about temporal mechanics. Usually we'll move into quantum entanglement and all sorts of other spooky science before Ben starts to get fidgety and reaches for one of his standard "escape the conversation" tropes. He'll pull his Nintendo DS out of his pocket, fart at an oppotune moment, or inexplicably yell "Sharon!" in an attempt to break out. (That's OK, Ozzy and I go way back).
One of the wonderful things about the Internet is it, too, has a temporal dimension. I love things like the Wayback Machine, a view of what the Web looked like at previous points in time. I love my Google Calendar, and I always keep an eye out for services that let me do occasionally useful (but often puerile) tricks like scheduling an e-mail to send later, pretending I am somewhere else in space-time, or generally just messing about. Twitter, on the other hand, is so "real-time", it's almost impossible to treat it like most other Internet resources - it's a constantly moving target. Unless your other tools are up to that task, you could be in for a few surprises. For instance, when I'm away from the computer, I get DM's immediately via portable e-mail, but @replies may take up to four hours before I receive them in a search keyword summary (from tweetlater). That's alright, people think I'm just slow to respond, and not a slave to the thing. Likewise, if I reply from my e-mail gadget through ping.fm, who can guess how long that will take to make its way through the intertubes? That's what happened yesterday. Not only was my e-mail device being upgraded, but it seemed ping.fm was unbearably slow as well. Let the paradoxes begin.
Quitting time was approaching rapidly, and ominous rainclouds were gathering outside, so I figured it was time to take a break and went outside. Rain does wonderful things to my psyche; you can't keep me out of the stuff. While I was outside, I messed about a bit, blew off some steam, sent some tweets from my e-mail device to answer the eternal Twitter question - "what are you doing?". I must admit, this part of Twitter is my secondary addiction - the primary part is interacting with people, but throwing out off-the-wall notes, checking the responses, and thus discovering what would make a good blog post or not, is pretty precious as well. I thought little more of it; I've been doing this for months. On getting home, I found my teenage girls had filled the house with friends. My left eye twitched; the sort of nervous twitch Dads with teenage daughters get all the time, produced by insane estrogen levels over Twilight or whatever. Ben and I did exactly what any male should do in this situation; we went and hid in another room and wheeled out a couple of episodes of "guy stuff". Red Dwarf, provided he'd promise to go straight to bed afterwards, which he duly did. That left me with an evening to myself, hidden in my sanctuary from the company of wolves upstairs. Twitter seemed an ideal way to pass the time.
Not that The Boy would let me, of course. He came staggering downstairs, complaining that he was "too excited to sleep", wandered into the kitchen to get a banana, hollered "Whatcha dooo-in?" and flying son bombs me from scross the room. I've had years to prepare myself for these. After the first time when he was about two, dropping that cannonball head of his, running straight at my nether regions and sending me reeling in paralyzed agony, I've learnt to prepare for this, tighten the muscles, and just hope he doesn't hurt too much. He took a leap into the couch and tucked himself deep into my armpit. Clingy, apparently in need of some extra male bonding this evening.
"Who are those people then, Dad? Ay? Who's that?"
"Those are Daddy's friends son. Daddy's internet friends."
"It's good you have friends Dad." Cheeky monkey. "Who's that?"
"That's Daddy's friend, son." My left eye twitched. "You really, really, need to be in bed, son." I scrambled out a text message on my little e-mail gizmo to respond to an unfinished conversation. He wouldn't be letting me type on the computer for the rest of the night.
"And there's you, Dad."
Sure enough, it was. An earlier incarnation of me. Previous Me. The version of me that had been dancing in the rain, about four or five hours ago. Previous Me was then, but was tweeting now. It had taken those words that long to get through all the intertubes. Who knows why. Somehow, I'd managed to create a twin - and, of course, it would have to be an evil twin, wouldn't it? They always are. Present Me watched, dumbfounded, as Previous Me went into overdrive, tweeted all over the boards... and got responses. Not me. Not Present Me. Evil, Previous Me. My left eye twitched. I tried to free my arm pinned under my son. Previous Me had to be stopped, no matter what the consequences. If we intersected, if we touched, if it was matter and anti-matter, if the world would end - it was irrelevant. I had one big advantage. I knew what Previous Me was going to say before he said it. Surely I had the upper hand - unfortunately, Previous Me didn't have his arms pinned under an eleven-year old bruiser of a boy.
Then, I saw my chance. I wriggled my arm free from The Boy, as he was beginning to nod off. Maybe, just maybe, this would work. Twitter won't let you tweet the same thing twice in a row. All I had to do was get Present Me to type what Previous Me was about to say. We'd collide in the timeline, in a glorious display of fireworks, annihilating each other, dark and light, becoming pure energy. I pulled up my Sent Folder and saw the words, typed them, carefully, exactly, precisely. previous me wouldn't see this coming - he couldn't, he was firmly sealed in the past. I entered the message and hit Send, closed my eyes tightly and waited for the resulting explosion.
The blood vessel in my left eye finally burst. The twitching stopped, and Previous Me was no more. The world was saved, yet again, from a shadowy fate, a character displaced in time, one who, I knew, had the capacity for unspeakable evil - because he was, after all, me. I'd walked away from the encounter with a minor graze, nothing more. No annihilation, no black holes on earth; just Present Me, left to fight another day. I staggered to the bathroom to clean myself up, wash out my wounded eye, and pull myself together after this experience. He'd be back, I knew it; it was up to me to behave on this timeline.
The device in my Coca-Cola Polar Bear sleepy pants began to vibrate. A tweet.
You shouldn't mess with time travel, Present Me.
At that, I figured it was time to go to bed.
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