I Am the Real One, Right? (ONC2024)

Chapter Six: The Science Behind

You're likely brimming with questions about the lightning, the split, and time travel, and all the science behind it. Trust me, I was in the same boat. With multiple versions of me and crazy jumps in timelines, understanding what really happened requires closely following the timeline for one of the versions.

So, I woke up without memory and had to do some crazy stuff on my journey to figuring out who I was. Oh, I haven't told you about the time when I helped a blue alien return to his home planet. I'll come back to that soon. Then, finally, when I found out who I was, there was already someone living my life. After trailing him, I finally decided to take him out. Now, the date that day was June 23, and this is important. Keep that in mind.

After I took him out, the light flashed again, and the date was now June 9, so I traveled back about two weeks. I thought maybe I was just going crazy until June 23 rolled around again, and I found myself on the same road as a speeding car headed towards me. Luckily, I survived; I had seen it all unfold once from inside of the car.

When I finally came face to face with my newer version, who, just like me, had a lot of anger towards me, we were hit by lightning again and sent back to June 9th. It's a different story how we came to a truce and eventually found Dr. Helen Archer. 

So let me jump again to me and my other version figuring out things with Dr. Helen Archer. She explains it much better.

Me and my other version sat there in Dr Archer's cabin, trying to be good students but feeling utterly lost, as she tried to make sense of it all. Just the idea that there might be two more versions of us out there was enough to make our heads spin.

"Could it be that the other two versions of us are in different timelines?" my other self threw the question out to Dr. Archer. "You know, like they show in movies with parallel universes and stuff."

Dr. Archer paused, mulling it over. "Honestly, nobody really knows what happens when we start jumping around in time. Sure, imagining parallel universes might help solve some problems, but it also brings up a whole bunch of new ones. Like, how do these alternate realities even come about, and how do they interact with each other?"

She continued, "Plus, you're both here, so you're obviously not in different timelines."

"How is that possible?" I asked, feeling the weight of confusion pressing down on me.

"I can't tell you exactly how the lightning worked. Maybe it had enough power to disrupt time and space. It pushed you back in time to two different points, thus creating two versions of you," Dr. Archer replied.

"There's another way to look at time travel," she continued. "We always assume that traveling through time means jumping from one point to another. You dislodge yourself from one moment and place yourself back in time. This can lead to all sorts of paradoxes, like killing your younger self or your grandfather and preventing your own existence."

I never understood this obsession with these time travel people, always talking about killing their poor grandfather.

"But imagine time travel as temporal reversion," she explained.

We shook our heads as if we understood and repeated after her, "Ohh, temporal reversion," but it was clear we had no clue what it meant.

She clarified, "We're always traveling through time, even at this moment. But it's always in one direction: forward. Now, picture the same thing, but in reverse. You'd be moving backward through time. Events that have already occurred would be undone, and beyond a certain point, you'd cease to exist," her explanation begins to make sense.

"In fact, the only reason you're even aware that you've traveled back in time is that somehow your memory hasn't reverted," she continued. "Wait, I could write a white paper hypothesis on this," she said, making quotes in the air. "If I state that we often travel back in time, there's no way to disprove it."