Fractured Infinities

Chaos Magic

Mortals tend to believe that time is linear. It 'flows like a river' or 'soars like an arrow' into the future, in mortal parlance. But, like so many mortal metaphors, these are missing the point. Time has dimensions too, just as space does; they're simply not as obvious.

But then, neither are the bulk of the spatial dimensions. Theories suggest that space actually contains eleven dimensions, eight more than the usual three visible to the naked eye. Those three are often termed x, y, and z, but the other eight don't have such convenient names. In fact, unless you're a physicist, you probably don't know that they exist!

They do, though: they're curled up inside the big three dimensions like shy atoms hiding inside a massive molecule.

Imagine a piece of paper laid out flat on a table. Although it's technically a three-dimensional object, its thickness is minuscule compared to the other two dimensions, so you can treat it as a two-dimensional object. For simplicity's sake, let's call those dimensions width and height.

Let's also assume that this is a gigantic piece of paper, so both width and height are basically infinite. If you were an ant walking on it, could walk forever on it and never reach the end.

Now take that imaginary piece of paper and roll it up into a very tight cylinder. If you're that ant, you'd be a bit confused, right? The paper still has height, but when you try to traverse the width dimension, you end up walking in a circle. You can still walk around in two dimensions, though; they just behave a little strangely.

From a giant's perspective, though, that cylinder of paper only has one dimension: height. Just as you disregard the thickness of the paper as being too small to matter, the giant ignores the tiny thickness of the cylinder – it looks like a line to them. The dimension that you know as width hasn't vanished, though; it's simply rolled up very tightly.

From the universe's perspective, you're in the same position as that giant, which is why you can't detect those other eight dimensions – they're too miniscule to notice. But the math says they exist, and everyone knows that math can't be wrong (except, of course, when it is. But let's pretend that doesn't happen much.)

Mathematical foibles aside, the paper analogy explains a whole bunch of previously-unexplainable things, so it'll probably stick around for a while. In fact, it makes a lot of spatial equations much more tractable, so you might think it'd do the same for temporal ones.

Unfortunately, time isn't nearly so accommodating.

People have described time as a river, a line, a rubber sheet, a circus, or even a big wobbly ball, but none of those explanations are too accurate. How do you describe a highly chaotic, nonlinear phenomenon to a species whose brains are wired to be linear? Those species lucky enough to possess nonlinear mental processes have never found a good way, and so they resort to math which only a fraction of a fraction of the population can hope to understand.

That's a pity, because time is fascinating. Think of it like a massive sandstorm, where each grain of sand represents a moment in time. You can go forwards, backwards, or sideways in time, but you can also skip around in no discernible pattern. To mortal eyes, time flows linearly because they can only land on a single grain at a time. So they skip from grain to grain and assume that their path is a straight line, where it's really more of a jagged squiggle.

That squiggly-ness is why it really doesn't make sense to count the number of temporal dimensions. It clearly has more than one, but how many more? Like a chaotic attractor, time is fractal, which means that its dimensions can be fractional. You could argue that time has two dimensions, or three, but you could also say that it has 2.783 dimensions, and no one could definitively prove you wrong. There's even an argument to be made for infinite dimensions.