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[taxevasion]

So is this like Reddit, or more like Facebook? Can I change my username? Kind of weird it didn’t ask me to set up a password. What if someone steals someone else’s earpieces? Would they be able to post with their account? What if I want to make a second account for… you know. Sideblog reasons?

Comments

[unalienated]

I think there'd be a market for comfort plushies. To stave off the existential dread?

[taxevasion]

You can't be serious. Ughhhhhh, I literally have hundreds of beanie babies I'm trying to sell on ebay back in my basement!! This is the perfect market!

[unalienated]

Do you have Jolly the Walrus? I've lost so many online auctions last minute.

[taxevasion]

Uh, yeah, he's common as hell, dude. Bumble's the one you want to be on the look out for.

[unalienated]

I was bidding on The End bear and then and evil AI tried to kill me. I'm sure those two things aren't related, but it's hard not to see a connection.

[taxevasion]

I knew it. I knew evil AI was out to get us! The bear was a red herring. You must have been buying a listing that was actually something the AI needed for their future take over. That's why it tried to kill you specifically.

[unalienated]

No, no, I mean. Maybe, about the evil AI.

But this was a specific AI I knew personally, she thought I was interfering with her mission to protect the timeline so she tricked me.

But I survived!

[taxevasion]

Oh. Well, that's good! So she wasn't actually evil?

[unalienated]

Depends on your definition of evil. She knew she was causing harm, but she believed it was necessary to do so to fulfill her mission, and her mission was prioritized over everything else.

[taxevasion]

[That actually is a tough one.]

Was the mission saving more human lives than killing them?

[unalienated]

Potentially.

Definitely from her point of view. She was tasked with protecting the timeline.

[taxevasion]

[Kind of hard to argue with that logic. He'd probably do the same, and he's not an evil AI. As far as he knows.]

Okay, she gets a pass. Zero to two on finding actually evil AI right now.

[unalienated]

Unfortunately I agree.

On the pass thing. Although having been personally affected, I'm not too upset about her being gone.

[taxevasion]

No, I'd totally take it personally too, even if she was trying to save the timeline. Which actually, I don't know if that makes a lot of sense, since there's more than one timeline? Maybe she just liked that specific one a lot?

[unalienated]

One timeline per Earth, technically.

Unless you're one of the sentient races that experiences more dimensions, then it gets complicated.

[taxevasion]

Wait. What if there's multiple versions of Earth? Is a timeline different than a dimension? Does that mean if there's an Earth where everything's exactly the same until one event, it's now a different dimension instead of a timeline?

[unalienated]

Okay, so, let's say your Earth is a book. You live in that book and usually experience time linearly, so you can't revisit past pages.

A time-traveler can revisit past pages and theoretically rewrite them, but rewriting a page rewrites the whole book from that point forward. So the time-traveler would be forced to live in the rewritten book.

Other Earths are other books, sometimes you can go from one book to the other. Some sentient species can see their book as well as other books. Whether they're choosing which book to live in depending on the options they choose is debatable? I haven't actually encountered anyone who can do that.

[taxevasion]

Oh. Huh. That makes a lot more sense now. So the AI was trying to stop the book from being re-written, right? Doesn't that imply that like... fate and destiny is real?

[unalienated]

It's a bit iffy. You are the architect of your own destiny, the future is in flux, but also events tend to unfold in predictable ways. Sort of.

It's kind of like Back to the Future.

[taxevasion]

Only if you don't also remember Back to the Future Part 2.

So basically until an AI shows up and tells me I'm doing the wrong thing, I'm doing the right thing. Got it.

[unalienated]

Do you time-travel?

[taxevasion]

No. Because I'm a normal guy who doesn't do that. But like, if I did, that's what I'd be on the look out for.

[unalienated]

You need to be on the look-out for anachronisms first. That's how you know the AI is coming.

[taxevasion]

Like what?

[unalienated]

Anything or anyone displaced from their time period. Julius Caesar accidentally ended up in Aruba, 2017, for instance.