If looking at a normal universe from the outside—as I do on the regular—is
like staring at a still painting, looking at Fickleverse is like trying to
spot one particular mosaic tile that’s glued to a powered up chainsaw...in a
room full of powered up mosaic chainsaws. I have an idea of how it works,
but it’s incredibly difficult to make out the details. It’s too chaotic, too
unpredictable, too messy. So I can’t give you many specific stories that
took place on this world. I can’t even be a hundred percent sure whether the
only populated planet is an alternate version of Earth, or some other place.
I had to work really hard to find one interesting story by digging deep, and
trying to find the most linear of proverbial needles in the haystack. Like I
said in an earlier installment, people in Fickleverse know that they’re in
Fickleverse. They recognize that time moves in more than one direction, and
events almost never add up to an inevitable conclusion. I found one woman
who kind of seemed immune to the sort of temporal changes that most people
experienced here. Her name was Corain Flint, and she lived a pretty standard
life; or at least, as standard as it could get. She was born in one year,
and died 74 years later. In that time, technology in her immediate area
advanced 74 years, and she aged along with it. Her parents remained the same
throughout her entire life, until they passed when she was in her forties.
She never had any siblings, but she had two children with a consistent
husband. They all stayed as they were until she was gone. Like everyone
else, she too could see that time was fickle, but she was more perturbed by
it than most, because she felt more like an observer, and less like a
participant.
It was tough for her, trying to convince the people around her that some
things didn’t make any sense. Her neighbor’s first name kept changing, and
while everyone else automatically adapted to each transition, she could
never keep it straight. She had to actually ask what his new name was, and
when she did, he would be confused and upset, because to him, it seemed
obvious. Yes, his name changed, but how could she possibly not know that
that was the next logical step in his nominal development? Most films played
in the right temporal direction, but not all, and though everyone else was
able to comprehend a story out of the backwards dialog, she didn’t have any
idea what the hell was even going on. They usually wouldn’t give her her
money back. Corain eventually gave up, and realized that she was pretty much
alone in her feelings about time and reality. She just tried to live her
life in the best way possible, and ignore the discrepancies unless
impossible. Several years later, she started thinking about it again when a
friend she had known her entire life simply disappeared. No one else who
knew this person believed Corain when she claimed he was real. They had no
recollection of this man, and no reason to suspect that something had been
done to their memories. Nonlinear time was one thing, but a whole person
spontaneously being completely removed from the timestream was unfair, and
the last straw. She decided to go against her friends’ advice, and start a
support group for others like her. She didn’t know if such people even
existed, but she had to try. There had to be someone out there who could see
where she was coming from. There was. There were many someones. As it turned
out hundreds of people around the world also experienced time more like her.
A chapter sprang up in every major city, and no one else ever understood
what their deal was.
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