Time Travel

As I write, it is as yet unknown how millions of miles of the Mycelium body knew everything all at once. Metal Dogs - Chapter 15

The first time I noticed it was in June 2022. An article in my feed said our evolutionary trees were incorrect, based as they were on appearances: in fact, we are more closely related to those beings from our geographic location.

One of the constraints of time travel fiction lays in the danger of changing the past so that you, the protagonist, or (tragically) your true love, are never born.

But the Mycelium understood immortality. A single fragment could remember and recreate the whole network. Its entire consciousness was held in every cell of its labyrinth body.

Thus, it also knew time travel. Though the network spread densely over vast geographic spaces, the entire being knew what happened at the farthest tips of its hyphae in an instant. Scientists proved this occurred too fast for chemistry, not even airborne chemistry. Though they theorized electricity and energy, as I write, it is as yet unknown how miles of body knew everything all at once.

However it worked, the beginning knew its endings. The Mycelium knew across the thousands of and potentially infinite years and miles of its life and consciousness.

Human memory has its tricks too. Our minds are plastic, as are our bodies, ever shifting, responding to the story we tell ourselves, to the constructs we agree to, to our beliefs.

Even human sight, the seemingly straightforward observation of what is, requires amazing work by the efficient and clever mind to smooth and make seamless the data collected by our scanning eyes. I read that much of what we see is what we collected on past journeys, information our brains fill in from memory.

A long time lover’s face can appear to us unwrinkled, unshaped by tragedy or joy, as when we first met.

I was helped to imagine how the Mycelium thought through the film The Arrival, which offered an alien species with this capacity for time travel as well as for global, transspecies unity, delivered through the gift of a new language.

In the end of the film, the linguist protagonist, who is time-disoriented throughout, remembering a daughter she has yet to birth, helps usher in world peace through a small personal knowledge she has of an international adversary. She had gained this knowledge in the future, when he told her what she had said to him over the phone to stop his act of war. This he whispers in her ear in the happy ending: intimate local knowledge of his true love.

The aliens had helped train the protagonist to cross into the distance of the future like mycelial hyphae. She could remember what happened all at once as if the history of her body and consciousness were one great fungal web.

The same day that I rewatched The Arrival, I received a text from my first girlfriend, who was now married, a mother, engaged in environmental activism. It had been thirty years since our split. These collapsed in an instant. I was twenty and fifty-three at once. As she wrote, “All that we were is still there sitting in its own world as real as it was back then--the green place in the mountains. You are waiting for me to meet up with you--there in the multiverse.”

Time travel does change the future.

The first time I noticed it was in June 2022. An article in my feed said our evolutionary trees were incorrect, based as they were on appearances. In fact, we are more closely related to those beings from our geographic location. African elephant shrews are more closely related to African elephants than to European shrews because they come from the same continent, along with aardvarks, golden moles and swimming manatees.

It seemed past scientists were incorrect. Or had time travel changed our present?

Then there was another study showing that monarch butterflies were not dying out after all, but able to rapidly return under the right conditions. In fact, they were thriving. And yet, a relative of mine could not read this fact. It was as if she were on a different network altogether. Can you?

In other cases, articles I had linked as citations to other posts, observing the effects of climate change and of ecological social movements, simply disappeared. I arrived at errors, at expirations, at innocent newsstand homepages. I learned to save a pdf so that my dated citation, “accessed on,” had material evidence. But these too were stored in imperfect databanks accessible to the network. Would they vanish? Would I even think to look?

Something was changing. Was it my algorithm? Or was it history?

No doubt, whatever the explanation, I could sense the importance of our project. I could feel it was already working. Somehow.

I knew enough of our plans to understand how evolutionary trees might change. I mean, it made sense that as we returned, we would bring ecosystems isolated for a millennium back to the planet. Each one would have more in common with it’s arkmates than with those on others.

But how was it already happening?

We had returned before we had left. I had not expected we would time travel.

NEXT CHAPTER:

This is a piece of a larger project. I will paste the next episode here when it is written.

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