World-line stories: MM's slides and other people's crossings

Four ways to cross, in MM's count

MM's own slides

From Adventures in world-line travel, written for readers who asked "what was it like". His standing answer: nothing like the movies. "Most world-lines looked like every other one. When you slide, you just cannot notice any difference." The exceptions are the stories.

The two lives he says he wrote first

• Pago Pago. In the intention article MM tells how, years before it happened, he specified a tropical South Pacific island life on paper, then forgot about it, then found himself living it: "I manifested Pago Pago!" It came with a surprise: once there he wanted fresh French bread, so he started a new campaign for that.
• Zhuhai. The second worked example is his present life in southern China, with the specifics (a quiet, prosperous, family-centred life) again written down long before. He gives these as the proof of method he can offer: "over four decades of doing this".
• What he learned. Trends visible from one line are useless as advice for someone on another: "the moment that I try to act on them they change and alter." Outside events are "scenery that you observe outside the window on a train".

Crossings caught on camera

• The aluminium foil lady. A Russian dash-cam clip of a woman appearing on a road in a shiny, foil-like coat. MM reads the coat as radiation shielding for "crude" equipment, the road as a coordinate, and her clothing as a mismatch with the destination era.
• The airport woman. A Chinese clip from November 2019, before the pandemic news, of a woman appearing in an airport, offered as a second example of an egress point.
• The Beatles tape. "James Richards" said that on 9 September 2009 he hurt himself chasing his dog in Del Puerto Canyon, California, was helped by a man with a large machine in his house, and came home with a cassette of Everyday Chemistry, a Beatles album from a world where the band never split. MM: the music is easy to dismiss as a mash-up; the tape less so.
• ProfessorPhate. A 1999 to 2000 poster describing a home world-line where the United States never entered the Second World War, Germany dominated Europe, America became a "garrison state" defended by particle-beam towers, and an organisation moved him between lines. He called himself a "transposer" and described a sense he named "chronopathy". MM's verdict: "fantastical and outrageous", not endorsed, posted only because "there are others who enter and leave this world-line".

The Mandela list, and why MM keeps it

MM's rule: "memories do not reside within the physical brain" and "we all do NOT share a common reality. We share a common reality TEMPLATE." When large groups remember something the record does not show, the model calls it a bleed-over: two clusters of world-lines with different pasts have drifted close enough to overlap.

He files "coincidences" under the same heading: the 1898 novel Futility that sank an unsinkable liner called the Titan, Poe's cannibalised sailor Richard Parker and the real one of 1884, a 1991 Wizard's Hall that reads like Harry Potter, Tom Clancy's pre-2001 airliner plot, the Simpsons' Trump presidency and their London "Shard", a comic-book shuttle disaster, the Dallas newspaper ad on the morning of the Kennedy assassination. "Nothing is coincidence." In the model, fiction and premonition are both glimpses across nearby lines.

Stranger things, explained the same way

In Using the MWI to explain the unexplainable MM collects reader stories and sorts them into slide types:

• Died, but did not. A man remembers dying in an accident, then finds himself alive on a line where it never quite happened. PissedLizard's own account (part 34) is the archive's fullest version.
• Sudden abilities. A co-worker with a head injury who can suddenly do things he could not: read as a slide onto a line where the components of his consciousness sit differently.
• A visit from the dead. A father seen briefly after his death: a consciousness in wave form, still nearby (part 6).
• Loops and ghosts. Star Trek's causality loop episode is the cultural on-ramp; ghosts, missing objects that return, and time slips are all "bleed-over" from neighbouring lines.
• Pets that follow you. A bonded animal shares your line and can find you again after a slide or a death; MM's cat stories are in part 20.

John Titor, in detail

1. The faxes. On 29 July 1998 someone faxed the radio host Art Bell claiming to be a time traveller; a second fax followed. From late 1998 or 1999 to 2001 the same voice posted on bulletin boards as "TimeTravel_0" and then "John Titor".
2. The mission. A soldier from 2036, sent to 1975 to fetch an IBM 5100 computer (which, he said, could read old IBM code needed after a future computer crisis), who stopped in 2000 to see his parents and to talk.
3. The world he described. An American civil war beginning around 2004 and ending in 2008; a short nuclear Third World War in 2015 with major cities hit by clusters of warheads; a rural, decentralised America afterwards. He said his line differed from ours by about two percent.
4. The machine. "A stationary mass, temporal displacement unit manufactured by General Electric... powered by two top-spin, dual-positive singularities that produce a standard, off-set Tipler sinusoid." He described artificial micro-singularities captured and electrified, Kerr fields, a "variable gravity lock" to keep the machine in place, a Geiger counter on the unit, and gravity distortion visible from outside as bent light.
5. Divergence. "When you go back in time, you travel on your original timeline. When you turn your singularity engine off, a new timeline is created." So nothing he said "had to" happen here.
6. The trail afterwards. A 2004 patent application by Marlin B. Pohlman with the same drawings; Italian investigators tracing the posts to a "John Rick Harber"; a crowd of imitators, videos and book deals that MM dismisses as "all hoaxes".