Gleister set the machine's controls for the limit of its forward ability---a matter of some millions of years of human time, or several hours from the viewpoint of a star, or a googol of chilicosms from the outlook of a Paramecium. He pushed the button. Something happened.
At Gleister's level of awareness, he seemed to be traveling on a straight line extending between past and future; a line capable of countless branchings as chance or circumstance arose. But seen from a higher level of magnitude, a time track is a fixed orbit around some unimaginable center, and what feels like a deviation is mere perturbation in an inevitable circle. Only the macrocosmic outlook permits the fiction of straight lines and novelty; the microcosm is the realm of circularity and repetition. The interface between these different realities is coincidence. Rate of coincidence is a function of rate of speed. Travel fast enough and far enough and long enough and you get to see the cosmic scenery---the haunted landscapes of eternal recurrences.
Gleister experienced a brief moment of vertigo (Quaestura Effect) and then, there he was, the world's first time traveler, standing in the unimaginably far distant future. Tremulously, he looked around him.
The first thing he noticed were the policemen.
Gleister Main Line Sequence Time Track One Variation A:
...determined to keep my eyes and ears open and my mouth shut. One of the first things I notice is the accommodation effect which regularizes my experience. (Inseparability of subject and object, constancy of sense-ratios.) It is all so familiar! I suppose that an electron, traveling from one atom to another, also expects to enter a realm of unimaginable novelty. But perhaps the scenery in every part of the universe is roughly similar; since one sees in accordance with who one is rather than with what is there.
Linguistic accommodation as well. Are they speaking my language or am I speaking theirs? I can never know: the transaction cannot watch itself being transacted.
I am in the town of Mingusville 32 S. There are at least four different sets of uniformed police on the streets---municipal, political, secret and special police. I am posing as a Nepalese sociology student writing a thesis entitled "The Ecstasy of Conformity." (This theme is acceptable to officialdom of any time period and explains away my chi-chi accent and lack of presentday knowledge.)
Mingusville 32 S is a ramshackle place containing some interesting technological retrogressions: steam-operated vehicles burning dried cow dung, for example, as well as many horse-drawn vehicles (and mules, oxen, and even a few camels). Is this due to depletion of fossil fuels? And whatever happened to atomic power?
Mingusville has a rudimentary communication system, but only officials have individual telephones. Electricity is scarce and expensive, and equipment maintenance is haphazard. I estimate that two-thirds of the homes use kerosene lighting. No structure is higher than three stories: cinderblock construction sometimes faced with brick or tile. Center of town is dominated by large open-air market facing gigantic police barracks. My impression is that the people around here lead uneventful, slothful, unchallenging lives. This is reflected in their willingness to drop whatever they're doing and talk for hours with a stranger such as myself.
I learn that various diseases are endemic here: equivalents of trachoma, encephalitis, tick fever, etc. (Cholera and bubonic plague devastated this region six years ago.) There are many beggars in the streets, although this is forbidden by the Emperor. Blacks and whites are present in roughly equal quantities. I am unable to detect any appreciable difference in social status on a racial basis: everybody here seems to be equally deprived.
Government is the only interesting game in town. One man rules the world---the Emperor Mingus. He maintains a standard police state. Mingus is your typical paranoid fascist, has everybody watching everybody else. There are cameras and recorders everywhere, miles of film and tape, legions of people monitoring all of this, other people monitoring the monitors, and so on and so on until you get to the Emperor, the ultimate monitor. I wouldn't have believed you could control a world in this way, but Mingus is giving it a pretty good try.
He is aided in all this by a secret weapon. It seems that Mingus possesses a time machine. When something goes wrong, he can (subject to certain natural restrictions) go back in time and correct it. It's a hell of a good way to take out underground leaders: don't bother combing a city or countryside for them, just go back to before they went underground---to when they were children, say---and then kill them.
The main restriction on all this is physical. Mingus has to do it all himself. He can't entrust the time machine to anyone else, because then that person could go back and kill Mingus and become Emperor himself.
Even with this limit, the machine gives him absolute and uncanny powers. Yet in spite of it, there is a resistance movement. Not everybody can be located via time machine. The vulnerable ones have been weeded out already. Mingus's entire creaky organization is devoted to finding and destroying those enemies that Mingus cannot personally destroy.
People tell me that the time machine looks like a shoe box. It is made of white plastic. People nightly curse Gleister, the fiend who invented the thing. The word "gleister" has entered all languages. "I'll gleister you" is the ultimate threat; "you damned gleister" is the ultimate insult.
There is a great deal more to learn about this place, but it'll have to wait. I've just learned that I am an absolute and unmitigated gleister and that I have gleistered the human race but good. I must do something about it.
Gleister Main Line Sequence Time Track One Variation A Continuation 12 plus Gleister Main Line Sequence Time Track 5 plus Gleister Minor Sequence 32:
Gleister sat down on a bench in Mingus Memorial Park to think things over. What should he do? The first thing that occurred to him was to go back to just before he invented the time machine and not invent it. But that could not be done, to judge by the experience of the other Gleister. Not only can you not step into the same river twice; it is not even the same you who can't step into the same river twice. Everything modifies everything. There was no niche in the past waiting for him to come back and occupy it. Nature will tolerate a paradox, but she abhors a vacuum.
There seemed to be no point in trying to go back and convince another Gleister not to invent the time machine. (Again!) There wasn't one Gleister to convince, anyhow; there were a multiplicity of potential Gleisters, each of them identical to him up to the moment of contact, and each of them different from him from that moment on. That too was inevitable: like the universe, the mind is a plenum constantly cycling its contents. A novel input redistributes the contents and changes their cycling rate. Gleister could remain himself only if he didn't interfere with himself.
But the situation he had presented to the world was intolerable. He was determined to do something about it. But what should he do?
He sat and thought, uncomfortably aware that at least one other Gleister had done the same thing. How many more Gleisters would sit on this spot and consider the alternatives?
But that was defeatist thinking. From one viewpoint there were (potentially) a multiplicity of Gleisters; but from another viewpoint there was only one, and he was that one. After all, it didn't matter what these other people called themselves or where they came from, he was only the person he was here and now, the person whom he experienced. Reality is positional, ego is relational and nature doesn't deal in abstractions.