MISC: Castled

[Dave Van Domelen]

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               "Castled" copyright 2011 by Dave Van Domelen
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SUBJECT: Thirty day personal update
NAME: Jacob Eisen
DATE: May 2, 2011
THREAD: Alpha 77-sub-gimel

     I was castled three years ago, and I still don't know what's different.
At least if I'd waken up to find everyone was reptilian or Europe was
colonized by expansionist Mayans I could be certain that nothing I knew was
useful and start settling in on mainstreaming.  
     I've done a few dozen of these updates, I know I'm deviating from the
recommended format, but how many times can I repeat the same things?  My
mnemonic implant has the previous thirty-some updates installed, so even if
another castle dumps me sideways into the body of another me, I can still
access the old files.  I guess if I leave too much out, though, the sniffers
will pick it up and I'll get a fine.  Can't really afford to get too many
fines, since I'm on "disability" until I can be mainstreamed, and the pay
isn't all that good.
     Not that I blame them.  I'm an engineer, and a pretty good one, if my
last performance review can be believed.  But what if the difference between
my current thread and the one in my memories is a millionth of a percent
difference in the official definition of some fundamental unit of
measurement?  A pint may be a pound the world around, but is 1.0000000 pints
exactly 1.0000000 pounds in this time thread?  Maybe, maybe not.  And no one
will hire an engineer who might make that kind of error without knowing it.
     Of course, I did check.  My memories of all the physical constants match
with the ones in the local textbooks.  But it could easily be something
important that I won't discover until I make a million dollar mistake.  So no
job for me until the divergence point is found.
     At least they're pretty sure I'm an accidental castle, and not a plant
shifted sideways across timelines for some unknowable purpose in the time
war.  I'm not a hostile mind implanted in a friendly body in order to get
access to sensitive parts of the timeline.  I used to have that kind of
access, which is why I got tested regularly, and why I got tagged as a
castle.  So, that much was the same...the local me had the same job as the me
currently in this skull.  The same friends, the same hobbies, even the same
unwashed laundry waiting for the basket to get full enough I'd bother to run
a load.  
     Could be worse.  Well, not for me, since I seem to have ended up in a
world so identical that no one can tell the difference.  But fifty years ago
in the alpha threads, no one but the time soldiers knew there was a time war
going on.  If someone woke up in the wrong thread to find everything was
changed, they tended to get locked up in the nuthouse.  Eventually enough
cases of this particular "schizophrenia" were diagnosed that it got
suspicious, and I guess around then some time soldier decided we were ready
for the truth...that he wouldn't just be locked up as another nut (not that
it'd hold him).  Lord help anyone who gets castled into what they're calling
the delta threads, though.  No one in that set of timelines knows about the
time war yet, so they're still putting castles in the loony bin.
     It gives me the cold shivers to think that in a few centuries they'll
figure out how to disconnect the mind from the body and send it bouncing
around in time, taking over the bodies of anyone not trained to resist them
and making them do...things.  Sometimes the time soldiers leave their
borrowed bodies as mindless husks, they're not always very careful.
Sometimes you get deserters who try to hide out for decades in their stolen
skins.  But usually the original mind gets back in.
     The problem is, it's not always the right thread.  I don't pretend to
understand how this all works, but if you're displaced at the same
"meta-time" that a change is being made in your local past, your body changes
to match but your mind can't.  That's the most dramatic kind of castle, they
got the name from some sort of chess move.  Those poor bastards at least can
usually figure out what went wrong, although the trauma of full displacement
can ruin them.
     Still, there's a lot of time threads and only so many time soldiers.  In
2011, I can only find a few dozen definite cases of full displacement
castles.  Maybe double or triple that to include all the ones the government
doesn't want us knowing about.  And it's not what happened to me.
     Near as anyone can figure, dreams are to blame.  The time travel
technique actually came out of dream research.  Will come.  Whatever.
Certain people, when dreaming, have looser connections between mind and body
than most.  If those people...I'm one of them...have a particularly strong
dream at the same meta-time a change is being made, we don't synch up
correctly.  That's why I keep talking about waking up to changes.  It doesn't
happen when you're awake unless a time soldier is taking over.  And even they
try to grab sleepers, since it reduces the odds that someone will notice them
entering a host.
     I hear that anyone important in the government or industry gets special
training to learn how to sleep without dreaming.  I wasn't important enough,
I guess.  Or the training doesn't really exist, and it's just propaganda to
keep people from freaking out over the possibility that one morning the guy
looking out from behind Obama's eyes is from a reality where everything went
all Mad Max and this guy's gonna go on a conquest bender.
     Not sure how they could work out something like the mnemplant and not a
no-dream thing, though.  But I'm a hardware guy, not wetware.  I barely
understand enough to see why we have to do these thirty day updates and wipe
the daily archives to save space.  Even if that old "we only use ten percent
of our brains" saw were true (it isn't), you're still going to fill up fast
if you keep perfect copies of everything every day for the rest of your
life.  
     Maybe they secretly test people in dream labs before letting them run
for office.  There's a happy thought.  The dream police, they get inside of
our heads.
     Let's see.  What else do I need to say before I run the compression and
deletion?  Oh, yeah...just in case it gets lost in the compression, do NOT
fall for identity theft scams like that one last week.  If they really could
stop me from castling again, it'd be tech the government would have, and
they'd use it.  I suppose the scammers could be time soldiers looking to make
something on the side, but that's about the only people advanced enough to
have that sort of technique.
     Tomorrow's another sift.  What if they never find anything?  What if I
set off a false positive on the scanners, and I never castled in the first
place?  They swear they've ruled that out, but we've only been able to detect
this sort of thing since the 1980s, can they really have gotten all the bugs
out yet?
     Hell.  Maybe I just snapped three years ago, I'm crazy and all this
stuff about the time war is just the way my brain is trying to rationalize
whatever it is I went crazy over.  Just because I remember PSAs about
castling back in the 90s doesn't mean they really happened.  After all, the
really crazy people believe in all sorts of things that don't exist and
didn't exist.
     Even if I'm sane, I wonder how many castlers end up going totally
bonkers because they can't trust their memories anymore?  And will I become
one of them?

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Author's Notes:

     Just an idle idea I had while driving the other day.  I toyed with
trying to fit it into ASH or even LNH, but decided to just go standalone.
     This is not really meant to be a clear narrative, so if you're having
trouble figuring out what Jacob is talking about at times, that's on
purpose.  :)  His first few monthly reports were probably a lot more coherent
and informative, but he's reaching the breaking point here.
     One thing I will explain, though, is why the term castling.  In chess,
there's a move where you can sort of switch the King with one of the Rooks.
But it's not an exact swap, and neither ends up on either of the original
squares (contrary to how I initially and incorrectly learned the game).  So,
it's a swap of minds, but things don't quite end up in the same places.