Omar was reprogramming his computer. He yelled, “WHAT THUH—OW!” and pushed himself away from his desk by practically kicking the wall.

A confused Omar cradled his foot while riding along in his swivel chair as it rolled smoothly across his bedroom floor. The sudden change had been so abrupt that it hit him with an almost physical force. His brief journey across the floor ended when one of the chair's wheels caught on an errant left shoe. The matching right shoe was nowhere to be seen, due to being lost long ago. He said, “What The HELL!” properly, as he had originally intended to say.

Shedding the last of his forward momentum, his chair rotated slowly until it came to a stop, leaving Omar facing his bedroom door.

“What the heck just happened?!” he asked, his befuddlement apparent as he looked around the room. He added, “What's going on? …” and drew out the question with the mental effort of trying to remember something he forgot. When his gaze finally landed on his monitor again, he glared at it suspiciously. He then practically spoke to the device, asking, “No—wait … What was I even doing?” as though he was interrogating his computer.

After his stubbed toe had been sufficiently coddled, Omar tried to recall the last thing he could remember before the most recent gap in his memory. To do this, he spun around in his chair a few times while repeatedly mumbling, “What was I doing before?” until he eventually stopped to glare at his trash can, giving it the same accusing look he'd just given his computer monitor. “Oh, yeah. I finished that awesome rice sandwich, then drunk some iced coffee—or tried to—which was pretty much a failure. Then I failed again!” and the only thing he could do was shake his head in shameful regret. There were no bottles of iced coffee on his desk, empty or otherwise. Based on the fact that they weren't in his trash can either, Omar deduced that during the gap in his memory, he must have gotten up and walked all the way to the kitchen in order to toss his empty bottle in the recycling bin. To him, this was another shameful waste of effort.

In this, he was only partly right. Instead of actually walking, Omar, in his fugue state, remained on his chair while rolling out of his bedroom and all the way to the kitchen. Regardless, and in either case, he'd still declare it to be a shameful waste of effort.

“Whatever. That's not important,” is all he had to say about that, before adding, “The real question is, ‘what the heck was I doing?’ ” while glaring at his monitor again.

Omar rolled his chair back to his desk and closely examined the open programs displayed on his screen. There were several instances of his favorite text editor open, each of which contained programming code that looked vaguely familiar.

“This couldn't be what I was doing?” he said, clicking on the various windows. “Like this, … isn't that part of my window manager? And that one is part of the OS' kernel,” he noted as he sat hunched forward, squinting at his computer monitor.

If operating systems were like jelly-filled donuts then the kernel would be the jelly and the window manager would be the visible, outer part of the donut.

“Mmm … donuts,” he mumbled absently to himself. And just like that, the errant thought left him as quickly as it had appeared. “What? … I don't know how to do any of that! What the hell was I thinking?” he added, referring to his ability to rewrite his computer's operating system. Omar was confident that he knew enough about reprogramming operating systems to know that it was something that he couldn't actually do. Even though this wasn't the first time he's had such a reaction, the current situation was nonetheless a departure from his normal experiences.

⁂

Initially, as a college freshmen, Omar had been working towards degrees in both computer science and educational administration. After he successfully hacked into his university's computer system, he dropped both majors as they'd outgrown their usefulness. He realized, consciously and in retrospect, that his original choice of majors might have made his intentions noticeably more obvious. Simply dropping those majors through normal channels might've appear suspicious, or so he thought, and he wanted to avoid potentially drawing unwanted scrutiny towards his actual motivations and extracurricular activities. This was putting it mildly because the moment he realized this, he said, “What the hell was I thinking?”

Bribery, blackmail, and threats of legal action ultimately made Omar's college years possible. During that time, the world of computing truly opened up for him, and in doing so, his already questionable activities became that much more nefarious. He was overexposed and in dire need of some thing or place that could serve to cover him in a shroud of plausible deniability. To make matters worse, on his college campus, Omar stood out as a particularly sketchy individual, even when his actions were relatively benign. Thus, in an effort to “hide in plain site,” which was a concept that wasn't at all what he thought it was, Omar fell in with the community and subculture of computer hacking.

The hacker community was split in half with the law-abiding “white hat hackers” on one side, as respected “computer security analysts,” and the “black hat hackers” on the other side, who flaunted the law as the much feared criminal adversary. Omar tried to pose as a white hat hacker, but he was too much of an amoral asshole to pull it off.

Meanwhile, he unknowingly shunted his black hat hacking activities to his subconscious mind, which then manifested itself through his fugue states. Consciously, he still genuinely enjoyed computer hacking, but he was becoming increasingly annoyed with the work that went into keeping tack of all these ethical issues. Luckily there was “gray hat hacking,” a third side of the divided hacking community born from the ambiguous division between good and bad.

Gray hat hackers were a “third side” in the sense that they were rarely discussed, and their existence tended to remain unacknowledged. However, when they were discussed, gray hat hackers were described as those who blur the line between what should and shouldn't be, which was effectively the definition of Omar's entire existence. If their actions were recognized at all, then those actions would be deemed as being of “mixed legality,” even though the combination of “legal” plus “illegal” is still technically just “illegal.”

To be a gray hat hacker, Omar had to present himself as being a mere “computer person” who understood the difference between good and evil, even though his apathetic laziness meant that he sometimes didn't care enough to even think about the difference in the first place. This meant that as a gray hat hacker, Omar wasn't a hacker at all, because gray hat hackers don't exist.

It was a performance that Omar excelled at, which he quickly mastered to the extent that, even today, he often does not even realize that he is a hacker. More than that, his efforts to hide this fact were so effective that he no longer had any real understanding of the true extent of his own programming skills. At least, not consciously.

⁂

Omar scoffed derisively at the mysterious array of open programs and files that littered his desktop, and without much thought he decided that they were all clearly unimportant. Nonetheless, he carefully saved and closed each and every file.

“Buttt, …” he said, and then giggled briefly at his own juvenile thought, “heheh—what's more important is, why stuff like this keeps happening? It's like, stuff that doesn't happen, keeps happening. Or maybe—no that doesn't make any sense.” Thoughts flitted in and out of his mind as tried to articulate his concerns.

Staring at nothing in particular, Omar sat slouched in his chair with his arms crossed, completely unaware that his furrowed brow twitched with the stress of his hidden thoughts. He sat up suddenly and said, “Aha!” somewhat loudly, like he just had a brilliant idea. “Maybe this is a side effect of the rice sandwich experiment?!” he said before deflating again.

The bad joke did little to ease the sense he had that something weird was occurring, but it did hint at a deeper truth. Since his epic lunch, Omar's convenient lapses of attention have been more like “strange, inconvenient gaps in his memory.” Even with the limited awareness he has of his own “normal experiences,” these inconvenient gaps were quite unusual.

Nonetheless, he was still unaware of his abnormally hyperactive subconscious mind and the extent to which he relies on it. Normally, his hyperactive subconscious mind influences his conscious thoughts and actions in subtle ways that he rarely notices. When it isn't subtle, as with his fugue states, the details are as uninteresting as possible, and the transitions into or out of those states are always smooth enough for him to conveniently dismiss.

Instead of smooth transitions, these inherently inconvenient experiences have been abrupt interruptions of Omar's conscious thoughts and actions, and upon witnessing this, he could not simply dismiss it as uninteresting or unimportant.

Still, rather than think that there might be something “wrong” with him, Omar's first inclination is to think that there is something wrong with everything but him.

In Omar's defense, his absurd shift in blame was at least somewhat plausible given that reality, as he understood it, has changed. Realizing, after the fact, that he might actually have something to legitimately blame, he asks himself a simple question, “What if this is what happens when the timeline changes in ‘Outworld?’ ” but is then instantly confused by his own thought. Out loud he says, “Wait—what? That isn't what I was going to think about,” except that it literally was what he thought about. After a moment, even he begins to suspect as much. “No, actually—I think it's just that weird word, … ‘Outworld.’ I feel like I've seen it somewhere before.”

Technically, he never stopped seeing the word since it first appeared right in front of his face. Not only that, he also heard the word spoken by his interface during one of the few brief periods he was actually paying attention to the introductory lecture. Even so, his confusion was understandable given that the word was defined during one of the many, many other periods he wasn't paying attention. Nonetheless, the word “Outworld” was still floating within his field of vision.

“Meh. I'll remember where I saw it eventually,” he says dismissively, before adding, “I bet it'll come to me when I'm not thinking about it,” as if he made an effort to think about it thus far.

At this failure, Omar's subconscious mind tries again, but this time using word association.

“I wonder. … Does that mean there's an ‘Inworld?’ …” he asks himself, but the word association doesn't end there. As soon as he finishes that sentence, he realizes that “Inworld” is a synonym for the “chronopause.”

Again, he consciously heard both of these words, “Inworld” and “chronopause,” before, in the lecture. However, both words sounded even less familiar to Omar than the word “Outworld” did because neither word has been defined or even related to the other. At least, neither had been defined in this part of the tutorial. Some of this strangeness makes its way to Omar's conscious awareness, giving him a sense that it's sort of odd how he knows that “Inworld” and “chronopause” are synonyms, even though he has no idea what either word means.

Omar's subconscious mind tries once more to nudge him into consciously seeing that the word, “Outworld,” is in the topic list that's right in front of his face. This time however, it works.

“Oh, there it is! I knew I'd remember when I wasn't thinking about it,” he says, and thus encourages his own idiocy. Then he adds, “I remember now. ‘Outworld’ is just the real world,” He's confident about this even though he only heard that definition while he wasn't listening.

The strange word association sticks in his mind, and as a “test,” Omar tries the same thing with a similar pair of words.

He asks, “If an outhouse is an outdoor toilet, then does that mean that an inhouse is an indoor toilet?”

Unlike before, no ideas or word associations come unbidden to him. Even to Omar, it isn't entirely clear whether this actually proves or disproves anything. Thankfully, before he can fully commit this erroneous association to memory, he recalls his original question. Unfortunately, his next thought was just as wrong.

“So I guess this is just what happens when the timeline changes.” He shrugs. “That's gonna get old real fast.”

And that's it. This conclusion settles the original issue he had regarding his sense that something was wrong. That “something” was still wrong, and the underlying problem causing it had not gone away.

Without anything else to distract him, Omar's attention returned to the still ongoing lecture in his head.

“ … additional rewards. This includes useful contributions to our research of humanity, the chronopause, or anything else that might be of interest to the game, or to one of our authorized non-human collectives.” That was the end of the “Science!” topic on the list, which was after the ominously named “RIP.”

Based on the amount of time that had passed, Omar “reasoned” that the “Reality Investigation Program” probably wasn't important because it had taken too long to explain. There was no real logic behind this maddeningly inane reasoning because it was merely meant to justify his deliberate inattentiveness, after the fact.

Welcome!

An Introduction to Reality Break

…

…

5. Skills and basic character stats?

• Learning and acquiring new Skills

• Improving basic character stats

• Returning to Outworld

6. How do I win?

• No True Win Condition

• ‘Reality Breaker’ as the End of Player Progression

7. Then what's the point of this?

• The Goal of the Reality Investigation Program (RIP)

• Science!

• Life, et cetera …

“Life, et cetera …” his interface declared, just before it began this subtopic's explanation. “On Earth, with our without the game, a small but non-negligible number of humans become permanently chronoactive, spontaneously through natural means. These are Earth's ‘natural chrononauts’ who are, by default, designated as ‘non-player chrononauts’ to the game, unless they officially register as a player. “You are a ‘player chrononaut’ who became permanently chronoactive, artificially, through our well-designed and minimally invasive procedure.”

At this, Omar's left eyelid twitched spasmodically for a few seconds as he, metaphorically, banged his head against the walls that separated his subconscious and conscious mind. He notices this twitching, even going so far as to rub that part of his face, but then pretends that none of that actually happened. It might as well have not happened because, due to his limited attention span, Omar forgets about it less than a second later.

“For those natural chrononauts who survive long enough to master the basics of time-travel, the accumulation of traditional wealth and power is an almost trivial matter. It is nearly as simple a matter for these natural chrononauts to extend their own lifespan by traveling to a future where longevity treatments are plentiful and popular. With such long and capable lives, issues that were once frivolous, like boredom, become existential matters. What were once existential matters become both, more concrete and more ambiguous. This is a defining shift in perspective that is very common amongst both player and non-player chrononauts. As a consequence, this perspective impacts how many within the community of permanently chronoactive people live out their lives and interact with each other. Because you're a complete newb, as both a player and a permanently chronoactive person, this perspective might be difficult to understand.”

Omar wasn't the sort to deny that he was a newb. By his reasoning, “all of the great ones were newbs at some point,” and of course he assumes that he too will become one of the “great ones.”

“Eventually, you might begin to think about your legacy, or your mark upon the world, as a tangible thing that you can observe. After all, you could choose to see it immediately by traveling to the future, or just as well, watch it slowly unfold over centuries of life in normal ‘linear time.’ On the other hand, the nature of your legacy in ‘lateral time’ is abstract enough that many debate whether such a thing exists at all. Over the course of lateral time, any event can be undone or redone in a different way, as it is generally accepted that spontaneous change is a fundamental aspect of history itself. Right now, from your perspective, only a portion of your entire life is a part of history, but eventually your legacy, all of your actions, and even your birth will become a part of history that only exists in iterations of the current timeline that never were. Nonetheless, vague ‘echoes’ of events undone, can persist, and in a universe with two dimensions of time, that will be the true extent of your legacy.”

“With this in mind, the game is a system that provides additional structure and meaning to the life of potentially powerful time-travelers with supernatural abilities.”

Hidden in the subtext behind those carefully chosen words, Omar had a sense that the AMIs were also talking about their own boredom. Omar thought he was an expert on boredom because it was something he dealt with on a regular basis.

He wasn't.

While it was true that he was intimately familiar with it, his experience with boredom was one of pathological avoidance. If anything, the real experts on boredom were “Inworlders;” those human denizens of the “inner-layer ” of the chronopause who live out their very, very long lives as permanent residents on the “Islands of Stability.” Compared to Inworlders, Omar was as much an expert on boredom as a paranoiac was an expert on personal safety.

However, in this case, regarding the AMIs, Omar was correct. “If that-all was true of humans,” Omar thought, “then I wonder how true it would be for aliens that regularly traveled between the stars. Even if they had the patience of saints, they'd still have to deal with the centuries it would take to travel just a few light-years at non-relativistic speeds, and that—Wait a second … why couldn't they use time-travel to shorten the trip?”

As he thought about it, Omar suspected that time-travel alone wouldn't be enough, but then he remembered the big word he just used, and his brow furrowed in confusion.

“Non-relativistic? Uhm, what's, … Oh! That's like Einstein's special relativity, right?”

It was. Special relativity describes the strange stuff that would occur if someone traveled at nearly the speed of light.

“Wow! I didn't even know that I knew that,” he said, in brief amusement. To Omar, this was equivalent to him saying, “I forgot that I knew that,” which would be, for a normal person, an absolutely absurd claim to make regarding Einstein's special theory of relativity. Forgetting some or most of the specific details of relativity is not unusual, but forgetting that you ever knew anything about relativity in the first place, is very much unusual for most anyone other than Omar.

With that, Omar was able to recall what he knew about special relativity with the familiarity of something he'd read long ago, because that's exactly what it was. Physics textbooks were amongst the many books Omar's parents bribed him into reading, back when he was in high school. Having read those books within various fugue states, Omar cannot consciously recall doing so, but he still read them just the same.

This does not mean that everything he learns or reads during his fugue states is always available to him. It just so happens that such knowledge tends to be unavailable if he neither wants nor needs that it.

“A person on a spaceship traveling at nearly the speed of light might experience a 100 year trip as being only a day long. If this was a round trip then 100 years still passed on Earth. For us humans, that's a problem because we aren't used to planning things 100 years into the future—or even planning 10 years ahead, for that matter. But with time-travel it would be possible to return before you left.”

For some reason, Omar felt like this was incorrect. There was something wrong with that scenario, but he could not figure out what it was, let alone how he even knew this.

This was another example of Omar being aware that he might know something that he had no way of knowing. The prior example being his awareness that “Inworld” was synonymous with “chronopause,” and not his knowledge about special relativity which he merely “forgot” that he knew. This time, Omar was certain that he hadn't ever read, seen, or heard anything that would give him the impression that his scenario was somehow faulty.

He was wrong, yet again.

Just as with before, Omar's subconscious mind was feeding him information acquired during the introductory lecture, except that it was during a part he actually consciously regretted “missing.” The problems of space travel, including this very scenario, were discussed in the first topic under the ambiguously labeled “Space Travel” heading; a heading that was, of course, still floating in his HUD.

“This is just weird. So apparently, aliens in the Milky Way Galaxy usually don't travel at relativistic speeds—like near the speed of light. Why do I even know that? How do I even know that? This doesn't make any sense because I'm pretty sure that I don't know that at all.”

Omar either knows things, or he doesn't. He has hunches, makes wildly accurate or implausibly insightful guesses, but then he also doesn't care when he is absolutely wrong.

When he consciously or subconsciously knows something, that knowledge is most often implicit. That is, Omar knows things in much the same way that someone would know whether or not they liked ice cream. The reasoning and justification behind that ice cream preference is often not implicitly understood, but Omar tends not to dig that deeply unless he's sufficiently motivated to do so.

This doesn't mean that the knowledge he possesses is always unerringly accurate, but at times it can be. His memories can range, inconsistently, from being vague or incomplete things he barely recalls, to information he knows with photographic fidelity and detail. However, above all else, he rarely notices anything odd about any of this. The exception to this being his occasional, but nearly always asinine, statements such as, “Oh, wow! I totally forgot that I knew all the intricate details of one of the most important and sophisticated physical theories of modern history,” but without the sarcasm.

All of this strange weirdness was starting to bother him again, and so with uncharacteristic effort, Omar asks himself, “Why do I think they can't travel at the speed of light—or even faster than the speed of light, for that matter? Isn't that how it usually works with alien invasions in science-fiction?” Then he waits, expectantly, for an answer to his question.

Technically, this is an explicit thought, but in much the same way that a battering ram is a hammer. To be clear this isn't, at all, how he normally thinks. Even with his recent examples of mysteriously knowing things that he doesn't think he should know, Omar does not actually have any good reason to expect that his question will be answered in this way. In reality, the real reason was that he always wished he could ask a question in this manner, and then get the answer in his head automatically, but without the effort of thinking about it. Omar has some rather odd ideas about how minds are actually supposed to work.

Due to his chronically short attention span, Omar doesn't wait long for an answer. However, he does finally realizes why he keeps thinking that time-travel and relativity are related.

While speaking to himself, he says, “I thought that time-travel was the reason you can't travel faster than the speed of light, right?” like a question, except that he's really just thinking out loud. Then he adds a drawn-out, “Yeah, … ” while nodding slightly in approval. “That actually sounds familiar,” because it did sound familiar to him, and in a fairly normal way in fact.

However, when he says, “And time-travel's apparently a thing, right?” he falls out of his chair with a dizzying sense of vertigo.

This too was another departure from his normal way of thinking, but one that's about as subtle as that aforementioned metaphorical battering ram.

Now that he was stricken with vertigo and sprawled out across his bedroom floor, Omar finally and begrudgingly admits that, “I think there might be something wrong with me.”

Then, as if admitting the truth was the first and only step to recovery, the dizziness fades away enough for Omar to stand/stumble to his bed. Sadly, he trips over that errant shoe and falls too soon onto his bed. The wind is knocked out of him as he lands, stomach first, on the edge of his bed with an audible, “Oof,” like he'd been punched in the gut. “Uggh, … owww, … whatever. This is fine,” he says as much as groans. Most of his upper body manage to land on top of his bed, and that was well and good enough for Omar.

“That's all for the introductory lecture!” his interface said, sounding annoyingly chipper. In response, Omar groans unintelligibly into his bed. “Please see your tutorial instructor if you have any further questions. We will now begin the calibration phase of this part of the tutorial. Please find a safe place to sit where you can focus on the upcoming tasks.”

Emboldened by his interface's pronouncement, Omar makes the effort to drag the rest of his body onto his bed.

“Now that I'm here,” he reasons to himself, “I might as well take a nap,” and then yawns. “I sat through that entire lecture, so I definitely earned a little break,” and by this he means to sleep through the rest of the tutorial.

Laying down, with or without getting punched in the gut by his bed, had apparently been the right move because the dizziness and strange weirdness from before, were all but entirely gone. Omar's interface asks him a question, and in response, Omar does his best to groan as disagreeably as he possible can, just before closing his eyes.

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