Do we live in an engineered reality? In 1999, an individual by the name of ProfessorPhate shared what he claimed to be the truth about our worldline, in which we are the unsuspecting players of a hidden “reality war” that could one day doom us all.
Sound farfetched? It’s a somewhat confusing story, I’ll admit, and I don’t want to simply repeat everything (you can read ProfessorPhate’s complete emails here). But his curious messages contained some very interesting remarks on time travel and worldline divergence.
The basic premise is this: there are those who believe that individuals working on the Montauk Project have discovered the ability to time travel, and have used this ability to manipulate past events. By doing so, however, they have created multiple eccentric worldlines, one of which is our own.
ProfessorPhate, meanwhile, has found himself thrust into the position of informant for these so-called timeline engineers.
Chronopathy and Worldline Traversal
ProfessorPhate began his strange tale with a brief explanation of what he calls “chronopathy.” It’s something that reminds me of John Titor’s alter-vus, in which certain people may remember supposed differences between worldlines when something is changed. Perhaps this may prove to be an answer to our so-called Berenst#in Bears Problem, otherwise known as the Mandela Effect.
Chronopathy, ProfessorPhate claimed, was “the ability to detect locales where there is a temporal discontinuity.” He explained this as a “site of unusual temporal integrity” or “a configuration that is peculiarly related to a counterpart on another time/world-line.” These characteristics would indicate a “higher potential” for traversal between wordlines. He claimed that “an overcast day is the most conducive condition…for reliable and repeated observations.”
He first became aware that he had been living in a different worldline at about six years old, gaining knowledge of his original worldline through conditioning and reinforcement by his so-called “superiors.”
“Although I learned in 1974 how to physically transfer myself back to my aboriginal world-line,” he said in his emails, “agents there ‘grafted’ my consciousness upon a duplicate in this world.” He went on to describe the experience, which involved a dream-state used to convey information from worldline to worldline.
He also claimed that he was not the only one to visit our worldline. “I am becoming persuaded,” he said, “that this Earth may have more exiles, agents, or what-have-you from alternative Earths walking around [than] I have hitherto believed.”
Worldline Divergence
The major differences between ProfessorPhate’s worldline and our own involve the outcome of World War II, which the timeline engineers may have meddled with. In his worldline, the United States never entered the war, instead becoming an isolationist “Fortress America,” and the Axis Powers ultimately succeeded. This would have a profound effect on the global economy (among other things, of course), and according to ProfessorPhate, his worldline remains 25 years behind ours.
“Perhaps the most glaring departure between the two is that the United States never participated in the Second World War,” he wrote, stating that the British Empire had signed a peace treaty with the Axis Powers in his worldline.
But there are other differences. There is no Internet. Cars and clothing styles are different, and “the Sixties never happened.” Most curious of all is that the Roswell incident of 1947 never occurred, nor did the Montauk Project or the Philadelphia Experiment, having a drastic impact on the course of technology.
As ProfessorPhate explained, it was Roswell that allowed us to “retro-engineer” alien technology. Without this, our fantastic leaps and bounds in commercially-available technology – and all the social implications that had – never came to be. The computers of his worldline were therefore generations behind our own.
Despite these differences, ProfessorPhate was convinced that certain hidden technologies do exist on his worldline, namely the ability to traverse and communicate between them. “Some party or parties in the United States has the power to implant my psyche into this world-line and to communicate with me as required,” he said.
The Fate of Our Worldline
ProfessorPhate makes no qualms about it; he views our worldline as a ticking bomb of improbability, and claims that our “metaphysical and empirical eccentricity” is what attracts so many worldline travelers.
“I have come to consider the question of which time/world-line was the first as a meaningless one,” he wrote, “However…I have ascertained that this world-line, compared to my own…is profoundly far-fetched and [volatile].”
He goes on to list a few potential divergence points, events that may have created our worldline or at least led to its uniqueness. These include the “passing of the Dark Satellite” in 1881, the existence of the Montauk Project, and the “detonation of a teratological bomb by the U.S. in 1993. “As for being a multiversal cross-roads,” he wrote, “Whatever this world-line was originally, it sure is one now.”
Benefits of Eccentricity
But what benefits do we gain from being so peculiar?
“The strain of [improbability], indigenous to all world-lines, is unusually and significantly pronounced in this one,” wrote ProfessorPhate. He claimed that our worldline was capable of things that would be “prohibitively difficult” in his, stating that “discoveries, inventions, experiments, etc., which, if possible at all, would require exorbitant time and labor to even attempt on another-more staid-world can be performed on this planet, at this time, with comparative ease.”
This, however, comes at a cost. “Unfortunately,” he explained, “every such act…increases the instability of this world-line. Improbabilities compound themselves until, if you will, the speculative bull market crashes.”
Does this mean that our worldline could end at some point? “This worldline,” he said, “is regarded as a fascinating, useful, and horrible example of what happens when temporal/ontological manipulation escalates.” In that sense, I suppose the answer is yes.
I’m reminded at this point of John Titor’s original fax to Art Bell in 1998. If you remember, Titor mentioned a “brick wall” that no one could travel beyond in 2564. Could this be the date our worldline ends? ProfessorPhate had his own estimations, specifically involving the date we reach Vernor Vinge’s so-called technological singularity.
This doesn’t mean there’s a set date for the end of the worldline, however. He called it “one of those a-journey-of-a-thousand-miles-begins-with-a-single-step sort of things.”
The countdown will begin, he said, once we reach the singularity, when the pace of our technology and innovations become “vertically ascendant.” When that countdown ends in unknowable.
And that is where the story ends. Or does it? There’s a lot I left out here, as I focused on the quotes I found most interesting. Read through his original emails from 1999 for more on what ProfessorPhate calls “paranormal exploitation,” and the astral domain.
Really, though, I suppose the entire story about our engineered reality and the ultimate fate of our worldline is best summed up by ProfessorPhate’s final comment in his final email: “I just thought that someone might want a heads-up.”
