“How does it manifest?” said Maeve. “Put it on a personal level so I can grasp it.”
“Well… You’d get things like Déjà vu, Jamais vu, Presque vu.”
“Already seen, never seen, and almost seen,” said Maeve, translating the French.
“Yes, people could be beset with Déjà vu, thinking they have already lived experiences due to the ripple effect of the backwash migrating through their past. Then again, they might lose memory functionality, and suffer Jamais vu, thinking familiar or routine events were all new and completely unique. The third is when you’ve got something on the tip of your tongue, but just can’t get it out—a sensation that something you know is impending, right on the cusp of happening or being expressed, but inhibited in some way.”
“But Jamais vu is fairly rare syndrome, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but it can sometimes lead to the Caprgas Delusion.”
“Enlighten me,” said Maeve, not being familiar with that condition.
“Psychologists think it’s a delusion where a person comes to believe an associate, friend, or even a close family member or spouse, has been replaced by an identical imposter, a double.”
“Invasion of the Body Snatchers?”
“Not quite, but you have the general idea. It’s called the ‘delusional misidentification syndrome,’ and patients with extreme cases have even claimed they believed time was warped, or that they were trapped in some kind of recurring time loop.”
“Now you’ve got my attention,” said Maeve. “You think this isn’t really a delusion at all.”
“I have my suspicions, because things like this can happen in a Chaos Zone. These patients might have been experiencing something very real. Beyond that, you get memory loss, because lived events are suddenly being reordered, and time has to account for the memory of those events in living persons. You see, our brain is like Kelly’s RAM bank—our Touchstone Database. We keep it running here at all times, and protected by a low order nexus point. A human brain is like that, only it won’t be protected—unless it’s also in a nexus bubble. That’s why we remember the history and don’t suffer the memory loss. You see how disturbing this is? Events change and things you once knew simply vanish, like that key that was hanging around my neck.”
“Scary,” said Maeve. “You mean I might suddenly lose a Shakespeare play and never know it was gone?”
“Worse than that—you might suddenly lose a person and not even remember they ever existed. And there are other effects that could arise from the dual Heisenberg Waves after the Paradox is encountered. This can cause real time loops, replays, echoes, phasing events, things falling out of sync with their own time, even the shifting of physical matter. The duality of the Heisenberg Wave also introduces another dangerous possibility. A doppelganger could arise—a double walker… perhaps more than one.”
“Your Capgras Delusion made real?”
“Exactly. That may not matter if the duplicate is just another nobody, but if it happens with a Prime…”
“I see where this is going,” said Maeve. “I had never considered this possibility.”
“Yes,” said Paul. “The problem is, if we do get one, it will most likely be a Prime, because they tend to inhabit Nexus Bubbles, which can protect them from Paradox effects. You were worried about Stalin, well suppose he were still alive in that milieu when this Heisenberg Wave splits, and the world ends up with two men of steel. Can you imagine the consequences—two Stalins? And that is just the little stuff.”
“My god,” said Maeve. “What else?”
“It’s easy to see that all these effects can cause real chaos. In fact, now I’m beginning to really see the danger that Fairchild spoke of when she use my terminology—Grand Finality. Things could come flying apart to such an extent that time is unable to restore a viable continuum. In effect, the meridian suffers a fatal break—it shatters.”
“But wouldn’t that just mean things spin off onto another meridian?”
Paul gave her a long look. “You don’t understand,” he said slowly. “Forget the many worlds theory, that’s all bunk. A meridian is just a possible reordering of events. You can have an infinite number of them, but only one universe. Everything settles onto one meridian in the end. All the others are ‘also rans.’ They are just possible outcomes arising from a variation introduced in the continuum by a time traveler. That variation generates a Heisenberg Wave, and as that wave moves forward, it slowly weaves all the various strands from these possible meridians back into one—but only one remains in the