## [RST][HF][WIP] Flotsam: exploiting physics inside a Time skip

* Author: u/VanPeer  *The shard made me do it**
* URL: https://www.jukepop.com/home/read/9165
* Score: 17

* Created: 2015-10-29T00:46:15

### Post:

[Link to content](https://www.jukepop.com/home/read/9165)

### Comments:

> **u/protagnostic** [+3]  (7 hours later)
> 
> Ooh, clever. I'd like to learn more of the Tall Ones.

>> **u/VanPeer** [+5]  *The shard made me do it* (9 hours later)
>> 
>> Thanks for taking the time to read it. This is my attempt at a web serial. Its just too much fun to mix science and fantasy :-)

> **u/RMcD94** [+2]  (11 hours later)
> 
> I wonder how much off the time skip is from the modern definition of an hour. 
> 
> Did they build this when the world had a revolution in 12 hours or 23 hours?

>> **u/VanPeer** [+2]  *The shard made me do it* (21 hours later)
>> 
>> Interesting thought. One hour is the approximate increment that the protagonist perceives that I picked artbitrarily, so, yes, that would be a 'modern' hour. This is a secondary world, modeled loosely on South Asia. I had imagined the ruins to be 50 million years old, based on old estimate for the Himalayas. 
>> [Earth's rotation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_rotation) slows  at a rate of 1.7 milliseconds per kilo year. So a day would have been shorter by only a quarter of an hour when the Time Conduit was built.

>>> **u/RMcD94** [+1]  (21 hours later)
>>> 
>>> Only a quarter of an hour should be perceivable with their technology (almost a minute a skip) so it is an accurate method of dating, assuming that measuring the slowing of the Earth's rotation is something they can do which I don't know.

> **u/None** [+2]  (a day later)
> 
> Wonderful story. Very creative physics and monster.

>> **u/VanPeer** [+1]  *The shard made me do it* (a day later)
>> 
>> Thanks. I'll try to keep it interesting as I move forward with the story.

> **u/Abpraestigio** [+2]  (21 hours later)
> 
> I find the fact that the second word of the first sentence is already spelled incorrectly to be incredibly off-putting.
> 
> I know it's petty, but seeing something like that saps all of my hope that I'm about to read something good.

>> **u/VanPeer** [+3]  *The shard made me do it* (22 hours later)
>> 
>> Thank you (I corrected it.).
>> You are not being petty. I feel the same way when I see spelling or grammatical errors in a literary work. Having smirked at similar errors in the work of others', I should hold myself to a higher standard. I appreciate the honest feedback, and up voted your comment.

> **u/traverseda** [+1]  *With dread but cautious optimism* (18 hours later)
> 
> Very good.

>> **u/VanPeer** [+1]  *The shard made me do it* (20 hours later)
>> 
>> Thanks !

> **u/MultipartiteMind** [+1]  (19 hours later)
> 
> Nice concepts!
> 
> Something that puzzled me:  [spoiler  ](#s "are new brains needed once every few days, or once every month or so?  Anemone says she feels everything for a few days, then when it fades she has to feed again (which matches the timing for Sibi following Vick), but when thinking about her spawn Sibi is suddenly assuming only ten victims a year (wheras I would imagine five to twelve times that number from one every few days, assuming a ~365 day year length).")

>> **u/VanPeer** [+1]  *The shard made me do it* (21 hours later)
>> 
>> You are absolutely correct. I concluded the same thing when writing that paragraph, [but](#s "but such a frequency of victims at a single spot even from one spawn would draw too much attention. So I assumed that Anemone's spawn could survive at below human levels of intelligence, while Anemone herself needs to feed more frequently in subjective time to maintain an edge, which itself is a plot device to give her motivation to hunt humans. There is no danger of Anemone herself being discovered since she is a time drifter. Thanks for taking the time to read so carefully. ")

>>> **u/MultipartiteMind** [+1]  (a day later)
>>> 
>>> Thank you for the reply!
>>> [](#s "Putting myself in her shoes, I have difficulty imagining her not wanting for her children what she wants for herself (that 'edge')--maybe something closer to addiction than need?  Then, though, her children would presumably reach the same conclusions once they had first recently eaten a brain.  The time drifter no-discovery-danger is in any case a very good point that I hadn't thought about!  If I need alternative head-canon, I may imagine all her children always skipping a month before eating someone new, to maintain both subjective intelligence and objective low feeding frequency.  That said, why didn't Anemone take Vick's corpse (or Vick himself while still alive) deep inside and skip forward one or twenty or fifty or a hundred years before laying her eggs and becoming unable to move from that spot?  Even if she has to eat again while they grow, and even assuming arrogance/victory-certainty, she seems to lose little and gain the advantage of unwary prey instead of someone coming to attack her who knows that she's dangerous.")

>>>> **u/VanPeer** [+1]  *The shard made me do it* (a day later)
>>>> 
>>>> I mostly agree with both your points, [however](#s "Anemone *doesn't* want too many of her spawn drifting through time and overlapping each others' territorial centuries. One assumes her spawn  will reach an equilibrium between intelligence required to survive or risk getting caught. Your second point is also entirely reasonable, even if she has laid her eggs many months ago. Lobsters typically carry their eggs with them for months and then lay them to gestate for several months more. I admit it was mostly for plot reasons that she didn't skip a century after she captured Vick. But she does have a psychological terror of running into the original builders, which prevents her from jumping into the far future")

>>>>> **u/MultipartiteMind** [+1]  (a day later)
>>>>> 
>>>>> I see!
>>>>> [](#s "Does she take a different survival strategy from her offspring because {if she died it would have been the end of her line, but even if some of her offspring die (lacking that 'edge') it doesn't matter to her as there are so many more}?  Similarly, I also note that if they mated with each other (producing more clutches of thousands) overlapping would be hard to avoid, whereas without mating with each other they would all die out childless (no grandchildren, so futility in having children in the first place); is her endgame plan that a lot of them survive and die childless, some of them go too far and are captured by the Tall Ones, and a lucky few get to return to the sea, mate with her kin there, and continue her line with grandchildren et cetera?  Incidentally (though please ignore this question if you prefer), lobster tastes delicious, especially with butter:  after eating so many humans/brains, how does Anemone taste?")

>>>>>> **u/VanPeer** [+1]  *The shard made me do it* (a day later)
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> [My outline was very similar, specifically] (#s " Anemone's intent was definitely to seed a breeding pair every kilo year, though this does not occur to Sibi since he is a bit of a prude who projects his cultural mores on non human life forms.  You are correct that Anemone follows R-selection to ensure survival of a fraction of her offspring whose lower baseline intelligence is a trade-off that's acceptable to her. She might even have other egg sacs stashed deeper in the ruins drifting at varying rates into the future. She however absolutely needs to mimic human thought, in order to handle the arbitrarily deadly threats that drift up within the ruins. Though it never occurred to me that even a single breeding pair would spawn thousands more which would mess up territories.")

> **u/GaBeRockKing** [+1]  *Horizon Breach: http://archiveofourown.org/works/6785857* (a day later)
> 
> Seriously good stuff, anemone is a genuinely interesting monster.

>> **u/VanPeer** [+2]  *The shard made me do it* (a day later)
>> 
>> Thanks ! 
>> Anemone was *very* loosely inspired by the character(NPC) Quelaag in the game *Dark Souls*, a monster who is as much a victim (of her own biology) as the humans she preys on.

> **u/Anakiri** [+1]  (3 days later)
> 
> I wouldn't expect to be able to find anyone in these ruins... If Anemone enters the ruins, then vanishes forward in time, then you enter before she comes back, then you will always be out of phase, both of you appearing exactly when the other vanishes. And the deeper you go into the ruins, the more possible phases there are, and the less likely you are to meet someone who crossed the thresholds more than an hour before you. Have I misunderstood the mechanics?

>> **u/VanPeer** [+1]  *The shard made me do it* (3 days later)
>> 
>> I don't think you have misunderstood the mechanics, [but ](#s "the time gradient makes it possible to catch up with someone who enters the time flow earlier. For simplicity, say, you are stepping over from a region of normal time into a 6 hour time skip. So anyone who entered it roughly 14 hours earlier will just pop into existence. The result is no different from showing up to meet someone coming out of stasis. It is still unlikely to encounter someone trying to escape. As you and others have pointed out, all Anemone has to do is to jump an arbitrary amount into the far future to escape anyone tracking her. The ambush is partly for plot reasons, unless of course Anemone actually intended an ambush.")

>>> **u/Anakiri** [+1]  (3 days later)
>>> 
>>> That's not what I mean. Say Anemone goes from normal space to a 6-hour-skip zone just before midnight, right in time to be hit with Skip 0 and sent six hours forward in time. Hot on her heels, Akalya enters the same zone just minutes later, but Anemone has vanished. Akalya wastes an hour searching for someone who isn't there, and is hit by Skip 1 and sent six hours forward.
>>> 
>>> Skips 2, 3, 4, and 5 pass without incident. Then when Skip 6 passes, Anemone reappears. She goes about her business for an hour until Skip 7 sweeps her further forward. While she is disappearing, Akalya reappears, none the wiser. She keeps searching for another hour, but Anemone doesn't exist then, so it's hopeless. Skip 8 sends her forward.
>>> 
>>> Anemone reappears with Skip 13 and disappears with Skip 14. Akalya reappears with Skip 14 and disappears with Skip 15. This happens again on Skip 20. They're practically right on top of each other, in the same place, in the same 6-hour-skip zone, in the same time period, but they never exist at the same time. Avoiding this would require either luck, or active coordination, I think.

>>>> **u/VanPeer** [+1]  *The shard made me do it* (3 days later)
>>>> 
>>>> Agreed. If Akalya enters the time skip close on Anemone's heels she will never catch up. However if she arrives there at least 7 or more hours later (which she does) then she has a 1/7 chance of getting back in sync with Anemone. She has to hit that 1 hour slot in the 1 plus 6 hour period or its multiple. A small chance to be sure, but not vanishingly small. Does that make sense ? Let me know if I am wrong. Thanks for taking the time.

>>>>> **u/Anakiri** [+1]  (3 days later)
>>>>> 
>>>>> Yeah, you're right. The chance is 1/7 of being physically capable of finding someone you're looking for, as long as you enter the zone from a zone with a cycle-length that is coprime with the new zone's, which is easy for a prime 1+6 zone. 1/7 isn't vanishingly small - if nothing else, you can leave and come back and search the area seven times, if you know to do that. But once you get deep enough that you're skipping more than a day, it becomes increasingly unfeasible to search the ruins, even if you're willing to burn decades of outside-time. It seems like something Sibi would have to worry about, if he's planning on entering the ruins to find someone specific. He knows how it works. Did he just plan on getting lucky?

>>>>>> **u/VanPeer** [+2]  *The shard made me do it* (4 days later)
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Sibi knows the chances of a rescue are slim. But Akalya offers him more money than he can resist, and he intends to make a single good faith attempt and offer condolences to the widow after the search turns up nothing. He knows enough not to go too deep into the ruins. His main fear is random predators from the past, but Akalya's high-tech weapon reassures him. What actually happens is partly for plot reasons, as mentioned before, and takes him by surprise.

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