Now then
It’s been staring me in the face, but I’ve just realised something about Lifespan. It’s a virtual Time Machine.
There are two core modes: the default is “outside time”, and the other is “time travel”.
Outside time is like standing back from the whiteboard and drawing timelines on it. You see it all. You’re a Tralfamadorian.
e.g. this is Nick Drake
Time travel mode is where you jump into the whiteboard, and you’re actually in 1985. When you’re there, 1985 is now. If you were 9 then, you’re 9 now. Everything is true as it was in 1985, given our best available knowledge back in the future.
You can no longer see everything, only what was known at that time. Things that haven’t happened yet don’t exist. People who are dead in the future are alive.
e.g. this is Nick Drake in
1969
One detail is that you have to travel to a precise day… you can’t time travel to all of 1985 at once. You can go to 13 February 1985, though. Look at your watch, and it’s the right time, but a different date.
In this mode, you can witness events and leave things behind. And - here’s the best bit - if you do something, it lives in the moment you did it. It’s like going back and posting into your past as if you’d been there. (Which you might well have been, just without your laptop which hasn’t been invented yet.)
Under the hood, your action in 1985 still has the underlying timestamp of today, just so we know… but the important thing isn’t the timestamp, it’s the dates on the spans.
Why…?
Well… if you find an old diary or photo, what are you meant to do with it? In the present, it’s something from the past. But if you go to past, it’s the present, and you can insert it so it’s there when you go back to the future. If you close your eyes and remember being 9, and write something, it’s a memory.
If you found an old half-written diary entry, you could add it in the past as a truth from then, and then complete it back in the future. These would be separated, though. One is the original information, the completion is a later addition or annotation.
You can also do this stuff when you’re outside time, because you’re omnipresent and all-powerful… but it makes more sense to travel back and do it now, then.