#woe.begone spoilers through 105

[orchidbreezefc]

the "syncing to the mike cloud" model of time travel

since i mentioned this in my [link: mike guide], here's my current theory for how causality works in woe.begone!

everything in woe.begone (aside from some stuff with continuous corrections and the boulders--find the followup theory post on that [here]) seems to indicate that only one timeline can exist at once. the timeline can be changed, but ALL of it changes and overwrites the previous one like an obsolete save file. the two save files don't coexist; you can't load one and visit a point that only happened in the file you overwrote. there's only one series of events in the file, complete with its echoes forward and backwards.

the big question this brought up for me was: what does that mean for [latvia] mike returning to his own time period to spend time with edgar? his native timeline no longer exists, right? just like michael's? mike's moving 5 years forward in THIS timeline, not to a timeline that has been erased. isn't he just visiting mikey's edgar 5 years from now? but mike hasn't reported any incongruous experiences with the edgar of 5 years from now. nor has he bumped into any 5-years-older mikey, even when he lives there full-time.

the options here are: 1. edgar is lying to mike, 2. mike is lying to the other mikes and audience, 3. you CAN visit undone timelines, or 4. (my theory)--latvia mike is the current mikey 5 years from now. at least he is when he's in his own time period--and that's the crucial part.

when latvia mike sets foot in 2022 and talks to mikey, mikey has an experience (the conversation) that mike has not had. in that moment mike diverges from mikey causally. mikey can't become this mike, because he has memories (of the conversation) that mike doesn't.

my theory is that it's specifically the act of returning to his own time period that reintegrates mike with mikey's trajectory. when mike returns to his time PERIOD (not timeLINE), he syncs to the mike cloud--he downloads the patch that contains mikey's memories of the conversation they just had. mike goes in airplane mode when he's in 2022. it's when he reconnects by returning to his own time period of 2027 that he syncs back up with the current timeline's memory storage. mike retroactively re-becomes mikey.

by this logic, michael is NOT causally linked with mike OR mikey, because he hasn't returned to his own time--and this is very good disincentive to do that, because in some sense he would be re-dooming mike and mikey to becoming him. judging by latvia mike and the fact that he got the memories of the nail-in-the-tire timeline, this seems to largely consist of obsolete memories from timelines that no longer happened, but i don't blame michael for not wanting to risk it, or for that matter to collect more memories that will become obsolete the next time he talks to mikey or mike. mike and mikey go to michael's time in 105, but michael did not time travel to arrive there, he just Lived There Already.

axe seems to show mike cloud syncing in action. each set of mikes experiences a conversation that none out of the 9 of them originally had, but returning to their own time periods (separated by a matter of hours) reintegrates all 9 sets of memories into the most recent 3 mikes.

the upshot of all of this is that mike being causally related to mikey means that mike and mikey, the non cowboys in the situation, would have the cattle brand that says MW on it, and michael and MW would not. so that's extremely funny.