stephan.com
scattered thoughts

Last week, noted blogger The Ferrett started A New Project For The Nerdily-Inclined, called

The Open-Source Wishing Project!
It’s based on a strip from his online geek comic, Home on the Strange. The general idea is, lets figure out what we want to wish for BEFORE we find the lamp with the genie in it, and let everyone find the problems, so we don’t wind up with a 12 inch pianist.

I suggested a new wish thread, based on my favorite wish, and it got accepted! I feel honored!

Wish For Subjective Time Control 1.0
For a long time, my favorite wish has been

The Wish for Time Control 1.0

“I wish to be able to control time for the entire universe or any desired subset or subsets, generally but not necessarily excluding my own subjective experience, in the manner of a VCR: pause, rewind, fast forward, including the ability to undo any changes I make to the time continuum”

Note that this neatly encapsulates most of the other wishes in the set, making them trivial or close to it.

Wish for lots of money/to be rich
Easy! Stop time and walk into the counting room of your local drug dealer, leaving with a bag of cash. Fast forward to tomorrow to find out the lotto numbers/stock prices/sports scores, then rewind to today and place your bets. It might be more fun to just take things, though.

Wish to find one’s true love
Well, it might not help you find her, (the search is half the fun, and who says there’s only one?) but once you do, it’s a lot easier to woo her - freeze time, go get a dozen roses, and pull them out of thin air. Rewind and get rid of her boyfriend or un-say that stupid thing you said. Promise her the world, and deliver.
Also allows for creepy/kinky things like in The Fermata.

Wish for world peace
Freeze time and disarm soldiers, etc. Make miracles to convince the bad guys that Allah doesn’t want them to do that. Selective assasinations to eliminate troublemakers. I also imagine pantsing the president on national TV.

Wish to return a loved one from the dead
Pull them out of harm’s way, stop them from catching bird flu, fast forward them to a time when there’s a cure.

Wish for happiness
Yeah, not so much. But it would make me happy

Wish for immortality
OK, that would be my other wish, generally combined with happiness as something like “to live as long as I want to, and want to as long as I live.” But lacking that, fast forward to a time with better medical care, rewind to just before you put on the mispacked parachute, etc. You’re immune to almost anything but an instant death that happens too fast to freeze.
Oh, yeah, and you can rewind your body to any age you want. I recommend doing it a year at a time, so as to not freak out the locals.

Wish to undo a personal situation
duh.

Plus:
Let’s not forget the ability to find out just what really happened - screw the Zapruder film!
Freeze time during the final exams to look up the answers and get any degree you want!
Age your enemies to death!

A couple of specifics about my wording:

Freezing time covers 99% of my day-to-day stuff, but why not go for rewind/ff?
“Desired subset” because it would suck to freeze time and not be able to open doors, or have to walk to Ireland. I say walk, because the water would be frozen too, right? If I get three, teleportation goes on the list.
Multiple subsets would be very handy, though I think you could do without.
Undo, because I’ve read The Man Who Folded Himself and lots of other time travel stories and seen The Butterfly Effect. It’s too hard to predict changes down the line, so you need to be able to experiment.
I thought about making it like a DVD player, rather than a VCR, to skip directly to a point, but I think FF/rewind (as long as you can do it subjectively fast enough) steps around problems like movement of the earth, materializing inside a new wall, not knowing precisely when you want to go to, etc.

I can’t really think of anything I’d want to do that this power would not allow; some things might end up requiring a lot of personal effort, but that might be fun.