OBSERVER

written by
Moses Hershberger
 O B S E R V E R

At a London music hall theatre, Richard Hannay (Robert Donat) is watching a demonstration of
the superlative powers of recall of "Mr. Memory" (Wylie Watson) when shots are fired. In the
ensuing panic, Hannay finds himself holding a seemingly frightened Annabella Smith (Lucie
Mannheim), who talks him into taking her back to his flat. There, she tells him that she is a spy,
being chased by assassins, and that she has uncovered a plot to steal vital British military
information, masterminded by a man with the top joint missing from one of his fingers. She
mentions the "39 Steps", but does not explain its meaning.

Later that night Smith, fatally stabbed, bursts into Hannay's bedroom and warns him to flee. He
finds a map of the Scottish Highlands clutched in her hand, showing the area around Killin, with
a house or farm named "Alt-na-Shellach" circled. He sneaks out of his flat disguised as a
milkman to avoid the assassins waiting outside. He then boards the Flying Scotsman express
train to Scotland. He learns from a newspaper article (read by a pair of women's undergarment
salesmen) that he is the target of a nationwide manhunt for Smith's murder. When he sees the
police searching the train, he enters a compartment and kisses the sole occupant, Pamela
(Madeleine Carroll), in a desperate attempt to hide his face and escape detection. She frees
herself from his unwanted embrace and alerts the policemen, who stop the train on the Forth
Bridge. Hannay then escapes, hiding behind the bridge's truss.

He walks toward Alt-na-Shellach, staying the night in the house of a poor crofter (farmer) (John
Laurie) and his much younger wife (Peggy Ashcroft). The crofter becomes suspicious of sexual
attraction between his wife and Hannay, spying on them from an outside window. In fact,
Hannay has revealed his current predicament to the young wife and asked for her help. Early the
next morning, the young wife sees a police car approaching and warns Hannay. She gives
Hannay the crofter's dark coat so as to better camouflage him. Hannay flees across the moors and
at a bridge he finds a sign for Alt-na-Shellach. The police, hot on his trail, fire several shots at
him and even employ a Weir autogyro to chase him down. He eventually arrives at the house of
the seemingly respectable Professor Jordan (Godfrey Tearle) and is let in by his maid after
saying he has been sent by Annabella Smith. The police arrive, but Jordan sends them away and
politely listens to Hannay's story after ushering out all his afternoon guests (including the local
sheriff) visiting the house. Hannay relates to Jordan that the man at helm of the group of foreign
assassins and spies is missing the top joint of his ring finger. Jordan corrects him by revealing
that the top joint of his (Jordan's) pinky finger is missing and thus he is the head of
aforementioned group of spies. Jordan then shoots Hannay as he inches towards the door, and
then (apparently) leaves him for dead.

Luckily, the bullet is stopped by the crofter's hymn book in the coat pocket. This is revealed by
Hannay to the local sheriff in his office (the same sheriff from the guests at Professor Jordan's).
More police arrive when the sheriff reveals that he does not believe the fugitive's story since
Professor Jordan is his best friend in the district. The police move to arrest Hannay, handcuffing
his right wrist, but he jumps through a window and escapes by joining a Salvation Army march
through the town. He tries to hide at a political meeting and is mistaken for the introductory
speaker. He gives a rousing impromptu speech—without knowing anything about the candidate
he is introducing—but is recognized by Pamela, who gives him to the police once more. He is
taken away by "policemen" who ask Pamela to accompany them. They drive past the police
station, claiming they have orders to go directly to Inveraray, but Hannay realizes they are agents
of the conspiracy when they take the wrong road. When the men get out to disperse a flock of
sheep blocking the road, Hannay escapes, dragging the unwilling Pamela (to whom he is
handcuffed) along.

They make their way across the countryside and stay the night at an inn. While he sleeps, Pamela
manages to slip out of the handcuffs, but then overhears one of the fake policemen on the
telephone, confirming Hannay's assertions. She returns to the room and sleeps on a sofa. The
next morning, she tells him what she heard. He sends her to London to alert the police. No secret
documents have been reported missing, however, so they do not believe her. Instead, they follow
her.

Pamela leads them to the London Palladium. When Mr. Memory is introduced, Hannay, sitting
in the audience, recognizes his theme music—the annoyingly catchy tune, a tune he has been
whistling and unable to forget for days. Hannay, upon recognizing Professor Jordan and
witnessing him signal Mr. Memory, realizes that the spies are using Mr. Memory to smuggle the
Air Ministry secret. As the police take Hannay into custody, he shouts, "What are the 39 Steps?"
Mr. Memory compulsively answers, "The 39 Steps is an organisation of spies, collecting
information on behalf of the Foreign Office of ..." at which point Jordan shoots him, jumps to the
theatre's stage and tries to flee, but is apprehended. The dying Mr. Memory recites the
information stored in his brain—the design for a silent aircraft engine—and is then able to pass
away peacefully, saying "I'm glad it's off my mind."

Hannay and Pamela witness Memory's death as their clasped hands are shown from behind,
Hannay's handcuffs clearly visible. As they stand together at the side of the stage, their hands
begin to touch. Now hand in hand, they watch as the hurriedly ushered-on chorus line dances to
an orchestrated version of the Jessie Matthews song "Tinkle Tinkle Tinkle", while the image
fades to black.

At a New York City hotel bar in 1958, two thugs, looking for someone they refer to as "George
Kaplan", see a waiter who is calling his name. Advertising executive Roger Thornhill summons
the same waiter and Thornhill is, apparently for that reason, mistaken for Kaplan, kidnapped,
brought to the Long Island estate of Lester Townsend and interrogated by spy Phillip Vandamm.
Despite Thornhill's denials, Vandamm thinks he is lying and has henchman Leonard arrange
Thornhill's death, in a staged drunken driving accident. Thornhill, surviving, is arrested for
driving under the influence and taken to the Glen Cove, New York police station.

Thornhill fails to convince his mother and the police of what happened. Journeying to the scene
of the crime with police, a woman at Townsend's home says he showed up drunk at her dinner
party. She also claims that Townsend is a United Nations diplomat. While searching a hotel
room with his mother that appears to belong to Kaplan, Thornhill answers a phone call from
thugs who are in the lobby. He escapes and visits the U.N. General Assembly building to meet
Townsend but realizes this person is not the man he met on Long Island. As he questions
Townsend, one of the thugs throws a knife, killing Townsend. Thornhill catches Townsend as he
falls and grabs the knife, which gives the appearance that he was the murderer. A nearby
photographer captures this apparent crime; Thornhill flees and attempts to find the real Kaplan.

A government intelligence agency realizes that Thornhill has been mistaken for Kaplan, an
imagined persona created by the agency to thwart Vandamm; they decide against rescuing him
for fear of compromising their operation.

Thornhill stopping a truck while being attacked by the crop duster, from the film trailer

Thornhill sneaks onto a train, the 20th Century Limited; there he meets Eve Kendall, who hides
him from the police; the two establish a relationship—on her part because she is secretly
working with Vandamm. In Chicago, she tells Thornhill she arranged a meeting with Kaplan at
an isolated bus stop in a rural area. Thornhill waits there; rather than Kaplan arriving, Thornhill
is attacked by a crop duster plane. After trying to hide in the fields, he steps in front of a
speeding tank truck; it brakes for him and the airplane crashes into it, allowing him to escape.

Thornhill reaches Kaplan's hotel in Chicago to discover that Kaplan had already checked out and
left before the time when Kendall claimed she talked to him on the phone. When Thornhill goes
to her room and confronts her, she leaves; he tracks her to an art auction where he finds
Vandamm. Vandamm, who is purchasing a Mexican Purépecha statue, leaves his thugs to deal
with Thornhill. Thornhill, in order to escape, disrupts the auction and police are summoned, who
take him away. He explains that he is the fugitive murderer and they release him to the
government agency's chief, "The Professor"; who reveals that Kaplan was invented to distract
Vandamm from the real government agent—who is Eve Kendall. Thornhill agrees to help
maintain her cover.

At the Mount Rushmore visitor center Thornhill, now willingly playing the role of Kaplan,
negotiates Vandamm's turnover of Kendall for her prosecution as a spy. When Thornhill appears
to confront Kendall, she shoots him, seemingly fatally, with a handgun that is actually loaded
with blanks and flees.

Afterward, the Professor arranges for Thornhill and Kendall to meet. Thornhill discovers Kendall
must depart with Vandamm and Leonard on a plane. When Thornhill tries to dissuade her from
going, he is knocked unconscious and locked in a hospital room. Thornhill escapes the
Professor's custody and goes to Vandamm's house to rescue Kendall.
At the house, Thornhill overhears that the sculpture holds microfilm and that Leonard discovered
that the gun used by Kendall to kill Thornhill was filled with blanks. Vandamm indicates that he
will kill Kendall during the flight. Thornhill warns her with a surreptitious note. Vandamm,
Leonard and Kendall depart the house to board the plane. As Vandamm boards the plane,
Kendall takes the sculpture and runs to the pursuing Thornhill. They flee to the top of Mount
Rushmore. As they climb down the mountain they are pursued by Vandamm's thugs, including
Leonard, who is fatally shot by a park ranger. Vandamm is taken into custody by the Professor.

Kendall meanwhile is hanging on by her fingertips on the mountain. Thornhill reaches down to
pull her up, at which point the scene cuts to him pulling her—now the new Mrs. Thornhill—into
the upper berth of a train. The train then enters a tunnel.

Scientists research time travel, hoping to send test subjects to different time periods "to call past
and future to the rescue of the present". They have difficulty finding subjects who can mentally
withstand the shock of time travel.

The scientists eventually settle upon the prisoner; his key to the past is a vague but obsessive
memory from his pre-war childhood of a woman (Hélène Chatelain) he had seen on the
observation platform ("the jetty") at Orly Airport shortly before witnessing a startling incident
there. He did not understand exactly what happened, but knew he had seen a man die.

After several attempts, he reaches the pre-war period. He meets the woman from his memory,
and they develop a romantic relationship. After his successful passages to the past, the
experimenters attempt to send him into the far future. In a brief meeting with the technologically
advanced people of the future, he is given a power unit sufficient to regenerate his own destroyed
society.

Upon his return, with his mission accomplished, he discerns that he is to be executed by his
jailers. He is contacted by the people of the future, who offer to help him escape to their time
permanently; but he asks instead to be returned to the pre-war time of his childhood, hoping to
find the woman again. He is returned to the past, placed on the jetty at the airport, and it occurs
to him that the child version of himself is probably also there at the same time. He is more
concerned with locating the woman, and quickly spots her. However, as he rushes to her, he
notices an agent of his jailers who has followed him and realizes the agent is about to kill him. In
his final moments, he comes to understand that the incident he witnessed as a child, which has
haunted him ever since, was his own death.
The bridge is robert testing the MRI on himself in 53

Eternal sunshine on the spotless mind

Future robert steals equipment from lab and blow's up lab. On the run from government. Takes
equipment to secret location. Powers time travel machine.

Knowing what future robert knows he goes back in time to save dying wife. Mental time travel.

Rule of 1 hour. Limitations. Balances future and past time continuum. Break it and time distorts.
Splits into parallel universe.

Government want machine to visit parallel world. Robert destroys work. Like hulk 2008. Army
wants hulk.

Visits four key moments in past to course correct her sickness.

It ends with future robert dying from car accident. Feds chase him. He is still synced with past
self. Wife is on deathbed. They both die together but in different timelines.past oliver has the
mind and memory of future oliver.

use "curious case of ben button" as an example of the ages finally meeting in the middle, and
then going in the other direction.Angels and Demons - the particles lab set-uptime travel love
stories like: about time and the time travel's wife. throw in the theory of everything

Robert R. Wilson travels through time to save his wife.

Since going back in time proves to be futile to save Inez, he goes to the future to find the cure for
his wife's illness. But the forces that be won't allow him.

Central theme: life is made as it is. There is no going back or jumping ahead to change it. Even if
life can be altered, it
My theory is that the uniformity of the lines on the panel being disrupted by the bullet holes is a
metaphor for time fractures and (future Robert) has to find these fractures in time and fix them.
These time fractures cause all sorts of distortion in time, including but not limited to reversing it.

the particles machine breaks apart with robert inside the machine - this cause the time slips and
puts Robert in a coma (we think it turns out to be a dream, but after Robert discovers the "totem"
item he picked up from the past, it's not a dream).

Present Robert experiences time slips that bring him back several seconds in time after waking
up from a coma of some sort.

the Mirror Universe Theory which states that when the universe was created in the big bang it
also created a alternative universe where everything that happens on earth happens on the
alternative universe but backwards.

Maybe the Tenet of time is the protagonist. Tenet is a principle or belief that is generally held to
be true. A general truth is essentially a construct, and in the construct of how time moves, one
can not go back. Just like language referring to eternity...the construct of time disallows human's
to be able comprehend terms regarding endless time, because no human has existed in that realm.

"Time has come for a new protagonist." Tenet is centered on the poster. And TENET is placed in
two different settings...black and white. The colors could represent Time periods, good and evil,
beginning and end, (the shift between black to white)? If someone were to change the rules of
time, say for instance be able to manipulate it as a means to leap forward or go backwards, this
essentially would be a destruction of our current tenet of time itself. In that regard, maybe time is
the antagonist as well as its manipulation would destroy the Tenet.

So essentially at the core TIME is both the protagonist and antagonist, good and evil, light and
dark, forward and backwards...a palindrome.

Children of men and Stalker as world setting for 1983North by northwest and 93 steps and
foreign correspondent and charade for 1950s setting. Perhaps story elements and tone as well
Agency recruits Oliver to program to contact mirror universe. This leads to the eventual ww3 in
1983.Oliver travels back to A. Escape with work (briefcase) and B. to save wife. They both
evade agency.

Like ESOFSM, they escape and go deeper into their minds. Oliver takes Daisy to certain points
to keep the connection between his mind

I believe somebody briefly touched on this but I would like to put emphasis on the word "time"
in a literal sense. I believe that Time is actually going to be something tangible in the Tenet
universe, hence Time has come and is literally coming after a new protagonist, time has come
and is literally coming after a new mission, hinting that time may be the potential antagonist,
similar to how Projections in Inception affected certain ops within dreams...

the Sator/Rotas square

There are 5 components that complete this square.

SATOR - nominative or vocative noun) (from serere=to sow) sower, planter, founder, progenitor
(usually divine); originator; literally “seeder”

AREPO - unknown, likely a proper name, either invented or, perhaps, of Egyptian origin, e.g.
coded form of the name Harpocrates or Hor-Hap (Serapis).

TENET - (verb) (from tenere=to hold) he/she/it holds, keeps, comprehends, possesses, masters,
preserves, sustains.

OPERA - (nominative, ablative or accusative noun) work, care, aid, labour, service,
effort/trouble; (from opus): (nominative, accusative or vocative noun) works, deeds; (ablative)
with effort.

ROTAS - rotās, accusative plural of rota) wheels; (verb) you (singular) turn or cause to rotate.

Thought 1 - Nolan will incorporate these concepts into characters and potentially their names
will start with the first letter of each of these concepts - each of them will represent one of these
components.

The reason I believe this is because in Inception, the characters first letters of their names spell
out DREAMS PAY.

Thought 2 - There may be a significance/symbolism in the word OPERA. We know that one of
the confirmed shooting locations is the Oslo Opera House in Norway, so there may be some
significance here, but the question is what will it be?
In terms of characters - I can see there being a character that embodies the definition of Sator
(potentially JDW who was rumored to be the one who is able to jump from the past to the
present and the future). He could be the originator, the planter, of whatever the conflict/plot is.

We have TENET, which will be a character who is responsible for sustaining, preserving
something (probably preserving and sustaining Time? bc Time runs out, right?)

And then we have Rotas - the one who can manipulate (or rotate/bend) time. Also potentially the
antagonist.

Character names could possibly start with the first letters of these words.

Another thing to note - the gas masks we see will definitely be an integral prop used by
numerous characters throughout the film.

Twist - Government agency made contact with a mirror universe

The suited hunter turns out to be mirror Robert – he can’t breathe our oxygen. Warns him about
the ripple effect. Five key moments. All have to do with his wife. Needs to correct them before a
distortion breaks his universe and eventually his.

Reason for these distortions is because Robert’s memories of his dead wife are affecting his
bridge (the tesseract bridge) to the past. He is grieving the loss of his wife. He figured his
machine (MRI) could save her.

Mental Time Travel

You Can't Fight Fate

Ripple Effect-Proof Memory

Time Crash

An illustration of Schrödinger's cat, showing the branching of parallel universes according to

a many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics

La Jetée

Arrival – the aliens gave louise the gift of time

Primer (2004)

In The End of Eternity (small spoiler warning), time agents always erase themselves from
existence, due to the fact that the genetic combination at conception is so easy to be changed.

In 1947, Oliver Wilson is a professor of physics at Cornell University and the director of its new
Laboratory of Nuclear Studies. Wilson and his colleagues constructed four-electron
synchrotrons.

During one a research effort, involving electromagnetic reduction of objects' weight, Oliver
accidentally discovers an 'A-to-B' time loop effect: objects left in the weight-reducing field
exhibit temporal anomalies, proceeding normally (from time 'A,' when the field was activated, to
time 'B,' when the field is powered off), then backwards (from 'B' back to 'A') in a continuously
repeating sequence, such that objects can leave the field in the present, or at some previous point.

Present Oliver lives in an alternative history where the Second Cold War has a turning point that
is heading towards WW3.

Scientists research time travel, hoping to send test subjects to different time periods "to call past
and future to the rescue of the present". They have difficulty finding subjects who can mentally
withstand the shock of time travel.

The scientists eventually settle upon the prisoner; his key to the past is a vague but obsessive
memory from his pre-war childhood of a woman (Hélène Chatelain) he had seen on the
observation platform ("the jetty") at Orly Airport shortly before witnessing a startling incident
there. He did not understand exactly what happened, but knew he had seen a man die.

After several attempts, he reaches the pre-war period. He meets the woman from his memory,
and they develop a romantic relationship. After his successful passages to the past, the
experimenters attempt to send him into the far future. In a brief meeting with the technologically
advanced people of the future, he is given a power unit sufficient to regenerate his own destroyed
society.

Upon his return, with his mission accomplished, he discerns that he is to be executed by his
jailers. He is contacted by the people of the future, who offer to help him escape to their time
permanently; but he asks instead to be returned to the pre-war time of his childhood, hoping to
find the woman again. He is returned to the past, placed on the jetty at the airport, and it occurs
to him that the child version of himself is probably also there at the same time. He is more
concerned with locating the woman, and quickly spots her. However, as he rushes to her, he
notices an agent of his jailers who has followed him and realizes the agent is about to kill him. In
his final moments, he comes to understand that the incident he witnessed as a child, which has
haunted him ever since, was his own death.
Washington - ex-military, recruited into the CIA (or some other gov't agency) to fight "the
Threat"

Donavan - Washington's agency handler

Pattinson - Agent with a special knowledge of/experience fighting the Threat (possible turncoat)

Poesy - expert scientist consulting with the agency about the Threat

Branagh - the billionaire owner of multinational corporation weaponizing the Threat

Caine - the billionaire owner of a rival multinational corporation (provides Washington with
resources/intel to bring down Branagh)

Debicki - wife of Branagh (possible agency plant/asset)

Smith - arms dealer selling Branagh's Threat to hostile foreign powers as an intermediary

Kapadia - Smith's wife/partner

Johnson - mercenary/security working for Branagh

the movie is about a time manipulation machine the military designed to avert potential disasters
by undoing them through time-reversal and JDW and Pattinson are part of some special CIA
team assigned to deal with some fallout from this or something like that

I think Branagh is the head of a multinational corporation weaponizing time manipulation tech
and selling it to terror cells and hostile foreign powers through intermediaries, and our secret
agent heroes are sent in to stop him. But it would be cool if the technology was originally
developed by the gov’t
John David Washington (JDW) is a part of a security team that is tasked with extracting an
important person during an opera house terrorist plot. They disguise themselves as Russian swat
team members. While trying to round up explosives planted by the Russian police forces, one of
his men turn on him.. but he is saved by a mysterious man seemingly moving in reverse. After
successfully saving the people in the opera house and extracting the target, they are ambushed by
enemies, and JDW is captured (see Prologue). The part in the train-yard (30sec in trailer) is the
scene where John David Washington's character is eventually killed, early on, by being forced to
swallow a cyanide pill after he refuses to give up his team. He is later brought back to life
through time reversal by some strange organization (27 sec in the prologue is his death being
reversed; the trains are moving backwards signifying time is reversing). The organization offers
to recruit him ("welcome to the afterlife"), he was literally brought back to life so that he could
be recruited for their mission(s). This organization, named TENET (probably an acronym) has
somehow found a way to manipulate i.e. reverse time, but probably just in a local sense, meaning
only specific events in a local region of space-time. And there is likely a limit to how far back
things can go. The reversal happens in real time, while the rest of the world goes forward. The
organization is probably trying to track down someone who acquired their technology (maybe a
rogue agent?) and planning to cause global chaos with it (they are "trying to prevent world war
3").

TENET means any Religion's main ideas or principles.

RELIGION

Afterlife and isolated time manipulation

QUANTUM MECHANICS

World War 3

Catastrophism messages often received by messengers of Gods even Alien Abductees

a "stele device" is discovered somewhere in america in 1971. 33°15'81.N 117°35'06 W

In 1983, that same stele device is found here: 60°35'71.1"N 185°13'30"E (reversed coordinates)
but with a homing device for the government agency to pick up with satellite. agency conclude it
came from a mirror universe
I have a small theory about the time mechanics of the film, based off of one scene in the trailer.
Keep in mind this is just me spitballing, and of course we know very little about what's going on
in the story, but it's fun to theorise.

I have seen a lot of people talking about how the isolated 'time rewinds' may be some kind of
gadget/device that JDW's character may acquire from the spy agency he is working for.
However, based off of the trailer, I don't think the time fluctuations are a thing the main
characters are doing, as much as it is something that is being done to them.

Towards the end of the trailer we see Pattinson and JDW driving backwards down a freeway,
engaging a car in a chase. The car then flips, and we close this trailer on a shot of the car crash
reversing back into functionality. Pattinson and JDW look at the wreck with some surprise. I
think the way the trailer presents this information, it seems like they're driving backwards in a
chase, then the car flips, and then they drive away. But that's not what's happening. At the end of
the trailer they're arriving at the scene of a car crash they haven't caused yet.

TITLE: OLDE HALLOliver Louis WilsonDaisy Elizabeth Wilsonname of the house. wife
named it.it should a place. a location. why? because the location is the constant anchor to
hero."A Ghost Story" - the romance of the characters

the reversals in time are happening because the prime timeline is caught between its mirror
universe

Borges' narrator describes how his universe consists of an enormous expanse of adjacent
hexagonal rooms. In each room, there is an entrance on one wall, the bare necessities for human
survival on another wall, and four walls of bookshelves. Though the order and content of the
books are random and apparently completely meaningless, the inhabitants believe that the books
contain every possible ordering of just 25 basic characters (22 letters, the period, the comma, and
space). Though the vast majority of the books in this universe are pure gibberish, the library also
must contain, somewhere, every coherent book ever written, or that might ever be written, and
every possible permutation or slightly erroneous version of every one of those books. The
narrator notes that the library must contain all useful information, including predictions of the
future, biographies of any person, and translations of every book in all languages. Conversely,
for many of the texts, some language could be devised that would make it readable with any of a
vast number of different contents.
Despite—indeed, because of—this glut of information, all books are totally useless to the reader,
leaving the librarians in a state of suicidal despair. This leads some librarians to superstitious and
cult-like behaviors, such as the "Purifiers", who arbitrarily destroy books they deem nonsense as
they scour through the library seeking the "Crimson Hexagon" and its illustrated, magical books.
Others believe that since all books exist in the library, somewhere one of the books must be a
perfect index of the library's contents; some even believe that a messianic figure known as the
"Man of the Book" has read it, and they travel through the library seeking him.

The story takes the form of a signed statement by a Chinese professor of English named Doctor
Yu Tsun who is living in the United Kingdom during World War I. Tsun is a spy for Abteilung
IIIb, the military intelligence service of Imperial Germany.

As the story begins, Doctor Tsun has realized that an MI5 agent called Captain Richard Madden
is pursuing him, has entered the apartment of his handler Viktor Runeberg, and has either
captured or killed him. Doctor Tsun is certain that his own arrest is next. He has just discovered
the location of a new British artillery park and wishes to convey that knowledge to Berlin before
he is captured. He at last hits upon a plan to achieve this.

Doctor Tsun explains that his spying has never been for the sake of the Kaiser's Germany, which
he considers "a barbarous country". Rather, he says, he knows that Germany's intelligence chief,
Lieutenant Colonel Walter Nicolai, believes the Chinese people to be racially inferior. Doctor
Tsun is therefore determined to be more intelligent than any White spy and to obtain the
information Lt.-Col. Nicolai needs to save the lives of German soldiers. Doctor Tsun suspects
that Captain Madden, an Irish Catholic in the employ of the British Empire, is similarly
motivated.

Taking his few possessions, Tsun boards a train to the village of Ashgrove. Narrowly avoiding
the pursuing Captain Madden at the railway station, he goes to the house of Doctor Stephen
Albert, an eminent Sinologist. As he walks up the road to Doctor Albert's house, Tsun reflects on
his great ancestor, Ts'ui Pên, a learned and famous civil servant who renounced his post as
governor of Yunnan Province in order to undertake two tasks: to write a vast and intricate novel,
and to construct an equally vast and intricate labyrinth, one "in which all men would lose their
way". Ts'ui Pên was murdered before completing his novel, however, and what he did write was
a "contradictory jumble of irresolute drafts" that made no sense to subsequent readers; nor was
the labyrinth ever found.

Doctor Tsun arrives at the house of Doctor Albert, who is deeply excited to meet a descendant of
Ts'ui Pên. Doctor Albert reveals that he has himself been engaged in a longtime study and an
English translation of Ts'ui Pên's novel. Albert explains excitedly that at one stroke he has solved
both mysteries—the chaotic and jumbled nature of Ts'ui Pên's unfinished book and the mystery
of his lost labyrinth. Albert's solution is that they are one and the same: the novel is the labyrinth.

Basing his work on the strange legend that Ts'ui Pên had intended to construct an infinite
labyrinth, as well as a cryptic letter from Ts'ui Pên himself stating, "I leave to several futures (not
to all) my garden of forking paths", Doctor Albert realized that the "garden of forking paths" was
the novel, and that the forking takes place in time and rather than in space. In most fictions, a
character chooses one alternative at each decision point and eliminates all others. In Ts'ui Pên's
novel, however, all possible outcomes of an event occur simultaneously, each one itself leading
to further proliferations of possibilities. Albert further explains that these constantly diverging
paths do sometimes converge again, though as the result of a different chain of causes. For
example, Doctor Albert says, in one possible time-line Doctor Tsun has come to his house as an
enemy, in another as a friend.

Though trembling with gratitude at Doctor Albert's revelation and at his ancestor's genius,
Doctor Tsun glances up the path to see Captain Madden rushing towards the door. Knowing that
time is short, Doctor Tsun asks to see Ts'ui Pên's letter again. As Doctor Albert turns to retrieve
it, Doctor Tsun draws a revolver and murders him in cold blood.

Completing his manuscript as he awaits death by hanging, Doctor Yu Tsun explains that he has
been arrested, convicted of first degree murder, and sentenced to death. However, he has "most
abhorrently triumphed" by revealing to Lt.-Col. Nicolai the location of the artillery park. Indeed,
the park was bombed by the Imperial German Air Service during Doctor Tsun's trial. The
location of the artillery park was in Albert, near the battlefield of the Somme. Doctor Tsun had
known that the only way to convey the information to Berlin was to murder a person with the
same name, so that news of the murder would appear in British newspapers connected with the
name of his victim.

Time travel as a means of creating historical divergences[edit]

The period around World War II also saw the publication of the time travel novel Lest Darkness
Fall by L. Sprague de Camp, in which an American academic travels to Italy at the time of the
Byzantine invasion of the Ostrogoths. De Camp's time traveler, Martin Padway, is depicted as
making permanent historical changes and implicitly forming a new time branch, thereby making
the work an alternate history.

Time travel as the cause of a point of divergence (POD), which can denote either the bifurcation
of a historical timeline or a simple replacement of the future that existed before the time traveling
event, has continued to be a popular theme. In Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee, the protagonist
lives in an alternate history in which the Confederacy has won the American Civil War; he
travels backward through time, and brings about a Union victory in the Battle of Gettysburg.

When a story's assumptions about the nature of time travel lead to the complete replacement of
the visited time's future rather than just the creation of an additional time line, the device of a
"time patrol" is often used, most notably[citation needed] in Poul Anderson's "Time Patrol"
collection—where guardians race uptime and downtime to preserve the "correct" history. In the
most celebrated of this series, Delenda Est, the interference of time traveling outlaws causes
Carthage to win the Second Punic War and destroy Rome with massive consequences for the
present day.

A more recent example is Making History by Stephen Fry, in which a time machine is used to
alter history so that Adolf Hitler was never born. This ironically results in a more competent
leader of the Third Reich, resulting in the country's ascendancy and longevity in this altered
timeline.

Quantum eraser experiment

Many-worlds interpretation

Magnetic resonance imaging

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170215-the-strange-link-between-the-human-mind-and-
quantum-physics

Quantum mind

https://home.cern/news/news/physics/particle-physics-brain

Double-slit experiment

Observer effect (physics)