More feedback! What a lovely thing to wake up to on an 18 F morning when my furnace is dying and the guy won't be here until tomorrow. The darn thing is almost as old as I am and we have a homeowner's warranty on it, but they won't replace it for free until it's well and truly dead. So we've been playing a game since October with the repair people wherein we call them when we think it's gone and they come out and resuscitate it. Eventually they're going to get tired of this game replace it like their policy says they will. Right? Right?
In the meantime, we have four portable heaters and we cart them around the house. And now I have some more lovely FDK to warm me, too.
Artemis - Do I have to finish the nfic by December 25? Because I don't write nearly as fast as I used to and, while this one is technically "finished", but it's terribly unpolished. No promises, but I'll try to get it done by Thursday.
Vicki - Yes, exactly! They are the
same people so they didn't disappear. It's like when you tell yourself, "I wish I'd known that when I was younger". They actually do know a thing or two. Also, you have the wittiest grandchildren. A grandson who wants an iPod and loves diamonds (real ones!) and now your very wise grand-daughters. Awww.
LnC Junkie - Thank you! I think it does read better in one shot and I'm delighted you thought it was worth the wait. I had so much fun picturing them in my mind interacting with their future/past selves. I've missed you, too!
countrygurl - I did see Frequency years ago. All I really remember about it is someone listening to the radio.
Their futures selves don't disappear because
they are their future selves. I'll try to explain my rationale at the bottom of this post.
cookiesmom - Thank you! Thank you for reading and thank you for taking the time to reply. It really does mean a lot.
Okay, now for some thoughts on Flarks and Ploises. My guiding theory when I started the story was based on the
"grandfather paradox" . Simply put, you can't go back in time and kill your own grandfather before he had children. To do so would make impossible your birth. If you're never born, how can you go back and kill yourself off?
It was this article in the
NY Times that helped solidify the theory I was going to use. I'll quote, because it's easiest.
But what about killing your grandfather? In a well-ordered universe, that would be a paradox and shouldn't be able to happen, everybody agrees.
That was the challenge that Dr. Joe Polchinski, now at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, Calif., issued to Dr. Thorne and his colleagues after their paper was published.
Being a good physicist, Dr. Polchinski phrased the problem in terms of billiard balls. A billiard ball, he suggested, could roll into one end of a time machine, come back out the other end a little earlier and collide with its earlier self, thereby preventing itself from entering the time machine to begin with.
Dr. Thorne and two students, Fernando Echeverria and Gunnar Klinkhammer, concluded after months of mathematical struggle that there was a logically consistent solution to the billiard matricide that Dr. Polchinski had set up. The ball would come back out of the time machine and deliver only a glancing blow to itself, altering its path just enough so that it would still hit the time machine. When it came back out, it would be aimed just so as to deflect itself rather than hitting full on.So they aren't gone, they're just
deflected. One little nudge and everything has changed. Luthor is dead, so there's no one to stop them from getting married before the New Kryptonians show up. Wells' theory was that Clark was altered by the NK's quantum disruptor, leaving him sterile. Now that problem is solved, too. And their future no longer includes that stupid clone/amnesia arc.
One caveat, the grandfather paradox assumes that time is circular, I deliberately made it linear in this story. Otherwise, as Flois laments at one point, she would be destined to live the past three years on a continual loop. I'd much rather they just got on with their lives - together.
![[Linked Image]](http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/ns/cms/dn12761/dn12761-1_587.jpg)
![[Linked Image]](http://www.rageboy.com/mbimages/cover-clip-420-occult-russian-080148331X.jpg)
I'm confused. In Part 8, there is a bit of necking going on in the future before Clark calls it off. In Part 9, Clark has proposed to Lois in the past, and the scene ends with her 'yes'. In Part 10, Lois wakes up in bed with Clark back in 1995. While she insists that "nothing happened" in the future, Clark is silent about what happened in the past. So... who did what with whom, when? 
