TimemiT

- Time is a palindrome! exclaimed the mathemagician.

Once more, she scanned her equation on the whiteboard and there was no doubt in her mind. It was correct. Time was not a circle; it was not an arrow. It was a straight line that curved in on itself. The universe had begun sometime in the past and it would reach its end somewhere in the future. Then, time would unwind and send it all back the way it came from. The fierce explosion at the start of everything would be sucked back into the empty nothing. Then once more there would be a bloom of plasma, stars and dust, black holes and galaxies clustered like grapes on the vine. It would all repeat itself, again and again and again. It had already happened- how many times before? The mathemagician could not know. Her formulae were not powerful enough to see beyond the start and end of time, and there was no way to count the pulse of the universe from the inside.

Her elegant fingers traced the long line of digits, symbols and Greek letters on the whiteboard. For another half-hour she worked to explore a path branching from her main equation. She nodded as she solved it and watched the value emerging: fourteen billion and then some; the age of the universe!

She turned her attention to a different solution of the same branch, this time going the opposite way. Her equation had reached the beginning of time; it should be able to find the end. Methodically, determined, she attacked the problem with all the might of her brilliant mind. Another value started to come into focus. The universe would end... when... She felt the blood drain from her face.

The universe is a very big calculator, she thought, as she pressed on with shaking hands. What it calculates is itself. It is a model of itself, a 1:1 scale simulation, full scale in space and time. Its execution will terminate when the solution is found to the very equation that describes the age of the universe. And she was about to solve that equation herself! But that meant that the calculation must have completed- otherwise she would not be able to find its result! Mathemagics is possible thanks to the connection of the human mind to the underlying superstructure, the layer of existence where all is numbers. As values form in the sea of endless potential, the human mind becomes aware of them through the application of mathemagical formulas. However, the superstructure is too vast, too chaotic, for the mind to find any new meaning in it. Mathemagics can only fish already existing equations and their solutions out of the vastness. And now she had just caught one such solution. Her heart pounded madly. Time would end...

... 14 billion years after the beginning, her solution said. "Well", she thought, "that makes sense". There was a whooshing sound from outside and the noise of cars crashing while hundreds of horns blared and alarms tweeted, as if a giant vacuum cleaner was sucking everything up. What will it feel like, she wondered, to experience the palindrome...? People had been born, lived and died while time went from past to future. When it doubled back, they would find themselves re-entering the time stream at the point of their death, their lives would rewind to their birth and they would become unborn. Would they be aware of it? Was it possible to know time flowing backwards? Surely, if memories form with time, then with time unwinding, they would un-form and the conscious mind would simply have no opportunity to watch them vanish?

She felt the ground shake faintly and watched her hand moving over her writing on the board. For a moment, she was not certain what she had written and why. Then she realised she wasn't writing anything new. Her marker pen traced her writing from right to left, undoing every line, curve and point. By the time she reached the beginning of her equation, the memory of its solution was lost to the future. For twenty-odd years, her life coiled back like a spring. She walked backwards, talked backwards, loved backwards. So did everyone and everything around her, but nobody seemed any the wiser for it. They couldn't stop and think of the past prompted by a thought coming from the future and they couldn't know the future as they slid inexorably towards the past.

Eventually, she was a toddler again, then an embryo and finally ceased to have existed yet she was conceived again and took her first steps, spoke her first words, learned the secret formulae of mathemagics that led her to the solution of the equation describing the palindromic nature of timemit fo erutan cimordnilap eht gnibircsed noitauqe eht fo noitulos eht ot reh del taht scigamehtam fo ealumrof terces eht denrael, sdrow tsrif reh ekops, spets tsrif reh koot dna niaga deviecnoc saw ehs tey detsixe evah ot desaec yllanif dna, oyrbme na neht, reddlot a emaceb ehs, yllautnevE.