: Re-reading that, I’m not sure how it raised that question. I guess my mind
: jumped faster than I could type. I was thinking that a free W’rkncacnter
: could somehow locate in time-space-ether the one trapped in the end of
: Infinity, then go back in time and manipulate events to get itself into
: that timeline. Pure speculation, I’m pretty sure. On further thought, I
: doubt they’d be smart enough to be able to do that, being pure chaos and
: all.
In multilinear time, you can travel back and get yourself into any timeline you want, by making that timeline when you travel back, but not like you seem to be thinking of. Let me illustrate it this way:
Say you and I want different events to take place - say we get in a fist fight, so of course, each of us wants ourselves to win. The first time around, I win the fist fight. So then you take your time machine, travel back and (lets use Infinity style where you rewind time in your own mind), then knowing just what moves I'm going to pull off, counter them and win. Of course, the original timeline where I won still exists. So now, in the second timeline, I realize what you've done, learn time travel myself, and then go back and counter your counterattack and still wind up winning. Hah! Except, the second timeline where you won still exists.
This is why time travelling to "chase after" someone else who just went back to change the past doesn't make any sense in multilinear time (and why I had to invent psychological excuses to retcon that behavior in Eternal, once I realized this). If we're sitting here in a timeline where I won and then suddenly you... do whatever it is you do when you travel to the past or send your own brain-state to your past self (which is what seems to happen in Infinity)... then why should I care? I'm still sitting here in a timeline where I won. Ok, so some other timeline exists where you won. I can't unmake that... all I can do is make yet another timeline where I win. But I'm already in such a timeline now, so why should I care?
Basically, the point is that the a freed W'rkncacnter wouldn't (or at least shouldn't) care about whether there are other timelines where it's not free, cause it can't unmake those, it can just make new branches of them at best. And if the only sort of time travel possible is send-your-past-self-your-future-brainstate like Infinity uses, and not self-your-body-to-somewhere-else-in-spacetime like Eternal uses, then the W'rkncacnter would have no use in rewinding to some time in the past when it wasn't yet freed, and waiting around for the future of a timeline where it was still not yet freed to suddenly sabotage people there... because it couldn't do anything. It'd still be trapped. Heck, unless the W'rk can subtly influence probability even while trapped, then if it rewound in it's own mind like that, the next future it ended up in would be any of the possible futures that could result from that time, and it would have no control over which one came to be, so there wouldn't be any point in doing so.
Now in Eternal I have a little bit of a copout that makes this all sort of invalid - the Cybernetic Junction allows you to skip timelines as well as travel time, if you know the timeline you want to go to. That's how Hathor returns to the timeline that Eternal starts from in the failure branch of Chapter 4. She gets her hands on a ship with a Junction and, knowing where she wants to go since she's already been there, jumps straight there with it. So the W'rkncacnter, having that same sort of power, could theoretically start screwing around and jumping into random nearby timelines. But each time it entered a timeline, that timeline would split, and there would still be a future (actually, many futures) of that timeline where a free W'rk didn't suddenly appear. And technically, a freed W'rk could jump around to any point in space in any point in time in any timeline, so if any W'rk was *ever* free at any time in any possible history, then there is possible a branch of this timeline we're in right now where a free W'rkncacnter shows up here in my bedroom. But, there are infinitely many more timelines where that doesn't happen, and this seems to be one of themOH GOD MAKE IT STOP[no carrier]
