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Here’s how the theory goes: if you’re at the centre of a snarl in continuity, you’ll notice. Nobody else will, though. You’ll feel time being rewritten and see the world change around you; they won’t. From their perspective, you went to bed yourself and woke up yourself, albeit not the same one. From your perspective, you went to bed yourself and woke up your grandfather, and also, unrelatedly, a functional alcoholic. You’ll remember what came before but you’ll also remember what hadn’t come before but now does; what wasn’t neatly slots itself into what is, until you’ll never have known any better, except for the eternal conviction that something is wrong and will never be right. Occasionally you’ll look in the mirror and think: This isn’t who I am. What you really mean to say is: This is who I am, but it isn’t who I should be. Not was: you always were this person, at least since someone rewrote your timeline. Which of course they never did, because your timeline has always been this way, ever since it wasn’t.
Time travel. It does funny things to the mind.
The real problem with all of this, beyond the obvious questions of consent and agency, is something like this: how can you really know? If your timeline’s been rewritten, how can you prove it? No one else can see it’s happened; their eyes slide right off it, like you’re concealed by a perception filter, or a particularly loathsome brand of invertebrate. They don’t want to look at your timeline. It irritates them; it hurts them, even. And anyway, how many people really have their timelines rewritten? Be honest: did it happen to you, child? Did it really? You’re not even on your second regeneration yet; you’re bound to see things that aren’t there, or not see things that are. How can you know the truth?
So you’re left an unreliable narrator in your own life. Or you’re just a liar, it’s hard to say. Nobody will believe you, because they’ve never known anything else. In fact, factually speaking, you are wrong. How can anyone have changed what was always true?
Fact and fiction begin to blur. The lamps don’t light up when you step into your House, silly: Heartshaven has always been dead.
In your memory, of course, they said Dvora where Heartshaven is. But they don’t remember the reality where Dvora stands, and nor do you, not really. Still, a fuzzy impression of Cousin Alianora with her hand on your shoulder springs to mind. She would be proud, if not for the fact that Dvora fell when you were young and the shockwaves carried you off to another corner of the planet. Lake Abydos has waters you dream of drowning in; sometimes you think you did, as a little child, and never looked into the Untempered Schism. Mayhap you have a guardian angel watching over your timeline, correcting for mistakes: you’re not convinced by children’s tales, only you could swear you were left-handed once upon a time.
It would be a kindness if you had died, in truth. Then you would not have seen the Untempered Schism and witnessed madness and the fall of Gallifrey. One upon a time, they say, Gallifrey had three moons: in the glimpse you saw, it had none. The twin suns spread and consumed everything, first Pazithi Gallifreya, then the planet itself; Karn was eaten too, and the darkness within the second sun came out to consume everything. Its name will be Pandora, and you will be scared.
Unless, of course, none of that ever happens.
You are seven years old. Your name was Romanadvoratnalundar yesterday, but you awoke to find it was Romanadvoratrelundar. Now no one believes you when you insist that’s not your name: even the Matrix, arbiter of justice, recorder of all knowledge, sacred and sacrosanct, says you are wrong. And you are; you are wrong. You’re always stuck in the wrong timeline, lagging a bit behind the official versions. You can see the corrections being written on, the continuity errors disappearing in real time. Everyone can: you’re a Time Lord. It’s what your people do. But only what happens to them.
If the others of your people have their timelines unwritten and rewritten, they don’t say it. The lamps of Heartshaven glow steadily: they do not falter, even though you can see them vanishing out of the corner of your eye. But when you look back, they’re there; so’s Lothair, even though he wasn’t there and never had been just a span ago. Now he’s a truth, anchored to reality; suddenly the idiom, I wasn’t loomed yesterday, tastes bitter in your mouth.
It’s you who’s the problem. The lamps are fine.
You are seven years old. Your name is Romanadvoratrelundar, and you are always wrong about the present. You have not looked into the Untempered Schism yet, and it terrifies you. You have two friends: Taris, headstrong; Rorvan, steadfast.
You are eight years old, and you have no friends but Sartiacaradinora. You ran screaming from the Untempered Schism, bleating of civil war. There hasn’t been a civil war on Gallifrey in … oh, more than a year, now. Gallifrey doesn’t have civil wars. Gallifrey doesn’t do civil wars. You looked into the Untempered Schism and you didn’t see civil war at all. You didn’t see the two suns consuming the solar system, either. In fact, you didn’t see anything at all. (It terrified you so badly you stood there silent, immobile, like some sort of Weeping Angel. The custodians had to move you.) And nor did Taris and Rorvan. Who are they, anyway? Engineers?
You sit up in bed. You are eight years old. You are Romanadvoratrelundar, and when you sat up to get out of bed, you felt a hand round your ankle. It said, listen to me, listen to me: everything that’s happening to you is real. I saw it. They’re the real liars, the Academy. Don’t you want to burn Pazithi Gallifreya?
You are eight years old. You are Mana, and you are never right. Sartia says no; you say, yes, I saw it, all of time and space, and it showed me the truth. And the truth was none of this.
You are eight years old. You are caught in an unreality, and no one else even knows you’re in it.
What do you know about lamps, anyway?