Positional reality

Positional reality is the principle that a person’s identity and the reality of an event depend on where that person stands in time and on the experiences available from that position. It governs the story’s account of time travel: Charlie Gleister can meet versions of himself without those versions remaining interchangeable, and a return to the past does not restore an untouched place in which the same self can begin again. The principle turns a time-travel paradox into a problem of perspective, continuity, and consequence.

Identity Across Time

When one Charlie Gleister explains the principle to another, he insists that they are both Charlie Gleister but are also separate individuals. They occupy different time tracks and undergo different experiences at different moments of subjective time. Their shared identity is therefore real, but it does not erase the difference created by their positions. The distinction is not simply between an original and a copy: each Gleister experiences himself from a particular here and now, and contact between them creates a further difference in what they know and experience.

This account gives precise meaning to the otherwise contradictory claim that the two men are the same people and different people. Their continuity rests on a common history up to the moment of contact; their separation begins as their experiences diverge. The conversation itself demonstrates the difficulty. One Gleister first frames the future encounter as meeting himself, then tries to restate the sequence as inventing a machine, traveling forward, and returning to tell himself not to invent it. The other accepts the outline but warns that the two should not keep referring to both of them as I. Positional reality makes that pronoun inadequate: shared identity does not guarantee a shared standpoint.

The principle also limits what can be meant by repeating an event. The Gleister considering the problem at Mingus Memorial Park recalls that he cannot simply return to the instant before inventing the time machine and occupy it as though nothing had changed. The past is not an empty slot held open for a traveler. The person who would return has already been altered by what has happened, so even an apparently identical location in time cannot furnish an identical self.

Contact, Change, and the Past

For Gleister, the consequences extend beyond his own identity. He understands that his time machine has helped bring about a disastrous situation for the human race, and he wants to act against the evil purposes for which it will be used. Yet the positional account obstructs the most obvious remedy: traveling back to persuade another Gleister not to invent the machine. There is no single, untouched Gleister waiting to receive that warning. There are multiple potential Gleisters, identical up to contact and different thereafter; an intervention supplies new information and changes the subsequent course of experience.

The account of the mind parallels this account of time. The mind is described as a plenum whose contents continually cycle; a novel input redistributes those contents and changes their cycling rate. On this reasoning, contact is not a neutral exchange between fixed selves. The warning alters the person who receives it, and that alteration changes what follows. Gleister can remain himself only by not interfering with himself. A return to the past therefore cannot be treated as a simple cancellation of the present: the attempted correction becomes part of the history that shapes the person making it.

The thought of preventing the machine is consequently different from carrying out that plan. Gleister considers the possibility, judges it impossible on the evidence of the other Gleister’s experience, and turns toward alternatives. He can remain in the future—which, operationally, is his present—disguise himself, and wait for an opportunity to strike against the Emperor. Or he can go back fifty or a hundred years, before Mingus’s accession to power, find the future Emperor, and kill him. These are options he considers, not outcomes the account confirms. Positional reality explains why intervention is fraught; it does not establish that Gleister succeeds in changing political history.

A Situated Self, Not an Abstraction

At Mingus Memorial Park, Gleister counters the thought that there may be innumerable versions of him by returning to the immediacy of his own position. From one viewpoint, potential Gleisters multiply; from another, there is only the person he is here and now, the person he experiences. He concludes that reality is positional, ego is relational, and nature does not deal in abstractions. This does not prove that other versions do not exist. Instead, it distinguishes their possible existence from the concrete standpoint from which a person must act.

The distinction gives the principle an ethical and practical force. If Gleister treats every possible version as equally available, his responsibility risks dissolving into an abstract puzzle about which self counts. By grounding action in the person he experiences himself to be, the narrative makes his responsibility local without making it inconsequential: he is the one who must respond to the world his actions have helped produce. At the same time, his choices affect other positions and possible histories. The self is situated, but it is not sealed off from consequences.

The park scene sharpens this point through the gap between general alternatives and specific action. Gleister asks what he can do specifically, after acknowledging both the multiplicity of possible Gleisters and the impossibility of simply undoing his own past. His available choices remain situated in a present that is itself the future relative to the machine’s invention. Positional reality thus does not offer a detached overview from which every timeline can be mastered; it describes the limits and obligations of acting from within one.

The Principle in Action

A later confrontation gives the principle a stark practical illustration. Hieronymous Gleister fires at an old man after telling him to abdicate, but the shot appears to have no effect. The old man says he cannot be killed there, then invokes positional reality as something Hieronymous will learn when he grows up. He adds that he must return to his work, describes that work as identical and meaningless for all slaves, and disappears. The exchange places the abstract principle beside an attempted act of violence that fails in the position where it is attempted.

The scene does not provide a full explanation of why the old man is invulnerable, nor does it establish that the principle makes him invulnerable in every time or place. Its force lies in the limit it demonstrates: an action that seems decisive from Hieronymous’s position does not dictate the result. The old man’s reply presents location and circumstance as conditions of what can happen, rather than treating an act as possessing the same effect everywhere.

Across the encounters, positional reality links time travel, personal identity, and political action without promising that any of them can be reduced to a clean formula. A person cannot step into the past as an unchanged self; contact changes the participants; and an action’s apparent meaning or force depends on where it occurs. The principle makes paradox part of the story’s working account of reality, while insisting that lived positions—not abstract labels such as original, copy, or possible self—are where experience and responsibility take shape.