Ethics of Metempsychosis and Time-Travel

2-17-17 

      I wrote five more pages towards the chapter “Taking Care of Hitler” in A Western Metempsychosis. In it, the four time-travelers are at a beer hall in Germany (I have to decide what city) and they are speaking (in English or German?) about their plans from within the bodies of their German hosts; their hosts keep their life skills and connections, but the time- travelers have taken over their concerns and motivations and added to their intelligence.

     However. if their acquired trans-migratory intelligence isn’t as developed as their own, their own intelligence trumps their takers'. For example, in the case of Leon transmigrating into Tuane, both men were of the same intelligence; Leon had nothing to add to Tuane but ambition and misogyny. Before Leon entered Tuane, Tuane was a hen-pecked wimp; he turned into a belligerent male chauvinist. But since Leon wasn’t any better in school subjects than Tuane, he had nothing to back up Tuane’s new ambition which is why Tuane had to lie about his religious commitments to the Mormon Elder and fabricate his education credentials to get a dean’s position at the college in Taiwan. His only self-education was reading the daily newspaper. Leon, who also rejected education, couldn’t augment Tuane in that way. Tuane succumbed to his shortcomings, couldn’t keep up the charade, and finally contemplated suicide, or was it Leon within whose ambition was thwarted that drove Tuane back to Craters of the Moon? Tuane on his own wouldn’t even have the guts to take his own life.

It was Leon who wanted out of Tuane, but where was Leon to go? I will have to change the plot by making Leon return to the cave, sip more met fluid, and grab a park ranger who goes to investigate. Leon cannot just pop out of Tuane and materialize from nothing; his body long gone he needs a new body to continue living outside of Tuane. Maybe he can ‘jump’ into a visitor to his cave; I have to decide. I like the premise that the spirit can only exit at the host’s darkest hour, or on the verge of death.

Willpower from without will encourage the four German hosts to ingest the time dust and follow the plan of the time-traveling back to pre-Nazi Germany, guests within their minds, but as in the case of Leon, Earl, Peg, and Gail who entered the Germans in Arizona , the four will have to leave their place and time, never to return. They, too, will go down as missing to their neighbors, family, friends, colleagues, and employers. They can keep up contact with their contemporaries only while living in the same time period, as Leon could contact Earl, when deja-vu inspired him, as when he wrote to learn of his succumbing to cancer from Peg, but in another time before their own time, it would be lunatic to do so as no pre-existing person would recognize him. 

There must be a devastating event for all four German hosts to succumb to if the time-traveling heroes hope to re-migrate when their purpose is completed; those are my rules. The prospect of death or the ‘darkest hour’ is the only way out, unless the hosts willingly become the vehicles, as Tuane was for fifteen years, at the start of the novel. 

The only occurrence of such a 'disaster' would be a public accident where some survive and others not. For example, I could put my characters on the Hindenburg or Titanic, send them back to America, and let history take its course. Just before the fatal moment, the time-travelers would ingest met dust, grab a suitable survivor, and make it out alive to complete their mission. Their hosts could then even survive without them; the shock of thinking they will die is sufficient for proto-transmigration. 

Ethically, I wouldn’t want to ‘kill’ the hosts after they had helped the heroes by unwittingly donating their bodies, leaving their own time periods. If any German character-host has cognitive dissonance, such as through nightmares or sleepless depression, I have to let him or her go.

My plot rules preclude carrying any non-organic material out of its time frame. The ‘time’ and ‘met’ dust passes through, though, because it is organic and bears Leon’s touch, just as his clothes. Paper books could ‘theoretically’ be transported through time, but every millimeter of every page must bear the DNA of the time-traveler; not a likely prospect. Only a page, such as a map, in extreme circumstance, might possibly be transported. These are the rules that I, as writer, must be consistent about.

     Any and all time travel and transmigration is limited to the supply of ‘time’ and ‘met’ dust Leon has synthesized from the pool in Craters of the Moon and taken with him. Though the pools of magic liquid may be there historically, how would a traveler from 1492 travel from Europe to Idaho? Leon’s last reasonable chance to replenish his stock would be when he returns from Europe in the 1920’s; then, at least they could take a steam engine train out West before heading by ship to San Salvador from Miami or Key West.