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Equilibrium of Life Equilibrium of Life 2004120801.jpg
In the real world, good effects are more or less countered by their opposite, negative effects. This results in a "baseline average" that is dynamic and thus makes for a more interesting life. In the end of the world, the goal is to make the baseline absolutely zero, which would result in a perfectly featureless existence. However, as long as there is a little bit of "emotion" in there, it may be possible to create the dynamic baseline after all. The story ends before this final point can be resolved.
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Hypothesis "Get out" Hypothesis "Get out" 2004120802.jpg
After the experiment, there is a split between HB and EW. By the end of the story they have almost come back together (which would have likely resulted in the circuit being "fixed"), but we are not told how it happens. Instead, the EW line juts off perpendicularly parallel, extending into infinity; it is possible, though, that it eventually comes to the HB line by wrapping back on itself or encircling all of infinity to come back to where it began. The EW cannot be easily represented as a 2D line, though.
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Hypothesis "Um..." Hypothesis "Um..." 2004120803.jpg
This is a slight modification of "Get Out." In order to better represent the fact that there is not exactly a temporally linear correlation between events that happen in EW and HB, imagine if EW was expanded to essentially fill the entire time space of HB without actually being connected to it. Instead of HB events correlating to EW on a line, they correlate in a plane.
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Hypothesis "This actually makes more sense" Hypothesis "This actually makes more sense" 2004120804.jpg
This is a third possibility that takes into account the fact that all of the events in EW may have actually happened after the events in HB, as opposed to being "interspersed" with it like with the actual chapters in the book. Events that take place in the infinite vertical perpendicular of EW correlate to events in the horizontal HB. As with the previous two hypotheses, the X-axis represents HB time, so a vertical line (i.e. EW) represents infinity at a singular point, which is what the grandfather described as "immortality." In this hypothesis, the temporally-sound events of HB are connected to temporally-compressed events of EW.
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