The Manheim Effect

“To me it’s like the color of the sky, it’s so self-evident that to see a bird fly past the window is to imagine its skipping solid trail through the medium of time.  

In time we are all connected, there’s just no denying that. 

There’s nothing mystical about any of this. 

I’m talking about stuff that is simply real.”

DATA 

Whatever the time distortion, I must add the antimatter at the appropriate moment. 

Geordi, if the Professor was right, I will need a twenty seven second countdown.

LAFORGE [OC]: 

You got it, Data.

DATA: 

Captain, I now have the antimatter and am moving towards the opening at the end of the lab. 

The next time distortion should occur within seconds. 

Geordi, begin countdown on my mark. Now.

(There's a big sparkle. Data looks back to see himself midway across the lab - no 2 - and getting the antimatter - no 3. Meanwhile, Geordi's voice is counting down, very echoy)

DATA 3: 

Captain, there appear to be three of us.

DATA 1: 

Should I drop the antimatter or wait for one of you?

DATA 3: 

Only one of us is at the correct time continuum.

DATA 1: 

Which one?

DATA 2: 

Me. It's me!

GEORDI [OC]: 

Five, four, three, two, one.

(The middle Data arrives at number 1 and the antimatter goes in, before number 3 gets there. The effect stops. There is only one Data)

PICARD [OC]: 

Data, report. 

Are you all right?

DATA: 

Yes, sir.

PICARD [OC]: 

Is it closed?

DATA: 

It is well patched, sir. 

Closed indicates a permanent condition, which I cannot guarantee.

• This Readout tells you where you’re GOING,

• This one tells you where you ARE,

• This one tells you where you WERE —

The Manheim Effect was the term used by Lieutenant Commander Data to describe the temporal distortions created as a byproduct of Doctor Paul Manheim's time/gravity experiments. The Effect, which was caused by Manheim opening a "window" into another dimension on Vandor IV, consisted of a specific moment of time which repeated itself.

The effect was first felt in 2364 by the crew of the USS Enterprise, which was in close proximity to the Vandor system. Investigating, the crew experienced the effect again, and learned that it was also experienced on the USS Lalo, a colony on Coltar IV, and in the Ilecom system, thousands of light years away. Questioning Dr. Manheim, they learned that the effect would continue unless the window into another dimension were to be closed.

As Commander Data seemed to have an easier time withstanding the effects of the time distortions, Captain Picard ordered him to beam down to Manheim's laboratory alone to seal the breach. 

As Data prepared to close the window by adding a specific amount of antimatter, he experienced another distortion, wherein three versions of Data from different points along the time continuum appeared. 

Realizing that only one of them was in the correct time period for adding the antimatter, they merged as the antimatter was added at the correct time and the distortions ceased. 

Responding to Captain Picard, who asked if the breach was closed, Data stated that it was "well patched." (TNG: "We'll Always Have Paris")

That’s cool man. I just watched the pilot and noticed a running image of your work: The human centipede.

GM: (laughing) You know I haven’t seen Human Centipede. I can’t watch horror movies.

LOL. Well my guess is that those forms of one long continuous being, which looks like a centipede, is your visual description of a self, moving through time, which you said you learned in Kathmandu in 1994 as how things actually are. How does this experience still interact with your life? 

GM: We can’t see any direction in time. We can’t see back, and we can’t see forward. We can remember back and imagine forward, but that’s it. We’re trained to feel like ‘individuals’ so we don’t actually see ourselves as the extended processes that we are, shapeshifters who transform through decades from small, plump baby things to large and horny muscular teenagers, to hard-working, middle age adults, and finally desiccated seniors dying on beds. If we sped that up and showed one human life over ten minutes, it would be a body horror werewolf transformation more outrageous and horrifying than any seen onscreen.

But to me it’s like the color of the sky, it’s so self-evident that to see a bird fly past the window is to imagine its skipping solid trail through the medium of time.  In time we are all connected, there’s just no denying that. There’s nothing mystical about any of this. I’m talking about stuff that is simply real.

Imagination can give you the ability to look backwards and forward. So, when you run it backwards, think how your grown-up mature body was once smaller, less massive, less capable of interacting with the environment – that’s real. Run it back to the beginnings of life on earth ad it’s clear that we all are one thing. A singular organism made of many parts, just like a human body with its billions of individual skin cells – which die and fall from the body every day.

So, what does that mean? If people learned this in school, if we understood and accepted, we were all the same fucking thing(!) it might help prevent the collapse into mad division that’s occurring, just now. It’s just a matter of perspective that could change everything.

But the organism we’re part of might be sick, who knows? When cells in a body turn against one another and the system that supports them starts breaking down, it’s cancer…

You had the gnostic experience. To just hear it or read it is one thing but when you have the experience that seems to be the most convincing thing.

GM: Well, it seems to become self-evident. It’s really like someone turns your head around in Plato’s cave and you realize that there’s a light and someone’s doing shadow figures with their fingers. Once you’ve seen it, you’ve seen it. And it’s ‘Oh, of course’! Of course! There’s no denying it. But I guess to have that experience is its own confirmation. It’s like living by the sea all your life, then having to explain that to someone living inland who’s never seen the ocean and doesn’t believe an ocean could exist because they’ve never seen one.

To me it can be confirmed intellectually by just thinking about time and how you are embedded in time. You know you had to be six years old to be here. So, where the hell is ‘being six’? Well, being six exists in a time direction that you can’t see or point to, but it’s still there. To misunderstand that is equivalent to flying from Los Angeles to London then, after touching down at Heathrow, insisting that Los Angeles no longer exists!

And once you’re truly aware of time as the medium through which we transmit our physical signal, then there is no denying that your personal track winds its way back into your mum and she goes back to her mum and it all goes back to that single dividing cell 3 and a half billion years ago. To me, that’s just basic mechanical shit. That’s not mysticism. I’m not interested in ghosts and spirit worlds. If I’m going to have transcendence, I want to be able to touch it.