Sunday Seminar Series: What's the Point?

Part of our Identity; Image via Wikipedia

Dear Readers,

  This is another installment in my Sunday Seminar Series, wherein I distill lectures from my introductory class, CHRN/AUG 100, for general consumption by distance students.

  You've had a bit of a break from this over the past few weeks, but I'm sure my best students have kept up with their reading and have minds eager to be pried open and molded.  I've always found that concept strangely aggressive, but I'll run with it.

   Today I want to talk to you about the whole point of the University of Constantinople.  It may seem all well and good to you that we advocate a sort of hybrid pragmatic-postmodern view to analysis of augury data, and that we collate and collect information and cultural anthropology across a variety of different time streams.  It seems well and good enough to me, at least.  Still, it's not all that we're here for.  This seminar will explain in a cursory overview what the next few will explore in more detail.

   First, the facts: We are a university outside of normal time, created by a freak accident.  We can obtain a variety of information from other time streams, and daily (well, at least, something like daily) our capabilities improve.  We can, to some degree, return matter to normal time, though this is a tremendously expensive procedure.  We can as well create copies of any individual who ever lived anywhere, though that is also quite expensive and it requires something of a special art so that you do not get the wrong sort of person.

   We have the same departments as any traditional university, from Engineering to French Literature.  However, each of these departments is informed by the boundary-pushing research that is shared between my department and the Department of Augury.  We stare over the edge and into the bottomless pit, and we make bottomless research a possibility.  In fact, for those of you reading this before getting dressed, we make it a too-literal reality.  Put some pants on.

   The presence of these two unique departments, as well as the diverse expertise of our population, allow us to make scientific and cultural advancement that would not be possible anywhere else.  The technology and social structure that we possess are unlike anything before or since.  Trust me, I know.  Of course, there is some argument that our divergence from normal time means there is no before or since, but this is too academic a matter for a simple figure of speech.

   With the ability to create a unique culture and a unique set of technology, there are only a few things that it is useful for our University to be: An odd sort of theme-park/museum, a business, or an army.  We are certainly not a business.

   I will explore the former possibility.  I do, often, think I am living in a museum, much like the ones that I loved in New York's Museum Mile.  We have more unusual things and people here, however, this comparison then leads me to believe that I am a captive in a zoo.  I am not.  I can end my time here whenever I like.  With new advances, I can even take vacations to time-normal locales.  Though this is somewhat dangerous.  I like that about it.  However, like a museum, we preserve that which we collect.  Here you find Byzantine fashions mixed with modern styles from across the different values of modern.  You find people from all worldviews and backgrounds, and art follows that.  Information follows that.  Architecture as well.  There is no freedom greater than the ability to reinvent one's past as much as one's future, and we possess that here.  It creates a unique academic environment.

  What about the second possibility?  Are we an army?  We have certainly been invaded.  I have taken up arms myself.  In fact, I make sure that I am never found without at least one piece of armor.  We do, also, have the ability now to invade others.  Yet we have not used it.  We've engaged in what I would call clandestine operations, but these have been for one purpose only: to ensure the absence of violent restitution when those who have revealed themselves as our enemies disturb the sanctity of independent time streams.  With the data that we have collected, the attack that visited us has put the power in our hands to counteract our newfound enemies.  They wish to prevent the natural course of time in each time stream, whereas we wish to preserve it.  They have a strict code as to what time should be, whereas we do not.  We believe in Free Will, or at least, something like it.  They believe in subjugation.  In this respect, we are an army.  I think of us more as repairmen, producing restitution of temporal damage.

   One thing we are, finally, is a sort of fiction.  I assure you that I am very much real and did in fact live a life in your time stream.  We are a fiction insofar that nothing that happens here at this university, nor anything else I tell you about, is a thing that will happen within your own awareness.  I think there is some power in this statement.  On my stage, I showcase the impossible, all so that I can show you that there is no such thing.

  Always,

  Dr. John Skylar
  Chairman
  Department of Anachronism
  University of Constantinople