From: hartley@matterhorn.ee.umn.edu (Tim Hartley)
Subject: QL: SPOILERS Deliver Us from Evil
Summary: theories on Ilia and Zoe
Keywords: QL
Organization: University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, EE dept.
Distribution: y
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1992 21:03:40 GMT


warning: spoilers, stream-of-consciousness, technobabble,
and personal theories to explain a TV show that I should
know better than to examine too closely follow:




spoilers      spoilers       spoilers       spoilers





no control-L follows






Excuse me if I rather rudely point that you all need to try
reading the parallel universe threads in rec.arts.star.trek.

It seems most likely that Ilia and Zoe and Lothos are not from
Sam's future, but the future that would have occurred had Sam
not started leaping in the first place.  WE and our present
history should be seen as the proper outcome of Sam putting
right what once went wrong.  We have already seen that Sam
himself is a result of his own leaping, when as Future Boy,
a 1950's children's television character, he suggested his
strings theories to the television audience, one of whom was
an eight-year-old farm-boy named Sam Beckett.  There are
instances where Sam changed his own history, for instance
keeping his brother alive through Vietnam and reconciling
his wife's differences with her father so she wouldn't jilt
him, but in our present timeline, we would not see this, only
Sam and Al, outside the timeline, can see this.  

I am not clear on whether Ziggy is outside the timeline as well,
but I would like to propose a theory: Ziggy's ability to
know what is changing and what is likely to change is a
physical property of the computer system--that is to say,
because of properties of Ziggy's circuits.  Say for instance
any change in history made by Sam propagates forward at a
finite rate, just as light and any other presently known
phenomenom does.  Ziggy's circuits could be designed to
make use of this finite propagation time to discern changes
as they occur by comparing the machine state a few nanoseconds
ago to the present machine state.  Changes in history would
cause discrepencies in state transitions (For instance
normally a state machine would go from state 5 to state 6; a 
transition for state 5 to state 7 indicates an error.  This sort
of comparison is used today to build fault-tolerant computers.)
If Sam designed the memory to be time-large enough, it would
be able to track the complete progress of his project.
This would probably be a side-effect of Sam's computer design
though, since we know Sam did not completely anticipate the
consequences of stepping into the imaging chamber.
There is a similar, but very different, theory proposed by
Isaac Asimov that involved a substance that dissolved just
before touching water, in anticipation of the water, and could
therefore be used as the basis of time-independent communication
theory.

Anyhow, given that Sam is a product of his own leaping, lets 
look at a world where Sam never started.  For instance, assume
he never leaped into Future Boy and therefore never planted the
idea of strings in his own head.  We can guess that without
Sam, a lot is going to go wrong and not be put right.  Following
present scientific theories, we can assume these changes will
build to create a world very different from our own -- like the
Butterfly Effect, which hypothesizes that a butterfly flapping
its wings of the coast of Borneo can effect the weather patterns
off the east coast of the North America days later, thereby
causing, for instance, Hurricane Andrew.

This world may be far less than hospital, a "hell" to the
people living in it.  For instance, possibly George Orwell's
1984 actually formed, with a Big Brother government regulating
all people do.  This is not at all implausible.  For instance,
possibly this Butterfly Effect pushed the world over the
nuclear brink -- there were a number of times when the 
superpowers seemed just on the edge, the Cuban Missile Crisis
probably being the foremost.  The result would be a hellish
existence for most people, and new and easily despotic 
governments.  To fully manage all the information a Big Brother
society would want on its citizens, the government would
require a massive computer, one that probably even dwarfs Ziggy. 

Lets complete our parallel fiction by making some further
One day the government managers come into work and find Lothos
in a state of confusion.  He notices hurricanes and mudslides
that have never occurred suddenly being a part of history
(the Butterfly effect again). According to Lothos, important
government diplomats are disappearing.  Even worse, he projects
that unless something is done quickly, the government may never
have existed.  This would be similar to Al projecting his own
disappearance in the episode where he was being court-martialled
for murder.

The government decides it does not much like the idea of never
existing so it formulate its own Project Quantum Leap.
The goal of this project is to ensure its own existence by
somehow off-setting the force that is changing their history
(Sam and his project QL).  The scientists in charge of the
project finally come to some sort of workable project.  

None of these scientists is as bright as Sam, of course,
and none have enough faith in their invention to try it out.
They decide the best alternative is to get some disposable
person, somebody nobody will notice missing, and somebody
immensely impressionable.  The perfect place would be any mental
institution.  Being a far less humanitarian society than our
own, they probably have a lot of those institutions that
Sam was in for a while -- with abusive guards and electro-shock
therapy and people with simple scizophrenia (usually not as
dibilitating as the movie "Sybil" would have you believe)
in with the truly violent patients.  Does anybody else think
Ilia fits the bill?  Sound like hell?  Would a person with
schizophrenia or mild dementia have nightmares she would be eager
to avoid?  Nonetheless, this leaper is not really evil, but nor
is she completely balanced (as evidenced by her mood swings).

This does not necessarily apply to the managers of Project
Quantum leap.  They tell this leaper nothing about the project,
but once she starts leaping, they tell her the only way for
her to get back is to complete her missions as they tell her.
They get a government agent, Zoe, to act as observer, and
to guide the actions of Ilia.

It is a definite possibility that this group has no more
control over the leaping mechanism than Sam and Al have.
Obviously their leaping mechanism is not as advanced as Sam's
and is immensely painful for the leaper.  All they want
to do is to ensure that the world will eventually reach that
brink, bringing about their government and preserving their
existence.  Lothos could easily do this by projecting
some action that will bring the world a little closer to the
brink, possibly taking in to effect that Butterfly effect.

Only after Zoe and Ilia have started muddling about in the
timeline will Ziggy notice the changes, reacting just like
Lothor with utter confusion, maybe worse, since Lothor probably
has a larger database and would therefore notice the
small changes in preparation for the big changes, such as
mudslides.  This seems to indicate some kind of dual
timeline, one for history and one for people muddling
about with history.  But we've glossed over this before
(that being the whole premise to Ziggy saying "There is a
89 percent probability that you are hear to ...", so
we'll gloss over it again.



This may seem like a whole lot of supposition (and it is),
and it may seem I have to much time on my hands (but I don't).
Nonetheless, it does hold together and is a much more
satisfying explanation of Ilia and Zoe than the B**g**m*n
or demons.  Please note that almost everything Zoe says
is suspect -- like any good despotic government agent, she's
a little paranoid and very protective of any and all information
relative to her project.  I suggest that her statement
"evil is real, don't be naive" is an attempt to mislead Sam
and make him think he is up against something bigger than he
is.  He had already shown his propensity to believe such
moralistic arguments in his talks with Ilia.

This scenario is better than the CIA conspiracy explanations,
since I for one don't think the CIA is quite THAT corrupt,
and I sincerely doubt that even if they were they would have
the know-how to put together their own Project QL.

It's also more satisfying in that it limits where Ilia and
Sam can run into each other.  They could only meet where
both histories overlap, limiting them to before the
brink and the new government.  Since Ilia and Sam are
about the same age, it is also possible that Sam can
save her soul while she is young.

Incidently, was I bleary-eyed or does that woman whose soul Sam
is supposed to save over the next three weeks look a lot like
Zoe?


Discussion is encouraged.
Flames to /dev/null.
Get-a-life suggestions will be cheerily ignored.