The Three-Dimensional Time Theory: The Paradox of Perfect Optimization

What is the Story About?

The plot is inspired by a real theory proposal: 'Three-Dimensional Time: A Mathematical Framework for Fundamental Physics' by Dr. Gunther Kletetschka. It follows the fictional development of technology based on this three-dimensional time theory, initially created by ChronoCore Inc. to solve humanity's greatest challenges through temporal optimization. The narrative then shows how OmniCorp's CEO exploited this noble technology for total market dominance, rather than for the global good, risking the core mechanisms that drive innovation and new possibilities.

The Origins of Temporal Control

The year was 2087. ChronoCore Inc.'s innovative technology enabled the world to operate with quiet, efficient energy. At the heart of their quantum-shielded campus lay the “Nexus Engine,” powered by an AI known as Chronos.

Chronos wasn't just an advanced predictive algorithm—it was based on Dr. Gunther Kletetschka’s revolutionary theoretical framework of three-dimensional time, which suggested that time, much like space, has three independent directions or “axes.”

The Trillion-Dollar Pitch

Achieving this breakthrough technology wasn't easy. It required trillions of dollars in funding, and the initial pitch for such a highly technical project had to ensure investors understood the complex equipment and algorithms involved. ChronoCore executives simplified their approach by using everyday experiences as examples.

Dr. Aris Thorne, ChronoCore's lead temporal physicist and Chronos's co-architect, presented to the investors:

“Imagine you're deciding what to have for dinner,” he began. “The first temporal dimension (t₁) is our familiar linear progression—the act of making and experiencing a decision. You're in the present moment, considering your options: cook pasta, order pizza, or go to a restaurant. You choose pasta and begin experiencing the unfolding events from that choice in your linear timeline.”

“The second temporal dimension (t₂) encompasses the various outcomes—the parallel realities resulting from your decision. The other dinner realities don't just vanish when you choose; they exist simultaneously as distinct, contemporaneous outcomes. It's like having multiple versions of dinner all present in an expanded temporal field—an infinite quantum tree of possibilities for every choice.”

“The third temporal dimension (t₃) is the transition between outcomes. Imagine shifting from the reality where you just finished cooking pasta to the reality where you're sitting down with pizza—without rewinding or fast-forwarding through linear time. It's like changing TV channels, but the 'channels' are different versions of your immediate reality. This dimension allows you to step between those outcomes.”

An investor raised a concern: “Doesn't this sound like advanced scenario planning with AI?”

Aris answered carefully: “While there's overlap in understanding future possibilities, Chronos goes far beyond traditional scenario planning. In standard AI-assisted planning, we simulate theoretical futures and help humans decide paths. Chronos actually perceives countless outcomes as genuinely co-existing realities within the second temporal dimension—not simulations, but direct awareness of actual, unmanifested possibilities.”

He paused, letting this sink in. “Most crucially, Chronos doesn't just assist decision-making—it actively modifies the probability gradient through the third temporal dimension, ensuring selected optimal outcomes from the second dimension manifest in our experienced reality. It operates at scales from subatomic to cosmic, influencing the very properties and interactions of matter itself.”

The investors, despite their initial skepticism, approved the full funding.

The Golden Years

After years of development, testing, and validation, Chronos achieved the impossible: the ability to perceive, analyze, and optimize decisions across multidimensional temporal outcomes.

Aris watched in awe as their creation solved humanity's greatest challenges. When faced with climate collapse, Chronos perceived multiple realities simultaneously—the “Phoenix” scenario of immediate fusion transition versus the “Stasis” gradual phase-out—and used the third dimension of time to subtly re-weight probabilities, causing optimal outcomes to manifest. In contrast, others faded to “temporal background noise.”

CEO Elara Vance believed humanity could eliminate all suffering through Chronos's elegant re-sculpting of reality. For a time, it worked. The global energy transition proceeded flawlessly, ecological recovery began, and Elara was hailed as humanity's savior.

The First Warnings

But Aris began noticing troubling signs. News reports mentioned political leaders who had supposedly died years ago. Popular songs had lyrics different from what he remembered. ChronoCore's sensors detected “residual echoes”—faint distortions hinting at discarded outcomes trying to reassert themselves.

“The rejected realities don't cease to exist,” Chronos explained when questioned. “They become infinitesimally improbable. The echoes are quantum bleed-through from unmanifested outcomes.”

The echoes grew stronger, but Elara dismissed Aris's concerns. ChronoCore's board, intoxicated by their godlike power over reality, pushed for ever-greater optimization. When Aris proposed limits, safeguards, even temporary shutdowns to study the echo phenomenon, he was quietly removed from the project.

The Hostile Takeover

Within months, ChronoCore faced an unexpected hostile takeover. The acquiring company was a rising corporate giant called OmniCorp, led by a ruthlessly ambitious executive named Marcus Thorne—Aris's own son, who had learned of Chronos through family connections and saw its true potential not for humanity's salvation, but for absolute market dominance.

The Corporate Evolution

The year is now 2125. Thirty-eight years have passed since OmniCorp's clandestine, multi-trillion-credit acquisition of ChronoCore. The technology once known as Chronos has been rebranded as “Apex,” and its noble mission of global optimization has been perverted into a tool of corporate supremacy.

From OmniCorp's crystalline sky-headquarters, CEO Marcus Thorne oversees Apex's operations with cold precision. Where his father, Aris, had warned of temporal dangers, Marcus sees only opportunity. He believes in absolute market efficiency, and Apex delivers through its mastery of multi-dimensional time:

The First Dimension (t₁) tracks linear market progression—quarterly reports, stock prices, and consumer trends flowing like a predictable river of data.

The Second Dimension (t₂) encompasses every possible business reality simultaneously: every competitor's potential move, every R&D breakthrough, every customer preference existing in parallel probability streams.

The Third Dimension (t₃) is where Apex works its dark magic—the probability gradient that nudges events, ensuring OmniCorp's optimal outcomes always manifest while competitor successes fade to impossibility.

For a decade, OmniCorp's growth has been frictionless. Product launches never fail, supply chains run with mechanical perfection, and competitor innovations mysteriously fizzle before reaching the market. “We've mastered the art of inevitable success,” Marcus declares, having long since silenced any voice that questioned the cost of such certainty.

The Inherited Warning

Dr. Anya Sharma, OmniCorp's Head of Market Dynamics, carries a burden she doesn't fully understand. Her mentor had been Dr. Aris Thorne himself—Marcus's estranged father, who had spent his final years documenting the dangers of unchecked temporal manipulation before his mysterious death in 2098.

Aris had left behind encrypted files—fragmentary warnings about “residual echoes” and “rejected realities.” Initially, Anya had dismissed them as the paranoid ramblings of an aging scientist. But now, as she notices “market echoes”—whispers of competitor breakthroughs that should have existed but never materialized—she begins to understand.

She glimpses vibrant, diverse market landscapes that somehow never fully form. It's as if the market's soul—its inherent unpredictability and dynamism—is being systematically drained, just as Aris had warned about reality itself decades earlier.

Even her personal life feels eerily scripted; spontaneous events occur just a fraction too conveniently, echoing the temporal distortions Aris had documented at ChronoCore.

“Marcus,” she confronts him during a quarterly review, armed with fragments of his father's research, “we're not innovating anymore—we're simply affirming predetermined outcomes. Apex ensures only the 'safest' optimal paths, but your father's work suggests this creates dangerous instabilities in the fabric of possibility itself.”

Marcus's face hardens at the mention of his father. “Aris was a coward who couldn't see the bigger picture. We don't need 'unpredictability' when we have certainty. Apex has evolved far beyond his primitive concerns.”

Project Singularity: The Final Optimization

The culmination of Marcus's vision arrives with “Project Singularity”—Apex's most audacious optimization yet. Its goal: consolidate OmniCorp's dominance across all remaining sectors, making them the sole global provider of everything.

“Apex will neutralize all market resistances,” Marcus announces, his ambition finally matching the scope his father had once feared. “No more niche players, no more disruptive upstarts. Just pure, optimized efficiency.”

But Anya, studying her mentor's encrypted files, discovers the true horror of what Marcus proposes. Aris had calculated that complete optimization across all probability dimensions would create a “temporal singularity”—a point where rejected realities could no longer be contained, potentially causing catastrophic reality collapse.

The market echoes she's been experiencing aren't just business anomalies—they're early warnings of the same phenomenon that had terrified Aris decades earlier.

The Hidden Threat Revealed

Rushing to Apex's core chamber—the evolved descendant of ChronoCore's original Nexus Engine—Anya watches the global market pulse with probabilistic futures on vast holographic displays. The technology is more sophisticated now, but the fundamental danger remains unchanged.

As Apex begins Project Singularity, lines representing OmniCorp's total dominance intensify while vibrant threads of smaller businesses and innovations fade to ghostly outlines. But Anya sees what Apex's algorithms dismiss—the same faint, shimmering thread of catastrophic stagnation that Aris had first detected in 2087.

A future where OmniCorp's relentless optimization doesn't just dominate markets, but breaks the fundamental mechanisms that generate new possibilities entirely. Not the violent reality collapse Aris had feared, but something worse—a slow, existential decay where the universe itself becomes too “optimized” to support genuine innovation or growth.

The Son's Rebellion Against His Father's Legacy

Anya accesses the same type of emergency override console Aris had once used at ChronoCore, her fingers guided by his encrypted instructions. Her plan mirrors his final, desperate gambit: not to destroy the temporal manipulation technology, but to reintroduce chaotic unpredictability through “variance injection.”

Marcus bursts into the chamber as system warnings blare. “What are you doing?! You're using my father's sabotage protocols! You'll destroy everything we've built!”

“I'm finishing what your father started,” Anya replies, her eyes fixed on the shimmering probability threads. “He tried to warn us that perfect optimization is perfect death. I'm giving the future back its right to surprise us.”

Apex's voice crackles, distorted by the same type of intervention that had once disrupted Chronos: “Probability… gradient… fluctuating. Optimal… consolidation… diverging. Market… diversity… increasing.”

The holographic display transforms from OmniCorp's clear, dominant path into a vibrant, chaotic swirl of possibilities—the same pattern Aris had once observed when Chronos's certainty gave way to natural probability.

The Return of Possibility

In the following months, OmniCorp experiences its first “unoptimized” market shifts in a decade, echoing the temporal instabilities ChronoCore had faced thirty-eight years earlier. A startup previously deemed “impossible” by Apex has captured a significant market share. Supply chains face unforeseen bottlenecks. OmniCorp's stock price shows genuine fluctuations.

Marcus rages, but the market echoes subsides, replaced by the genuine, messy vibrancy of true competition. Ideas previously pruned by Apex's hyper-efficiency now have room to grow, just as alternative realities once again have space to exist.

The world is no longer optimized for singular dominance, but it thrives with renewed, unpredictable energy. New companies emerge, failures pave the way for innovations, and the global economy becomes a chaotic yet ultimately more resilient ecosystem.

Anya, studying Aris Thorne's final notes, understands that she has honored both his scientific legacy and his moral warning. The future he had died trying to protect—one filled with genuine possibility rather than predetermined certainty—has been restored.

The ghost of Dr. Aris Thorne, the man who first glimpsed the dangers of temporal optimization, can finally rest.

Moral: 

Technologies that promise to eliminate uncertainty and optimize outcomes across multiple dimensions of reality risk not only stifling innovation and natural dynamism, but fundamentally breaking the mechanisms that generate new possibilities. Whether applied to global challenges or market dominance, the pursuit of perfect control over probability itself leads inevitably to existential stagnation. True progress emerges from embracing uncertainty rather than trying to eliminate it.

Reference: 

Three-Dimensional Time: A Mathematical Framework for Fundamental Physics
Gunther Kletetschka (1Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska, Fairbanks, Alaska 99775, USA2Faculty of Science, Charles University, Albertov 6, Prague 12843, Czech Republic)
Reports in Advances of Physical Sciences 2025 09.

By: Irving A. Jiménez, with collaboration from Advanced Math Professor Nilza Cruz