Separated as they were from everyone else within the pan-dimensional karass I was tasked with assembling, Nathan told me that each member of the channel-changing super squad inhabited isolated nodes of space-time instead of different timelines. A timeline, I discovered, was a poor way of describing the densely interconnected web of past and future selves of human beings on Earth. A more apt and elegant representation was the root system of a tree or a common houseplant.