Well this is a bit of a forum necro... In a forum about a movie about time travel. Weird. It's a not very often used time travel sub plot involving paradoxes, I'll explain it as best I can. Basically, there is one "official" time line that can ever exist. One can travel the time line back and forth, and for the most part everything is OK even with the presence of time travelers. However, if any significant changes occur, the time line is "damaged" and in an act of self repair, it "fixes" discrepancies and errors in it's time line by erasing key points so that time makes sense again.
The "error" we are talking about is a disease that originated in the future that the main character is from, which should ONLY exist in the future, but was brought through time to the past on one of their robots, and contracted by someone in the past. This could be represented as a *beep* or splintering on the normally whole time line. The problem became more complicated by the laboratory in the future sending assault robots to the past to eliminate people who had contracted the disease, which actually only made the problem worse... These people's deaths were sealed in stone on the time line, but due to the interference from the future, their deaths happened prematurely specifically due to entities from the future. This made the timeline essentially fracture and break. In an effort to mend this, the time line started erasing the previous future slowly, replacing it with a new future that corresponds with these new events that happened in the past (the death robots and disease out break).
It's lesser used because it's so ill defined. By the start of the film, the future is already being erased from existence, and replaced with the alternate future where robots destroyed mankind, and has been being erased for some time. The past, however, that they send the main character to is the exact point where the virus was first transmitted to the past (that kid at the very start that ran into the robot was patient zero) and from this past, which is different from the future the main character came from, the new future popped up. The problem with it is the definition of "Significant changes". In some works, going into the past and eating a single grain of rice is not enough, even though technically you've changed the past, to cause time to have to heal itself in any noticeable manner. In other works, your mere presence in the past is enough to start causing reality to fall apart. In some works, there just end up being multiple time lines, in others there is only a prime time line that exists which can be replaced by other time lines as an act of self preservation by the very concept of time. It's weird basically.
Tick Tock Goes the Clock...
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