In what sense is The Last Mimzy last?
There is a witticism that you will always find anything you lose in the last place you look. The foolishness of it is that it is automatically true, because once you have found what you seek you will stop looking. It is thus equally true that if our scientist in the future is sending back Mimzys to attempt to obtain something from the past, once one of them succeeds he will have no reason to send another.
That in turn means that this Mimzy was last in terms of departure time. The scientist did not send another after he sent this one, because his problem had been solved and he did not have any reason to send another. That means the Mandala Mimzy and the Alice Mimzy and all the others were sent before he sent this one.
However, this is a story about time travel. Even given that there were no departures after this one, could there be later arrivals? Could the scientist have started by sending the Alice Mimzy, then later sent the Mandala Mimzy, and perhaps have sent another Mimzy to 2160, scattering them through the timestream?
Arguably he could have done this. It would have been a bit careless, though. The safer approach would be to begin by sending the earliest first, and working forward through history. This is so because of the impact of nested anomalies. If one temporal anomaly falls entirely inside another, they interact in unpredictable ways.
Let us suppose that the Alice Mimzy was first. Charles Dodgson, a.k.a. Lewis Carroll, writes his stories based in large part on the seeming nonsense he gets from Alice Liddel, and it has no other impact on history. (The impact it does have is a subject of a future column.) Then after that the scientist sends the Mandala Mimzy. The Mandala Mimzy impacts Oriental religion (again, a subject for a future column). Dodgson is an educated clergyman. Unpredictably, the Mandalas, a new part of history thanks to the Mandala Mimzy, become part of his studies, and Alice happens to see one and comment that it looks like the box in which Mimzy came. Dodgson takes an interest, and working with Alice completes the mission of the Mimzy. That means that in the future the scientist who just sent the Alice Mimzy has his answer, and he no longer has reason to send the Mandala Mimzy, so he does not; yet if he does not, then Dodgson does not solve the Mimzy problem, and does not send the Mimzy back. This creates a complex interlaced infinity loop, in which sending the Mandala Mimzy back provides the clue for the Alice Mimzy to succeed, but the success of the Alice Mimzy undoes the sending of the Mandala Mimzy, and so undoes that success.
It cannot be said with certainty that the scientist is aware of this potential complication. However, we can be certain that no such disaster occurred (or the last Mimzy would never have been sent). It therefore is highly likely that the last Mimzy was both the last one sent and the last one to arrive, and that there is a direct correllation between departure order and arrival order. The orderly approach is the best and the most likely.
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