Ah, of course — Dave-A doesn’t meet Caliban nopt only because Caliban hasn’t yet been fired from underbed duty, but also because in Timeline A Dave DOESN’T DIE, since Dr. Narbon hasn’t received the contract to kill him.

… which means he doesn’t recognize Caliban when he goes back to age 6. Does that change the interaction there any?

Actually, in fact, Dave might not get unstuck in time yet. That might wait until Timeline B, created by the actions of President Kelly. Except Caliban has to have been fired already.

This is giving me a headache…

Apparently Dave is pretty predictable.  (At least if you’re a genius.)

So, the way I figure it, we start with Timeline A. This may or may not be the first timeline, but what, if anything, came before it doesn’t really matter here. In Timeline A, Child Dave-A never gets Caliban-A fired from his bed-hiding job, and Teen Dave-A starts smoking. Henchman Dave-A, who smokes and never met Caliban-A in Hell, then gets unstuck in time, and goes back to possess his younger self in 1983.

This creates Timeline B, in which Henchman Dave-A in Child Dave-B’s body gets Caliban-B fired from his bed-hiding job in 1983, but does not prevent Teen Dave-B from starting to smoke in 1993. Henchman Dave-A returns to the present in Timeline B, and, in the fullness of time-B, becomes Old Dave-A, a bitter old man who smokes and has destroyed everything he loves.

Henchman Dave-B, however, is our Dave. He comes unstuck from his body in Timeline B, where he smokes and met Caliban-B in Hell, and travels back to possess his younger self in 1983, which creates another new timeline, Timeline C. Henchman Dave-B in Child Dave-C’s body gets Caliban-C fired from his bed-hiding job, then goes on to prevent Teen Dave-C from starting smoking in 1993, and finally leaps to Old Dave-B’s body in the future of Timeline B, where he has the conversation with (a recording of?) Old Dave-A that we’re seeing here.

And then he returns to Timeline C, where he got Caliban fired and never smoked, and proceeds to live out the rest of the Narbonic strips…

So this Future Dave, Old Dave-A, knows that the timeline can be changed – he did it back in 1983, when he created Timeline B, and is certainly smart enough now (2023 “now”) to have figured out what happened there. That means that he knows that the Dave he’s talking to (Henchman Dave-B) isn’t the same Dave that he was, and may not react quite the same way.

So I figure that, rather than risking his plan getting screwed up by variations in the timeline, Old Dave-A just uploaded himself into the Lovelace hardware (assuming he wasn’t already living there full-time), where he’s using the attached holoprojector to carry on a real-time conversation with Henchman Dave-B in Old Normal Clone Dave-B’s body.

And he’s lying to Dave-B about it because he doesn’t want Dave-B’s to learn yet the truth of what Old Dave really is, and, most especially, how he got that way. Remember, learning that truth is what ultimately sends Dave mad… letting him learn it this prematurely would change the subsequent Timeline C completely. Old Dave-A doesn’t want that; he wants a Timeline C that’s predictable and as similar as possible to the Timeline B that he experienced… up until the point that Dave-B makes a single small change that nudges it onto the path that they want it to follow.

Maybe I dreamed it? I don’t know where that came from.

Where is the implication that Future!Dave’s recording isn’t a recording? I don’t recall anything like that. That would definitely give this a different spin.

Future!Dave may know that he can change his past based on his experiences when unstuck in time, but they will be different than our Dave’s as his actions would have altered the timeline to the one we’re familiar with.

Unless he doesn’t know that, and then he didn’t. Or perhaps his madness has allowed him to see that the past can be changed.