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| Image cropped and filtered, but credit due to Tormod Sandtorv / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0) |
My life’s story can be told in four chapters. I was born in a timeline that
I didn’t like. People were dead who deserved to survive, and two worlds were
destined to destroy each other. I needed to fix things, so I went back to
key moments in time for chapter two, and altered history to realize better
outcomes. The third chapter was the shortest, and was only there to serve as
transition to my fourth and final chapter. You don’t need to understand the
first few chapters to really get who I am, so I’ll start my story on the
cusp of the transition. This is the day I attempt to sacrifice myself for
the greater good. Things did not go as planned.
I can travel through time at will, but that’s not all I can do. My brain
works differently than most people’s, which is probably why sacrificing
myself for the greater good doesn’t feel like suicide to me. I don’t just
move through time, but I see how it moves. I understand causality on a level
experienced by few others. It may take me a long time to study history, and
I usually still have to gather the data somehow, but I’m an expert at
processing it, so I can make the right changes at the right moments. If I
surrender to this power, however, and more let time take control of me, it
often takes me exactly when and where I need to go. This allows me to bypass
all that research, and take a leap of faith. I’m kind of a control freak, so
I don’t do this feature very often, but it does save time, and it’s seemed
to work for me here. A man I admire named Mateo Matic has asked me to find
Horace Reaver in 2027, so that’s where I’m trying to go.
I find myself standing in what I immediately recognize to be the Bran
safehouse. I’m not sure why they call it that, though. Four people are
evidently living here at the moment: Slipstream, Alexina, Alexina’s son,
Alexi, and Agent Nanny Cam. That last one is presently petting some kind of
weird creature that looks like a cross between a hare and a dog. Hare of the
dog. Hm.
Alexina is the only one I’ve met personally. “Yay, Bhulan!” she exclaims,
both jokingly, and unironically.
“McGregor. I’ve come for Horace Reaver.”
“No, it’s okay,” Slipstream says. “Ace is good in this reality.”
“No, I don’t mean I’m gonna hurt him,” I clarify. “I’ve been told we can
help each other.”
“We don’t know where he is,” Slipstream explains to me. “We’ve come here to
regroup, and try to figure that out.”
Suddenly, the front door opens. “Well, wonder no more!” Horace Reaver
announces.
“How did you hear that?” Alexina questions. “The door and walls of this
safehouse are literally soundproof.”
“Hear what?” Ace asks.
“Where were you?” Slipstream asks. She slides over to give Paige a hug,
followed by Serkan.
“We were in another timeline,” Paige answers. “It took us some time to find
our way back.”
“Where’s the agent?” I’m not sure who Alexina is referring to here.
“Huh?” Agent Nanny Cam asks.
“Not you,” Alexina says. “The other agent.”
“Hello Doctor is still in there,” Serkan answers. “He nobly sacrificed
himself, so we could return.” Yeah, I don’t know who Hello Doctor is.
“Be honest,” Ace scolds. “We sacrificed him. He didn’t wanna do it.”
“He’ll be fine,” Serkan dismisses. “He wanted to be there anyway. That’s why
he opened the portal to it in the first place.”
“That’s misleading,” Ace tells him.
The door opens again. Jupiter Fury walks in. “Well, wonder no more!”
Everyone just looks at him.
“Oh, was that someone else’s line?” he jokes. “Shit.”
Alexina sighs. “You’ll always find us. Goddammit.” She holds her watch up,
turns a dial, and presses the button. I see immediately that she’s just
reset time a few seconds.
“Be honest,” Ace repeats, just as he did before. “We sacrificed him. He
didn’t wanna do it.”
No one else is aware of the time reset.
“Go home, son,” Alexina instructs.
“What?” Alexia asks. “I thought you wanted me here.”
“It’s too dangerous. Go. Now.”
Alexina takes his future wife, Agent Nanny Cam by the hand, then presses a
button on his belt. They teleport away.
“What just happened?” Paige asks.
Jupiter barges into the condo, just as he did before. “Well, wonder no
more!”
“Jupiter?” Ace asks. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m here for the Omega Gyroscope! I know you’ve brought it here. I can
track it anywhere, so there’s no point in trying to hide it from me.”
“Oh, this?” Slipstream reaches into her bag, and pulls the gyroscope out.
Word is, it can do nearly anything. It can rewrite reality with a single
thought. I considered seeking it out for my purposes in chapter two, but
decided it wasn’t the route I wanted to go.
“Give it to me,” Jupiter orders. “I need it.” And then, in the blink of an
eye, he’s on the floor. He was badly hurt, as if having just finished a
fistfight. “What the shit was that!” He tries to stand back up, but
something forces him back down. It isn’t like there’s some invisible person
stopping him. It’s more like falling back down happened, but then someone
erased all of our memories of it.
I turn to Alexina. “Someone is altering time. They’re making us forget. You
can push through that.”
“You want me to get myself out of a memory block?” Alexina asks.
“Yes.”
“I’ll try.” She closes her eyes, and breathes out deliberately and slowly.
“There’s a man, and a woman. He beats Jupiter up, and we just watch. We’re
confused, but we just watch, like we trust him.”
“Why don’t they want us to remember?” Paige asks.
“Remember what?” Alexina asks back. She’s lost her memory again.
I look around. Everyone has lost their memories again. I’m the only one
strong enough to recall the moment that Alexina described, though I still
can’t actually recall the moment itself. I sigh, frustrated. I ask her to do
it again, this time trying to get a name of these mysterious memory-wiping
individuals. She gets more than that. Kallias Bran and Aeolia Sarai are not
wiping memories on purpose. They’re stuck like this, unable to truly
communicate with anyone. They can impact reality however they please, but no
one will ever remember them. Apparently this happened because of a coin.
When it’s done, Alexina feels taxed, though of course, she has no idea why.
I’m still the only one who has any clue what’s going on. I also feel a lump
in my pocket. When I take a peek, I see this whole purse of coins. If these
can remove anyone from the global consciousness, I have to keep them safe,
and away from others.
I look back over to Jupiter. He looks worse than before, suggesting he’s
suffered further beating. “Whatever you do, I’ll always find that gyroscope.
Sooner or later, it will be in my possession, so you might as well hand it
over now.”
“I don’t understand,” Serkan says. He kneels down to get on Jupiter’s level.
“We’re friends. Why are you acting like this?”
“We’re not friends.” Jupiter spits some blood on Serkan’s shoes.
Serkan’s not fazed by the blood. “Yes, we are.”
“You’re thinking of Jupiter Rosa. I’m Fury. He’s my alternate. I’m the real
one.”
“He’s right,” Alexina confirms. “This isn’t the man you know. It’s just like
you’re not the same Serkan who still lives with his mother and little
brother.”
Serkan frowns.
“You’re gonna have to kill me,” Jupiter says. “It’s that important to me.”
In another blink, he’s lying unconscious on the floor. Kallias must have
knocked him out for us.
“We have to get rid of it,” Slipstream decides. “Can it be destroyed?”
“No,” Alexina replies. “Not something this powerful.”
“Yes, it can,” I disagree. I step towards Ace. “The hundemarke can do it”
“No,” Ace says, shaking his head. “I know the only way to destroy the
hundemarke, and I’m not letting it happen.”
“What way are we talking about?” Paige asks.
“Someone would have to kill themselves,” Ace is disgusted at the prospect.
“No one’s ever been willing to do that,” Alexina adds. “I don’t know anyone
who would.”
This was always meant to be the last chapter of my life. I tried to start a
new life once my mission was complete, but I’m finding myself very unhappy.
This is my chance to end it on my terms, in a way that cannot be changed. “I
would,” I say plainly.
“No,” Ace decides.
“You don’t know me,” I say to him, “but this is what I want. I’ve been
thinking about it for a very, very long time.”
He just keeps shaking his head.
“Please.”
“I can’t be responsible for someone’s death. It’s not fair for you to ask me
to do that.”
Suddenly, the hundemarke is hanging around my neck.
“Holy crap,” Alexina says, stunned. “How did you do that?”
“Thanks, Kallias,” I say with a smile.
“Who’s Kallias?” Paige doesn’t like not being in the know, and based on what
I know of her future, she’ll dedicate her life to the pursuit of knowledge,
so she never feels ignorant again.
“Okay, great,” I say with an air of finality. “Now the gyroscope.”
“No!” Ace cries. He runs over, and takes it from Slipstream’s hand. Then he
steps back defensively. “I’m not letting you kill yourself! Violence is
never the answer. I’m putting my foot down. We’re gonna find another way to
stop Jupiter from getting his hands on it...to stop anyone from getting
their hands on it, or the hundemarke.
Paige walks over to him. “Dad. Let’s talk about this.”
“No,” he says. “There’s nothing to talk about.”
Suddenly, there’s another unexpected appearance. A portal opens up, though
most of us aren’t at the right angle to see where it leads. It looks like
there are stairs though. Something in it catches Ace’s eye. “Protect this
thing!” he yells. Then he reaches back, and hurls the Omega Gyroscope into
the portal. It snaps shut.
“Where did you just send that?” Serkan asks him, stepping forward himself.
“Who were you talking to.”
“Mateo Matic; A trusted future friend.”
I nod. “That’s about as good as you’re gonna do. I still need to use the
hundemarke, and I could do with your help.”
“I’ve already helped you,” Ace spits.
“Mr. Demir,” I go on. “I would like you to come with me. The hundemarke
should prevent anyone from stopping me from doing this, but it can’t hurt to
have a little extra help in the way of some power suppression.
“I can do that,” Serkan agrees, “if this is what you really want. And I
don’t have to say, there’s no going back.”
“I’m ready. And Ace, if you could protect me from physical threats? What I’m
doing will save lives.”
It looks like he’s finally resigned. “All right.”
“I’m going too,” Paige declares. If this messes with reality, I need to be
in the same place as my dads.
Her fathers want to argue, but they see the logic.
We all four hold hands, and I transport them to the Darvaza gas crater in
Derweze, Turkmenistan. It’s not the only place where it can be destroyed,
but it’s a good one. To the average human, the fires burning here are like
any other, but the flames are of special temporal significance. They can
actually kill a time traveler better than they would anyone else. It’s
reportedly instantaneous. It’s not been studied much, so we don’t know why,
but they’re just particularly more dangerous to our kind.
“Do you need a minute?” Serkan asks reverently.
I smile. “No time like the present.”
Arcadia Preston suddenly appears a few meters away. Both Serkan and Ace fall
into defensive positions. “It’s okay,” Arcadia says in a sincere voice. “I
hope you appreciate what I went through to get this. She hands me a
parchment of paper.
I take a quick look at it. “The LIR Map?”
“I decided life isn’t fun when you have all the answers. Just...get rid of
it.”
“Okay,” I respond.
As soon as Arcadia disappears, she reappears, but she’s dressed in different
clothes, suggesting she’s from a different point in time. “I have one more
thing for ya,” Future!Arcadia says. Then she hands me the Insulator of Life.
“Is someone in here?” I ask her.
“Would you believe...no?”
I reject her with my eyes.
Arcadia gives in, “it’s my father. He’s incredibly dangerous. I need you to
do this, not for me, but for everyone.”
“Is he the one using the hundemarke to assassinate people all over time?” I
ask.
“Yes,” Arcadia says.
I’m not a murderer, but...okay. “Okay.”
A third—or second?—person wants in on this action. At first all we see is
the business end of a knife, appearing out of nowhere. It slides down, like
it’s cutting through the fabric of spacetime. It opens enough for the
feminine figure of what looks like a futuristic astronaut to slip through.
She stands there a moment, sizing us all up. Then she smashes a button on
the back of her neck, which acts to retract her helmet. “My name is Zoey.
I’ve been all over the bulkverse, looking for this. I finally found it in
omegaverse.” She removes the Omega Gyroscope from the hardback backpack on
her back. “If I had known that’s what they called it, I probably would have
started there.”
“Um. Thank you?”
“I need someone to get a message to Lucius and Curtis,” Zoey requests.
“I just saw them,” Ace says. “In prison.”
“It’s important that you find them again,” Zoey continues. “They said, if
there was one thing they regretted, it was how they treated Yatchiko. Just
tell them to be nice to her.”
“We can do that,” Serkan agrees. “Should we tell them the message comes from
you.”
Zoey shakes her head. “They won’t know me yet. Say it’s from their future
selves.” She takes her knife back from its magsheath, and jams it into a new
portal. She tears it apart, and slips herself back through.
I wait for a moment. This is not what I expected. I look around. “Does
anyone else wanna give me somethin’ to destroy?” I call out to the aether.
Nothin’.
“All right, good! Then I’m gonna do this,” I go on with my outside voice.
“Here I go!” I continue waiting, and still nothing. I take one last look at
the Reaver-Demirs. “Something profound and poetic.” With that, I throw
myself into the fire pit.
Before I reach the flames, gravity shifts, and pulls my feet down to a
floor.
“Oh, hi,” a woman behind me says. “Are you my first guest.”
I turn around to find none other than Danica Matic, Concierge to The
Constant. “Something went wrong.”
“All right. Well,” Danica begins. “Let’s figure it out together.”
This was how chapter four of my life began.
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