The four of them reached out for each other, and took hands. They were
totally in sync, and were able to make the jump without saying a word. They
were back on Earth, but roughly 542 million years ago, standing on the beach
of an ocean. They lingered for a moment or two before letting go, and
awkwardly turning away from each other. Weaver walked over to a rock a few
meters away, and stuck her arm into a deep hole. They heard a click, which
served to split the ground apart, and reveal a stairway leading down into
the earth. Lights began to switch on automatically, revealing that the
bottom was only a few stories down. “It’s okay,” she said. “We’ll be safe
down there. I built my own mini version of the Constant to be alone.”
“You’re not alone,” Goswin contended.
“We’ll see.” She stepped down, and never looked back to see if they were
following, but they were anyway.
They landed in a decent-sized foyer with a mostly homey feel, but also
laboratory-like qualities. Weaver continued to lead them down a hallway
until they came upon the main room where they found an aquarium that took up
one entire wall. The glass barrier curved inward, which would let creatures
swim right up to investigate the humans, if such creatures were anywhere to
be found. There was a lot of underwater life to admire, such as algae and a
seaweed of some kind, but no fish.
After Weaver tapped something on a control panel that the others assumed was
a security passcode, she watched them watch the prehistoric creatures
floating around soothingly. “Those aren’t plants, if that’s what you’re
assuming. They’re not animals either. They’re unlike anything you’re used to
in the modern age.”
“Protista?” Eight Point Seven guessed. She was more knowledgeable than the
other two, but still didn’t recognize these organisms.
Weaver shook her head. “Some people think that there are eight kingdoms,
including Protista and Chromista, but there have actually been eleven
throughout history and prehistory. Two of them went totally extinct long,
long ago. These right here belong to Ankorea, which came this close to
surviving to our day. They exhibited traits from all of the other modern
kingdoms. Their frond right there shows the first inkling of photosynthesis
that we’ll later see in plants. It doesn’t convert sunlight directly into
energy, but it does power the decomposition process that the organism uses
to break food down like fungi. It’s what makes them brown, instead of green.
Despite being multicellular, they reproduce via splitting, like bacteria,
which sounds insane, though I’ve never witnessed it up close. This area is
really calm and hospitable, but they’re extremophiles, like Archea, able to
survive in both high and low temperatures. They can nearly all transition
from one to the other if need be, making them unique. But unique isn’t the
right word, because they’re quite diverse, like protists.
“All of these that you see belong to Ankorea, despite how different they
look, and that explains why I built my constant here. You see, their
defining characteristic is that they all have this anchor that can anchor
them to the seafloor. This allows them to catch food as it floats by from
one spot while saving energy. Once they feel that the area has been
stripped, they pull the anchor up, and move on. They can swim or drift,
depending on their energy reserves. Some of their anchors extend, like the
majority of the ones you’re seeing, but that one there isn’t a rock. It has
a nonextendable anchor. When it’s released, this thing will kind of start to
roll around until it finds a better source of food. I don’t see it here, but
one of them actually has two anchors, so it can walk like an animal. It’s
crazy to watch, I wish you were here for that.”
“They sound so resilient,” Goswin pointed out, “how did they go extinct?”
“No one knows. I’ve brought a few experts back to study them, but we don’t
understand it yet. Of course this is all before whatever ended them, but the
current theory is that they were outcompeted by stronger organisms. They
might have overgrazed their own environment. As you can see, there’s not a
whole lot here. That’s pretty indicative of the world right now. The food
cycle is difficult to maintain in the Ediacaran period. The ones that
survive are the kind that thrive with less.”
“You brought other people here?” Eight Point Seven asked. “Did that not risk
paradoxes? If they had published papers regarding what you know to be facts,
but which were lost to the fossil records for the majority of the
population, I would have it in the repository of knowledge.”
“I erased their memories,” Weaver explained. “They weren’t happy about it,
but I promised to credit them for any work published after a point in the
timeline when I felt like this information could be shared. Honestly, I’ve
not even decided whether that moment will ever take place. There’s no decent
way to explain how anyone could possibly know this much about organisms that
never fossilized. Unless time travel becomes public knowledge, this is just
for me. And for you now, I suppose.”
“Are we going to keep talking about something dumb and meaningless, and
sidestepping the real issue, which is why we’ve come here?” Briar
questioned.
“He’s right. We have to address the elephant in the room.” Goswin looked
around the room, and took a half step back as if he were searching for a
literal elephant. “It’s no coincidence that we all agreed to jump to this
place without exchanging a single word. We all wanted to leave where we were
so we could unpack recent events and revelations.”
“The question I have,” Briar began, “is which of us are real?”
“We’re all real,” Weaver reasoned. “There’s just a slight possibility that
we’re shifting timelines without realizing it.”
“Not only a possibility,” Eight Point Seven argued. “I don’t belong with the
three of you.” She frowned. “This isn’t even my body.” The cut on her
forehead had since healed into a scar, which perhaps alternate or shifted
versions of her would be able to use to tell each other apart, but it meant
nothing to the other three members of the crew.
“We don’t know that it quite works like that,” Weaver tried to clarify.
“Time is a weird thing, and it’s getting weirder. The laws of causality are
breaking down, and we are at the center of it. Remember what I told you
about the river of consciousness. That’s not just a metaphor that applies to
us because of our bizarre situation. All conscious beings experience this on
the quantum level. Your mind is in a constant state of flux. Eight Point
Seven, you’re considered a true artificial intelligence because when you
were first created, you passed a series of rigorous tests meant to determine
this very thing. Classical computers do not flow like human minds. Their
alterations are quantifiable, and even reversible. They can be codified as a
series of rapidly changing states. No matter how rapid the change is, each
state can be pinpointed and recorded. Humans do not exist in states, and
neither do you. Not simply knowing, but understanding, this phenomenon was
key to advancements that led to things like mind uploading, digitization of
the brian, and total immersive virtual reality.”
“I’m having trouble following,” Briar said nervously.
Weaver faced him. “Time travelers tend to think of reality in terms of
clearly definable timelines, which you can destroy when you create a new one
by triggering a time travel event. We call this a point of divergence. But
that’s not really how it works. Time is constantly shifting through an array
of equally probable potentials of superposition—”
“You’re getting technical again,” Goswin interrupted to warn her.
Weaver sighed, frustrated at having to figure out how to dumb this down.
“There is no real you, or fake you. They’re all you, and you are all them.
Even without this thing that happened to us, you may be jumping to different
realities all the time, which exist simultaneously in parallel. That’s what
we’re all worried about, right? We’re afraid that we don’t belong together,
because we can’t know whether someone’s been replaced. Think of it this way,
it may be true that you’re always being replaced, no matter what you do. You
step into a new reality, don’t realize it, and move on like nothing
happened. That could simply be how it works for everyone. It may be an
inexorable characteristic of existence. There’s still a lot about the cosmos
that even I don’t know. So the question is, if that has been happening to
you your entire life, why worry about it now?”
“Because some of us appear to be shifting back,” Goswin noted.
“Yes,” Weaver conceded. “We’re encountering ourselves, not as fixtures at
different points in the timeline, nor even as alternates from conflicting
timelines. They’re just us, copied to possibly infinite numbers, looping
back on ourselves, and criss-crossing each other’s paths. It’s chaos. It’s
chaos incarnate. That’s scary, I get it. We can try to fix the issue,
or we can try to ignore it.”
“Wait.” Goswin stepped farther away, and peered around the corner of another
hallway. “If we thought to come to this place, how come no one else did? Our
other selves, that is. Or...whatever we should call them.”
“Shifted selves,” Eight Point Seven suggested.
“They should not be able to enter the premises,” Weaver assured him. “I
placed us in a temporal bubble. We’re currently moving through time at a
speed that is only nanoseconds slower than outside, which is more incidental
than anything. The purpose is to erect a barrier that cannot be breached,
even by another me. It’s a safeguard I put in place, not to stop
my...shifted selves from coming in, but any alternate. If another Weaver
shows up, she’ll see the bubble, and know to jump to a different
moment—perhaps a year from now—to avoid running into herself. When you
travel this far back in time, precision is implausible at best. I have labs
all over the timeline, but this is more of a vacation home to get away from
people.”
“Maybe this already happened, and they went back, instead of forward,”
Goswin proposed. He had wandered over to the kitchen table where he found a
piece of paper. He lifted it up, and turned towards the group to read it out
loud. “Shifted Selves Visitor Log. Weaver, Goswin, Eight Point Seven, Briar,
Six Point Seven, Ellie Underhill, Holly Blue...” He stopped at the last name
on the list. “Uhh...”
“Are there tally marks next to each one?”
“Uh, yeah,” Goswin confirmed. “The usual suspects are about even. Holly Blue
is here three times, as is Six Point Seven, and Ellie came once. I guess she
decided to join us on the X González in one timeline.”
“At least one,” Briar added.
“Right,” Goswin agreed.
“What is it, Gos?” Weaver asked him. “You’re balking at something, and it
isn’t the tally marks. Those are interesting additions to the crew, but not
wholly shocking. Who’s on the list that shouldn’t be?”
Goswin looked up from the paper. “Misha Collins.”
“The Misha Collins?” Eight Point Seven asked.
“Who’s Misha Collins?” Briar asked, having lived his whole life literally
under a rock, or cave, rather.
“Misha Collins is an actor from the 20th and 21st centuries,” Weaver
explained. “I would like to hear the story that led him to show up here.”
A shadow appeared out of nowhere next to the refrigerator. It was sliced up
in segments, which were shimmering, and moving from side to side like Pong,
as molecules worked to coalesce into full form. It started with the shoes on
the floor, and began to work its way up as the traveler struggled to find
his place in this point in spacetime. Pants, trenchcoat, narrow tie over a
white shirt, and finally the neck and head. It was none other than Misha
Collins. He only took a few seconds to get his bearings. “What is it this
time? Uh, I mean...report.”
