The Strongholds at the End of Time

Doc Brown — I foresee two possibilities, one coming face to face with herself 30 years older would put her into shock and she’ll simply pass out, or two, the encounter could create a time paradox, the result of which could cause a chain reaction, that would unravel the very fabric of the space-time continuum and destroy the entire universe. Granted that’s a worst case scenario, the destruction might in fact be localized, limited to our own galaxy.

Marty — Well that’s a relief.

— Back to the Future II

“There is no future,” the time traveller said and blew his brain away. Even more disturbing than this was the fact that he looked like me. But his words were the thing that made me shiver, that reached into me and brought my deepest fears to the surface.

These words, despite that I had never spoken them aloud, had gone around in my heads in the last months and weeks. I had reached a point in my life where I had thought that there was indeed no future for me. All paths I had chosen until now, all my major decisions in life had only led to failure. No job, no money, no family, no friends, no anything that had any worth. And no chance to change it.

And worse, I had thought about suicide. It was the easy way out. I had tried not to think about the pain and just examined the idea as an abstract concept. It would have easily solved all my problems. But when the time traveller who was my look-alike blew his brain out, believe me, there was nothing abstract about it any more, and I knew that this wasn’t the way I wanted to go out. But where there hadn’t been even a chance to change my life before, my deceased look-alike had given me one.

Life from death. Yeah, I know. Living is funny that way, if you do it long enough, the strangest things can happen. Like the appearance of a time machine.

It all began with a strange noise that made me look up while I was moping around in my apartment. If I’m down, it seems, the most exhilarating thing I was able to do was contemplate the ruins of my life. It’s sad, I know.

Something began to happen in the middle of my room. Whirling motions, like a miniature storm trying to materialize inside; only, it had a spherical form. The motion sped up, regained force and the sphere grew. Some of my remaining possessions were sucked up. Then with a bang it stopped. I was temporarily deaf.

Inside my room a black sphere had appeared. A hatch opened and a man crawled out. He looked like me, more or less. “Do you know who I am?” he asked. I wasn’t able to say anything; I don’t think I even nodded. Seeing yourself up close can make you feel existential. I was probably shocked. But that wasn’t the worst thing. He looked like me, maybe a little bit older, at most five years.

“What do you want?” I said.

He began to laugh like a maniac, took out a strange-looking gun and said his famous last word. The rest you know. Wait, there’s something I’ve forgotten to tell you. Before he splattered himself, he flung something at me. Since my attention was occupied by the strange gun, I only remember that whatever he had flung hit me. That’s it.

Moments after his death I felt a creeping feeling on my chest. Whatever he had flung, it had leeched onto me like an infection spreading over my body. Whether it moved over or under my skin I wasn’t sure. I wanted to do something but felt completely numb.

“Wait some seconds until you’re synchronized,” said a voice in my head.

I tried to say something, but even my mouth was numb.

“You can think your words, I can already understand you,” said the voice.

I tried to remain calm. Who are you? I thought.

“Can you see the big, black orb inside your room?” I looked at the sphere, and suddenly countless small, human-like eyes opened. No eyelashes. “Yeah, that’s me. I am a T-Globe Numbolus Bobartarsius 2000. You can call me Bob.”

What are you? I thought.

“What do you think I am? I’m a time machine. I can bring you to any point in this space-time-continuum and more. I am here only to serve.”

I was a little stunned. Okay, I wasn’t only a little stunned. I just had experienced in a few moments’ time an existential crisis, a bloody suicide and a talking time machine. Too many things had happened to process properly. I tried to sit down. Only, my chair had been destroyed during the appearance of the T-Globe, which made me sit down with a bang on the floor. Pain can be a good wake-up call. I wasn’t numb anymore.

“What do you want here? Why did he,” and I pointed at my dead look-alike “kill himself? What happened here? What happened to me?” I looked down at myself and saw the strange thing had spread over nearly my whole body, only my hands and my head weren’t covered. It looked like a tattoo, only not some mystical motif but like a schematic of circuits or something like that; it looked geometric, technological, like the surface of a computer chip.

“Oh that,” Bob said. “That’s nothing. Only the synchronization matrix that allows us to communicate with each other. As for your other questions, I can’t help you much. Our dead friend there has inserted a mean sequence of instructions into my program, and the moment I began to synchronize with you, most of my memory was wiped. Apart from some facts, like that he did this to me, I am a blank slate.”

“Very convenient.”

I knew that the T-Globe couldn’t shrug, but I still got the feeling it had just done that. “What can I say,” Bob said. “I’m only a machine here to fulfil your instructions. I’m just a helpless tool, programmed — or better, slaved — to my owner’s will.” He didn’t sound like a nice, helpful tool who would fulfill all my whims, more like an evil genie from a bottle, trying to twist or misinterpret my wishes.

“You know, I can read your mind,” he said “and I am shocked at your mistrust. Can there be no friendship between man and machine, no trust?” He made a noise, which I identified as a laugh some time later. If you never have heard a machine laugh, you wouldn’t believe it.

The whole situation seemed a little absurd. I wasn’t sure what to do now. If there hadn’t been the dead body of my look-alike and the black sphere in my room, I would have thought it had been all a dream.

“You know, I can still read your thoughts. Why don’t you try me out a little bit? You could make a small jump into your future or past. See if you like it. What could happen?”

“Into my future?” I remembered the words of my look-alike. Before the appearance of the time machine I hadn’t thought that there even was a future for me, but now maybe there was. I could flee from all my problems, into the future, or even the past. I could fix my life. Hope is easily stirred; I wasn’t one to ditch this chance away. “Sure, why not. It can’t get any worse.” I climbed through the open hatch into the T-Globe. I wondered whether I should do something about the dead corpse.

“I don’t think he will run away,” Bob said, reading my mind. “And since I’m a time machine we can always stop at the right point to pick up the dead body later.”

“Could you stop that?” I said to him.

“What, reading your mind?”

“Yes.”

“No, I can’t, we’re synchronized, mind-linked, head-to-head. I am a slave to this, like you, until you decide to sever the connection.” Somehow his voice sounded outright smug. “So, when do you want to go?”

What would be sufficient enough to convince myself that I really was connected to a wise-cracking, know-it-all time machine, that this wasn’t just a big joke at my expense? “Thousand years into the future,” I said.

“Are you sure?” Did I heard something like worry in his voice?. “You know how fast your society has changed in the last hundred years. Who knows how fast it will change in the next thousand.”

“How do you know, I thought all your memory is gone?”

“I still have all the knowledge to maintain myself and function properly, and I can access your memory, all your knowledge and wisdom. Not that it’s that much.” There it was again. Wise-cracking. I wondered who had thought it would be funny to design such a machine.

“I want to travel a thousand years into the future. Now,” I said with my most commanding voice. I think I got it right, at least a little bit.

“Okay, a thousand years it is.”

When I had entered the T-Globe, I looked around. There wasn’t much to see, a strange looking seat and not much else. Something like a carpet lay on the floor, and sometimes ripples like waves moved on it. When I tried to catch one of them, the carpet stopped moving. The walls were covered with some strange imagery that had no end (it covered the whole inside of the T-Globe) and changed every moment. I couldn’t say whether it was art or some alien computer interface, or both. It reminded me of fractals I had once seen on a pop science show on TV.

I sat down into a seat which changed his form at surface contact. “Mimetic,” Bob said without further explanation.

“And what does that mean?” I asked.

“It remembers your ass. Are you ready? Yes? Okay, here we go.”

A display appeared in my sight. When I tried to touch it, my hand went right through it. The actual date appeared, right down to the minutes and seconds, which changed with the flow of time. Then the speed of change moved up, first the minutes flickered by with the speed of seconds, then the hours, then the days and at last weeks, months and years went by in moments. I could hardly follow how much time went by, but when the counter had passed beyond the thousand years I had hoped to go forward in time, I knew something was wrong.

“Bob, what is happening?”

“I don’t know. I’m trying to find out.” His voice had lost its self-assurance.

The years went by, faster and faster. When we had surpassed a million years I felt as if something had snapped in the right place in my mind. It was as if my mind cleared and I realized that I was really sitting in a time machine, that all this wasn’t a joke, it was real, absolutely real. And something was wrong, very wrong.

“BOB.”

“Yes.”

“What is happening?”

“It looks like your deceased Doppelgänger has again fiddled with my program. We are heading for a specific time, but I can’t say when we will stop. I don’t have access to that part of myself.”

“And what should I do until then: wait?”

“Sure. Or I could show you the flow of time. Look.” The walls of the T-Globe went transparent. I saw the earth, changing with the flow of time. Nature was long gone; the whole surface was teeming with artificial structures that were born, bloomed and went away in seconds, but these seconds must have been centuries or millennia in real time.

“Is that real what I’m seeing?” I said to Bob.

“Approximately. It’s a projection based on the data I get from my sensor phalanx. A real picture would be impossible since we’re outside of the normal space-time-continuum and don’t interact with matter or energy, like light waves, in any way you could perceive and made sense off.”

Since we had nothing more to talk about, I looked outside and waited for Bob to stop moving through time. The outside view was fascinating, but after some time all the strangeness of the mega-structures that future civilizations had built got to me. You can cope with only so much strangeness without any characteristics you knew, until your brain screams to you to close your eyes or look away. So I slept.

“Mick,” Bob said.

“Yeah?” I dozily opened my eyes. “What’s the matter?”

“We have stopped, but we have another problem.”

“Bob, can’t you wake me with something nice?”

“I’m not responsible for your inability to cope with the facts of reality.”

“No, but you could be nicer.”

“I could.”

I tried to wake up, really wake up. What I needed now was a very strong coffee. But for all the tech I assumed was inside of Bob, whoever had built him had probably forgotten to install a coffee machine. But asking wouldn’t cost me anything. “No,” he said before I could ask. I had forgotten that we were still mind-linked. “I’m a time machine, not a coffee machine.”

“So, what problem were you talking about?”

“The timeline is collapsing.”

“Please could you say that again, and in words that make sense to me.”

“If there’s enough matter, it will theoretically slow the expansion of the universe and reverse the expansion until everything will collapse. That’s called a Big Crunch. There are other possibilities, but this is one of them. The final outcome of the universe is dependent on whether the matter density of the universe is below, above or equal a certain value called the critical density. But all that should have played out in the far future, the very, very, very far future. But we’re only six million years into your future, and the Big Crunch is about to happen.”

“How?” I felt completely calm. Talking about the end of the universe wasn’t as bad as seeing a Doppelgänger of myself killing himself. It should be the other way round, but it wasn’t. My Doppelgänger had been something personal; the universe was just some big concept that I had a hard time relating to.

And after all, the crunch happened in my far future, whether six millions years or much, much farther, I didn’t really care. But I was interested at least, because, you know, it was the universe and all that. Who wouldn’t want to know? Sure, most of our life we are mostly interested in the people around us, in our own small, little lives, but from time to time we look up to the stars, contemplate the fate of the universe, the meaning of it all, the big things. Or at least I had done so.

“From the data I have collected since we both have been synchronized back in your time, the main offender of collapsing the universe is something you call the Great Attractor, a gravitational anomaly which lies at the center of the local supercluster of galaxies. Don’t wonder, you heard the word once in a TV-Show, but you have forgotten it for years. Like you have many other interesting things to do.

“Back to the problem. The Great Attractor’s gravitational pull has increased exponentially over the last six million years. If this goes on, your universe will collapse in a short time, which ends the timeline, your time-space-continuum. Bye-bye.”

“So that’s why my psychotic Doppelgänger killed himself.”

“Insufficient data. But it could be.”

“And what now.”

“I’m only a machine. I don’t decide. I don’t choose where we go or what we do. That’s your job.”

“And where in time can you go?”

“Not only in time, but to every point in the space-time-continuum. Everywhere and everywhen.”

Did you ever stood before such staggering possibilities. My life hadn’t been gone very well recently; I could go back and try to fix it. Every time something went wrong, I could just go back. Or I could begin from scratch. Play a little bit, win some money. With the time machine all that would be easy. Or I could chose to live somewhere in the past or even in my future, or maybe even somewhere else. Bob had said everywhere after all.

I could do all this. When I felt like it, after all I had a time machine in my hands. “Endless possibilities” sounds good until you really have them in your grasp. Decision hell. And then a thought occurred to me. What if my Doppelgänger had been a future me? What if he had used the time machine and something had happened to him that made him kill himself? Was I poised to go the same path, to end coming back, blowing my brain out and starting this endless loop again? The easiest way would be to go back, win some money and then to never use the time machine again. Or I could find out what had indeed happened.

I know, curiosity killed the cat. But then, curiosity has driven mankind to build machines that took us to the Moon. Sometimes it’s worth the risk. I remembered a time in the past, when I had been a kid and dreamed of greater things than myself. Many of us want to be astronauts when they are kids, before they get older and settle for other, less higher goals, like programmer of accountant software. Not that it was a bad job, it just wasn’t... Ah, you know what I mean.

The first thing I wanted to try was to save my deceased look-alike. After all, I had a time machine in my hand. I could go to the point when he killed himself and stop him. But if I did that, I wouldn’t get the time machine, and wasn’t sure how the manipulation of the timeline would work out for my present self.

What I needed now was information, about how time and time travel worked and all that. I had read some SF in the past, and there had been many different concepts of how time travel worked, but I had someone at hand who should know.

“Bob,” I said.

“Yeah, I know. You want to know something about time travel. Okay, here is what I know. There are many timelines, don’t ask how many, because I don’t know.”

“Stop!” I said. “You never told me there is more than my own timeline. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You didn’t ask. Okay, back to the timelines. There are stable ones, but there are also unstable ones, these arms are created by meddling time travellers. Timelines can repair themselves; small manipulations can be easily mended.

“For example, you go back in time to kill your grandfather. What happens next is probably that your grandmother finds someone who is very similar to our killed grandfather on the genetic level. When they get children, the timeline repair mechanism makes it so that they get a kid who is, on the genetic level, very similar to our real father or mother who are impossible now because you killed our original grandfather.

‘Small manipulations are easily smoothed over. A timeline manipulation creates an arm, which is a local divergence from the main stable timeline, but after the timeline repair mechanism has smoothed over the major divergences, the arm feeds back into the main timeline. If that isn’t possible, it sometimes changes course and feeds into one of the other main timelines.

“Sometimes, but that is very, very rare, a divergence can’t be mended. Then a temporary arm transforms into a timeline of its own, the former timeline splits in half and two stable timelines are the result.”

“Have all timelines been created this way?”

“I don’t know,” Bob said. “But probably not: some timelines are very similar; you could call them parallels of each other, where the differences could have been easily smoothed over by the timeline repair mechanisms.

“But back to timeline manipulations. If you go back to stop the time traveller from killing himself, your younger self will never get his hands on the time machine, but you won’t stop existing either. Imagine that all timelines are single filaments of time that are embedded into something that could be called a meta-timeline. When a time travellers leaves the flow of time of a single timeline, he is still confined to the flow of time of the meta-timeline, while he can go into the past of a single timeline, he can’t go into the past of the meta-timeline.

“So even if you change your past on a timeline in such a way that you never had access to a time machine in the first place, the meta-timeline chronology will preserve your existence, because the meta-timeline has, for a lack of a better word, stored the state of the timeline when you had access to a time machine.”

“So...” I said. “If I have understood everything, timeline repair mechanisms protect the chronology of individual timelines, whereas the meta-timeline makes sure that there exists a chronology of time travel in such a way that no time travel loops or other major paradoxes occur. The meta-timeline is like another dimension of time, like there are three dimensions of space, at least on the macro scale.”

“Exactly.”

“And you know that all...?”

“Because of knowledge that hasn’t been wiped from my memory during our synchronization,” Bob said.

“So there won’t be any problems for myself when I stop my other self. Then let’s go and save him.”

I thought this would be the easy part, going back to my younger self, stopping the other self from killing himself. Before I did this I acquired some money through betting — a time machine can be very useful at times — and then I travelled to the point when the time machine had first appeared in my room, gave my younger self the money and told him that he should come back a day later. With the money he had enough to live a carefree life, if he chose to. Then I waited.

“There is no future,“ the time traveller said and tried to blow his brain out. Before he could do this, I kicked him in the nuts, very hard. He folded instantly. I felt his pain; there are things that are hard to look at. Then I took his gun away.

When he could talk again, he began to scream at me: “THERE IS NO FUTURE! THERE IS NO FUTURE!”

I think there’s something wrong with his mind, Bob told me through our mind-link. It looks like a thought virus that’s driving him insane. Should I help him? Bob thought.

Hasn’t my double the same T-Globe like I do, a double like you? Why doesn’t it protect him? I thought back.

I’m not sure, but I think the virus originates from my double, maybe that’s why our double, Mick Suicidal, may have manipulated my program, so that most of my memory was wiped when we synchronized.

Can you help my double and his T-Globe? I thought.

I can try, Bob’s thoughts came back.

While Bob tried to save his and my double, I could do nothing but sit and look at my own double. Under closer surveillance the small details surfaced that were different between the two of us. He was a little older, but also in much better shape, apart from his mind. He looked like he trained every day and took care of himself. I wondered whether he had come from some alternate timeline, or whether he was some sort of future self of me.

BOOM!

I turned my head and saw the T-Globe of my double self-destructing, imploding into a point of nothingness.

Bob, are you still there? I thought. I had parked him on the roof of the house, since there was only place for one T-Globe in my room, and also it would have tipped of my double.

All clear, he said. I immunized your double’s mind against the thought virus, but I couldn’t save my double.

After that there wasn’t much I could do, apart from waiting for my double. I hoped he had some answers.

“There is no future,” were the first words he said to me. “I thought everything was all right with him, Bob,” I said.

My double sat up. “I’m all right now. But the fact remains that there is no future,” he said.

“What do you mean,” I said.

“How much do you know?” And so I’m told him everything that had happened until now, how he had killed himself, my own foray into the far future and back again.

“Then I tell you were I am from. I come from another timeline where time travel was discovered years ago, and where I am a member of an organization who explores all the timelines. We were first created to protect our timeline, but we found out that this wasn’t really needed, because of such things like timeline repair mechanisms. During our explorations we ran into the Chronology Protection Authority.”

My face must have shown my curiosity.

“The Chronology Protection Authority is something like the organization I work for, only much more advanced. They are actually responsible for the timeline repair mechanisms. If you wonder from which timeline they are, the better question would be, from which time.

Every timeline is a universe bounded in space and time; it begins with a Big Bang and ends with a Big Crunch. Shortly before a universe collapses, on most timelines the last generation of intelligent life will be or has been able to make a controlled collapse, creating universe-spanning computers that exploit these last moments of the collapsing universe to create Omega Point Strongholds. These strongholds, despite the fact that the external universe is finite, can run forever, because the computational power of them is accelerating exponentially faster than time runs out.

And all these super-minds that run on all strongholds from all timelines are the Chronology Protection Authority. In a certain sense, for them time has ended and all they do is look back. They created the timeline repair mechanisms and other things, and they are the ultimate guardians of chronology. But something has happened. We lost contact to them, one after another. It is, as if they had never existed.”

“But how is this possible?” I said to him.

“The Great Attractor. It has appeared on every timeline. The timelines collapse much sooner than they should, and when they do, intelligent life hasn’t yet achieved the technology to make a controlled collapse. And the Omega Point Strongholds never get established. And thus no Chronology Protection Authority.”

“I thought that this was impossible. I mean, shouldn’t the chronology of the meta-timeline have protected them, even if all the individual timelines had been manipulated?”

“Yes, that’s the idea.”

“Then how?” I said.

“Someone has found a way to travel in mega-time. Whoever it is, he has travelled into the past of the mega-timeline and manipulated all the individual timelines in the far past of the mega-timeline in such a way that all timelines collapsed before their time.”

“But why and who? It doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “Why destroy the Chronology Protection Authority, and who could be able to do it? Who could gain from this?”

My double shrugged. “I was trying to find out, but then I ended up here. I can only remember that I tried to go back and to find the exact point on my timeline when the Great Attractor was installed. I was sure that the manipulation of the mega-timeline must have remained on the individual timelines, even if I couldn’t reverse what had happened to the mega-timeline.”

“Wouldn’t it work if we counter-manipulated every single timeline, reversing what has happened?”

“No, strangely the timeline repair mechanisms are still working, even though they were created by the beings who occupied the now vanished Omega Point Strongholds. And these repair mechanisms remember only a chronology where the Chronology Protection Authority has never been established and will counter our every move, even if we could somehow reverse the manipulations on every single timeline and stop whoever installed the Great Attractor. Which we can’t. Our best bet is to find out who has done it, and try to find a solution then.”

“But you already tried that. And it ended with your suicide.”

“Yes, but now Bob and I have been immunized against the thought virus. If they try this again, it won’t work. The question is, will you help me? I could use another pair of hands.”

Well, and there I was again. Decision hell. I could take it easy, search for a place and time to live and forget all the time travel stuff. I could easily forge a future for myself with the help of the T-Globe. What did the universe or the fate of the mega-timeline or the Chronology Protection Authority mean to me? Nothing. It should have meant nothing. But as I have told you, there had been a time in my life when I contemplated the big things. The really big things. As a kid I had the time and zeal to be still worried about the fate of the universe. At that little kid, I realized, wasn’t dead yet.

“Did you ever doubt that I would help to save the universe and all the rest?” I said.

“I did,” Bob said, but it was said more in playful way than anything else.

And then we travelled into the past, to a moment long before I had been born, into the center of the local supercluster of galaxies where the Great Attractor was located. Which sounds colossal, but if you have at your hands technology advanced enough, such a voyage can be done in a short time and doesn’t even look that big anymore. It’s like travelling with our car to the next city. How often do you think about the fact that it may have taken people in the Middle Ages days, what we do in hours routinely? Still, some of the projections Bob created to give me an idea how fast we moved and where we were, were really marvellous.

“We’re not alone anymore,” said Bob. He projected a sphere with a diameter of a meter, and small point beside it. “We’re the small speck beside it,” he said.

“It looks like the timeship of a member of the Chronology Protection Authority,” said Suicidal Mick to me. I called him that to differentiate between us. “Only that it looks like a twisted, inverted version.” Suicidal Mick shrugged, “I don’t think he is a member of the Chronology Protection Authority.”

Suddenly a voice filled our heads; a voice that sounded like its user had been in the nuthouse for a long, long time.

inDeED I’Am NoT. mY nAMe is THE MANY FRACTIONED ONE. i aM frOM thE CHRONOLOGY DISRUPTION CORPS. EVerY tIMeLIne is OUrs to PLaY with. EvERy MegA-TiMeLINe wilL fALL bEFoRe OUr powEr. We crUsh evERy reSIStance. There Is NO FUTURE. ThERe is No MeaNING. ThERE Is no TIMe. ONLy US. onlY us. US. uS.

This went on for some time. “It’s trying to infect us,” Bob said. “But we’re safe. The virus is transmitted over the communication channels, but he is also open to exploitation from us. I might have a chance to infiltrate his system.”

While Bob tried to infiltrate the timeship of the mad thing or whatever it was, Suicidal Mick and I had to listen to more of its hogwash. After some time I was sure that it was indeed completely mad, but that was probably what saved us. If it had been sane, it would have observed that its virus didn’t work on us. Or we were just too small to been seen as a threat.

Some time later it stopped gibbering and the gigantic timeship vanished.

“Did you get anything,” I asked Bob.

“More than enough. I was able to break into his databases.”

“So, who was he?” my double asked Bob.

“He’s a member of the Chronology Disruption Corps, like he said.”

“But I never heard of them.”

“Understandable, because they are from another mega-timeline. It seems that there exists countless other mega-timelines, and each of them harbours the same number of individual timelines. And like the individual timelines, the mega-timelines are alternates or parallels of each other; they branch sometimes, and feed back into themselves or other mega-timelines.

“In many mega-timelines something like our Chronology Protection Authority has formed; in others nothing like it ever existed and the Omega Point Strongholds of the individual timelines are at war with each other.

“In other mega-timelines no individual timeline has ever gave birth to life at all. And then there are mega-timelines like the one from which the Chronology Disruption Corps stems from. These harbour something like the antithesis of the Chronology Protection Authority. It’s as if all intelligent life on the individual timelines of such a mega-timeline goes mad when their universes collapse. They see the Omega Point Strongholds and the whole system of timelines and mega-timelines as the ultimate prison with no escape. And so they don’t want to protect time, they search for a way to destroy everything and meanwhile spread as much chaos and destruction as possible. If there’s no future for them, they think, then there should be no future for everyone. They want to commit suicide and take everyone with them. They want to erase creation in such a way that it will be as if it had never existed.”

“Shouldn’t they have already succeeded?” I asked. “It looks like as if they are the only ones who found a way to travel in mega-time. Who could stop them now?”

“Well, they don’t think that it stops with mega-timelines. If there are countless mega-timelines, then these are embedded into something of a higher order of time, call it giga-time. And maybe it goes on, countless giga-timelines that are themselves embedded into something of a higher order of time. But the members of the Chronology Disruption Corps are very sure that there is an upper boundary. They want to reach it, and from there go back to the real point of creation of the whole system, something the call the Source. And then they want to erase everything, unmake it.”

“And what can we do to stop them?” I said.

“Not much, apart from following them,” Bob said. “I have learned enough about their technology to mask us and appear as one of their smaller utility ships. We can travel with them piggy-back, but not much more.”

Which we did. From here on my story may sound increasingly surreal, if it hasn’t already. Bob masked the T-Globe, and then we moved a little backwards in time and went together with The Many Fractioned One to the meeting point of the Chronology Disruption Corps.

There we remained with the rest of the fleet, their twisted and insane looking timeships, until they cracked the barrier to giga-time travel. Then they cracked tera-time travel. At one point I stopped counting the orders of time, the layers we had cracked. We just moved with the whole fleet, tried to learn as much about them and their technology as possible and remain hidden. And then they cracked the last layer. They called it hyper-time. And then we moved backward in hyper-time, back to point were everything had begun, to the Source.

In all this time we had travelled with them, we had learned much about them. To understand their technology, the science that was behind it, we had to change ourselves slightly. Human brains are limited, and even Bob had his limits.

Slowly we had overtaken our hosts, The Many Fractioned One, uploaded our minds into his data matrix, reconfigured our minds, expanded them, again and again. We still had no way of stopping the Chronology Disruption Corps by force, only one ship against millions of others, it was impossible. And slowly we moved toward our final destination, the Source.

“What do they want to do?” I said to my double. He had chosen to study the communications of the Chronology Disruption Corps, and to make sense of their plans.

“They think there might be a slight imbalance at the Source, a small chance that the whole system of hyper-time and every chronology that is embedded into it could be destabilized. This is what they want to exploit. Exploit the imbalance, amplify it, until the whole system destroys itself. There would be no future, no present and no past. There wouldn’t be anything.”

“And now,” Bob said. “Do we want to watch the end of everything, or do we want to stop them?”

I looked at them and the said: “The way I see it, even if we find a way to stop what they’re doing, it won’t accomplish anything. They want to rewrite the information in the Source to destroy all of creation. If we change whatever they’re doing; we’re not only saving hyper-time, but them with it. And then they can destroy us, and after that proceed with their original plans.”

“Do you have any idea what we could do?” said my double.

“I know what I’m doing now,” said Bob. “Wallowing in misery. The end of everything is near, my end is near. Which is even worse.”

Apart from Bob’s antics, yeah, I might have an idea. “Temporary arms of individual timelines that have been created because manipulations of the timelines feed back into the main timeline after the timeline repair mechanisms have smoothed over the manipulations and repaired the chronology. Only in very rare cases are they unable to repair what has happened, and the timeline splits. We know that higher orders of time, mega-timelines, giga-timelines, tera-timelines and so on, all behave in a similar manner, apart from the fact that there are no timeline repair mechanisms on these levels. It should be easy to make them split.”

“I can’t see how this will help us,” Bob said.

“You’ll see. There is one and only one reason why they’re insane, all of them, the whole Chronology Disruption Corps. They have come from the Omega Point Strongholds at the end of their timelines. They think that time has ended. I’ll change that.”

And that was what I did, when they attempted to erase all of creation. I changed the program they transmitted to the Source. It began slowly at first, a small crack appeared, and then slowly the hyper-timeline began to split. And then those two began to split. And faster and faster it happened, eight hyper-timelines, sixteen, thirty-two and on and on it went.

The timeships of the Chronology Disruption Corps were shook like leaves in a storm; some lost control of their position and disappeared somewhere on the newly born hyper-timelines. But a sizeable contingent held position, and I knew we were lost. They would find us, stop us, and then destroy everything. They were still insane, after all.

And then something happened. The best way I can describe it, is that something or someone activated a firewall around the Source. I tried to access the core program of reality again, and was blocked. I tried some other ways, and was still blocked.

“I think we’d better leave,” I said to Bob and my double, after I had told them about the firewall. “The Chronology Disruption Corps won’t be happy after they find out what has happened. And we’re the most likely target for their anger, if we remain here.”

“But what did you do, that the hyper-timelines split like they did?” Bob said, after we had left.

“That’s simple,” I said. ”All the individual timelines all over the hyper-timeline were similar; they had nearly all the same matter density, the same elementary particles, the same physical forces, the same cosmological evolution. I modified the Source in such a way, that instead there being only one form of basic individual timeline that followed all the same laws of physics, I added a program to the core reality that randomly changed the physics that were applied to the individual timelines.

“In some, gravity will be stronger; in others, there will be more than four forces. Some of these individual timelines will only last seconds; others, ten times as long as the old timelines; and somewhere among all these possibilities, there will be one timeline that has a set of physics that will make it last forever, ever growing, expanding forever, one timeline where no halt state will ever be achieved, where entropy doesn’t win.”

Boundless space and time, an open future, that was what I had tried to achieve when I rewrote the core reality. And then we had witnessed how something or someone had sealed the Source against any further intrusion, any further programming. Or at least that was what I had told the others, Bob and my double.

Everyone knows that a programmer always leaves some backdoors behind. In time I would come back and see if one of them could breach the firewall around the Source from the inside. Maybe I could analyze the firewall and find out who was behind it. Maybe hyper-time hadn’t been really the top-most level of the whole structure of layered time and there were beings who looked over us down here.

Who knows? Only time will tell.

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