Holi woke. Blinked. Wet, blurry. Soft green light. Everything green. Yellow-green. Hazy forms moved like fish in murky water. Bright murky water. Green.

A fish form swam slowly forward. A shadow in emerald depths. Closer - not a fish. A darkness moving closer. A man, not fish. Face of a man looming from green sea. Close - peering. Holi blinked. The face smiled.

Holi blinked again, tried to clear the blurriness. She thought that she should be afraid, but all she felt was quiescent. Not afraid, not moving. She became aware that she wasn’t able to move and yet still she wasn’t afraid. Maybe she had been drugged.

Her eyes, she could move her eyes. She looked to her right, blinked and found a moment of clarity. A room of clinical modernity. A huge upright tube - that midget in it. Suspended in a big tube of green liquid. The thing just floated there, weightless.

At the periphery of her vision, another tube. Plastic or metallic, with a glass panel curving across the front, full of yellow-green fluid. This tube was between the one with the midget and... Realisation cut through the veil of her stupor like the spasm of an electric jolt. She too floated weightless - body and mind suspended in a capsule of deepest yellow-green. ‘Cry o-chamber’ letters said on the midget‘s tube. She was floating in one too. Should she be crying? Panicking? Yet she experienced only serenity. How was she breathing? She was breathing? Her attention was captured then by an odd sight: running across the room before her was a duck. It was pursued by a flustered man in a white coat.

*****

Rat-Elmo had been keeping out of the way, hiding in the shadows of what no longer felt quite like his own home. The place appeared huge to his rodent senses with all sorts of new spaces that had meant nothing to him as a human. Now, he found himself lurking under furniture, slinking along the skirting boards and lingering in dark places and corners. He had a good idea that the frightful ear-thing knew he was there. It had slunk out of the bedroom not long after materialising.

Rat-Elmo had followed it around for a while as it surveyed the house. At one point, it had hovered over a model car that Elmo had constructed, then jabbed it with its pin, making the car vanish. Rat-Elmo remembered working on the model. Then, found he could no longer recall it. Only the memory of the memory like trying to catch smoke. Was that what it did - delete things?

It seemed capable of fading into the shadows even better than himself. Like himself, it was waiting here, anticipating something.. Rat-Elmo formulated a plan of action: wait it out, keep an eye on it, follow it wherever it went, along with his past self and Holi, all the way to Yorkshire. Then go through the events of that day once more and then maybe he’d find some answers. At least he’d meet up with his idiotic future self again and sort him out - or would it be a different version of his future self?

Time passed and the day came when the trip to Yorkshire was due to happen. He watched his past self and Holi getting ready to leave the house for some last-minute shopping before their holiday began. His chest tightened as they bustled about their mundane tasks. Little did they know what was to come. He felt sorry for his alter-ego; wondered if he should warn him, spare him the pain of being where he now found himself. But did it work that way? Wasn't the future inevitable once it had happened?

He wondered whether there would always be two versions of himself now. No, not two, three - there had been a version of himself from ten minutes before his own time. There were future versions too! How many was that? Five? Six? This was terrible - he was losing count. A sickening wave of anxiety swept through him as he wondered if his mind was shrinking away, becoming just a rat. No - he had to get back, undo all of this tangle. He must. Rat-Elmo took the opportunity to venture down into the vacant kitchen and was about to try scavenging around the cupboards for gnawables when an unexpected event sent him scampering into the cover of a doorway.

From nowhere, with no warning, a figure emerged from thin air and stood looking about himself. It was Elmo; an Elmo, at least, dressed in a sleek black coat with a textured, black body-suit beneath. The rodent brain of the lurking Rat-Elmo grasped that this was surely Future-Elmo. The new arrival looked smug as he established his whereabouts; he took a chair at the kitchen table, placed a familiar, metallic, egg-shaped object before him and pulled his mobile phone from his pocket. The time traveler pressed some keys, got a connection and began a brief conversation with Roan, saying something about ‘being compromised’ and someone coming to get him.

What was going on here? Was his future self messing about with time and causality? Had this interference with the thread of time happened previously - had it always been there? An eternal loop that could never be untied once initiated? Back in the car someone had said that he had called! Rat-Elmo was determined to find out. He darted from his hiding place, leapt onto a vacant chair and thence onto the kitchen table just as the phone conversation ended. This sudden appearance startled Future-Elmo, as did the simultaneous sound of voices from beyond the front door.

The Elmo from this time was obviously returning. The only one who truly belonged ‘here’ or rather ‘now’.

"Oh-no!" Future-Elmo managed, jolting forward in panic, hands flailing, feet flying in an eruption of bony arms, spindly legs and badly cut hair. He crashed into the table, sending the phone skittering off one edge and his device careening off of the other… It fell top-first to the floor, impacting the floorboards with a muted ‘supping’ sound and vanished into suspicious air!

Rat-Elmo had only just managed to scrabble onto the table and witness these occurrences, when the life force was almost crushed right out of him with almighty intensity. A colossal, yellow-and-orange clad bottom descended onto him from a similar nowhere as that from which Future-Elmo had arrived, accompanied by a weird supping sound much louder and far deeper than the first. As blackness swept in like a tsunami, Rat-Elmo heard the door open, Holi gasp, and a deep voice exclaim, "Oh! I very say! You ring a bell!" He felt the weight pressing onto him ease somewhat as Future-Elmo attempted to force the immense, anonymous posterior away - and then it was gone as quickly as it had come with a further ‘sup’.

Through closing eyes, he caught sight of Future-Elmo leaning toward him as he began to black out, but they flicked open again in horror as their lips met. The idiot was attempting man-to-rat resuscitation. Better to die! It passed through his delirious thoughts that this hadn’t happened before - he would have remembered a dead rat. But wasn’t your life supposed to flash before you if it was time to die. Maybe he wasn’t going to die. The last thing he heard was the voice of Elmo at the door saying, “Who are you? You look like me. And what was that, that, thing? With the yellow suit and beret?” and lastly, “Are you kissing that rat?” Then the blackness was complete.

*****

Elmo 3124b was engrossed in some serious moping. He would have liked to remain a little out of things for a while following his recent botch up with the phage programme. He really couldn't be blamed. If they didn't work everyone so hard, then he wouldn't have been so tired: up at six for morning workout and breakfast, a long day of desk and computer work and then various meetings and study in the evenings.

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

The life of an Elmo was a hard one and truth be told he wasn't naturally one for working all that hard, he liked an easy time of it, a nice desk and not too much responsibility. No wonder he had taken a few quick moments to rest his eyes. A power nap was what it was. They were beneficial, that was widely recognised. Amid his miserable musings he noted that Foby 1, walking purposely ahead of him, had his hair slicked back and tightly gathered into a somewhat ragged ponytail.

"Flash jerk," he muttered, "Who does he think he is in his black leather suit and trendy, dark sunglasses?" These gripings came to an abrupt, uncomfortable end as 3124b noticed they were entering the I.T. department. Everyone knew him there! He worked with them, sat at their dinner table! Was expected to socialise with them. Now he had to take the walk of shame behind action-man here, right through the middle of them. It couldn't be worse. He felt eyes on him although no-one made actual eye contact. He sensed the disapproval, the condemnatory down-the-nose smugness of those that hadn't messed anything up. He began feeling hot, bothered. One minute they worked alongside you, quietly competing, the next they kept out of your way and whispered when you passed as though you were a rat with the plague. No one liked rats.

Foby 1 strode for the data section of the department. He was a self-confident, self-assured self. 3124b hated him already. Foby 1 - where did a name like that come from anyway? "I'll bet he loves the '1' bit. Foby 1, Foh-Bee-One," he said the words inside his head with the heaviest coating of sarcasm he could muster. What irked him most was that this cooler version of himself was just like him, yet so very 'not him'. "Foby 1," the sarcastic voice inside continued, "and I’m 3124b - not even 3124a."

"Look here," the object of his annoyance broke the silence in a commanding tone. He was standing before the computer system in the data section. "Find data streams for any subjects even remotely involved with your project whilst I set up the relevant interfaces and get cracking with the analysis systems."

"Its voice is so irritating!" 3124b grumbled inwardly as he sat at the controls.

Noticing Elmo 3124b wasn't pressing anything, Foby 1 paused, "Problem?" he enquired.

"No, there is not a problem," 3124b replied, adding silently, scathingly under his breath, "Just you."

The darker, sharper one busied himself whilst the less fashionably dark, less sartorially elegant

one tried to focus on the screens and input terminals before him. He should know this. The data streams... Had he been trained on data streams? Foby 1 seemed to notice his hesitation and remained paused, hands on hips frowning at him.

"The left one... Put in the subject codes and bring up the main menu. Look out for marker pins."

Boy, was he galling, look at him there with his girly fingers clamped around his hips in his red and black leather.

"Yes, the left one - it's this button here isn't it?" Elmo hovered his hand loosely over a range of possible targets.

"No the next one." The complacent jumped-up... how did the menu work then? This screen wasn't like the one he used. Elmo tried to look like he knew what he was doing. It looked like new software. He never got new software. Not till everyone else had been saying how good it was and then gone quiet because they were using it all the time. Then he got it, when it was old software. How could he be expected to keep an eye on everything if all he had was...

"If the gear's a bit unfamiliar maybe you could leave that and just patch me up to the Intervention Control Room."

"To the what was that?" 3124b enquired cringing at his own ignorance.

Now Foby 1 turned and looked over one shoulder, an eyebrow raised as if anyone ought to be able to do that simple task.

“Tell you what,” he offered “Why don’t you grab a couple of splitter nodes from the resource bank. Can you do that?”

3124b wanted to grab that la-de-dah ponytail and strangle him with it. He felt hot, his collar was tight, a vein throbbed in his temple.

“Sure,” was all he said, as he slouched off, muttering to himself in the direction of the resource bank.

When he returned, Foby 1 gestured for him to sit, then placed a sensory input set on his head. Mr. Super-Efficient already had his on.

“Okay, drop the shades and we’ll take a look-see.” Even the pitch of the voice was frustrating, deeper than everyone else’s. Surely that was fake, and what was that accent? Nobody else round here had an accent like that. It had to be put on. Foby thumbed a switch.

Instantly, the confines of the data room were replaced with the virtual freedom of the visualisation interface that Foby 1 had so deftly connected to the head set. Here you could arrange raw data into 3D representations. The efficient one had chosen to display his source material as a tangle of glowing strands. They looked like jellyfish tentacles, undulating and waving in the flow of some unseen current. Foby 1’s on-screen representation of himself wandered among the strands and filaments examining each and searching for who-knows-what. Smart little oik.

3124b pretended also to be interested in what he saw. As he gazed around at the undulating, luminous amber-orange forms, he realised that they were actually quite beautiful in a weird kind of way. They reminded him of nerve systems or drifting seaweed, tapering tubes that gently curved and flexed.

He found himself meandering among the threads, admiring their hypnotic curling. One caught his attention with its effulgent colour. He went closer, peering at an unexpected movement inside one of the tubes. He wondered if he would be in there somewhere. Was his own tenuous thread of existence to be found within this image of tidal time?

"Stay with me, can you do that?" The voice made 3124b start. Him!

Foby 1 pointed at a group of threads that ran in a bunch, like a lock of red-hot fat hair or maybe more like long, thin sea anemone tentacles waving in a slow-motion rock pool, no they reminded him of spaghetti....

"Are you listening?" the superior tone came again.

“As you know, the phage notes irregularites in dreams, it drops a marker pin then assesses. If the irregularity in question shouldn’t be there it deletes it - a bit slow, but efficient. If it got out of a dream, someone helped it take a physical form, it would likely keep marking, keep deleting… Here are the diverging timelines, from 2009. Your phage appears to have infected each of them."

"My phage?" 3124b said out loud, then just to himself, "Oh now it's my phage. That's just great. Why isn't it your phage? Or 2's phage?"

Foby 1 frowned and continued, "Yet it seems to have made a jump here in this thread..." He was leaning in close to one of the beaming spaghetti tendrils, studying a nub that had formed on one side. It was leaking slightly, a warm, amber-yellow, viscous liquid that Foby 1 took care not to touch.

"Hmmm,” he pondered, narrowing his eyes, “Once we catch them we'll have to cauterise most of these."

"Cauterise?" Elmo 3124b found himself asking audibly and as his brain hurried, stumbled to keep up, "Them? What do you mean, them?"

"To your first question: cut off the unproductive time-lines, sever them and seal them. To your second..."

Even this efficient way of answering his flood of questions was annoying. The Foby-Elmo-One, the wonderboy, destined for greatness...

"...yes them. Since your phage entered the flow of time prior to the divergences you see before you; when time split into these different possibilities, different realities; your phage multiplied. There is, of course, one version in each timeline."

"More than one!" came Elmo 3124b's awed gasp. "But wait, we can't interfere with other realities. That's not possible."

“How do you think someone sent that rogue Elmo back to 2009? Someone interfered well and good there, didn’t they? How were we able to get Holi in here? How do you think UnKnown World Mistletoe got herself here and that bunch of wretched, little midgets got into Yorkshire to steal our device from First-Elmo? Interfering with other realities seems to have been going on for a while.”

"But sever? Cauterise? Won't that kill off anyone living in those realities?"

"They are all just copies, multiple versions of the same thing. If we erase the duplicates it's not exactly killing anyone is it?"

3124b imagined himself being erased. He probably would be wouldn't he. They'd keep this... this... thing rather than him wouldn't they? Well who wouldn't? Who wouldn't want the better version? Still, he didn't fancy being erased.