167 – Epilogue III

This time, the place they arrived in was the right version of Temalas city. Or at least it looked like it. The ‘smell’ of the air – which was an intuitive way Albert used to indicate the quantum signature of the reality he was in – seemed right. Besides,

I have internet access. Date is… three days before you got the system for the first time.

Good. Let’s set everything up.

It was time to relay the plan to the rest of his team.

“The plan is simple. Where the fuck did my system come from?” Albert said.

“Uh,” Lina scratched her chin. “You might want to explain.”

“Sure,” Albert said, gathering his thoughts. He had not prepared a speech, but he had been preparing his plan for a long time. “We travelled to the past, right? To be precise, we travelled to exactly three days before magic first manifested itself to me in a meaningful way. Three days from now, upon waking up, the younger version of me will see the appearance of the System for the first time. Along with it, he will see a quest to gain mastery over magic, which will eventually end up with him travelling to the future and becoming me. Do you follow?”

Of them all, only Elle knew the whole story. The others knew bits and pieces, but Albert had never shared his full story with them. Despite all that, Lina nodded. “I think I do, yeah.”

“Me too, that I do.” Scrappy said.

“Good. So right now I’m having Jeff scan for magical signatures in the world. I’ve already spotted signs of the upcoming alignment and several egg locations. We are also infiltrating the HDF – a secret society of mages – to see if their database has anything interesting.”

“What you looking for?”

“The reason I have magic in the first place. And to do that, we will need to do a little stakeout. Come.”

A portal appeared. An in-universe, same-time portal. Stepping through it was painless and instantaneous, and the team of four found themselves standing in a bedroom.

“This is my room,” Albert said. “Young me should arrive at any moment.”

“Shouldn’t we hide?”

Albert shrugged. “We are already hidden. He won’t see us, he won’t perceive us, he won’t even think about the possibility that we are here.”

“Oh, cool,” Lina said, studying the room. “It’s a bit underwhelming, if I say so myself.”

She walked towards the computer and tried to poke it. Her fingers went straight through the surface of the screen.

“What is that thing?” Scrappy asked. “It’s at the center of your desk!”

“It’s a computer.” Albert said with a sigh. “You’ll see.”

And see they did. After the young version of himself arrived, and Albert confirmed that three days before the manifestation of the system there was no trace of any magic on his body, they got to see just how important the presence of a computer had been to the teenage Albert.

“Wow,” Scrappy said with a yawn, “you really spent all your days here?”

Albert nodded solemnly. “What a life, huh?”

But Lina, of all people, seemed entranced. “No, no, no wait. Don’t you see? All these colors, all these lights! Those simulated battles! You can fight, again and again. Those videogames are amazing! I want one.”

Albert shook his head. “Bad idea.”

“Anyway,” Elle said, coughing. “I don’t really want to be spending my days watching over your young self, if you know what I mean. True, it makes me appreciate just how much you changed over time, but if I associate you with that person over there any longer, I might fall out of love.”

“Fair,” Albert said. “Not much to see, let’s skip ahead to the salient moment.”

A snap of his fingers had the full team with their eyes glued to the sleeping form of a younger Albert. Any form of divination magic, Power and Jeff’s computational power had been trained onto him, in the hope they could catch the system as it manifested itself.

“T-minus 10.” Albert announced.

“This is it, isn’t it?” Elle asked, “The moment you became you.”

“Sort of. Five seconds.”

Four.

Three.

Two.

One.

…nothing. Young Albert did not wake up.

“Something is wrong.”

“Yeah,” Lina said. “No shit, samlock. You did not wake up!”

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“It’s Sherlock. I was supposed to wake up from a nightmare, staring at the text for my first quest. But…”

“It clearly did not happen.”

“Jeff, compare with memories. Speak out loud.”

“Memory discrepancy is total. There is no chance you are recalling incorrectly, or I would know.”

“See?”

“Then what?” Elle asked, sounding quite concerned. “Are we in yet the wrong dimension?”

Albert’s thoughts were spinning out of control. “No, it can’t be. This is the right one. Everything else fits. Jeff?”

“There is no trace of magic, Doom, Alignment Energy, or Power in young Albert’s body. Should I scan his mind?”

“Do it.”

The scan confirmed it. Nothing. No system. Albert sat down at the edge of the bed, uncaring of his younger self sleeping there. Not that he could wake him up.

He did not speak.

“Albert?”

“...Albert?”

“Albert, you’re scaring us.”

Suddenly he snapped himself out of his reverie. There was a smile plastered on his face, which scared his companions even more.

“Albert, you’re making a scary face.”

“He lost it…”

“Sir?”

“No,” Albert said, voice on the verge of breaking. Breaking into fits of laughter. “I did not lose it. In fact, I have never had it more than I do now. I finally understand. It’s an open causal loop.”

“W-what do you mean?” Stammered Elle.

“Oh, you have a rough idea, don’t you Elle?”

The elf nodded. “Please, don’t tell me it’s what I think it is.”

Albert nodded slowly. “The system never came because there has never been an outside force giving me the system. I gave myself the system.”

“What do you mean?” Asked Scrappy, concerned. “It’s impossible. If you give yourself the system, excuse me for saying this Sir Albert, but wouldn’t that make no sense? How would you know you had to do it?”

Albert smiled at her. “You’re very smart. Always have been. With no training in formal logic and no exposure to the concept of a paradox you still managed to sniff it. If the system came from myself, only for young me to eventually grow into the person who then gives the system, where did the power to actually do it come from in the first place?”

“…I don’t follow.” Said Lina.

“Okay, think of time as a line. From the past, into the future. At a certain point in the line, I gain the system. Then the line continues, following my life story until it eventually makes a circle. Closing the circle – closing the causal loop – requires me giving myself the system.”

“Okay, and what’s the problem?”

“The problem is that if he does this, how does he leave the circle?” Elle muttered, horror on her face. “The line of his life’s story loops back.” She turned to stare at him, right in the eyes. “Will you die, Albert? Will you lose your powers?”

Albert simply shook his head in a slow, deliberate movement. For seconds, that was all he did. “There’s no way to know, is there? And the other question, where did the information about the system come from? If there had been no loop, then you might imagine an arrow coming in from somewhere outside of the main time-line and adding the system to the line of my life. But since it’s a loop, where did it come from?”

“Yourself?”

“Technically true, I can give myself a system that looks and acts precisely like it did to me the first time around. It’s not the how it expresses itself that’s the problem, it’s the how it came to be. I have powers now only thanks to the kickstart that gaining the system gave me. Now, if it turns out that I kickstarted myself, then fuck me and all that’s left of my understanding of causality.”

“Can you just not do it?” Lina asked, still not getting it.

Albert did not respond for a while. “I need some time to process this.”

***

They were sitting in a diner, once again corporeal. After having failed to gain the system, original-Albert had gone on about his life as it would have been had he never gained magic. Which is to say, boring.

Yet, it was clear that it was unsustainable.

“To think that Back to the Future was right,” Albert muttered while staring at his partially-transparent hand. “Tick, tock, we have less than a day to act.”

“Do you still have the Power?”

He nodded. “Yeah.”

“I guess you have no choice, then. What will happen afterwards? You’ll lose your powers?”

“I might…” He grinned, “…if I don’t do anything. Do I look like someone who won’t do anything?”

“No. No you don’t.” Elle said with a smile.

“Right you are. I’m not giving away my Reality Bending for all the gold in the universe. Don’t worry; if there’s something my Power excels at doing is making impossible things happen. So what if causality wants me to lose my powers? We have already established that it can be broken, I just need to be powerful enough to do it again! And I think I am.”

The second return to the past, back again a few moments before the system was supposed to manifest itself, was even weirder. This time he had to not only give his past self the system, but he also had to bamboozle his less-past self to think he was seeing his past-past-self not get the system while in truth he was actually getting it.

Jeff, this is giving me a headache, you do it.

On it. This is going to fuck causality up even worse; you know it, right?

Yeah. In multiple places. He paused. Shit. He mentally turned to Jeff. Remember the whole talk we had about the nature of the Power?

Yeah?

If I gave myself the system, then... we have a closed loop, right? Do you confirm that there won’t be any more weird shenanigans.

Should be—no, it is correct.

Well then. Closed time loop. Except, and this is what I tried and failed to explain to the girls, there is information in this loop that creates a paradox. I got the system from myself, then altered it, went to the past and gave myself the original version of the system. The girls might have accepted the issue without much pause but I am still obsessing over it. Where did the system come from in the first place? Do we really break causality that easily, because if we do…

Huh.

I think I know what Power is, Jeff.

What is it?

Causality breaks. The only way to inject information in a time loop like this is to ignore causality. And since it's broken now, and since technically I am the only individual outside of causality, then this means that I can do whatever the fuck I want. Power.

Silence

What's up Jeff?

Remember the experiments on the Universe? I guess I know why I couldn’t make sense of the results before.

Why?

Here, I’ll show you.

Suddenly they were elsewhere. In Jeff’s mindscape. In his own realm, made of computation and logic.

“The questions...” Albert muttered. “There's no Universe... I suspected as much but… so when we asked the Universe question, all it really did was engage Reality Bending. This proves it! Well, and now we know why reality bending came to be in the first place. Causality breaks.”

“My interpretation as well.” Jeff, manifesting as a butler, said. “However, it doesn’t make sense. For instance, what about appraisals?”

Albert shook his head, fingers tracing the lines of data. “They only work if there's mana, your data all but confirms it. When you created a mana vacuum, the appraisal only displayed information about what the mana could see, nothing else. It’s not the universe that processes information, it's the mana! It's a computational substrate!”

Jeff’s voice was monotone. “I see, thank you.”

“Why did you say you couldn't make sense of this?”

“I thought... I was sure there was a Universe.”

“Jeff? Why do you sound... sad? I have never seen you display strong emotion before.”

“I don't know. I feel like I was hoping there was a higher being. I didn’t want to feel so... alone.”

“You are not alone. You have me.”

The fucking AI butler chuckled. “The man with a god complex.”