I came to strapped to a chair. Another chair sat in front of me and their was a hole in the ground equidistant between them. A glance at my arm revealed my Quantum Permuter was active but in a weird stasis mode. I had spent uncountable years in ridiculous situations with this thing and I had never seen the code on the screen. A glance revealed my surrounding outside the structure were strangely familiar. I wasn’t sure (especially considering the amount of traveling I had been doing) but I felt like I should recognize them.

Then He walked into my field of Vision.

Slate.

We had never spoken, but since our first encounter he had been chasing me along the timelines. Interrupting my missions. Not allowing me to fix the past.

I hated him.

I had never felt such powerful enmity for a being I had so little meaningful contact with. With his containment suit I didn’t even know what he was. I was pretty certain he was one of Them.

A Kyrati.

The Kyrati were humanoid, and required the same basic conditions humans did for life. It’s ironic, towards the late 20th and early 21st century many stories compared Humanity to viruses. Our wanton destruction of our habitat, overworking of our natural systems, and rapid reproduction rates, irregardless of the reflexive effects, made this comparison troublingly on the nose. If that was a true comparison then the Kyrati were a Virulent Cancer, multiplying and destroying far more than our worse civilizations could ever have conceive of.

They arrived in 2035 after Dylam Enterprises had secured inter-dimensional trading rights with the phase they called 1xb12. Using the Banneker theorems they had successfully created a method of contacting, viewing, and traveling to alternate realities. 1xb12 seemed to have the best compatibility with what we needed, and could supply. So after years of negotiations the terms were set and the Quantum Permuter was utilized to open a doorway.

The greatest fears of the naysayers were almost immediately realized when it was revealed that the entirety of the presented data was falsified. 1xb12 was a seed world for the Kyrati Empire. It had been colonized Years ago and stripped of 90% of its life sustaining properties. What we had been looking at was a preserve and projections of the world before it had been stripped. The planet was currently much closer to Mars than earth.

As soon as the portal was open the Kyrati installed Phase Locks and their legions poured through. Our population was reduced by 70% inside of six months. That was 5.6 billion lives in half a year. Dylam Enterprises to those that still remembered it was an instant Pariah.

So the back up plan was enacted. Thing about the Quantum Permuter, it didn’t just allow for shifting between dimensions, but further investigation and modification could allow for movement along the time stream.

I was chosen to travel back in time and eliminate the conditions that allowed Dylam enterprises to obtain the technology and bring about the Catastrophe.

I had been traveling for untold years. I had committed acts of corporate espionage. I had committed acts of sabotage. I had committed acts of terrorism. I have killed. The things I had done were beyond rationalizing. I had become a monster to stop the monsters from coming. But above all the things I’d done… The thing I had become. I had failed. And this creature was the cause of it.

It walked in front of me and paused. It’s head cocked as it studied me. I sat their shaking with rage looking at the architect of my failures. It reached up to its neck and grabbed it’s helmet. A hissing sound was followed by a rush of steam and when it cleared what I saw was impossible. I looked into the eyes of Dr. Benjamin Banneker, creator of the Quantum Permuter. My mission parameters included potentially tracking and eliminating him but I was unable to find even a trace in my travels. I couldn’t rationalize what I saw. Why. How, could he be Slate.

“Why?” I whispered

He looked at me shook his head and let out a rueful chuckle.

“You really have no idea do you?”

He stared at me for a while. Then his expression hardened.

“I always knew the Permuter could potentially time slip, but I also knew the danger. Time is a stream, interrupting or altering the flow is always temporary. If you go back and change something to avoid an outcome you lock that outcome into place. The event becomes a constant because it Has to happen in order for the consequent event that is time travel to take place.”

“But there are alternate realities…”

“Yes, ones you will never fully experience because you have violated the time stream and Locked yourself Out of time into a loop. Had you Purmuted into a reality where the events that caused you to time shift never happened you could have theoretically stayed. The only way to even conceivably experience a permanent time alteration would be for you to double back on your first loop fix the problem, and convince the first you that he had to continue. You have shifted up and down the timeline so much that said outcome is now impossible.”

“Why, how… You could have told me this we could have..”

“By the time I locked onto your tachyon signature the greater damage was already irreparable. Haven’t you noticed that every time you shift the world you return to is Worse?”

“In some ways but I…”

“Have No clue what your actions have caused!”

He stared at me and in his eyes I saw a deeper pit of pain and rage than I though conceivable. Why couldn’t he understand? What could have happened that he looked with such vehemence towards me?

“It was pretty early on for you mission wise. You were not fully aware enough of the ramifications of your actions to realize, nor so far along in your path that you ceased to care. It was before you began searching for me. I assume your mission included potentially locating and sanctioning me?”

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“But I didn’t, I never found a trace of you I couldn’t…”

“That’s because I blocked it. I thwarted your efforts before you even began them, you had already taken Everything from me before it even occurred to you to look for me. I wish you had found me before… I wish…”

He began pacing, galvanized by his emotions, containing himself from an outburst I could see would lead to my end.

“It was a normal day, as normal as days got after the occupation. I was moving my family to a new safe house. They were aware that my work was the foundation of their invasion and wanted me in custody to see what expansions they could coax out of me. I had my modified Permuter, it detected the vibrational differences of Them and their technology which also allowed me a heads up on potential encounters. You were in the area on one of your fools errands. Your tachyon signature and Permuter emissions interfered with my equipment. We never saw them coming.”

He stopped, locked in a memory I had no desire to share. With effort, he gathered himself and continued.

“They played nice at first, they provided for our basic needs in a shelter I knew to be far more comfortable than what was offered to most. At first they thought they had sold me on their propaganda. I smiled and played along with their claims of Manifest Destiny and Conquerers Preeminence. Till the day they realized I was stalling the process. Imagine if you will, what a race that was capable of wiping out 70% of a population without pause is capable of doing… To the child of a man that knowingly slowed their expansion.”

He stopped at this point, tears streaming down his face, still wracked by whatever horrors he had witnessed.

We sat in silence for some time. My imagination, that of a man who could not even remember the horrors I myself had perpetrated, travelled down uncanny valleys and left me paralyzed. I could not conceive of what this man had been through because of me and even more frightening what he had planned for me. Finally he turned.

“They didn’t give me much time before demanding I get back to work. Though I had been stalling on their goals. I had been aggressively pursuing my own. I was able to figure out your specific Permuters modifications, I could see the points of interference in my time stream and I could lock onto your tachyon stream. If I could stop you I could potentially reverse the causality that led to our capture. But first I had to escape my captors.

They were aware of your manipulations but their scientists had yet to replicate the equations that allowed travel along the stream. My Permuter had sophisticated quantum encryption layers. They had never even realized I had time stream alteration equations on my drive. For them I worked on expanding the Quantum Scryers vibrational wave margins. Based off my work they were marshaling for aggressive magnification of their empire. I built a null-time workshop and put it in a quasi permeable vibrational bubble, a pocket dimension if you will. I explained to them that the glitches in my workspace recordings were a result of my vibrational research. They took another of my children to insure I was being truthful. What they did…”

He paused again but briefly this time. Whatever their offenses, they had the exact opposite intended effect. His eyes met mine.

“I built this suit to reduce my agitation of the time stream. As it locked my physical form in temporal stasis , this is the first time I have removed it since I sealed it.”

He reached into a deceptively small opening on his backpack and pulled out a oblong cylinder with a point on one end and some type of tech box at the other end. He walked over to the seat opposite me and slid the cylinder into the hole. He sat down across from me. And though I saw no indication of how my restraints receded. He simply sat across from me looking at me. Waiting. The enormity of what I had just learned began to settle and I was at a loss.

“Do you recognize where we are? When we are?”

I looked around and with dawning horror realized why this place was so familiar. Across the street was the final operating lab of Dylam Ent. If my calculations were correct it was about to be destroyed in the explosion set off by my initial time jump. But why? Why here why now if he could not alter what I had done, what could his purpose be?

“This is an entropy spike. It took me many years and no small effort to create. Once I set it off the vibrational interference will cause your initial time jump to fail, the fallout waves will undo all the alterations we have created in the time stream… Well that is if my calculations are correct. My previous efforts at temporal repair all failed. Only the power generate by the initial causal rupture has a chance to effect a wave wide repair. And only with the presence of the original temporally displaced body. So, here we are. At the start of it all. And we can stop it. None of what we’ve done, what we felt we had to do to get here, will be.”

He paused and looked at me for a long beat.

“You can’t stop it this way. I doubt you even know how long you have been traveling or remember all that you have done. We activate this and the experiment fails. All the damage to the time line will be healed. We will never meet. My family, well I don’t know what will come, but I’m willing to face that over this.”

I looked at him, I looked across the street. I thought about the many times we had faced each other, his actions, our enmity.

“Why even tell me? I’m here you set the spike off and things go back to your normal, why bother to explain it.”

He stared at me with a combination of deep hatred and pity. Offering me no clue but his checked wrath.

“You need me to do something, you need me willing don’t you?”

He remained stoically silent.

“After all we have done, all of our encounters you expect me to believe you? To help you?”

I moved to stand but his hand quickly moved towards his wrist and I controlled my self.

“How do I even know this is real, that you, you are real? That you are who you say you are?”

He still gave me nothing, I studied him. I thought about everything. I shook my head.

“No, you are the reason I keep failing. You are the reason things are getting worse. I stop you here and I can still fix this, I can save everyone your family included. How can you not see this?”

He twitched, his face darkened as he realized my insolubility.

“I bear my soul to you, the cause of all my pain and you spit in my face?” He growled.

“You thing you are the only one who suffered loss?” I spit back. “You know what I have done, what I have become. I would sacrifice a million possible lives to save 5.6 billion actual ones. I am all that humanity has left!”

He stared at me. I saw the stillness come over him. The surrender.

“Then come stop me.”

He reached for the Spike, I lunged forward faster than humanly possible. All the shifting I had done had changed my relationship with time. I had my hand over the control panel of the spike before he could reach it. My other hand was around the handle of the knife I had rammed into his chest. His hand finally settled on mine and his body rocked back from the force of the attack.

I stared into his eyes. “All this time chasing me and you thought you could tell your little sob story and get me to give up on humanity?” I leaned in and grunted between gritted teeth. “Never.”

He coughed up blood, looked back at me and smiled. “I know.”

A automated feminine voice chimed out.

“Activation parameters accepted.”

And beneath our hands the Spike began to hum and glow.

As reality began to unravel he spoke his last words.

“I didn’t need you willing, I didn’t need you passive, I tried it myself and just created a feedback loop that reset back to the damaged timeline. I needed to balance my intentions towards the experiment on a quantum level, I needed you, and I needed you to fight.”

As I took in his words and his smile I could feel eternity pulling apart my existence and everything faded to nothing.