Jackrabbit Joe squinted into the shimmering waves of heat rising from the barren frontier landscape. They were near the edge of what was possible— for Joe, anyway.

Time travel had been invented a hundred years earlier, and people promptly set out to destroy everything that came before. As the certain past was flooded with more potential energy than was possible, paradox feedback loops were created. Countless bubble realities split off into endless moments that eradicated themselves through their own recreation.

It was impossible to know how long the temporal war raged. Time became meaningless, and history became a dream.

Eventually, power began to consolidate until the Big Three had gained enough influence to control the distant past. Those three were, of course, Banks, Government, and Religion. Together, they forced stability on as much history as their influence could reach. The distant past still changed, but now it only changed in the ways the Big Three wanted.

Jackrabbit Joe knew, however, that, for all their power, most of their influence remained in the past. The innumerable scars left by paradoxes in the probable landscape left their future in flux. In the end, none managed to homogenize the last thirty years following the war.

Joe pulled down the bandanna covering his twitching pink nose and pulled his whiskers straight before checking his guns. “Weapons check, Kid,” he reminded his brother.

It was in that shifting frontier that Joe and his uncountable number of brothers and sisters had been born. Joe had watched more than one of them die or fade into impossibility. He wouldn’t say he was used to it, but it no longer surprised him, and he’d come to see the necessity.

Cottontail Kid was the nineteenth of the name. Another brother he’d saved from the gluttonous maw of their deadbeat dad, Chonkers.

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Joe swore under his breath at the thought of that monster. It pissed Joe off to no end that he couldn’t end the bastard without risking his own origin, but, like everyone in the frontier, Pa Chonkers existed in a flux of probability.

It was just Joe’s bad luck that that probability was directly tied to the likelihood of his own continued existence. Some of the reasons for that were obvious. Joe wasn’t the product of immaculate conception for one. Neither were any of the brothers that Pa ate instead of Joe over the years. By the time Joe was old enough to defend himself, his Pa had too many possible pasts and futures to end any without reprisal, let alone a keystone event.

Not that Joe learned that lesson easily. It was what killed the first Cottontail Kid. And the next three.

Every time Joe had tried to end Mr. Chonkers, his Pa knew and was waiting. Joe finally gave up and decided to put as much distance between them as possible. Then, as though the multiverse were mocking him, his father’s possible futures crumbled without explanation. Now Joe couldn’t find a timeline in which Chonkers survived past Joe’s 8th birthday.

It was all the more infuriating because Joe’s siblings didn’t stop dying to protect him from unseen dangers. Yet, that same limited past made it increasingly difficult to steal away one of his younger kin to a possible future as Cottontail Kid.

Joe glanced over at his brother. Kid was young here in this possibility. They both were. Still, Kid was seven at most. Even Joe’s body was only in his mid-teens, barely old enough to drink.

It was enough to make a fella jealous of cats like Felix. With cats, it was only possible to tell where one life ended and another began if you knew their name. They were all named before birth, that name becoming the source of their identity rather than something as transient as a single body. It was where Joe had gotten the idea for naming his stolen siblings Cottontail Kid. They might not be immortal, but Joe fully believed that each and every cat had nine lives. So far, he’d done them one better with Kid.

“I am not paying off that fucking cat,” Joe repeated, thinking about how annoying it would be to stop Felix’s petty theft of their inheritance. He was just glad they were far enough forward in time that Pa Chonkers couldn’t get involved.