How does a person react to being put through a blender of wholly unique and awful experiences and coming out a mush of things on the other end? Blades of existential dread, physically weakening guilt, and memories of blood all stabbing and swirling and mincing me into a paste.
I’d like to know what the proper response would be. What a therapist with their neat little view of the world would explain, how it’s simple, and I should’ve just healthily released my pent-up emotions. They’d probably tell me that getting shown reality in its truest form and understanding your insignificance on a cosmic scale was a perfectly normal experience that others have been through. That it’s hard, and it will take time to heal from, but I was still beholden to act reasonably. Prescribe me some medication, and let me back into the real world outside of nicely decorated office spaces with ever-patient individuals.
Personally?I curled into a little ball on my bed and deliriously sang possibly the very worst rendition of Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville through tears, Misty eyes glued to my phone as it beamed the lyrics and music back out at me in a hushed whisper.
In my defense, there was the odd logic that, I certainly didn’t know the lyrics, and I’ve never been close to musically inclined. So, if this was a death throw or a hallucination, I shouldn’t be able to come up with functioning lyrics, even if I was just going crazy and hadn’t actually been thrown back in time. Honestly though, how much of that reasoning is retrospective is up for debate. Mostly, I just wanted to listen to some music, ignore some of the immense weight on my back for a few minutes, and untether myself from eldritch oblivion.
Jimmy Buffet was just the first thing my shaking finger hit.
“Serchin ‘fer my, mhmhm-, shaker a salt.” Lost, the lyrics provided the gap in my logic. Lost shaker of salt. My voice was a toneless muttering that only matched the vaguest of progressions, really only copying the louder and quieter sounds, completely missing pitches or any musical finesse. More the mumblings of a schizophrenic who isn’t quite sure if they’re talking to someone real than an attempt at signing. “Wast’n away again in Margaritaville.”
I probably listened to that one song about 20 to 30 times, until the opening jingle of upbeat flute music sounded like a heartbeat monitor, the only confirmation I had that I was still alive and still moving forward in time. That more Margarettavills had come and gone. It was weird, and I won’t deny that, but I genuinely didn’t know how to react and entered some bizarre default setting of mindless listening and humming.
It took probably a few hours to finally calm myself down enough to function once more like a person. I grabbed my phone and left Margaritaville, the song incidentally now cursed by association with what I just went through.
I narrowed my eyes as I looked at the date, trying desperately to figure out if the date was at all significant. Admittedly, I wasn’t good with the dates that things happened, but I knew a few key things hadn’t happened yet.
Let's discuss the end of the world, and how it happened.
The exact date is a little bit loose in my head, and there’s some academic debate over it if I remember correctly. But sometime in the year 2050, reality fractured, and the holes in the universe let something alien where it didn’t belong. Earth took its very first major hit on the 7th of January.
Most of New York was wiped off the map by a single creature that Emerged around Coney Island. Its limbs were the size of buildings, all eight of them. A gargantuan spider, whose individual fibrous hairs were like a million fused spears pointing angrily out at the world. It had eight red eyes that only seemed to convey hatred, they were sharp like rubies despite their round shapes, and they seemed to contain a kind of intelligence behind them.
Missiles, tank shells, bombing runs, napalm, white phosphorous, tear gas. Nothing worked, and finally, man resulted to our final and most terrible weapon.
The irony wasn’t lost on people, as Manhaton became one of the only places in the world to be annihilated by a nuclear weapon. The terror wasn’t lost either when the thing kept moving.
So we hit it again, then a third time.
The bombs landed within a mile of each other on Coney Island, where intelligence presumed that the creature was trying to create a nest.
The actual fireball only consumed about 3000 feet per nuke, anyone within turned into a silhouette of ash, that got wiped out by the next dropped bomb. For three miles from each center, for a total range of about six miles, the blast damage destroyed buildings, toppled skyscrapers, and pulled streets out of the ground, sewer system open like the veins of a wrist cut open. Everyone within 5 miles of any of the three bombs had intense third-degree burns, often requiring one or more amputations to survive. They were considered lucky, the heat so intense and so quick the pain nerves in their body were seared off before a signal could be sent.
An estimated 1 and a half million people were killed only an hour after the final impact.
The thing was finally dead, but the cost had almost been worse than if we had let it wreak its havoc.
The world needed a new solution, and an all-new arms race entered the world.
Adam was the one to finish it.
A similar creature emerged off the coast of Norway, from the arctic sea. This one was a snake, similarly massive, a creature that seemed like its own landmass, its body resting on the sea floor yet still poking up above the ocean as it moved towards the mainland. Its movements destroyed local ecosystems, its fangs leaked a poison that killed species of fish. The world dispaired.
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Before it could fully emerge onto land, a single man did what had required three nukes in the past. The image of Adam, an average-looking man with bright blond hair and an unassuming frame, lifting his fist high into the air, a gargantuan creature dead in the water beneath him, its towering frame looking more like terrain in the background than a creature, much less on that he had killed. Its massive gaping maw ripped open and apart, black ichor-like blood turning the waves of the coast into an inky void, only penetrated by the vision of sheer light that was his proud form.
It sent the world into a frenzy. In an intensity that had never been seen before, nor I do think it ever would be seen again, even if humanity moved forward. There was not a single person on earth who didn’t know who he was, or what he could do.
He was given more monickers and nicknames than anyone could ever properly categorize, given by different nations and peoples, but the one that stuck was Adam. Not his original name, I think that was somewhat lost, never fully revealed by anyone that knew for sure. But Adam stuck. The first man, the origin, the one who emerged from Eden.
He was revered like a god, he probably was one to some people. He was one to me in a lot of ways. I discovered my power before he became known for his, but it was only after I saw him and what he could do, that I gained the motivation to reveal myself to the world as well.
His existence seemed to usher in the era of superpowered people and their abilities, or more accurately, everyone's superpowers. It seemed achingly slow yet happened all at once at the same time.
Every single person had a power.
Now, the powers were spread out over all of humanity, and like I said, it came from a finite source and was divided. But if what I’ve said about Adam hasn’t already made this clear, the power spread was not even. The vast majority of people were somewhat useless, with powers that were more like unique traits. Making perfect coffee no matter how poor the ingredients are, being able to clean liquids up through a rag twice as fast, and being able to eat plastic. Things like that. Then, people like me could manipulate time.
It was plainly unfair.
Society didn’t really have time to catch up with how fast things were changing. It was bizarre in a sad way, to see how many people spent the days before their impending doom working office jobs and posting things on social media. I don’t even know what I think they should’ve done just that it was strange, how no one really seemed to be able to conceptualize that the end was just years away.
Now though, I was back in time, back before Adam died, back before the chosen few of humanity, those seemingly decided by divine means to be the ones to bring humanity to salivation had all fallen. Now, it was my turn to be that savior.
The thought had me throwing up in my bathroom toilet.
Though, admittedly, that might’ve been the vertigo, dehydration, emotional exhaustion, and extra lunacy I brought onto myself from so much time spent in Margaritaville. I had gone from killing all of my closest friends to humanity's only chance at survival.
A bit of time spent throwing up and crying was probably for the best, and I challenge anyone who says otherwise.
I pulled my pale and shaking body up and staggered still clothed into my shower, throwing the nozzle on high. Calming torrents of water hit me instantly, even the initial cold was a deeply refreshing and calming feeling. I caught my breath, hunched over and leaning on one of the shower's boxed walls, panting and wheezing.
The deep tension in my body, like a gnarled root system had pierced into my body and twisted itself up, slowly untangled and relaxed. I started to become aware of my power once again, it was resting in the back of my mind, and it too had a knot tangled up inside of it, my ability twisted into itself.
Water was streaming down my hair, onto my cheek, and down my face, a little bit getting into my still-open mouth as I continued my calming breaths. I focused on the knot and tried to relax and unwind it, not quite sure what it was.
I slipped.
Not my body, which remained hunched against the cool tile walls of my shower. No, it was my mind that slipped out and away, past my body and into the timeline of the world once more. My own timeline more specifically.
Every person and thing has one, as far as I know. The way time works for me is something like a sweater. Every individual thing is a thread, and it all weaves together into one thing. Displacing or moving around one thread isn’t going to mess things up, which is why I was able to use my power normally.
Reversing all of time as I had done, likewise wasn’t too bad, since I just moved the sweater itself.
This was more like finding a thread and tracing it with my finger, seeing where it led, where it came from.
And so of course, since I was following my thread, there could only really be one place that I found myself.
New York City, minutes after the third bomb dropped.
I saw a young teenager with my face, desperately clawing at a pile of rebar and concrete. Like a great mace’s head, the spiked exterior and vaguely round pile I was trying to upheave. I saw my 15-year-old self sobbing and screaming, his clothes torn up and dust caking him and everything around him. His face wasn’t even able to be pale under the layer of thick gray dust.
I don’t think it’s hard to guess who was under that rubble, who I was trying so hard to claw out, my fingernails getting clawed into thin stubs, my fingers bleeding as I grabbed and gripped rebar with my bare hands, trying to upheave hundred-pound chunks of debris.
Streams of people passed by, more like a liquid than a collection of individuals, all taking the path of least resistance away, upstream, past the blast and the monster from hell. I don’t think any of them even looked at me.
My power went off for the first time, and I stumbled forward as the piece I was holding vanished, temporarily up in the air where it had been, once a chunk of a building's support column. I could see the way my younger self didn’t even take any time to register how bizarre or strange that was and just started doing it, almost rebuilding a section of the collapsed skyscraper as my power triggered over and over and over again.
It wasn’t too much that covered my mom and dad, I could see that now that I was older, looking at it over again. At the time it seemed like it could’ve been Everest itself, that I had pawed away at and used my powers to force off of them.
The shockwave had sent a truck closer to the Manhattan area flying at absurd speeds, and that truck had clipped the edge of the 432 Park Ave building, and some of its top corner came off, and hit the street under it. We had been trying to get out of the city, away from the bombs and the monster. We hadn’t moved quickly enough.
Turning my head away was a deep temptation, but I think in some way that keeping my gaze fixed on the 15-year-old was important, as he finally found the two, their bodies mangled and destroyed.
He leaned down and tried to hug the pulverized forms, he tried to save them with his power but, he couldn’t. His strength was still shared by so many people, reversing the end of a timeline was impossible.
I tightened that conscious knot in my powers, and I got pulled out of the past, back to the present, or the past of the future, or, whenever now was.
Sorry, I’m not an expert in physics or time, and when now was became very difficult to understand as time went on.
But I was back in my shower, which I turned off, and in a few minutes, in a change of clothes.
It wasn’t a knot in my mind, or a tension I had from what I had done. It was a very complex weave I had to hold onto to keep everything from tearing apart. A favor from the whatever that had messed with me in the unknown realm greater than reality.
If time is a sweater, imagine that I accidentally tore a hole in it while trying to move it. The more I became aware, the more I recognized exactly what was happening and what I was doing. I was using five threads, alongside my own, to stitch the hole.
Five people, back in the past with me, that I had to keep alive to tether the world in its past state.
Damn.