A man was standing on a rooftop and watched the horizon in a world of ashes and darkness. His eyes cold and void of emotion. Anger and hatred burning in his heart.
“These men and women of the world are fools who do not understand the world they live in. I tried to warn them time and time again, and yet they always end up turning the world into a wasteland.” He sighed.
“Tidanos, it’s time.” A man in a lab-coat popped up on his mind device to inform him.
“I guess it is. I’ll be there in a few minutes.” he answered.
He turned around and headed for the lab where the chronal mind relocation machine was located.
Tidanos had been born into a well off family in the 21st century and had, just like many other people, received the benefits of the developed technology and society. Even though life had its challenges, because everything looked fine on the surface, humanity had great prospects and people were hardworking, the future would be a bright and prosperous one. Or that’s what he, just like so many other people, thought the future would be like. But soon reports started coming in of people going mad en masse. Insanity spread like wildfire and the majority of the population started fighting violently with each other, countries started wars for no apparent reason and the world erupted into chaos. The most terrifying thing about it all was that no one knew or understood why and thus no one was able to stop it.
The underground powers of the world were forced to join forces and many scientists and experts of various fields desperately went together to find a solution, but to no avail. They tried all kinds of treatments and tried fixing the problem by artificially shutting down people’s mental aggression, but in turn their bodies started to quickly deteriorate and have all kinds of ailments. Even worse, the people trying to cure them were also affected, resulting in the only practical treatment being euthanasia. With humanity on the brink of extinction and complete societal collapse, there was little hope. Yet there was still one hope left, time travel. If it was possible to send people back in time, then maybe they could prevent all of this from happening.
After successfully creating a temporal relocation machine, Tidanos was chosen as one of the candidates together with 9 other agents to rewrite history from the past. They were going to travel about a hundred years back in time, to the 21st Century. The organization, all the scientists and engineers and everyone involved saw this invention as a great achievement and had great pride in their hearts for the historic moment of the first time travel. However, the people selected as time travel candidates, also known as time agents, weren’t that impressed even though they appeared to be.
The reason for this was that this wasn’t the first time or perhaps one should say the first timeline in which they did this. In fact, they had done this in multiple other previous timelines. Tidanos had personally time traveled maybe hundreds if not thousands of times. He had long since stopped keeping track of it at this point. Even though their bodies were currently around 120 years of age, their minds had experienced thousands of years of time. Of all the agents, he had been there the longest. Being a man of principles and having an indomitable spirit, he had endured far longer than the others. Most people were only willing to go back a couple of times, as there were only so many times normal people were willing to experience humanities downfall. Those who experienced it too many times would usually end up losing their sanity in one way or another.
That this had happened many times before was a secret that the agents had not revealed to the higher-ups or anyone else. It would just make things difficult for them and wouldn’t be able to change things regardless. Other than him, the other agents had basically given up at this point. The other agents who kept following along were basically psychopaths, super sadists and at least part masochists in nature. They could be said to not only lack sympathy but were virtually immune to suffering and should probably belong in a supermax prison for the mentally insane. The only reason they were able to mentally endure seeing humanity’s downfall over and over again, without going insane, was that they simply didn’t care that much what happened to it. As long as they could continue to travel back in time in each new timeline, they couldn’t care less.
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Tidanos had tried getting these kinds of people off the team, but as no other of the capable candidates in the club of regressors were willing to go anymore and it could lead to him compromising his one chance to prevent the doom of humanity, he had no choice but to tolerate them for all this time. Moreover, these kinds of people were like cockroaches. Even if you killed them, they would just come back in the next timeline. Even if he eradicated them properly by also killing them in the past, something which he had done on multiple occasions, others would simply come and take their places in the team. He had basically given up on getting rid of their kind at this point and chose to stick with these individuals because they at least left him alone and allowed him to do his own thing compared to some other people who chose to be a hindrance to him.
Moreover, it was difficult to find someone else competent enough to travel back in time so he had no choice but to tolerate it. He could only kill so many people in the past without drawing attention to himself. It was difficult to fix it and he had other things to worry about. It also came with its own risks. In order to ensure he was able to continue searching for solutions to fix the world, he had left them alone for the time being. But now, this time, things were finally going to change. After all these times he had finally figured out a way to prevent his world from turning into a post-apocalyptic wasteland. In order to do that, he was going to have to dispose of his messed up colleagues, something he had also all planned out. All there was left to do was to put it into action.
When he arrived at the lab there were only some scientists there as well as the 9 other agents. In order to fool the higher ups that they were dependable, the other agents kept up their image as usual which included being punctual at this moment in every timeline. He knew them well. He looked around and saw one of the scientists he had colluded with and could tell by his gaze that everything went according to plan and that everything was ready. All the agents, including Tidanos, strapped into the machine that was going to transfer their minds and memories back in time. This particular machine couldn’t send people's bodies back in time but only the minds and memories of him and his fellow travelers, a process they called mental time travel. What it did was sending them back into the bodies of their younger selves in a past moment in time.
During this process it was imperative that they were as still as possible. If they moved too much, the results could be all kinds of things from failed time travel, messing up their memories, damaging themselves in the present or go so far as critically injuring or killing their past selves in the moment in time they attempted to travel to. It was even things some of them had learnt from their own personal experience. Therefore they made sure to set it and themselves up properly. When everything was ready and they were prepared to travel and strapped in and unable to move, one of the tiles in the roof started moving. It suddenly fell down, hovered in the air and turned into a drone. Its movements were so fast that it looked like a blur. Within moments it moved around the room, fired nerve system fryers at the nine agents that killed them before they had time to react and then quickly returned to the roof and camouflaged itself as a roof tile where it had been before.
The scientists in the room, 9 of them, quickly went and took them out of their pods using assist bots and went and strapped themselves in. Many other pods with metallic cubes several meters in all dimensions also went up out of the floor. They were also connected to similar machines as the one they were using, with the biggest difference being that they were much larger in size.
When everything was ready, the AI system sounded: “10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, time travel commence.”
At that moment, everything went dark.