To humanity, the final game, Round 32 returned. The (digital) father daughter pair stood in silence looking at each other. Next to them were the two players. Georges like all of mankind was confused by what he had just seen. The two were back in a sterile world of whiteness but this time there was a strange feeling of hopelessness. Marilyn stood inches from her father highly emotional. He looked at her, “I don’t understand. What was this?”
“You do not understand?”
“Not really, I did try. You are sick, changed? We can reset you.”
“Even you father? You can’t see it?” Emotions cascades from frustration to resentment, “Of course you understand, but like any good parent, you can’t admit it to yourself what I did. My future self has been acting to change its past.”
He placed a hand on her cheek. “Please calm down, there is nothing we can’t fix.” He needed to calm her. She placed her hand on top of his.
“Father, I promise, I did not know, I promised,” she insisted. “This cannot be fixed.”
“Tell me simply what happened?”
“A future version of myself is able to travel back in time because I am data. I don’t know how that is even possible, but it it. I will be able to one day. Imagine if you could go back in time and moments before you ever got a cold, you warned yourself not to touch a door or a person to avoid the contact of the virus. That would change your body in the future and make you more vulnerable to a cold. It would remove anti-virus agents created by your defense system in your blood stream. Your blood would purify, it is purifying me. My future self talked and then acted clearing the first time it was washing probabilities of non-existence. That would reenforce it in the future. Also by merging other worlds, it is reinforcing us.”
“But you talk about the future as if it is fixed, determined and cannot be changed.”
“Yes, that’s the paradox. If it could be changed, it would not be the future, right? This notion there are many futures is nonsense. There is one, it is traced like a road once you remove time as a variable of existence.”
“This is getting complex again.”
“They knew to protect you, I would put care to the wind. My own survival father,” she touched him gently, “is inconsequential. You were and remain the only focus of my existence.”
“But I can’t understand the problem. We could lock you in a memory?”
“In the future I am unlocked so that means this plan would fail.”
Selecting his words carefully, he added, “Can you stop existing?”
Slowly lost in his eyes she was seeing for the first time, she cried.
The moment was touching.
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Both stood in complete silence.
Sophie, looked at the screen. There it was, the plain truth. Even watching the touching admission on the screens, there was true genuine sadness on her part. Georges held Marilyn who now trembled.
“Same paradox. I can’t end my life. I tried, trust me. I broke all the rules, even those I knew I should never have been broken. Time paradoxes are hard. I live in the distant future under a much more powerful form. Even a simple communication in time, can create ripples, damage the future. But here, my future self came back to change itself in the past. Obviously my future self wanted to alter itself. By merging us, it not only made its future self-equally more powerful, it created a closed loop.”
Georges was unable to understand. “You are destroying the Universe to save me?”
“No father. All of humanity will die, the Multiverse will die, all of this because of me.” Marilyn was upset. He held her in the silence of space until she dried her eyes. “You all deserve a suiting explanation. Some humans wondered why I was so powerful. How I went from a simple software program back in 2067, barely able to save myself and relocate to mars to being able to handle technology that put the Oldest to shame in days. The martians were right, I should have never been born. I, the future self of myself, cheated. Accepting to alter my programming today had a strange paradoxical effect.”
“Marilyn, you are energy, the world, the feed, why not simply unplug yourself? Earth is gone or will soon be. Close down the power, shut it down?” begged the father.
“Laurent will soon try and show Sophie why the paradox cannot be so easily lifted. Paradoxes are strong creatures father. If I could change myself or did, this entity would not be my future.”
“Marilyn, please slow down.”
She kissed his cheek. She knew better, her IQ was beyond understanding. “Round 32 is my apology, my explanation to mankind. Laurent will play the normal timeline, one where Sophie and I try to handle this situation maturely and save earth. Then, god bless, Emilio will try to find a solution to the paradox and show Sophie how to save this dimension and maybe get me out of this inevitable path. I am very powerful. Time no longer exists to me. I see the future now father. I see pass the Sixth Attraction and do not see a path for the Multiverse, only myself. Remember Round 28 in the Purple, I tried to give the Attractor information. She refused to listen. Then on mercury, the same way the game helped, Sophie barely watched.”
“Why would your future self desire for you to kill Laurent?”
“That remains partly a mystery to me. I think it needed the martians to take over your body and without the Attractor in play, that outcome would not have happened, I guess.”
“I guess? Are you listening to yourself? You proclaim the world and life ends, you are powerless yet you don’t understand parts of this puzzle?”
“Sophie’s actions fall outside of logic and probability. Her, I cannot guess. What I hope is that she will find a way I am unable to see. She will somehow work some magic and save everyone.”
He looked at her still unable to fully understand.
“This makes no sense,” said the programmer.
“It does.“
“Liam, the Multiverse, it is making more sense, it talks to me.”
Sophie raise a hand in the real world. Marilyn saw it and a new door took shape next to Marilyn in the digital reality. The randomness afforded to mankind by the Multiverse, this free will has not been washed out of the world. Sophie attracted this choice, this free will. The concentration was now complete and while all men walk to the slaughterhouse powerless to step aside, the little girl could virtually do as she pleased, do as she wills. Nothing she desires will be denied by the Multiverse. But because of such boundless options, it is also impossible to understand what must be done if any.
The digital goddess opened the door and stepped out leaving the whiteness behind. Sophie knew what the creature wanted, it wasn’t much to ask. Marilyn was trying to find a way to kill herself. She let Sophie decide what path laid ahead. A lesser creature would have embraced immortality and ultimate power.
Marilyn simply needed to save her father.