"You mean to tell me you're the one who created T.H.E?!" I told him exactly as soon as Kronos pointed this out.
Chronos looked at the robot and immediately after that, the robot exited the cockpit and it was just me and him in the room, while he turned toward the interface and started moving things. The screen where he displayed the caption was there to the side while he was opening something else. One large image of a golden sword with a green halo and from it, many captions spread out and one caption with the same shapes similar to what I just saw just now. He came back and turned to me and started talking:
"Do you see this sword?"
I nodded my head in the affirmative, and he continued:
"This sword is just one piece of a... puzzle... that I'm deeply stuck in"
From the suit, he took out the same sword that was shown in the picture and showed how real it is - a golden sword with indistinct stripes around and at the top glowing with a strange green aura. Part of the sword seemed to be smeared with black liquid and its hilt was studded with strange straight lines and scratches, changing color every time I blinked, tricking me into only looking deeper and deeper into it, but Chronos put the sword back into the suit before I recovered and looked at him again:
"It was called a 'gamma sword', a source doesn't know the specifics of this one being 'alien'" he noted before turning back to the interface and starting to pull up the following images on the windshield, and I'm just amazed at what he said:
"'Alien'?! We found no alien form" I said in front of him and without turning back, I continued talking:
"I was supposed to be sent into space to explore the planets of Castor until recently, just to try to find out if there are alien beings, different from us and to prove that humanity is not alone in the universe. And you say that you hold in your hand a sword of alien origin?! Does the ruling authority know about it? !"
I got up from all the excitement surrounding this matter as if all of this was a big lie, but he brought the next picture to the screen. There, a device similar to a thick bracelet is shown, with similar shapes. I looked at the picture with many articles scattered about and then I looked back at Chronos, who just turned back to me, wearing the same device on his forehead, and began to speak:
"You're right, humanity hasn't discovered aliens" The robot came back in with something strange, semi-transparent, and resembling a strange round jelly, Al Chronos. As he approached him, the space jelly began to vibrate and nimbly climb onto him and stand on his shoulders. I was surprised that I had never seen anything like this in my life and he continued to speak:
"I'm the one who discovered them"
I see here in front of me a real alien?! Not the ones that are outside right now, moving on the land that was once a great metropolis, they tell me that it is not an alien or a creature that originated from the earth, but this, the one that sits on Chronos and does nothing, is it an alien?! I rubbed my eyes just to make sure I wasn't going crazy, but Chronos ignored my surprised face and continued talking:
"Mankind never found aliens because they didn't look hard enough. Where you were supposed to be sent you would find nothing. They are very common, but not close."
He continued to mutter about aliens and other things and I looked at the robot as he moved my helmet between the wires that were standing around, and began to project the writing that was on the room a few moments ago, seeing how he brought them up to the interface and before he continued to turn around and examine the helmet and I returned to Kornus :
"How did you discover them and how does that relate to you being guilty of turning Earth into T.H.E? Are they the ones who turned it just because you failed to communicate with them? That means they invaded us without any sensors and detectors..."
"I will stop you here" Chronos said and burst into my words:
"Aliens have never reached the solar system, they've never moved away and settled further away from their solar system."
"So how are they related?!" I screamed at him out of intolerance, but it didn't bother him, as if he foresaw worse things than this.
"If you want to know how it all relates, I have to tell you about something that even the smartest scientist in the world thought about and then gave up on because it was a 'ridiculous idea'"
He turned to the robot and immediately he began to project a strange video segment that showed Chronos standing in front of something huge, with a body structure that resembles a pterodactyl to a dragon that is only mentioned in fairy tales, looking face to face with him, but speaking strangely and differently. I didn't understand anything of what they were both talking about, but the shape engraved with green and blue stripes reminds me of Gabriel. The structure of his wings and the shape of his head also remind me a lot of him. Then I remembered his words:
"Is this Gribo?"
He looked back at me and confirmed this:
"Yes, this is Gribo"
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"Why are you showing him to me? What are you talking about there?"
"Don't you understand what he's saying?" He motioned to his robot and he began to play with the interface and then the voices he was making began to be heard more and more clearly and in understandable words until it sounded like someone speaking his native language, in my language:
"Human! I don't recognize the geo-space-time coordinates of this place. Can you tell me if anyone knows about this place?”
"No, just me" Chronos said before he started rummaging through his pocket:
"Earth is no more"
"But it doesn't make sense. Humans built me, my friends. For hundreds of millions of years, we've been guarding the Earth since they became extinct and disappeared from our historical records, and in all these times, the Earth has never disappeared or been destroyed in all these moments"
"You're right because this isn't your period" Chronos took out of his pocket something that resembled external documentation, and it reminded me of exactly the moment I woke up when I heard from the black box what he had recorded, those broadcasts, one by one. Gribo is only surprised by what was projected from his face, even though his face does not show this:
"The eruption of the Siberian Steps is not supposed to happen in another 180 million years since the first record of Homo sapiens. Do you want to tell me that it is possible to change events in the timeline? This is the same theory that has been proven impossible?!"
"It's true, and that's what happened"
"I went back to the past?" Gribo began to put his wings into one of the pockets deep inside his body before he pulled out a black box.
"You have never returned to the past. Rather, there is no more past, future, or present for the earth. It has gone out of the rules of time, space, and all possible periods from the point where humanity reached the state before the eruption, united into the one-time zone, and never moved again."
"WHAT?!!" He looked at Chronos and his eyes changed colors before returning to blue-green colors and replied:
"How come you're not lying?"
"I have no reason to lie to you. He called it 'T.H.E' - an acronym for 'Time Hybrid Earth' - everything merged into a uniform spatial time in which nothing changes and nothing will change. Every living thing that has lived since the beginning of life until long after humanity became extinct, all then merged into the creatures you see around - every creature, animal, plant, or nanobot you see everywhere, united from other creatures and became one when united all the periods"
Gribo showed signs of shaking, just like me when I heard those words.
"How is this possible? How do I move if everything came together for a fixed time? Who is he?!" He asked before Chronos started taking a wheel out of his mouth and the video cut off. I look with my mouth open and in complete shock. Chronos turned to me and began to answer the questions that Gribo had answered:
"When time is infinite, even when you unite everything, time continues to split and move forward, as a clear universal law. But what is happening here, is stuck at one point in the space of time. You can say that we are inside a black hole of time. I do not know why it is here, But this explains why we can move and gently live in 'frozen' time because it is only one line among infinity"
My brain began to melt from the bombardment of information that just came from him, also from the market. But he still hasn't answered me about how he is related.
"Who can do this? Let's say it's a contract with gods"
"A contract with gods?! What contract and what shoes are you talking about here"
"Contract for immortality"
I think I'm going crazy for him. He is unclear and incomprehensible! A contract with the gods for immortality? This is beyond ridiculous. He sat down and looked at me face to face as if he wanted to tell a painful story. It must be on this contract.
"One day, I found myself in a dark room, and in front of me stood a column with paper and an engraving tool on it. From the darkness came a voice telling me that if I want to live forever, not die and be immortal, all you have to do is sign this contract. The agreement simply gives All this just for the minimal price of 'entertaining them'. What a fool I was. I sealed not only my fate but the fate of all humanity. A fate worse than death."
He looked at the floor, in every word he said, regret was heard in his words. He breathed a deep sleep and continued to speak:
"After I signed I went back to living my life as normal. What this contract did was prevent me from dying and gave me access to things only heard in fairy tales - superpowers, access to technology that humanity has never heard of, and this lump of jelly that sits on me that I have to feed every day. But on day One, when I moved to the Kochav Tzedek base, he summoned me and I discovered two things. The first is that I am not the only one who signed. Many other aliens, each one different from the other, also enticed him to sign. And the second is that the entertainment he spoke to was only to entertain the gods and whoever created the contract He is not a god, these are someone above them"
He pointed to the headband and continued to speak:
"This, he created and only gave to me after I just 'paid' him, greedy. But this thing is capable of slowing down time around me. I didn't take this thing seriously while I was fighting against a white raven that could create bones out of nowhere. This was my first death and also the point where I regretted the fate of the planet because it turns out that every action we took determined the fate of the species they represented. I didn't know it until it was too late. Once it was over, I went back to Jupiter just to see what fate he was talking about."
"Eruption of the Siberian Steps"
"Right!"
"So how did it cause all this?"
"I asked him after I managed to achieve something there, and I asked him to spare the lives of all the people who lived on the planet. And you know what he told me? 'Fate cannot be stopped'. Because he is attentive and I asked him, he ended up stopping Fate Everyone who was on Earth, but as you see, it stopped everything! He gave Earth a fate worse than death! And that's only because I asked him to stop and only because I didn't take his entertainment seriously. No wonder he was called the 'Overgod' there."
He shot up and turned towards the robot in a rage, all the guilt coming his way like arrows. He watched the whole monitor while I tried to digest everything he said - violent? aliens? Immortality? What crazy universe am I living in? All this just because of one contract does not slow down people would want to sign it. I think I would do the same. I looked at Chronos on the interface. Suddenly the robot looks at me and pointed Chronos with one of his arms toward one of the interfaces and the strange writing that came out of the helmet. He seems to have managed to decipher them, but Chronos' face looks expressionless and he looks back at me. He came back to me while the robot continued his words:
"I think you have a bigger problem than I thought - you're going to be erased from reality"