This wasn't my first time experiencing a merge, but that didn't make it any less painful. Having the atoms of your own body slammed into the atoms of a nearly identical body via a time displacement field is one of the stranger things a person can go through. Your memories also merge, but not in some kind of exacting fashion. You might forget some of what you knew, or lose some of the memories of the person you're merging into. You might remember things as happening to you that actually happened to the other. Mostly, anything that's out of alignment just ends up being a huge jumble.
I merged into myself in Newfoundland. The middle of nowhere, really. I'd been here before at different points in time. It always looked about the same, the coast near the Torngat Mountains. Chilly but not bitter. Cloudy.
There were five kids with me. Teenagers. They were confused and shivering. But at least I knew who they were. They where the children of some of the Magna bigwigs, being groomed to eventually take their parents' roles. Keep the company in the family, as it were. We had originally been on a trip from Boston to New York City--a field trip, I guess you'd call it. You could also call it a punishment for me.
I still can't believe they made you babysit their kids.
Well, after the Speyer fiasco, they felt like I should get to know the kids a bit better so they'd trust me. One day I'd be giving them orders, after all. Might as well get used to it now. Anyway, Kirax had destroyed Earth. He had a grudge against me for supposedly killing his father, whom I'd never met. He came all the way back from 2103, knowing I was on Earth, and just... blew it the hell up. You know all this. DANTE pulled me out at the last second, but everyone else bit the dust.
So, I had him send me a week into the past, merging with the version of me in that timeline, and picked us all up to send us to Newfoundland. The kids were confused, to say the least.
Justin Sawyer was asking, "Why are we here, Mr. Maxwell?"
"Newfoundland," I told him, not that it explained anything. "We're gonna stop some bad things from happening."
"I want to go home," Margot Blanchard complained.
The other three echoed the sentiment: Molly Gershwin, Sharon Hitchens, Benny Star. The quintet ranged in age from 14 to 16. Really the the most obnoxious age range a person can be, and I have five of them on my hands. This really was a punishment.
I tried to reassure them, told them to calm down.
Why didn't you just send them home?
And admit I couldn't handle taking them on a simple field trip? Absolutely not.
DANTE had put us pretty close to our objective, an outcropping of rock jutting out over the coast. Maybe 50 meters inland from that, we'd find what I was looking for. I had the kids follow me up the hill, and they sure groused the whole way. This wasn't the trip they had in mind, but in my opinion this was gonna be far more educational. Once we got to the right area, I scanned around for a slight depression about the size of a manhole cover. You wouldn't know to look for it unless you knew it was there. Once I spotted it, I walked over and started brushing the dust and rocks off of it with my hands. It was buried a little deeper than I realized, so I called the kids over to help.
"Digging?" Justin whined. "What are we, day laborers?"
I wanted to call him a spoiled rich brat but I exercised incredible restraint and asked him nicely to assist. Reluctantly and with much annoyed sighing, they gathered around and helped me clear the rubble. We eventually got to a smooth surface that wouldn't let us dig any further: an entry hatch.
"What now?" Margot wondered. She kicked it. It gave a metallic clang.
"No kicking!" I scolded here. "This is sensitive equipment."
"In the middle of fucking nowhere??" Benny snorted.
"Language!" I was still their chaperon.
I reached down the front of my shirt and pulled out the necklace I always wore, a simple silver chain with a dull, metallic charm dangling from it. You know the one. A flat square with a hole in the center, and a narrow peg coming off of one of the corners. I tapped it on the hatch and it had the expected effect: it split in half and opened up.
I climbed down, knowing my way around this thing. I told the kids not to touch anything.
Lights came on throughout as I entered. The interior looked the same as it did in every other time period: more or less like the control room of Inferno, but a little more fleshed out. Really wished this thing was spaceworthy. Would've made a hell of a timeship. I went over toward the central core, a cylinder that was currently shut down, made obvious by its lack of any glowing or other activity. The panel in front of it, I only knew how to operate from past experience. To turn it on, I first had to slide my little charm into the slot down on the front. It hummed to life and symbols and displays on it all started to glow. The alien sigils emblazoned on it meant nothing to me, even with my translating technology. A few of them were recognizable because I'd seen similar ones aboard Inferno, but DANTE always declined to explain exactly what they meant, instead just telling me what their function was in terms I could understand.
I relied on him to do that here. "I'm a little rusty, DANTE. Plus, I haven't had to do it exactly this way, before."
"Who are you talking to?" Benny intruded.
"My imaginary friend," I joked. "Go sit in the corner and don't touch shit."
The kids all huffed away and walked over to the corner, where they definitely looked at the controls and thought quite a bit about touching things. I hoped it was all complicated enough they wouldn't be able to make it actually do anything.
DANTE chirped into my head. The upper left display is a rotatable 3D view of a target location. The display below it is a catalog of local astronomical bodies, arranged by size or distance, depending on the sort method you have chosen.
"OK, so what do I want here? Where are Kirax and his dear old dad hanging out?"
Scans indicate their respective fleets are in Saturn orbit. Their formation suggests they are carrying out drills in advance of their approach to Earth.
"Meaning I should catch them completely off-guard. Awesome. You think this thing has enough juice to do what needs to be done here?"
Power reserves should be at capacity. This core was last activated about 20,000 years ago.
This reminded me that I was buried nearby along with a handful of other humans. "Ah, right. That other me. This won't affect my need to use it 100 years from now, will it?"
No. I have already performed the calculations. It will have at least enough reserve power to allow you to conclude the First Koraxian War.
"I'll just have to trust you on that. OK, so I think I've located Saturn on this thing." The display showed a planet that sure looked like a big round boy with a hula hoop.
The third set of controls from the center left allows selection of bodies orbiting the target object.
I scrolled through and sure enough, there were fifty or so smaller objects in formation. I selected all of them. It was funny to carry out warfare this way, just pushing buttons on a computer, choosing what I want to blow up. It was slightly disappointing to know that I wouldn't get to see any of the carnage I planned to wreak.
"I've got everything selected, I think. Can you confirm?"
DANTE looked through my eyes. You have chosen both fleets. You should only select Kirax's fleet. Then, charge the core with the upper right controls. The slider just below that will engage the displacement procedure.
"You say 'displacement' but you really mean I'm going to vaporize them, right?"
No. We must return Kirax to the time from which he came.
"What?? Why the fuck am I doing that?"
To minimize temporal divergence. Destroying him and his fleet in this time period may have adverse effects on the future.
"I'll take your word for it, but that sure is annoying. OK, I've changed the selection. His ships are bigger, I think. Take a look again?"
Confirmed. You may move the slider.
I did so, and of course it was as anti-climactic as expected. The little blue dots were there on the screen, then they were gone. Notably, the other blue dots started to scatter. No doubt seeing the other fleet vanish spooked them. I quickly selected the lot. "I can destroy these ones, right?"
Yes. Strictly speaking, you are creating a time-space funnel which will displace them from their current reference frame and deposit them into the center of the sun. They will not survive.
"Dead is dead. Good enough for me. So why is it OK to kill Shatax but not his kid?"
Per Kirax's prior statements to you, from his perspective you had already killed his father. This ensures causal consistency.
"What you mean is, if I don't do this now then future-me won't have an encounter with him in 2098 and get accidentally thrown into the past. Right? And that will fuck up everything I'm trying to do now."
Correct.
"Jesus Christ. I'm glad you can keep it straight. OK, proceeding." I did the "make the blue dots disappear" thing again, and then they were gone. Neat.
"Can we go home yet?" Molly groused.
"Yeah, we're gonna leave pretty soon," I promised them.
Robert, I am detecting an unexpected temporal event in your vicinity.
"You're not just picking up activity from the Focus, are you?"
Negative. The signature is distinct.
"Distinct" was the right word, or even an understatement. There was a flash of light a few feet away from me, and after a few blinks my eyes focused on what had just shown up. A woman stood there, familiar, but older. My age. "No fucking way," I breathed.
"Robert," she said in a voice I hadn't heard in... who even knew how to count years anymore? "You really screwed up this time."
"June," I said, like admitting it was her would make it real. "You're supposed to be dead. I mean, I'm glad you're not, this is just... a surprise. Does this mean everything I've done worked??" Most of the point of me jumping around in time was to cause exactly this outcome, though not quite in this way. I wanted June back, but not when we're old as shit.
That's incredibly selfish. She's alive. Shouldn't you be happy about that? Like what, you don't like her now that she's in front of you with wrinkles and sagging tits or whatever?
Hey, give me some fucking credit. I just mean that in my scenario, we'd grow old together. If she's jaunting through time that means something else got screwed up. Intuitively, I just knew that from the moment she appeared.
Anyway, she said immediately that I had messed up, and I didn't have a reason to disbelieve it. The question was what exactly I had done and what I would have to do in order to fix it. At this point, the Focus had shut down and "consumed" my key. There was one buried with the other me nearby, but I would need that one in 2098. So I was "Focus-less" for the time being.
June elaborated. "There was an unexpected effect from what you just did here. It's not clear exactly why, but in my timeline, you died instead of me. Imagine my surprise when I realized I ended up taking on exactly the same mission as you, just reversed."
"Two peas in a pod, I guess. I take it this means we aren't riding off into the sunset together."
She shook her head. "No, there are still too many other problems. I need to take you and your charges here to the future, to the moment you sent Kirax."
"But... I just got rid of him! Come on. I don't want to deal with this shit again."
"There's no choice, Bobby." Ah, bringing out the big guns, calling me that.
Bobby?? I'm laughing my ass off here.
Shut up. She didn't have time to explain, but she did hand me another Focus charm. "I took this off your body when you died. I figured it might come in handy one day. I didn't think it would be anything like this, but here we are."
"I just want to lay down for a while," I complained. I didn't mean it. I just knew something was about to happen to separate us again, and I hated the thought. After all these years, she was here, right in front of me, only to tell me things were still fucked.
"No time for that," she told me. "Kids, come over here."
"Don't call us that," Justin grumbled.
"Just come on!" I yelled. Didn't mean to yell quite so loud. Their parents would definitely hear about that, but maybe it would seem less bad than... everything else?
They walked over, taking their sweet time.
June had us all join hands in a circle.
Are you sure about this, Robert? I may not be able to tether you again, if you travel via whatever means June has at her disposal.
"I don't think I have a choice, DANTE."
"DANTE?" June smirked. "Makes sense."
"You've got one, too, huh?"
"I'll tell you about it next time," she promised.
And then we were gone.