Alright, I guess I'll tell you about my dead body in Newfoundland.
That's the one near the Focus, right?
Yeah. Obviously, that's not me. It's a different me. Since I didn't personally experience this, you're gonna get my version of it based on the records the other me left.
So you're telling a story that's about you, but not this you, but you're going to tell it like it is this you?
Um, yes. More or less.
Got it. I think.
One thing that was kind of fortunate is that when the military dug up the area in 2098, they got what was left of my body. That included that Robert's Focus charm, but it also included his bones... and his cybernetics! They were mostly intact. I happened to grab the one part of his cybernetics that would be most useful to me: the memory module.
Damn, even your memories are cybernetic?
Nah, I still have real memories in my brain, but I also have a memory module which records a lot of important information, plus highly compressed sensory data. I can also intentionally write things to it, like it's a journal. I just have to think to myself that I want to write to it, and it picks up on the brain waves in question and stores whatever I want it to store, in plain text.
Suffice it to say, that was a very valuable thing to find on my body. Er, the other me's body. The military guys didn't know what they had, so they didn't realize what I took. All the better for me, eh?
Now, this isn't a thumb drive you can just plug into a computer and read the files. It's a unique, highly complex device. Did I have any of Dr. Agon's equipment for reading it? Of course not. Was I going to give it to him? Hell no! I'd learned my lesson by then. If it contained anything incriminating, he'd act like it was me who did it, and take it out on me. So, I just held onto it.
I even kept it when I got thrown back to 1988. I mean, it was on my tiny shuttle. It seemed even less likely I'd ever be able to get the data off of it then. Of course, Inferno came along later, but I didn't immediately think of the module. So much had gone on that I didn't even think to plug the module into DANTE's facilities right away. That brainstorm finally hit me in... 1997? Jeez.
Anyway, once I explained to DANTE what it was, he went to analyzing it.
Didn't you say it was thousands of years old?
Yeah, and the result of that is exactly what you'd expect. Quite a bit of the data was degraded. Do you think that stopped DANTE? He wasn't able to recover everything but we started with maybe a 30% retrieval rate and he managed to interpolate enough of the rest that we pushed it up to about 70%. You probably know there are techniques that can fill in missing data based on predictions of what that data might have been, right? DANTE can do that but to a far more sophisticated degree. So, as long as there wasn't a huge chunk of data lost with all of its context, he could probably get something back.
The first thing I wanted to know was: did he have the final records on that module? This would be a very boring story if he didn't. He got back the vast majority of that information.
What I'm going to tell you is the narrative we pieced together out of what was available.
I don't think I ever specifically told you about Stak and Vral.
Doesn't ring a bell.
I've definitely mentioned Sikaren. That's what those guys are. Or were. Beats me if they're alive. Best anyone can tell, they're immortal and can look like anything they want. They don't use it to impersonate people, mind you. It's just how they make it easy to relate to other species. It's a little like what the Oolians do, but the Oolians are just casting a complicated optical illusion. The Sikaren rearrange their bodies temporarily. Is it technology or biology? I've always wondered. Could be both, really. I can tell you one thing: other than the Idaltu, no one's technology has ever matched up to the level of the Sikaren, or at least what Stak and Vral showed me.
The fact that they supposedly built all of the timeships suggests to me that they have some kind of vast automation capability. Nanotech, giant automated fabs, I don't know. As open as they were about some things, they would never tell you how they built something.
Can we get to how this relates to you dying?
Yeah, sorry. So, there was some kind of whole clusterfuck developing about 20,000 years ago. The galaxy was a very different place. The splinters of the Overlords were scattered all around and essentially picking up the pieces. They weren't a threat to anyone yet. The Oolians were still getting their arms around our corner of the galaxy. They had a quick tussle with the Dor'Tel, but that was about it. The problem, basically, is that there were no major powers in the area that could stand up to a serious threat.
And so there was a threat.
Always! Stak and Vral showed up in a timeship. This one predated all the others they'd later build. It was a pretty rickety prototype as a result, and I don't think it was very good at the "time travel" part, otherwise they could have solved their problem more easily, maybe. They made quite an impression on the Oolians, who didn't exactly trust their motives right away. After all, their only experience with super powerful alien species was being enslaved by the Overlords. But in this case, it was just two guys, so they didn't completely freak out. Stak and Vral had come to warn them about some impending threat, which I gather they were quite vague about, but they needed some help. They needed materials and essentially a "no questions asked" policy about what they were for. This wasn't simple stuff, either. Stak and Vral needed highly complex chemicals that were only manufactured on a handful of planets the Overlords used to control. At that time, they were in space now claimed by the Alaxians--they'd later be the Koraxians. Again, they were keeping to themselves at that point. So, the Oolians had a dilemma on their hands. Two guys showed up out of nowhere with extremely radical technology that was far beyond what the Oolians knew, and they claimed to need resources that were only available in what was basically enemy territory, to combat a threat they couldn't even describe. It took a huge leap of faith on the Oolians' part that they were willing to spark a war of aggression to help total strangers on a dubious mission.
So how did you end up there?
The Director decided I was a linchpin. I already knew my way around the timeships. From what I can tell, this version of me had also been thrown back to 1988 originally, and the Director plucked him from sometime in the mid '90s for this job. So, I was sent back to make sure that the Oolians not only helped, but that they were successful against the threat Stak and Vral were worried about.
Did the Director know what the threat was?
Nope! He said that all attempts to probe the timestream in that era, beyond the "safe" places like Oolian space, came up empty. Literally empty. Like they didn't exist. Obviously, they did exist. But it was like something had the capability to block knowledge of itself from across space and time.
That's... what?? That sounds impossible.
Doesn't it? I'm sure I protested accordingly. So, I'm sent back, the Oolians are confused as to why a human has shown up to help them, but Stak and Vral just roll with it. I guess they'd seen enough weird shit that not much surprised them. The plan was, take the timeship and a few Oolian ships on a simple breach-and-hold. Stak and Vral figured the amount of stuff they needed could be produced in a few days, so that was how long we needed to hold this particular factory on this particular planet. We were not out to have a major incident, hence the small contingent.
The good news was that we took the factory fairly easily. For one thing, nobody was using it. It was in a fairly remote area and I guess the locals had no use for it. Perimeter orbital defenses were piddling, too. But somebody, somewhere sent up a signal flare, so to speak, and right as we were wrapping up collecting what we needed, the bastards showed up in force. Imagine a gigantic hammer coming down on you, except it's made of attack ships all piloted by very very pissed off green blobs.
We booked the hell out with what we had, the Oolian ships got trounced, but thankfully Stak and Vral knew the locations of tons of fold vectors, so we made use. Unfortunately, the Alaxians figured out what we were doing and basically positioned themselves at all the ones they knew about, and since they were descended from the Overlords, they know about most of them, too. So, I had a completely nuts idea: I knew from the First Koraxian War that there was a fold vector near the throneworld that led straight to Earth. I thought if we could get there without being noticed, we could jet the hell out of enemy space and they'd never find us.
Stak and Vral loved it. That one wasn't on their charts, either. Go figure. Here's the thing, though: they were hiding a lot about the threat in question, one part being that the large quantity of fuck-knows-what chemicals we stole act like a giant magnet for it. It's bait. But clearly, they wanted to only deal with one problem, not two, so getting out of Alaxian space made sense.
And we did that, but not before their little threat got into the FV envelope we used to jump from the throneworld to Earth.
This shit is my worst fucking nightmare, right? Some kind of universe-ending monstrosity is right over Earth, twenty thousand years ago, poised to make our home planet its appetizer.
OK, but what was it, exactly? I still have no idea.
It was... fuck, my brain blanks even trying to find words for it. It wasn't like the Rift. You could see that. It had physical characteristics, weird as they were. You could interact with it. But this thing? You could see it, but you couldn't see it. It would be picked up on sensors because you'd see a gaping hole where there should have been at least basic readings. I wouldn't say it was a nothing, because you can kind of conceptualize a nothing. This was like the aggressive absence of anything. You know? Nothingness is kind of a neutral concept, in my mind. There's nothing there, but the potential to be something is there. Like, an empty room still has a future. You can put stuff in it. You can paint the walls. This thing couldn't even have a name. Literally, if you tried to think of a name for it, your brain would just refuse to come up with one.
That's ridiculous. I'd call it a... a...
You can't do it, can you?
What the fuck? I can't even form a word!
I told you.
So, we came out of the FV over Earth, obviously. This thing was near the ship. Touching it? Not sure. I'm not sure "touching" is a meaningful concept here. But it was definitely attracted to the Spicy Chemicals. Stak, Vral, and I evidently disagreed over whose fault the next part was, but the ship lost control and made a controlled emergency landing--which is to say a crash--along the coast of Newfoundland. The situation was then worse than before: now it was on a planet where it could do a lot more damage than out in open space.
Well, obviously you beat it, since you're telling me this story.
Remember to give other me the credit. I'm just the messenger.
Things were hairy, major crisis, possibility of Earth and a lot more just going away, and I got Stak and Vral to come clean about what was happening. This was their first timeship attempt, as you recall. What they failed to tell anyone is that they fucked it up, big time. What they built wasn't a time machine, it was some kind of... it's hard to put. I told you about the First Koraxian War, how I used the Focus to destroy the fleet that came to Earth. Plus the time I used it to kill Kirax's daddy. That's just the tiniest bit of what it can do at full power. If you imagine the universe is made up of tiny elementary particles, or even that those particles are just pointlike intersections of multidimensional filaments with "normal" space, then imagine that what they created was a self-sustaining reaction to annihilate arbitrary pointlikes across space and time. A little like the Rift, but worse, because there was really no undoing anything it did. It wasn't some kind of causality anomaly, but just an... annihilator. But on a level that is hard to comprehend, because anything it destroys becomes as if it never existed in the first place. And that's what they built. By accident, mind you. They weren't trying to make that, it's just what happened.
Like I said, the chemicals were bait. They wanted to get it close enough so they could use the ship's temporal core to "unmake" it. Once the ship crashed, they salvaged everything they could to get the core working again and make sure it could do what they needed it to do. Now, remember how I need a Focus charm to activate the Focus, and it's a one-time use? Stak and Vral didn't have that problem. Their biology could interface directly, I guess. The charm was made for me, specifically--well before they ever met me, somehow. Did they explain that? No.
It turned out to be a three-person job to deal with this thing. Stak jazzed up the chemicals so they'd become a super-attractor near the core. Vral handled powering up the core itself. But they needed somebody to actually aim it, so to speak. The pre-crashed ship had a whole control surface for that. Now? Not so much. It had to be done manually. Which meant unshielded exposure to quite exotic forms of radiation.
Damn, you got the Spock treatment.
No kidding. You can surely guess the rest. The plan worked, the stupid ass thing was gone, and I was lethally poisoned with fancy particles. You might ask yourself, "Why would they leave an extremely advanced ship and a human from the future buried in a place somebody would probably find it someday?" Because they knew I'd need it, obviously!
I just want to say, also, they're called "Sikaren" because that's the planet they were first found on by the Oolians. Nobody knows what they actually call themselves, if there are other members of their species, nothing. Real helpful guys. I assume the Oolians picked them up later or something. No doubt everybody was grateful. Anyway, I often think about how Stak and Vral made something like that, had such a close call with it, and then chose to do it several more times. Absolute fucking nutjobs. But we'd also all be dead without them, so I guess it's a wash.