Alright, so June had taken me and the kids to the future, to the year 2103, specifically.
These are the Magna Black kids?
Some of them, yeah. Justin Sawyer, Margot Blanchard, Molly Gershwin, Sharon Hitchens, and Benny Star. They definitely stuck me with the most annoying ones.
I'm sorry, isn't this the same Sharon you fucked that one time?
That's beside the point. Also, not relevant to this story.
Everything in 2103 was a total shit show. The Second Koraxian War was underway, the Oolians were on the run because the Koraxians had come up with some new weapon, and Earth had been basically conquered. OK, I guess by that point it wasn't a "war" anymore, it was more like an occupation. The Koraxians wanted to locate the Focus and use it exactly the way you'd expect their kind to use it.
Luckily, the guys who made the Focus had the foresight to make it invisible to any kind of Overlord-derived scanning. Truth be told, it was immune to almost all scanning. You had to know exactly what you were looking for and you had to know pretty much exactly the right spot to search, or you'd never find it. The only reason I found it the first time, remember, is because my Focus charm interacted with a fold vector and it "pulled" the ship I was on toward it so that we crashed basically right on top of it. A whole bunch of other stuff surrounded that.
Right, Admiral Sellis and all that crap.
Yeah. You get it. So, short of some "in" like that, the Koraxians were just never going to find it on their own. They had a few options. One was to strip-mine the planet's surface until they located it. The time and effort required for that may have eventually been worth it, but they were impatient. The other and better option was to find whatever information humans had on it. The thing is, the Focus was top secret. It ended the last war so obviously we weren't going to publicize the existence of such a weapon, even if we didn't know how to activate it again. So, not too many people knew about it in the first place. But it had to be kept that way.
President Cuerva, whom I had plenty of beef with in general, nevertheless did a hell of a job running the resistance. She made sure information about the Focus and its location was kept locked up tight, out of reach from the Koraxians. Naturally, the Alliance government as a whole was essentially conquered and pressed into Koraxian servitude, a puppet government to serve the occupation's purposes. But Cuerva took her most trusted people with her and organized a resistance set on driving the Koraxians out. See, once she realized they now wanted the Focus, she knew that the sole objective of her movement had to be keeping the Koraxians from finding it, until they gave up and left or we managed to fight them off directly.
I had been away for a while, of course. I'd been living in the late 20th century for about 10 years by that point, so when I popped into the year 2103 after having been missing for about 5 years from that perspective, I got some weird looks. Plus, the whole thing with me having gone missing. Obviously, people were confused about that.
Long story short, my brother Richard was working for the President. He was far better at following orders and doing as he was told than I ever was, which means it was extremely funny when he decided to go to the Focus himself and try to use it to wipe the Koraxians off of Earth. This was completely without authorization, it should go without saying. Cuerva worried he was going to give the whole game away. But the reality was a lot worse. He and a few other members of the resistance who knew about the Focus had gotten their hands on some Oolian technology. They used the analysis done after the previous time the Focus was used to essentially work out a rudimentary control interface that didn't require a Focus charm, since they didn't have one of those.
"Rudimentary" was the problem. He fucked up, big time. I guess the blame isn't all on him. But since they had a weapon they couldn't properly control, they caused... well, a whole temporal incident. I'm not sure there was a word for exactly what they did. All I know is that by the time June took us to the year 2103 and plopped us right in front of Richard and his team, inside the Focus, things went a little ca-ca.
Richard was seconds from activating the Focus and then the Director showed up and um, broke his arm. Like, karate chopped his arm so hard he fractured it, just to keep Richard from activating the thing. Richard screamed because of that, and also because I showed up out of the blue, with a gaggle of teenagers in tow... yeah, I don't know why he freaked out, that all sounds pretty normal, doesn't it?
For a Robert Maxwell story, I guess that is not too unusual.
Plus June was there, and of course he knew June, so now he was also staring at a ghost. Hell, he probably assumed all of us showing up was because of him using the Focus, that he actually had made it do something, just unintentionally. But really, we were all there to stop him. Rather, the Director was there to stop him. Actually, the Director was there to stop June. I need to step back for a second.
Remember how Kirax had this fleet he used to blow up Earth that one time, in 1998?
Sure.
So, I used the Focus to destroy his fleet, or so I thought. I had only succeeded in wiping out part of his father's fleet, in reality. June showed up because according to her history, Shatax's fleet went to the future with knowledge of the Focus' location, which doomed the future Earth of her world. What she didn't realize was that it was her own time travel that caused this.
Try to follow this sequence of events.
Oh god.
In one timeline, I used the Focus to send Kirax's fleet back to the year 2103 to get rid of it, while simultaneously killing Shatax in 1998. At that time, I didn't know the Koraxians were occupying the Earth of that era. I actually overshot because I meant to send it to 2098 so it would be destroyed with the rest of the Koraxian fleet near Earth in the First Koraxian War.
Sending Kirax's fleet to the future was one problem, but destroying Shatax's fleet caused all kinds of internal turmoil within the Koraxian Empire, which affected their clandestine operations on Earth, which very slightly shifted the events of the War such that I died instead of June. A lot of other little details changed, but that's the one that matters here.
That June got recruited by a temporal black ops group, essentially. She did way more fucked up shit than me, according to her. What she didn't know was that in the year 2103, Kirax's fleet would show up with enough information about the Focus to allow it to be located and doom humanity. Once she learned this, she traced Kirax's movements back to 1998, realized that the use of the Focus at that time was the cause of Kirax's "relocation," so she'd have to go back in time and stop me from doing that.
But she didn't stop you. Didn't she end up helping you? She at least didn't stand in your way.
Yeah, she learned that stopping me actually made things worse. Which is to say, we had to prevent Earth's destruction in 1998 by the combined Kirax/Shatax fleet, but we also couldn't just dispose of Shatax's fleet because of how it would affect the unfolding of the 21st century. Like, getting rid of Kirax's fleet aside, Shatax's fleet had been "tainted" with enough knowledge of Earth and its significance that he was definitely not going to give up on finding the Focus at that point in time, so Earth would have been conquered if not destroyed a lot sooner.
Couldn't June--or somebody--go back in time to just after Kirax arrived and basically take Kirax out before he linked up with his father?
Nobody with the resources to do that would've had any interest in doing so. Outside the Focus, humanity doesn't really have any good countermeasures for an enemy that powerful.
Not even the Director could do anything about it??
Oh, you'd think he would, but his whole issue was that temporal incursions of that scale caused more problems than they solved. He preferred surgical strikes, like moving one chess piece rather than flipping the board upside down. I never agreed with that, but then he's the Director and I'm not.
But you are the Director!
You know what I mean!
So, June then realized that if she took me to the year 2103 I could just use the Focus again and take out Kirax's fleet at that time and wipe the Koraxians off of Earth altogether, and she figured doing this at the same time Richard was there made the most sense because we'd have some cover from resistance personnel, which was maybe not that good a plan now that I reflect on it, but she did kind of ad hoc the whole thing. The bottom line is, Richard's tampering alone made the Focus do Bad Things, and even with my Focus charm in play, the modifications his team had made meant even normal use resulted in Bad Things, and that's why the Director had to intervene. We were going to be trapped in a seesaw loop forever. He came to dislodge it.
Remember what I said about surgical strikes? He fixed the Focus so we could use it to whack Kirax's fleet and just enough of the occupation forces to make them fuck off indefinitely. He'd done the math to figure up exactly how much it would take to do that, and so that's what he did. He had orders to arrest June, so naturally she zapped herself right out of there before we had a chance to really talk. He scolded Richard but apologized for breaking his arm. And then he sent me and the kids back to 1998, and told me he would do a few "nudges" to make sure the effects of Shatax's disappearance wouldn't result in another loop like this, which also meant June had to die in 2066 again, so... I wasn't very happy about that.
But he didn't give you a choice, I'm sure.
He never does. Bastard.
So, wait, you were basically useless in 2103? You just showed up with those kids and did... nothing? While the Director showed up and did all the work?
I mean, my Focus charm was critical to activating the Focus! Doesn't that count for something?
Was that the one off your dead body, the one June gave you from her Robert who died, or the one you had since childhood?
Um, I believe it was the last one. No, sorry, the first one. Wait. Hold on. Fuck. Let me think this through.
There's the one I had in childhood. I kept that. The one found on my alternate's body in 2098, I used to activate the Focus at that time. When I had to use it in 1998, I used the one June gave me. So... OK, it was the one from my childhood.
Which you then used in 2103. Does that mean you had no ability to activate the Focus again after that?
That's exactly what it means!
I hope the Koraxians never figured that out.
Last I checked, they never caught on... lucky for us.