From here, we observe it all. Every timeline, every eventuality, every universe snuffed out by the hubris of an omnicidal alien race or a particularly psychotic Robert Maxwell.
We see all 12 megaclusters, the beginning and end of everything.
We are at the End Point.
The other versions of me never really understand what this is all about. They think there's some specific goal to reach, some crux event that, if properly triggered or prevented, will save June and create some better future.
None of it really works like that, of course. June isn't destined to die in every timeline, but she dies in most of them. That's just how it goes. I die in quite a few of them, myself. Death starts to feel a little less fearsome once you watch yourself die over and over. It's cleansing, in a way.
The End Point is outside of time and space, anchored just beyond the final instant where all timelines converge. That's one thing my many alternates never accept. Up to a certain point, the cone of possibilities keeps expanding. There are more choices, not fewer, spiraling outward. But eventually, the choices start to contract. The cone shrinks. The future holds fewer and fewer possibilities until it races toward the end, the point where everything winks out all at once.
And right after that is where we live. No timeline change can affect us. We don't age naturally. Our perception of the laws of physics remains unchanged because our human brains can't make sense of the actual circumstances we find ourselves in. But physics on the End Point are not like the rest of the universe. There are doors that lead from the top of the station to the bottom, rooms enclosed within other rooms but not accessible or even visible unless you enter them from the correct angle. Our bodies sometimes distort, too, and yet we remain unharmed.
I was given my role as Director by the previous Director. He was another Robert Maxwell. He didn't like explaining how things worked around here. He said it was better to "learn by doing and then do by learning." I have my suspicions about who he really was, but he always avoided confirming them.
What's to say about what we do? Time is a mess. If people would just leave the past alone, things would be a lot better. Instead, everyone is either trying to "fix" something or commit some kind of crime. The number of "dead baby Hitler" timelines gets so out of control. That's to say nothing of all the shenanigans pulled by various alien races once they gain access to time travel, although few top the Pa'rians for absolute lunacy. I can't think of many races that had the bright idea to bring a fleet from the future into the past to help them conquer their home galaxy a little sooner. What happens after that? The future you pulled the fleet from isn't accessible anymore. What if you made things worse and your future sucks now? But nobody thinks of that when they're pulling the trigger on a time jaunt. They're all rainbows and optimism.
It's strange to stand back and see it all at once. You realize how little any of it truly matters. Birth, death, empires rising and falling, whole species spreading throughout the universe only to be snuffed out by happenstance. You start to focus on the things of true importance: holding it all together so all the unimportant detritus can flow unimpeded.
I'm talking about timeline instability. Every branch destabilizes its upstream branches. Cluster too many of them and you get temporal vacuoles, which will physically swallow up and destroy chunks of a timeline altogether. This creates more branches, which only exacerbates the problem. Like a firefighter spreading flame in front of advancing wildfire to contain it, we drop temporal warheads into the center of a cluster of vacuoles and greatly expand them, capturing enough of several adjacent timelines to effectively close them off. It makes time a dead-end for some of the upstream timelines, but I'd consider that more merciful than the alternatives.
The whole thing is a house of cards that threatens to collapse on itself. We're the only force holding it up. There's about ten billion other organizations all doing whatever they want, when they want. The temporal buoy system helps keep at least some of that behavior in check. I know some of the others disagree with me and think the first offense should be temporal erasure, but as I always tell them, we're about nudges, not shoves. If threatening someone with complete erasure from existence gets them to rethink their cross-time antics, so much the better. Saves me some "future" trouble. And if they don't listen, we step up enforcement. Of course, we know ahead of time who will be reached and who won't, but managing when exactly they appear at the End Point is trickier. Time doesn't flow in any normal way in this place, so it's more about whether you walked through the right door the right way while you're in a particular mood, and then suddenly there's some guy sitting in front of you that's committed 187 temporal felonies and you're at the phase where you have to impound his time machine. You send him on his way, he wakes up thinking he had some really strange dream, and maybe he shapes up, and maybe he doesn't. Well, from his perspective it's a "maybe." The second I'm face-to-face with him, I already know whether this is a guy I'll be erasing at some point. But I have to do the formalities. I have to speak to them each time, give them the warnings, implore them to stop, warn them of the risks of time travel not just to themselves but all of existence.
Do any of them ever actually listen? Not really.
So, tying up the fragmenting timelines with vacuoles is about the only answer we have to the damage they cause. Temporal erasure is more like a post facto execution, except not because no one will ever remember that the offender ever existed, and for all intents and purposes they really didn't exist. In that way, it's something gentler than an execution. You didn't get to suffer because you weren't real in the first place. Isn't that comforting?
I think about those Robert Maxwells who are lucky enough to grow old and die. Most of them are less lucky. The only way I can grow old and die is by retiring. My predecessor wanted to do that, but in his own way. He used some device he developed to hide himself from all temporal monitoring, or so he claimed. He could have also self-erased. There's no way to tell the difference between the two, strictly speaking. Sometimes I think he's still out there, working off the grid, so to speak. I think that because maybe I'd like to do that, one day, as if "one day" means anything here. But I'd have to find another Robert Maxwell, somewhere in the glut of time, that I'd be OK having replace me. I haven't had any luck with that so far. They're all such insufferable little pricks.