by Damien Boyes
Gibzon takes what must be his usual place at the head of the table while the others gather around. Gamma and Sigma show up a moment later, and Gamma gives me a silent nod of recognition as she joins the rest of the team.
“This is the Destiny Matrix,” Gibzon says to me. “A quantification of all probable timestreams in the chronoverse. This”—he points to the volcano—“is Thrane’s line.”
“Growing every day, with each new timeline he entangles,” Alpha adds.
“It’s big,” I say, and immediately regret saying anything. It’s big? Gibzon just showed me a map of limitless creation and that’s the best I could come up with? “Who lives in that one?” I ask, pointing to the other large line, trying not to sound like an idiot.
“That’s us,” Delta says, and chucks his chin at Gibzon. “Timeline QRC-00-2155.567. We’ve managed to keep ourselves true so far, but only because Thrane has never come for us directly.”
“That time has finally arrived,” Gibzon announces, and even the people who already knew this tense up.
“When?” Alpha says, and Gibzon looks to me. The rest of the team turns as well, six pairs of expectant eyes, waiting for my answer.
“Captain Fan says weeks,” I say, but my throat is suddenly dry and it comes out a croak. Why am I so nervous? “Maybe days.”
“Now what?” Alpha asks, but this is directed at Gibzon. He holds up his hand and I can’t read anything from his blank eyes.
“What else have you learned?” Gibzon asks me.
“Thrane’s sucking Deadworld of its energy, and he has a singularity of some kind stopping you from jumping there,” I offer.
“We knew all that a long time ago,” Alpha spits, but this time I don’t think her anger’s directed at me. “Now it’s too late.”
“We have contingencies in place,” Gibzon responds, his voice still calm.
“Screw your contingencies,” Alpha fires back. She sweeps her arm at the world outside the glass. “You may be safe locked up in here, but all that is about to disappear—and you don’t care.”
Gibzon’s eyes shimmer. “Thrane’s initial incursion will result in only a 38.7 percent loss to this timestream’s probability. Our True Line is not in danger.”
“Still, it’ll make ’im 38.7 percent stronger,” Tau says. “If we cannae beat him now, what are we gonnae do when he’s got even more worlds tae throw at us?”
“We should have figured out a way to jump to his line by now,” Alpha says and looks at me. “She can do it, why can’t the rest of us?”
My face gets hot. They’re talking about me like I’m someone else. Like I’ve been part of this from the beginning. But I have no idea what’s going on around me and I’m tired of it.
“Enough!” I yell and slam my hand through the projection to the table below. Everyone snaps their attention to me. “You may all know me,” I say, and glance at Alpha, “or think you do, but I’m not her. I’m here and she isn’t and all of this is new to me, but from what I can tell if we’re going to do anything to stop Thrane from absorbing this place, I’m going to be the one who does it.” I sweep my eyes across everyone at the table. “Now I don’t care who, but someone is going to explain exactly what the hell is going on, and then we’re going to figure out a way to stop Thrane.”
My breathing’s heavy, waiting for a flurry of argument, but everyone stays quiet. So quiet, I think I can hear Tau’s heart beating beside me, even over the ragged in and out of my breath. Alpha’s glowering at me and Gamma’s got a weird grin on her face. Sigma’s staring right through me but Delta seems strangely relaxed, like he already knows how this is going to end. Gibzon’s the hardest to read. His expression never changes and his glowing milky eyes don’t give anything away.
“Of course,” Gibzon finally says, breaking the tension. “We know this is very confusing. We look at you and see the comrade we once knew, but we are strangers to you. You’ve undergone a world-altering transformation and handled it all on your own. You’re confused. You’re angry. Scared, even.” He looks across the table to his team. “As you all were, at one time. So long ago you might have forgotten, but we remember each of your reactions when you first came here.” Alpha looks away, and the tension seeps from the room. “What do you want to know?” Gibzon asks me.
What do I want to know? Everything. How I got here. Where here is. Who he is. Why he keeps saying “we” instead of “I.” Who all these other people are. Who Thrane is and where he came from … I could go on and on.
But there’s one thing I want to know more than anything—the thing is, I’m also afraid to hear the answer.
“What am I?” I ask, my voice quiet.
Gibzon watches me, his blank eyes studying my face, and the pause goes on long enough I’m starting to become uncomfortable. Finally, Gibzon says to me, “What would you estimate the probability of your world coming under invasion by an army from the future?”
That’s easy. “Before recently, zero.”
Gibzon nods. “The universe tends to agree with you,” he says. “But everything happens eventually, some things more than others.” He gestures toward the table and the spike representing his timestream. “The events that have led our world here are strong enough to ensure it’s still here. Were it otherwise the chronoverse would have given up on us a long time ago. Recycled the energy into more promising timelines.”
This is too much. “You need to start at the beginning,” I tell him.
“Of course,” Gibzon says, and once again the display zooms, this time all the way down to the rippling base of the graph. The surface of the map undulates, hills and valleys thrusting in the churning gray sea. “This is the quantum foam,” Gibzon says. “Where everything begins.” As we watch, a small rounded peak of color forms in the sea of gray, and the peak slowly ripens through the rainbow toward white. “This is a new timeline, a seedling. A potentiality.”
“Where’d it come from?” I ask.
“From nothing,” Gibzon says. “This is the chronoverse. An engine of creation.”
“Built for what?” I ask.
“To fulfill its purpose,” Gibzon says. “As are we all.”
“Which is?”
“To create life. In order to remain in existence, a timeline requires observers.” He continues before I can ask. “Sentient creatures able to collapse the probabilities inherent in the universe into discrete, concrete events. To harden time and create truth. Currently humans dominate the local timelines, but that wasn’t always so.” Again, I have so many questions, but I keep quiet as he continues. “The more likely a line’s events are to have occurred, the stronger the probability. This continues until a threshold is reached and the timeline becomes strong enough to survive on its own. We call these True Lines.”
My head’s full. How am I supposed to keep up with all this? “And that’s where I came from?”
“No,” Gibzon says with a shake of his head. “Your line did not exist long enough to mature into truth. It existed for only the briefest of instants before Thrane conquered it and absorbed its potential energy into his line.”
“What do you mean it only existed for a short time? I was there for eighteen years, and it was around for billions more before that.”
“Time is relative,” Gibzon says, as if that explains everything.
Delta must be reading the perplexed look on my face. “Timelines are created whole,” he says. “The second your timeline popped into existence it already had a history—all leading to you.”
“So what’s the point?” I ask, frustrated. “If the universe keeps making timelines just to suck them back in again?”
“You are the point,” Gibzon answers. “From infinity comes chance, chance becomes existence, and existence becomes inevitability. Extinct and impossible timelines emerge and reemerge on a continual basis—but never last long. The chronoverse tests every permutation, as many times as necessary. But in the end failures are failures for a reason, as they tend to fail.” His bla
nk eyes narrow. “The creation of a new boundless is an inherently rare and powerful occurrence, and it suffused your timeline with truth, which is why Thrane was so quick to pounce on your world.” His lips purse as though he’s considering some new piece of information. “Though the possibility of the chronoverse creating the same boundless twice is something we hadn’t considered. A probability near enough to zero that until a few moments ago we would have accepted it as such.”
“But here I am,” I say. “Again.”
“Yes,” Gibzon responds. “And as for your second manifestation, we cannot provide an explanation. It will require further study.”
That doesn’t explain much. And he still hasn’t answered my biggest question. “What am I then?” I ask. “Really?”
Gibzon points back to the fledgling timeline emerging from the soup. “You are boundless. An emissary of the chronoverse—and an anchor of sorts. Wherever you are”—he looks to the wider group—“wherever any of you are, becomes more real, more probable. More true.”
“And that’s what those spikes on the display are?” I ask, and the map zooms back out to show the two big timelines. Thrane’s hulks over everything.
“Yup,” Gamma says. “As much as it sucks, right now Thrane is the realest thing in the universe.”
“And by gobbling up the other timelines, he grows stronger,” I say, and I hear my voice grow quiet. “How does he do that?”
“At its very essence,” Gibzon explains, “the chronoverse is comprised of pure negative energy. All matter—all life—is derived from this energy, focused through the fundamental forces of creation. The more ‘true’ a timeline becomes, the more energy is concentrated there.”
“I could feel it, when I was there, when I was fighting him. There’s so much power in that world. I don’t know how anyone could beat him.”
“Wait,” Delta cuts in. “You never said you fought Thrane.”
This sends a jolt through Alpha and she looks at me funny—like the hate’s diminished slightly.
“Yeah, but he killed me,” I admit. “I flew into him and jumped him away from Captain Fan and the Resistance and he put one of his energy blades right through me.”
I can feel the electricity in the room. Gamma looks like she wants to laugh.
“You got close to him. And then you jumped him somewhere?” Delta says.
“It was either that or watch him kill all those people.”
“That’s not possible,” Alpha says.
I open my mouth to argue with her but Gibzon takes over. “Your abilities are derived by harnessing the negative energy inherent in the universe, and your body itself is akin to a negative energy battery. Energy density rises algorithmically as timelines grow in probability. There could have been enough energy in Thrane’s world to enable Jasmin to perform at those elevated levels.”
“No one’s that strong,” Alpha says again. For some reason, she doesn’t want to believe I could take Thrane on.
“I was,” I say, glaring back at her. “And if I had any idea what I was doing, I could have beaten him.”
Alpha smirks and I want to leap across the table and throttle her, but Gibzon speaks up first.
“Your training will begin soon,” Gibzon says, his tone ever patient, but there’s something behind it, a new urgency. “But do you not wish to finish this lesson first?”
“Sorry,” I say. “Go on.”
Alpha chews on her lip but doesn’t say anything.
“Once timelines have achieved a probability sufficient to become true, even then they do not remain singular. Instead they themselves exist as collections of near-identical branching timelines, timestreams, each only slightly different, and all fighting for survival. Only one can remain true.” The display zooms way in on Gibzon’s timeline and narrows focus on the white peak. Now that we’re close to it, the timeline looks like a comet, a single white dot blazing through space while it sheds a trail of dust. “True Lines are connected directly to the chronoverse, with the present as their leading edge, and constantly slough off less likely branches as observers make choices and take actions, with the most probable remaining true.”
“Is that why no one remembers me when I jump?” I ask.
“Precisely,” Gibzon answers. “Especially in weaker timelines with no True Line, each time you jump you create a branch, one where you used supernatural abilities to move through time and space, and one where you never existed. Which do you think the universe weighs more heavily toward truth?” I don’t need to answer. People with superhuman abilities jumping through time is one of the least probable things I can imagine. “When you jump you create new instances of that timeline, and if the timeline you left doesn’t have sufficient probable inertia built up, it ceases to be.”
“So those other timelines,” I say to the other Boundless, pointing to the smaller bumps on the Destiny Matrix, “are those yours?”
“We gave up cultivating personal timelines for the greater good,” Alpha says, suddenly defensive, like I insulted her somehow. “Those are lines of boundless who chose for themselves, not for the greater good.”
“What do you mean, ‘chose for themselves’?” I ask, not sure what she’s getting at.
“You know what you can do,” Alpha says. “The chronoverse doesn’t run background checks before it hands out powers. Any one of us could conquer an entire world if we wanted to. Even the combined strength of the world’s armies couldn’t stop us for long, and if they did manage to kill us we could come right back and start again. It might take a while, but no one could stop us. Some pretty crappy people get to be boundless. Imagine the worst person you know able to rule a world. That’s why Gibzon created the Omega Guard—to protect the chronoverse against threats like them. Like Thrane. Without us, everything would be his already.”
“Why hasn’t he taken those little timelines too?” I ask.
“Practicality. Thrane has come to arrangements with the self-centered boundless who live there. Non-aggression pacts. As long as they don’t threaten him, he leaves them to their timelines.”
“So what are you waiting for? How come you haven’t taken him out yet?”
Alpha sneers at me but Gibzon answers for her. “Thrane is a powerful entity, an ancient one. He predates us all. By the time we came to know of his existence he was already far too strong to confront. In addition, he augments his power by artificially maintaining hundreds of thousands of timelines—276, 736 as of last count. He captures the branches of his timestream as they splinter and bolsters their probability, jumps from world to world, remaining for only nanoseconds at a time, existing in a state of superposition to keep them all anchored to the present.” The display zooms once more and shows a close-up of Thrane’s timeline, and the smaller the resolution gets the clearer I can see that it isn’t a single line, but many—too many to count. If the close-up image of Gibzon’s timeline was like a blazing comet, Thrane’s is like a cross section of braided wire, with each strand an individual world. “This is the threat we face—not merely an invasion, but an invasion from hundreds of thousands of worlds simultaneously.”
“Is that why he looks so blurry?”
“He’s in a constant state of flux, existing across all his collected timelines at once.”
“That means … the world I just came from ...” I start, but fumble over my thoughts.
“Is one of many,” Gibzon says.
“Hundreds of thousands of Deadworlds …? Does that mean there are just as many Chens and Captain Fans I never met?”
“Precisely,” Gibzon confirms.
Ok, that’s enough backstory for today. I’m starting to lose track of it as it is. Right now there’s only one thing that matters. “But you have a plan to stop him, right?”
“Thrane uses his entanglers to harvest timelines, absorbing their energy into his,” Alpha says, “but Gibzon figured out a way to reverse the process, and allow the target timeline to absorb Thrane’s instead. We can use his entanglers agai
nst him, but we can only operate in one world at a time and he has thousands at his disposal.”
“That’s why you sent those communication devices to the Resistance,” I say. “There’s a Captain Fan and a Chen in each timeline, and you were going to use them all together against Thrane.”
“Indeed,” Gibzon says. “Each Deadworld also possesses a resistance. But even with the assistance of the loops, we have been unable to jump into any of his worlds. The singularity he’s erected provides interference enough that we cannot reach him.”
“Then why can I still make it through?” I ask.
“Because you can,” Gibzon says simply.
“That’s not a great answer,” I say.
“At this point, it’s all we have to offer. The chronoverse is mysterious and holds its secrets close.”
“So then if Thrane can throw up a big shield around his timeline, why can’t you?”
Gibzon’s mouth twitches at the corners. “Because it would take the resources of an entire planet to create even a small singularity in space-time. Thrane has an empire, while we work alone and in shadow. In this timeline the technology to manipulate the quantum realm is highly regulated, and has been for nearly a hundred years.”
“So this place …” I say, looking around, remembering how I swam up through nothing to get in.
“Is as hidden as we can make it,” Gibzon finishes. “And quite illegal in this world. We have certain allies, government contacts within the Department of Temporal Research and Security who know of the true nature of the chronoverse and the dangers it possesses, and we are aligned in purpose, but even if they were to muster the United Planet forces, they possess nothing on the scale of Thrane’s empire. We have kept the threat secret to prevent negative reactions from the populace, but with war approaching, we may need to reconsider our silence.”