by Al K. Line
Dale's heart was beating too fast, it felt like he was going to have some kind of a seizure the adrenaline pumped so furiously — this was not the kind of thing he was used to doing.
Praying, Dale looked down at the Hexad.
1 greeted him.
He went to get Amanda.
~~~
Amanda looked so helpless amid the backdrop of the huge empty warehouse. She was frightened and alone and was tentatively making her way back to the room, clearly unsure what else to do, not wanting to be alone or to leave Dale alone either. Dale didn't blame her, and was secretly pleased that he'd actually acted the way he did — he certainly never knew that he had such actions in him.
"You okay?" Dale asked.
"Yeah. Scared. But more importantly, are you okay?"
Amanda hugged him tight and he spoke into her hair. "I'm fine. The giant's gone, and the old man's unconscious on the floor."
"Let's get some answers then."
"Okay, and I have this too." Dale showed her the Hexad.
"Let's use it wisely then. One jump means we shouldn't be too hasty."
"Agreed. Oh, and you know that lump on the table?"
"That was Laffer, right? You set the Hexad to go off and send him back there. Why?"
Dale scratched his head. "Well, I figured that must have been what it was, and well, erm, if I'd done it then I had to do it so it would have happened. Right?"
Damn, is that right? It must be.
"I guess. And one mystery solved."
"Yeah, one down, many more to go," muttered Dale, as he stepped into the fake room, from the outside looking like nothing more than a large wooden box in the vast warehouse.
Amanda entered behind him.
~~~
Dale took the rope tie-backs from the curtains that were drawn, hiding absolutely nothing but bare wall, no window, and dragged the unconscious figure into a chair then tied him securely to it.
Both of them were nervous, not knowing who the man was, why he'd been after them, or even where they were: past, present, or future. The strange fake room was a mystery too, but clearly there for a reason.
Time to find out what was going on.
The man returned to consciousness in a matter of minutes, squirming against his bonds before finally settling down.
"Who are you?" asked Dale.
The man shook his head, refusing to answer. It put Dale in a quandary. What to do now? He wasn't in the habit of beating old men tied to chairs, no matter what the circumstances. He just didn't feel like he had it in him. Then an idea came to him.
"You see this?" Dale thrust the Hexad out, showing the 1 on the top. "How about I set it for, hmm, let's say a hundred thousand years into the past, or maybe the future, your pick, and I throw it at your damn head? You know what the number means, right?" The man nodded his head vigorously, fear emanating from him like a bad odor. "Good. Then you know that if I do that you will be stuck there, alone, no chance of getting out of it, back to here, or whatever time it is that you come from."
"No, please. Don't. I come from this time, forty seven years after yours. I belong here, this is my present."
"Who are you?"
"We're the only ones left. Is Laffer okay? Where is he?"
"He's gone."
"Oh. Oh dear, that is a shame. He was pretty much my only hope."
"Only hope of what?"
"Of getting you, of making you stop this madness."
Dale and Amanda exchanged glances nervously. "Making us stop what?"
The man looked confused, then realized. "Of course, you don't know yet. I sent him to get you before you could. Clearly something went wrong though, or changed, if you already know about the Hexads."
"Stop. You're not making sense. What did you want to stop us doing?"
"Why, telling the world about Hexads of course, stopping you destroying the world."
"And how exactly were you going to do that?"
"I was going to keep you here, in your future, so you would never be able to find them."
"Jeez, you people and your cryptic crap. Look, if you stopped us from finding the Hexads then you wouldn't be able to send your giant back in time to get us, now would you? As soon as your plan worked then it would have failed. The paradox."
"I don't care about that. The paradox would simply send the problem to another timeline. At least in my universe you would be contained, you wouldn't find the Hexads, and you wouldn't have ruined absolutely everything. I wouldn't have been alone, stuck with Laffer all this time, my last loyal employee after everything fell apart."
Dale sighed. "I think you better start at the beginning, don't you?" Dale had the feeling it was going to take some time to get to understand exactly why they were suddenly so popular and why everyone was blaming them for the end of the world, whatever that meant.
It was time to find out.
The old man seemed as confused as them by the sudden turn of events, clearly in no way prepared for his plan to fail once Dale and Amanda were actually brought before him. Dale wondered what the truth was about the future he'd had for them. Probably kill them if the way he allowed Laffer to beat him was anything to go by.
A Long Story
47 Years Future
There were countless questions, confusion on both sides, and a lot of threats were made, both by Dale and Amanda concerning what they would do with the old man who said his name was Hector, and by him threatening to come and get them and stop them no matter what.
It turns out Dale and Amanda really did end the world however, if Hector was to be believed.
As far as Dale was concerned he was as much to blame as they were though. He was, when all was said and done, just as responsible.
As the story unfolded Dale didn't know whether to believe it all or not a word — it was very hard to be told you were the one responsible for the end of everything, for reality to become so mixed up that nothing worked properly anymore and nobody was where they were supposed to be and chaos reigned.
Hector had been a successful entrepreneur for years, building a large empire with masses of employees and countless businesses in many different countries.
Then the Hexad was released to the world.
Ten years from Dale and Amanda's present they did indeed discover a hoard of Hexads in their garden after speculating about it over a drunken night. How the same thing had happened already to Dale and Amanda was a slip in the fabric of time where almost parallel universes collided, causing chaos and the current state of events.
Or maybe not. If Dale thought about it then all it took was for the them in the future to go back and leave the tin and for them to dig it up — everything followed from there. But that didn't make sense either, as the future them wouldn't have experienced what had happened so far, would they?
It went around and around in his head, the reality of time travel revealing deeper and deeper layers of mysteries and complications that all added up to the whole thing simply being impossible.
How could what happened in one of their futures end up changing their past and thus changing the future but still allowing the changes to remain? Maybe because in ten years they do dig up the Hexads? Was that right?
Sure, it had to be that. They just had to make sure they dug them up and then the events that had unfolded would make sense. They'd do what they'd already done, they'd send a Hexad back to land on the kitchen table so reality made some kind of sense.
But if they did all that, did things in their future to ensure that the past worked as it had, then they would be perpetuating what Hector said was the end of the world.
So maybe they should just not dig up the Hexads and nothing would happen apart from life being normal.
At that Dale paused, knowing that if such conjecture ended up being a reality then he and Amanda were about to blink out of existence and none of it would have happened.
They stayed right where they were.
So, obviously you can't change the past
? Does that mean you can't change the future either? The future versions of us clearly didn't decide not to dig up the Hexads, even if the reasoning why changed. So everything that has happened, and will happen, does? At least in one version of the universe. And we're stuck in this one, on our warped timeline, so events simply have to play out.
It was too much of a mind-bend, and at the heart of the problem Dale suspected that it would negate the whole concept of free will.
If the future was set, and they clearly did discover the Hexads, send one back, bury the tin, and everything else that had happened in just a single day so far, then was it even possible to change the future, the one they were in now where Hector was telling them they'd ended the world?
Dale shook his head. They had to try. Maybe that was the point? The future would be different, but they would still do what they had to do to let the complications play out and it would all add up to a convoluted version of the future where only they knew what had happened.
Or forget it all and just sit around on a Saturday enjoying the sunshine, moaning about hangovers and maybe mowing the lawn.
Dale gave it up as a lost cause, finally admitting he had absolutely no idea how it all worked and doubted that he ever would.
The interrogation continued.
~~~
"You're telling us that it's our fault but that we didn't actually do it? That it was these mysterious people that took the Hexads away from us and it was them that were to blame?" Amanda looked as frazzled as Dale felt. It had been a long day, or a long number of decades spanning universes and time, which is kind of more how Dale felt.
"Well, yes, but it was you that found them, and you that reported them. They came after them, and they got them. The police didn't know what they were and they took them easily enough, but you kept one, used it to escape, and then the knowledge got out, on the Internet, and soon the plans were there for everyone to see. All you had to do then was build one."
"And that's where you came in," said Dale. "I don't see why we are getting all the blame when it sounds to me like it was you, and people like you, that were responsible for this getting so out of hand. It's bloody ridiculous."
Hector held his frail, liver-spotted hands up. "I take my part of the blame, but nobody knew the repercussions of allowing Hexads out into the general populace. Okay, we kind of did, but money comes first. By the time the Government tried to put a ban on owning one it was too late: nobody would stand for it, everyone wanted one. People from far into the future, when the Hexads were actually invented, well, they came back, tried to stop it all, but it was all too far gone by then. Nobody was where they were supposed to be, nobody was doing what they should have been — things got really complicated. Incredibly complicated. Everyone was messing with everyone else's futures, timelines were jumping all over the place and nothing was working in a linear way any longer. Oh, terrible times. You helped create this world, the one we live in now. My present, your future."
Dale's head was actually going to explode, it really was. He thought it had been tough getting the confusion of time travel being a possibility straight in his mind, but this was taking it to the extreme. He tried once more to get the story to make sense. The interrogation would have to end soon, they were both exhausted and Hector looked like he might simply drop down dead some time soon. He was, after all, an old man. Just not a very nice one.
"So, in the future, for us, the past for you, you are saying that we discover Hexads, report them to the police as it's too freaky and weird, and then at some point later on the world gets to know about them, everyone wants one, and even though the people from the future, the far future, that invented them come back to try to stop it all, well, it still all happens and everyone ends up with a Hexad? Is that what you're saying?"
Hector actually looked annoyed with Dale, like he was a child unable to understand the simplest of explanations. "Yes my dear boy, that is what I am telling you. Your discovery was impounded by the police, then it was stolen back by the rightful owners, but then the plans became available. We built them, we made a fortune, then everything unraveled. It's your fault."
"How the hell is it our fault then if you are the ones that made them available to everyone?"
"Because, young man, you kept one."
"Oh."
"Oh."
"Exactly. You kept one, you sent one back to yourselves, back to your own time, and that's why you are here."
"How do you know that?"
"Because I have been trying to put a stop to this for so long now, so very long, that I have met you countless times and each time I learn something new. But this was the last chance, the final Hexad I had and Laffer failed me ultimately. Now it is down to you to stop it, you have to."
Dale stared at Hector hard. "You wanted to kill us, or keep us here so none of it would have happened, not all of it anyway, and now you want us to clean up your mess?"
"I keep telling you, it's not my mess, it's yours. You found them, you kept one, you used it, and you set this whole thing off. I've tried so many times to change all this, met you at different periods in your life, times you won't remember yet but will happen in the future for you, and it just never works out. I don't know what it is about you two but you have more than your fair share of luck. It's most frustrating actually."
"So what are we supposed to do?" asked Amanda.
"You need to stop this, this madness. I have tried countless ways, tried to stop you getting a Hexad, tried to stop you sending one back to yourselves, tried to eliminate you before any of this ever happened, but every time you somehow manage to continue down the path that leads to my world being nothing but confusion and pointless."
Dale took a break, just to stop the madness, but it was no use, he had to finish hearing what was being said, so he turned back and tried to get the remaining pieces of the puzzle straight in his head.
It left him more confused than ever.
Hector's knowledge was clearly limited in terms of what had happened in his own past that led to the existence of the Hexads becoming common knowledge, but as far as Dale could figure out then at some point he and Amanda had used the one that they kept, maybe then allowing themselves to pick up more of them, and somehow the knowledge was exposed. How the plans got onto the Web Hector had no idea, but it spread like wildfire and soon everyone wanted one. The plans were way too complicated though — nobody could figure out how to actually build them, apart from a few very talented individuals who learned the secrets that made the devices work, after years of studying the blueprints. At this point nobody actually had one that functioned, but once the first one was built all hell broke lose.
The greed of corporations meant they sold them for vast sums, more than whole countries were worth to the uber rich, the money allowing for investment on an astronomical scale that led to the creation of huge and extremely dangerous and complicated factories to be constructed that made mass production possible.
It all got out of control.
People popping in and out of existence randomly. People using the Hexad to send themselves back in time to alter their future to make it better, resulting in everyone else on the planet's future changing too, ripples spreading through minutes, hours, years and even centuries, lapping against the shores of time, meeting, crossing over each other as more and more people jumped, each jump changing reality for the world, each warp of time meeting the ripples of countless other jumps, sending things haywire, until there was little concept of 'now' for the majority, and people's lives became impossibly convoluted and strange as nothing was linear any longer.
It escalated until nothing in the present, Hector's present, could function as it should. Nobody was in the now, everyone had jumped somewhere, changing things until nothing was possible any longer. There was no firm reality, no anchor for existence, no linear path of birth, life, having a child and so on and so on. Time and reality couldn't keep up, everything was too tangled, getting worse and worse the more jumps th
at were made — too much manipulation of the past, and the future, for any universe to cope with. Time was broken and nobody had a history that made sense. People's parents never met, ancestors took different paths and never had children, and paradox after paradox built until it rippled out into every imaginable universe that ever existed and ever would until it all came to an end point.
Everyone simply vanished.
The universes, all of them, became too complex and too convoluted for anything to have a chance of making any kind of sense. As people changed their own pasts and that of others, so the paradoxes meant new universes were created to cope, or people found themselves in different universes and timelines just so their actions could have consequences and could have ever been made to happen in the first place.
Then the cosmic order became impossible.
So there was only one answer.
None of it ever happened. Reality had to continue to exist, of course it did, and time had to be real, a linear progression even though when you got right down to it everything was happening at the same time, past and future all wrapped into a cosmic ball. But peel back the layers and reality had to make sense: if one person was left alive in the present then the world simply had to exist, it stood to reason, so the universes did the only thing they could and the rest of humanity simply popped out of existence so there could be order once more.
"Oh, well, right, glad we got that sorted out then." Dale put his head in his hands and tried to stop his brain oozing out from the cracks that were surely forming all over his battered skull.
"Makes sense to me," said Amanda brightly, actually looking quite perky when Dale lifted his head and peered at her from between his fingers.