The Timegate Part Three

I received some compelling reasons to keep telling this story and so after much deliberation and deleted drafts I finally finished part three. Thanks for your responses, believe me I would not have continued writing the timegate without them. I’m pretty happy with this, but there will always be room for revision. I suggest you at least read the last part of the timegate part 2 located here since this jumps right in.

Without further ado.

“Time move’s one second per second regardless of the direction.” The man in the black, ragged robe spoke confidently.

“What the heck is that supposed to mean!?” Heur’s mouth was agape. “Isn’t that obvious?”

Kagami answered before the man in the black robe could speak “No it’s not.”

The man explicated “Take the case of me going back in time and giving my former self the paper. If I give him the paper at that point I would not immediately disappear. I also wouldn’t forget why I was in that time or developing the paper I wrote.
Nothing would happen as I stepped into the timegate to return to the present either. The truth of the matter is only my memory would slowly degrade. At first I would forget the 10 seconds of experience that had occurred if I hadn’t shown up because 10 seconds after I came back and handed him the paper never happened. Then a few minutes would pass and anything that happened to me in those few minutes that had changed would now become what I remember. As I stepped through the timegate to return to the future and the present played out for my other self the memories that I once cherished of me researching and developing the paper that I had so long committed would slowly crumble away. When I stepped outside of the timegate into my current future I would no longer remember having ever done the research at all.”

“Then what about the paper? Would it slowly fade away too, line by line?” Aravis spoke up in her inquisitor like voice.

The man was walking again and we all followed him like trained dogs. We hung on his every word and he couldn’t resist such a captivated audience “That’s just the thing. At the point just before the time traveler goes back: For instance let’s say this is the younger me who has grown up in this other timeline. When he reaches the point where he can go back and give the paper to himself at the same point in time or even earlier he has many choices. He can go back, or he could stay. He could even go back further in time. The real question is what would happen if he were not to go back at all. I believe that if he were not to go back the paper would disappear at that point in time and slowly works its way up to this point in time one second at a time. This means that even if we change the past we won’t see the results of it immediately, we will continue to live out our lives because that past cannot move faster than this present. What will start to fade is our memories and if someone is never born at some point along the way their childhood memories will black out when the past catches up. Their childhood and all of their memories will slowly erode one memory at a time. If you’re far enough away from when the change took place you wouldn’t notice the effects at all, however eventually your great great grandfather would no longer exist in your time and you wouldn’t know why. No amount of looking could ever find trace of him. Basically, if someone changed something twenty years ago it would take twenty years to catch up and you could only remember the last twenty years at any one time.”

“Wait,” I sputtered “So it would be like trying to hold onto something that was always disappearing?”

“Not exactly” the man continued “Let’s say you exist without the paper in our example and another you a second ahead in time exists with the paper. Both versions would make extremely different choices and one could never really erase the other. However, the man a second ahead in time could never remember what he had done the second before; he could never make new memories that would last more than a second. Humans are only adept at seeing the present and for good reason. If we saw two minutes ahead it would be very hard to orient our motion, for similar reasons if we saw two minutes behind we could not react in time to what’s happening in the present. For exactly this reason we cannot see the continuous fluctuation of time around us but cipro without prescription we know that it can only traverse the timeline one order cheap tabs second at a time or go back one second at a time.”

“Yes, but can you prove any of it?” Kagami asked still chewing her thumbnail.

“As a matter of fact I can.” The man whipped out a stack of papers from his robe and for the first time I saw that we had come back to stand in front of the black abyss that was the timegate. We had all been so enraptured by his speech that we had not noticed walking in a circle.

“Right now I am supposed to go back and deliver this paper to myself three weeks ago, but I’m not going to do it.” He held the paper in front of everyone to see.

He pulled a cigarette out of his pocket and lit it, I guess some people buy acomplia still smoked in the future, “I don’t think I’ve told you yet, but I’m a doctor, or used to be. My specialty was in total amnesia but I have given it the name time sickness.” He took a large inhale; it was really hard to believe he had ever been a doctor. “There is no cure and it completely defies everything we have ever known about amnesia. There is no damage to the hippocampus, frontal lobe, or amygdale as in normal amnesiac patients. This is what first clued in my superior and it wasn’t until I met a little girl who could not do anything that I finally drafted this paper. Her name was Gwen and she could not eat, speak, or remember. Most doctors wrote it off as her being retarded, but there was absolutely no damage to her brain and the electrical signals in her brain were firing just as normally as any girl her age. My guess is that someone altered Gwen’s existence right after she was born, even a couple of minutes before. My theory was further proven by the mother and father having a similar loss of memory after Gwen’s birth; they did not even recognize their own chi-…” The man’s voice broke a little bit and he had to stop for a couple of seconds. He wiped his nose and cleared his throat.

“I’ve worked all of my life to cure time sickness, but when I present my findings to the timegate authorities and other timegate theorists they laugh. Truthfully, I believe everyone to just be scared. For instance look at those cops.” He said pointing to some police officers walking casually to the side of us.

“Where do you suppose they are going?”

I couldn’t answer the question. I was still thinking about Gwen, Heur answered “They just look like they’re casually walking to me.”

The man had distracted himself and apparently didn’t notice the wet line running down his cheek. “They are going to catch a murderer. You might ask how there can be a murderer when the past and future are known. They don’t care; they won’t try to change it because someone’s existence hangs in the balance. The murderer believes that is what he will always do and the police believe they will always catch him after he’s already committed the murder. If they catch him early or late them someone else’s life will be altered and they won’t even notice the memories of their life slipping away and being replaced. Everyone here is afraid that if they don’t make exactly the same decisions that got them here they will never exist at all. They all hide and keep their stupid records and stupid timegate going non stop so no one will realize that time can be changed and neither the past nor the future are set in stone.”

Aravis asked the question that had to be asked “What are we supposed to do?”

The man smiled and turned his pointing purchase cheap pills fingers away from the police officer and back at all of us. “You aren’t supposed to do anything; I thought I’d explained that. However, for three more weeks you will remember this conversation because I decided to tell you four the moment I was handed this paper three weeks ago. In three weeks you must stop time sickness by destroying the timegate right after its construction.”

Heur asked another question that had to be asked “Why us?”

The man pointed his finger at Heur, “Because you four are the only ones with very little to lose. No one can travel further back then the timegate’s creation so you will always at least exist.”

I asked “Why should we?”

He pointed the finger at me, “Because if you don’t the present will never be acceptable. Look at this herd of people following pre-defined paths; they are too scared to live outside their schedule. Is this the future you want? Is a future where you only make decisions because you’re told you already made them really a future you can live with?”

“Uhh…” Kagami started and I noticed for the first time she had started sweating a little and looked extremely nervous “You don’t understand what you’re asking… We can’t just destroy the timegate with a bomb or anything… It’s not just a freezer and accelerator it’s really a Tipler cyl…”

The man threw his cigarette on the ground and stepped on it. “I know what it really is. It won’t be easy and you have to be careful. However, I also know that fifty years from now someone figured out a way to destroy the timegate. I suggest that you first go ask them.”

Kagami didn’t look satisfied with that answer and she chewed on her thumbnail more fiercely than ever. The conveyer belt of people kept moving towards the timegate and I couldn’t help but notice the five armed guards standing beside the gate.

“How are we supposed to get through the timegate? It looks like you have to have a pass and a reason.”

“Leave that to me,” He said pulling out a gun.

Heur gawked in disbelief “What the heck is that man? Aren’t you a doctor? Didn’t you swear the Hippocratic Oath to do no harm?”

The man smiled, “What century are you from? Doctors stopped swearing the Hippocratic Oath two hundred years ago.” He then turned to address all of us, “Remember you only have three weeks before you start forgetting our conversation, also don’t put in a number any later than 2683 as that was the year the timegate online buy Ampicillin was destroyed.”

Without another word the doctor in the ragged, black robe walked up to a bearded man in the conveyer line and put the gun to his back. He whispered something in the ear of the man he held the gun to and the man nodded and then screamed. “He’s got a gun help me!” At which point they both backed into the alley. The guards at the gate looked hesitant for a second than the doctor yelled “You always stop me”. The guards all ran after them.

Aravis, Heur, and I bolted for the timegate and it was only then that I noticed Kagami wasn’t following.

“Kagami come on!” I yelled back at her where she stood still looking flustered and worried,

She looked at me when I yelled and with pleading eyes she spoke “You don’t understand you can’t just…”

“We’ll worry about that when we get there!” I grabber her hand as I spoke and guided her behind me as we all sprinted for the gate. Aravis got there first and punched in some numbers on the screen. The gate whirred to life as the people on the conveyer belt just looked shocked and confused. Apparently none of them knew what to do since they hadn’t been expecting this. As soon as the black enveloped the timegate Heur and Aravis stepped in. Kagami pulled her hand free of mine with a little bit of effort.

She yelled in alarm. “Just stop already! Don’t you realize that we have no plan; we don’t even know if this can work!”

I looked at all of the people in line who had frightened looks in their eyes and didn’t dare move one way or the other. “I know… isn’t it wonderful.”

“Yes, but… you see…” she stuttered.

I grabbed her hand again “I know we can’t do this without you.”

Kagami’s eyes widened and she smiled. We ran into the abyss of the timegate together to do… well, who knows.