“How many times did you attempt to infiltrate the past?”
“About twenty-seven,” Vic said.“I lost count after the first few but started keeping a tally.Official count post-tallymarks was 22, but a conservative estimate is another five or six times before I started counting.So yeah.27, 28 times.”
“And how did you come to understand you had died?”
“Well, Stacey died, more like,” Vic said.“I just kinda went back and touched the Paradox again and tried to start things from scratch.”
“Hang on,” I spluttered.
“I admit I skipped out on theoretical time enmeshment in my undergraduate study at Darkhold U, but am I missing something?”Judge Volkheim asked.“How can you create two timelines and Paradoxes by accident, but not completely mess up the timeline when you go back twenty-eight times?”
“Uh, well, when you don’t know you’re working with a Paradox it’s different.But when you do know, there are… other options.”
“Consciousness transferal,” Drusella said.“I had only heard of it in theory.Are you saying you were able to complete not just one or two T-Flops, but 28 total T-flops?”
“T-flops?”Brynholf asked.“Can you explain the concept for the court record?”
“Time-displacement flip-flop action,” Drusella said.“The theory is that one can swap consciousness with a past version of themselves.Since it’s the same energetic equivalent you’re essentially completing a time-space transferal without temporally impacting the world around you.”
“It was difficult,” Vic said.“In fact, I was terrified I’d overshoot every time, but there seemed to be a groove to it after a while.It was easier to hone-in on that specific time frame.”
“If you could do that, why not go back and stop all of this from happening?”Judge Volkheim asked.
“More Paradoxes, and more dead timelines,” Drusella said.“A dead timeline is a terrible thing, your honor.Too much tampering and you put yourself on the short list for a Reckoning.Chronomancy research has found itself impeded by the insistence of the universe on order.It will send a number of, well, enigmas that are referred to as ‘Reckoners.’Reckoners have a tendency to aggregate like red blood cells against Paradoxes.This creates a sticky effect in Time/Space, which eventually results in the compacting of two or more disparate timelines together in any old fashion or form, irrespective of what actually happened.This is what occurs when the humans talk of the Mandela Effect.A Reckoning has simplified timelines and concatenated disparate pasts.”
Judge Volkheim nodded hesitantly.
“So what you’re saying, in layman’s terms…”
“Anything larger than a day or two will absolutely create Paradoxes,” Vic said.“The criteria to avoid creating a Paradox is that events leading up to the events that spark the Time Travel in the first place have to stay in place.The events we had witnessed were such that we were under the impression Nagisa and Eddie had died.”
“Yet they are very much alive,” Judge Volkheim said.
“And that was the trick,” Vic said.
Chapter5
Icould smell the sewers from the room we were in.The golden needle that I had thought I had put behind me so long ago from my past glittered from the green privacy vault at the far edge of the room, like the most bizarre treasure chest in the entire universe.
“Go on, then,” Vic said.
“Wait, come again?”I asked.
“We have to go back and fix things,” Vic said to me.“Grab the Routshammer already.”
“Wait.Not yet.I still haven’t wrapped my brain around this whole thing.I need you to explain it to me like you would to a child.”
“We can keep Eddie and Nagisa alive, but you have to do exactly what I tell you to,” Vic said.“No aberrations from the plan.You cannot talk to the past version of yourself, or me.”Vic cut himself off and sniffed at the air like a hound dog.“What is that?It reeks like elemental hexwork.”
“I’ve had a long day and haven’t had time to shower,” I said.
“No, not that.It’s coming from your pocket.What is that?”
I pulled out the tarot card I had gotten from Grynfelda before.It seemed to glow, pulsing against my hand like a primed bomb.
“Oh, perfect,” Vic said.His eyes seemed to glisten as he took it in.“Listen, let me modify that a little bit.This is your suicide pill.Something happens, you activate this and you go right up in flames.Poof, ash.”
“What?”I asked.
