“2+2=5”
School House
Rock*
Today I used my
dashing good looks to sweep a beautiful woman off her feet.
Unfortunately she was a warrior-wizard-princess from another universe
and she had to leave because her people needed her. Unfortunately I
don't think we'll meet again but I gave her a heartfelt goodbye
before she left through the vortex between universes.
Anyway onto the
flash fiction!
The Paradox
Genocide
I've got a
riddle for you. How can you attempt suicide by killing someone and
end up killing billions of other people while giving birth to
billions more? Then on top of that making it so that no one knows who
you are? The core of the answer is simple and something that people
have been thinking of the consequences of. Think a bit? Do you have
it? The answer is:
Kill your own
grandfather.
I wanted to
commit suicide. Originally I wanted to do it with a gun. But there
was a problem. With all the pain and suffering I had been through and
my own instinctual cowardice I couldn't trust death's door. What
would the afterlife give me? Would I keep my memories of my suffering
where ever I went? So instead of just killing myself I decided I
would back in time and kill my own grandfather. I access to the
technology. I was one of the few people with access to the military
time travel experiments. Finally working under their thumb would pay
off I thought.
I figured that
the grandfather paradox would kill me. Erase me from existence. If my
grandfather then my family line would be gone and I couldn't possibly
be born. Being erased meant I would have never felt that pain in the
first place.
But the worst
thing happened. When I killed him nothing happened. It didn't make
sense. Time travel theories all over told me that I should be gone.
But when I killed him nothing seemed to happen. I spent years in my
grandfather's time trying to figure out what had gone wrong. I made
it so that I couldn't be followed but that required the time portal
being one way so I couldn't go back so I was stuck.
I used my
knowledge of the future to assist me. Things were different in many,
many ways but enough was the same for me to make many safe bets to
lead me along. With my new success in life I managed to leave the
original depression that drove me to suicide in the first place, the
only darkness left in my soul being the guilt for killing my
grandfather. I made sure to use my knowledge of the future to cut off
the resources to time travel projects.
One day my
depression returned when I realized what had happened. Why I wasn't
erased. I was at the stock exchange and one random man said to
another “Time sure flies here.” while the other responded, “For
me it goes to a crawl. Guess time is relative.”
That made it
hit me. Time travel worked by messing around with relativity. In the
space-time continuum everything had a sort of relativity to
everything else as shown by Einstein. The time machine made the
relativity of my matter go from being in the present to being in the
past with my grandfather. So when my grandfather was killed I was no
longer related to my grandfather as a future result of him. In the
space-time continuum I was in the same place as him. So when my
grandfather died no paradox, there was no me in the present that was
a result of him anymore.
Though this
first part of the realization wasn't the part that caused my
depression. It was the part where I realized that only I was safe
from the paradox. The rest of the future beyond my grandfather
including the other instances of me that had not gone into the
machine was not safe from the paradox. If the way I under stood how
the world would “correct” relativity moving objects and alternate
time line like what I was experience would be line God had taken what
existed previously and torn it up and
created
something new. I realized that I had committed genocide of the entire
universe for clumsy suicide. The only comfort being that maybe this
“timeline” would be better. I doubt it would be enough to clear
my guilt.
I wonder if
this guilt would make me depressed enough to be willing to pull the
trigger and commit true suicide.
Author Comment:
Well along with making a depressing story I also resolved that
grandfather paradox that everybody keeps talking about in time
travel(though I'm not sure how well I explained it in the story, bit
of an info-dump) Also in my opinion when you think about it any time
line change, even without the grandfather thing I outlined does erase
all the previously existing people so doesn't that kill them? Time
travel is weird.
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