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LarrySun:
THE JOURNEY TO A THOUSAND FLASH

Flash 23: Spiral (Part 2)

Steve's death was a mysterious one. He had died from a gunshot wound to the head. I knew because I saw it happen - the horror had played itself right in front of me. My older self had appeared and killed my best friend. I vividly remember that the killer was wearing the same digital wristwatch we wore.

But the bullet was not found. That was the post-mortem report. It seemed like the bullet had either dissolved or it simply disappeared.

No one believed me when I said that Steve had been killed by the future me. They all thought I was so traumatised by my friend's death that my brain formed a fantastic explanation. There was no witness, I was the only one who saw the tragedy. Steve could not back my claim because - well - he's dead. I killed him, but no one believed me. The gun was nowhere to be found, and the bullet had simply evaporated - yet, Steve remained dead.

It eventually dawned on me that the tragedy I witnessed meant that the time-travel we planned to create was a success. Steve and I had made a pact that we would return to that moment. Nothing about the pact suggested that one of us was going to kill the other - but I had killed my only friend. There must be an explanation for that, and I planned to get to the bottom of it.

To arrive at the ultimate truth, I would have to create time travel. I knew that it was possible, so I worked towards it. I told no one about my plans, for I knew, once again, they would laugh at me. The only person who wouldn't mock me was Steve, my best friend. I decided to honour him by always wearing the digital wristwatch.

I chose to study physics and personally majored on 'the physics of time' - theoretical physics, or call it spacetime, if you will. I welcomed every material I could put my hands on. With the knowledge from textbooks Steve and I had plowed through over the years, achieving my goal was not as impossible as it was supposed to pose on the ordinary mind. I understood the concept of tachyon application. But I admit, the knowledge took its toll on me. No one told me that trying to create time travel would have its side-effects, not only on my psychology but also on my physiology. In trying to create a faster-than-light object that would help me achieve my goal, I met with an accident that damn near claimed my life. The tachyon I discovered was rubic-like; it was too much. All I needed was a tiny particle. I have studied physics enough to understand that making use of the entire tachyon at once would create a black hole big enough to swallow itself - and you know what that means, don't you? The entire earth would shrink into this hole.

What I was doing was dangerous. If the government knew, I would be locked away in a cell for the rest of my life. Hell, I might even be executed on the charge of terrorism. That is why I chose to carry out all my experimentation in the little basement I had built for myself over the years.

The tachyon was so solid that it could not be broken. No hammer or mallet had been fashioned strong enough to break a tachyon - because tachyons were not yet supposed to exist. Indeed, it's a compound no scientist has been able to form. Even Gerald Feinberg only hinted upon the possibility of its existence - he had never seen it created, but I digress.

To get the particle I needed from the tachyon I had created, I would have to make use of a laser. It wasn't the best instrument to use and I knew I ran the risk of causing fatality, but I knew of no other way. Besides, I knew I wasn't going to die; if I was, I wouldn't have appeared and killed my friend.

My safety gears were already properly donned as I brought the laser down to the tachyon. Oh, did it cause a great explosion! Thankfully, the basement was under a cabin in the woods, and the quake the explosion caused could only travel much. But I was highly fortunate. I wasn't supposed to survive such an explosion. The shock threw me off my feet and I landed many yards away. My safety gears were shattered. When I took off what was left of the suit and helmet, I was bleeding in the face. I managed to treat the would and looked in the mirror, there was an ugly gash on my face - I was beginning to look like the monster that had shot my friend.

But I didn't want to be a monster. My mission was to find the monster itself, myself. It seemed mildly confusing. But that man was the only person who could give me the reason for killing Steve.

The explosion did a lot of damage, but I got what I wanted. The tachyon had exploded into pieces. I was able to get the particles I wanted. I salvaged what I could from the destruction and built another basement. The mission must continue - I had come too far to back off now.

So, with the particle, I was able to create a little portal in my little basement. That was my first breakthrough. With the portal, I was able to, within a few seconds, get a brief glance of a different time, a different period. At that point, I had no idea whether the portal I created was the gateway to the past, or the future. The duration was too brief for me to make an accurate assessment. The portal had closed almost as briefly as it had opened. But I was glad that I was finally making a headway. In most of the books I read, I often came across a single philosophy - Physics holds the secrets of the universe. Whoever came up with that could never be more right. With the knowledge of physics and the application of some formulae I propounded, I was able to make possible what the best scientists of the world could only imagine. To say that I was proud of myself was a vicious understatement. But there was still a lot of work to do, a lot of stuff to achieve - I had to stay focus.

It was imperative that I tried to create more time for the portal to stay open. If the portal could remain open long enough, I could locate my villainous self from the future, bring him back to the present through the open portal, question him about why he did what he did, then decide whether to let him go, or kill him for killing my friend. But how would I be able to kill my future self? Wouldn't that be creating a kind of paradox on itself? Well, when the moment came, I would find out.

But I had no intention of killing my future self anyway. I didn't want to become a murderer like him. I had to be a better person than him. There must be a very good reason for killing my friend. Something must have gone wrong. Perhaps my future self had gone insane from creating a time travel, and he had only gone to the past to eliminate the only person in the world who had allow the seed of madness to germinate in my mind. For it was only Steve who had shared my belief about time travel when others had dismissed me as a stupid child. Maybe my future self believed that he would regain his sanity when he killed Steve. It's ridiculous, I know; but that's the only plausible explanation I could come up with. My future self was in the best position to explain, I must find him.

No matter how much I tried, the portal could only stay open for a few seconds. Apparently, I wasn't psychologically equipped enough to solve that problem. I would have to work with what I had. Trying to make it better would only result in a waste of time. I had to channel my attention to something else - something more pertinent: the location of myself.

Locating him was the most challenging aspect of everything. Apparently, my future self didn't want to be found. Somehow, he knew I was searching for him; he probably also knew my intention - that was why he chose to elude me.

It was hard setting up the portal and directing it to where he was in the future. I would only see him for a brief moment and the portal would close. I couldn't jump into the portal to join him because I knew that I would be trapped in his world. I had used half of all the particles of the tachyon. In that future, the tachyon had been long exhausted - so there wouldn't be a way to bring myself back to the present, and two versions of myself in the same universe would only result in chaos - I couldn't allow that to happen. The only thing I could do was bring him from the future through the portal before it closed. Then when I had got the information I needed, I would open the portal again and send him back to the future he belonged. It was a way of setting back the book to the shelf it belongs. If the wrong book is in the wrong shelf, there will be a wrong data in the catalogue. And if the catalogue is affected, then the entire library is in jeopardy. I sincerely hope you understand my metaphor. Anyways, the person I searched for didn't want to be found.

I was in a quagmire.

At a point, I thought about quickly reaching a hand through the portal into the future, grabbing him by the arm and pulling him into the present. But that would do no good either. First and foremost, I often saw various versions of him in various timelines. It often took a while to find the right version - the version wearing the same digital wristwatch I had on. Steve had been wearing the same type the day the bastard killed him. Even then, pulling him in would not be easy, especially within the few seconds available. He was more experienced than me. Whatever thought I was conceiving now, he had most definitely conceived it. He was me. He knew my thoughts, my plans.

There's a huge gap between the present and the future. The portal is the only communicating door between these two entities. Perhaps I should say 'between the future and the past', for, in a way, there's nothing like the present. In a different timeline, the present is either the past or the future. In my future self's timeline, my time was the past. His past self was hunting him, and he was running for his life.

When the portal is open, you can reach through it and take something from the future. Let's say you take an orange from the basket of fruits from the future and you replace the orange with a banana from your own timeline. As long as the portal remains open, the orange you took would be in your hand and the banana in the future basket. But as soon as the portal closes, the orange in your hand will disappear - it will return to the future it belongs, and instead, it's the banana you will see in the distance of your arm's length in the future timeline, only a hand would appear from nowhere and pick an orange, replacing it with a banana. When the portal closes, the banana will disappear from the basket - because it's in the wrong timeline. It's a simple analogy when you think deeply about it. It's imperative that you understand this analogy. I understood it too late; you shouldn't make the same mistake I did.

He continued to elude me. No matter what method I used, he was always a few steps ahead of me. He was like a grandmaster and I a rookie chess player - he knew my every move before I made them. Once, he had spoken directly to me before the portal closed again.

"Stop this!" he said, "Only you can correct the error."

He wasn't making sense to me. And the fact that he was telling me to stop only meant that I was closing in on him. It was only a matter of time before I caught him.

But it wasn't as I thought. It dawned on me that there was no way I would be able to easily catch him, especially with my bare hands. There was only one solution. I would need to immobilise him if I was going to catch him. An idea occurred to me and I embraced it without thinking twice. If I didn't want him to continue eluding me, all I had to do was get a gun and shoot him in the leg. By doing that, I would be able to drag him to my timeline and squeeze the question out of him.

Of course when I drag him through the portal, he would disappear back to the future as soon as the portal closed, but he would still be in my little basement, only invisible. But as soon as I got the portal open again, I would be able to see him. No matter how many times I set the portal up, I would make him confess, even if it meant that I would have to torture him. I was ready to expend the rest of the particle on getting to the truth - why he killed my friend.

After many, many years of devotion to the cause, I left the basement to go find a gun. It took me a week to finally get a pistol from the 'Black Market'. It cost me a little fortune, but I didn't mind. When I returned to my basement, everything was as I had left it, except a few birds that flew off as soon as I stepped in. I wondered what birds were doing in a basement, and how they got in. They must have flown in through the slit in the roof.

I set up the portal again and tried to locate myself in a future timeline. I knew enough about him to locate the particular version I sought - the one wearing the digital wristwatch. When I saw the arm and identified the wristwatch, I got into action immediately. I only had a few seconds before the portal closed. I would step into the portal, shoot him and quickly step back before it closed on me. That was the plan.

As soon as I saw the wristwatch, I knew exactly where his legs would be. He would try to jump as he had always done. I had already calculated the angle of his movement. My finger was on the trigger as I stepped into the portal. Within a split second, I shot where I knew his legs were going to be.

But I had been wrong. The portal had taken me to a different timeline, to a different version of me, the younger me - the one in the past. The arm with the wristwatch I was seeing wasn't mine, it was Steve's. And where I thought the legs would be was where Steve's head was.

I shot Steve in the head and stepped back before the portal closed. When I realised my mistake, it was too late. When the portal closed, I saw the bullet lodged on the wall of the basement. But the damage had already been done. The bullet had killed Steve in the past timeline.

Now I understood everything. My future self had tried to warn me but I didn't listen. Without a doubt, my younger self would attempt to track me down, and he would end up making the same mistake I did. I thought about correcting the error. I should take off the wristwatch, but somehow, the watch seemed to be the only thing keeping me alive. If I took it off, the pattern might change, rather than my younger self shooting me in the legs, rather than shooting Steve in the head - he might shoot me in the head instead. That's what my quantum calculation revealed to me. And if my younger self killed me, what would happen to the timelines? There would be chaos. I had no choice - I must keep wearing the wristwatch. The cycle would have to continue indefinitely - I must keep eluding my younger self, and Steve would keep dying.

Now that leaves me wondering how many times Steve has been killed, and how many versions of my future and younger selves are out there.

But most importantly, how many versions of this story have been written?

THE END

©Larry Sun, September 2020