🔴 REC    OCT 18, 2018 05:12:55    [▮▮▮▮▮ 100%]

“So as soon as you fire that thing up, Event B happens, and we sail right out of this time anomaly back into a world that makes sense, right?” Antoine asked.

“Something like that,” Camden said.

“Great. I’ll get the champagne,” Antoine responded.

“Of course, there’s a very real chance that outside of the time anomaly, time travelers like us—well, walking paradoxes like us—will suddenly stop being able to exist,” Camden said.

He was still working on the device. He had managed to enter developer mode so that he could scan the underlying code to try to learn from it.

“You should have led with that,” Antoine said.

“Wait,” Kimberly said. “Are we sure that we can’t just get to the other side of Event B and this will all be over?”

Camden looked at me, so I decided to take the question.

“All we know for sure is that any Generation Killer who ever lived past Event B never returned,” I said. “At the very least, that means that time travel is no longer possible. At the very worst, that means that they just got swept away. Heck, maybe they just stopped existing.”

There was silence amongst the group. We were all spread out around the office area, taking turns sleeping.

“So where’s our happy ending?” Anna asked. “What do we have to do?”

“Happy endings might be asking too much. We need to discuss risk mitigation,” Logan said. “The way I see it, we either go back in time and try to live our lives, waiting for the sociopath brigade to find us, or we risk traveling into the future, past Event B, and hope that we still exist on the other side. Which choice is the safest?”

“Those are pretty bleak options,” Kimberly said.

“Well… there might be a third option,” Camden said, looking up from his studies at the table.

He looked around the room, and we all waited for him to explain.

“I’ve been looking at the functions of this device, and I think I understand a little bit more about how it was used. Yes, it does have the function of coordinating across timelines to attract the meteor to Carousel. I guess the plan was they were going to let it touch down in the mountains and then go dig it up. Of course, they didn’t know that it was going to touch down 300 years in the past, but that’s not important. That’s not the only function of this device.”

“What else can it do?” Kimberly asked.

Camden scratched his head and prepared his speech. Logan and I had looked through it with him, but we felt it would be better coming from our Scholar.

“Well, it seems they weren’t sure about their math. That’s why the first reality that came up with this device ended up sending the plans to all the other realities. It’s because they had an equation they couldn’t balance or something. So they sent the device and the equation to all of the other timelines, and whichever reality figured out how to steer an interdimensional meteor was supposed to send out the answer to all of the others so that they would all have the solution.”

KRSL crowdsourced from the multiverse. Pretty cool concept.

“Which is to say what?” Antoine asked.

“Well… we have the answer to the equation now,” Camden said. “It was sent out by another reality back in 2020. They figured out how to make the meteor hit specific coordinates, right? And then, when they sent that out, they also sent out a list of ideal coordinates for other realities to try. I have that data right here.”

“Huh,” I said. “So the first reality to figure out the math to make the device work got to choose the coordinates for all of the different meteor strikes around the multiverse?”

“Basically, yeah,” Camden said. “Communication is really hard, so as soon as someone got the right answer, everyone else, I guess, fell in line. I don’t see where anyone’s corrected their math. I think… I think this works.”

The cost of saving Camden was that the story took a sort of sci fi route.

“But what does that mean for us?” Kimberly asked.

“Well, it means that if we can go back to before 2020, we could send out the answer ourselves, but we could probably change it. We could make it look like our reality was the first to figure out the answer to the equation,” Camden said.

“Change it?” Logan asked. “What could we change? If we give them the wrong answer, they’ll just reject it. I’m sure they could get a supercomputer to disprove anything we mess up.”

He sat in a spinning chair with his arms crossed.

“Okay,” Camden said, “but what if we don’t change the actual answer to the formula? What if we just change—”

“The coordinates of the meteor strikes,” Kimberly said, finishing his sentence.

If we were the first timeline to send out an answer to the unbalanced equation, we could take control.

“Or we could make the meteor hit in the far future, long after we’re dead,” Antoine said.

Camden shook his head. “No, they didn’t anticipate that the meteor would travel back in time. I think that’s baked into the physics. I’m not at all qualified to change when the meteor strikes.”

That would be too easy.

“Okay, so we can’t change when the meteor strikes,” I said. “Can we change if the meteor strikes? Can we make the meteor miss? Of course, that might throw a kink in the whole time anomaly thing.”

“They could still check to see if the meteor would miss,” Logan said. “There’s no way we could trick them like that. Besides, if the meteor doesn’t hit, our timeline doesn’t exist. We probably don’t exist—most of us, at least.”

There was a moment of silence after that.

“So how does that help us?” Kimberly asked. “If we can’t choose whether the meteor hits, and we can’t choose when the meteor hits. How does choosing where it hits help us?”

That was the golden question.

We sat and talked back and forth for a moment, trying to discuss if there was some optimal strategy.

“Wait a second,” Logan said. “If the coordinates where the meteor struck were planned out and sent to every timeline, why in the world did the meteor hit the center of town in our timeline? Did we just get the math that wrong, or is our timeline’s KRSL suicidal?”

Camden, who was tired and worn down to the bone, actually started to laugh.

“It’s not a math error,” he said. “I looked at the underlying code.”

He started flicking through the screen on the device as if to show us his findings, but the screen was dense, and I couldn’t even get it to show up very well on the camera.

“What does it say?” I asked.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

He coughed.

“So when they were making this device, they started by programming it, right? Not just the advanced math, or the physics, or the time travel—just the basic program. You know, what do you need this device to be able to do? You need to be able to enter coordinates and execute them, right? But they messed up.”

He scrolled the screen to a spot at the top. There was no way the audience would be able to see it.

“It wasn’t a math error—it was a programming error. When they were developing the original program, they created a dummy variable that contained coordinates they just happened to have on hand. They used it so they could check if their program itself worked. But then, at the end, they forgot to switch the variable. So even though you can enter in the correct coordinates and it appears as if the meteor is supposed to hit somewhere in the mountains, the actual coordinates used in our timeline were still those old dummy coordinates. And I bet you can guess what random coordinates they used to test their code.”

“Would that be the coordinates for the town of Carousel?” Logan asked.

“Yep,” Camden said.

“So our entire lives, our entire timeline, everything we know exists because of a programming error?” I asked.

“Honestly, that sounds about right,” Logan said letting loose a snort.

“That’s what I was thinking,” Antoine added.

We had a quick laugh.

“But if we fix the error, doesn’t that mean that we don’t exist anymore?” Anna asked.

She had been very quiet. I could tell she was worn out. I couldn’t ask any more of her, but it was nice to hear her add something to the conversation.

“I would suppose so,” Camden said. “But there’s no way to know. Inside the time anomaly, most ripples in time get fixed because similar timeline collapse in on each other, so it’s possible that even if the meteor never strikes the original settlement, a lot of Carousel would end up being the same. But I wouldn’t roll the dice on it.”

I got up, started pacing, then took a seat at the back of the room.

“I just feel like there’s a solution here that we’re not seeing,” I said. “Logan, can you give us a rundown of the history of this meteorite in our timeline? Just refresh my memory.”

Logan did that thing that smart people do in movies—he pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers, closed his eyes, and took a deep breath.

“Meteor hits in the 1740s. Town is rebuilt in the 1780s. The Carousel Adventure Society starts looking for the meteor, which at this point is just a legend, in the 1930s. They find it within a decade. It gets turned into a necklace. Necklace gets put in a museum. Necklace gets stolen in the 1960s. But you know that part.”

I thought for a moment.

“Wait a second,” I said. “Camden, do you have a map with all the little impact crater squiggles?”

“Not on me,” Camden said.

“Can you recreate one? Do you remember where the impacts were?”

He thought for a moment, then said, “Yeah, I can make one, sure.”

He flipped over the schematics for the meteor finder device and started drawing a crude map of Carousel, along with several dozen different squiggles placed around the Carousel River Valley.

“You remember this exactly as it was?” Logan asked.

“I remember everything,” Camden said as he continued to mark up the page. He had a trope for it.

Soon enough, a full map started to be revealed, with dozens upon dozens of little squiggles signifying where the meteor had hit—according to the memories of the many Generation Killers from their home timelines.

“So there are a ton in the mountains to the west, the hills to the north, the fields to the east, the rivers and canyons to the south.”

All of the craters were carefully placed away from town—except, of course, for the one from our timeline.

“This space right here is blank,” Anna said, pointing to a spot in the west that indeed had no craters.

It sure was.

“That’s Dyer’s Lake,” Logan said. He went and got a proper map of Carousel pulled up on his computer. “Yep. It would seem that the only place the meteor never struck was the lake.”

Camden stopped drawing. “Wait a second. We need to check something.”

For the next fifteen minutes, Camden fed coordinates from the device to Logan, who would type them in and mark them on the crude map Camden had drawn.

“That’s interesting,” Logan said after they had finished.

They had marked about sixty different coordinates around the Carousel River Valley, most of which matched up with at least one crater as reported by Generation Killers. However, there were three different coordinates within the area of Lake Dyer that no Generation Killer had reported from their timeline.

“Wait,” I said. “When was the dam at Dyer’s Lake built?”

“The early 1900s—1915 or so,” Logan said. He paused, then added, “And in those realities where the meteor struck in the area where the lake would one day be, their impact sites were covered up by the water and they were never recovered.”

“Do we have a lake depth map somewhere?” I asked.

“No, but I can find one,” Logan said, returning to his computer.

Soon enough, it was discovered that the three coordinates on Lake Dyer were right above very deep parts of the lake.

“Okay, but what does all this mean?” Kimberly asked.

“Don’t you get it?” Logan asked, unable to conceal his excitement.

“Help me out,” she responded.

“If we can tell every other timeline what coordinates to send the meteor to, we could just tell them to send it to the lake. And if they send it to the lake, the meteor never gets found, which means Generation Killer never steals the necklace—which means all of the Generation Killers bothering us would stop existing. Or at the very least, they’d get swept to the shores of time.”

“No,” Camden said. “It won’t work. If they don’t find the meteor, then Event B can’t happen.”

The excitement we had built got deflated all at once.

“Damn it all to hell,” Logan said, realizing the fault in the plan.

“Okay,” I said. “But that’s because the coordinates are at the deepest parts of the lake.”

Logan nodded and started reviewing his depth map again.

“So what if we found coordinates at shallower parts of the lake?” He asked. “But then we’d have to hope that they found the meteor at exactly the right date to ensure that Generation Killer never gets a hold of it. I mean, they’d have to find it after the 1960s, right? How do we ensure that?”

Silence… and then—

“The dam,” Anna said.

She got it.

“Last year, they had to drain half the lake so they could fix the dam. I was a counselor at Camp Dyer. We had to go home early.”

I didn’t even have to hint it to her—she figured it out.

“Last year?” Logan asked. “Oh, right, you’re from 1992. That sure is an idea, though.”

He pulled up information based on what Anna had just said.

“She’s right. The lake was drained to about half of its normal depth, uncovering a lot of land, even some historical settlements from the 1800s. Found a few bodies too. So that’s it, right?”

He got up and started to think aloud.

“If we can find coordinates that would hit the area that would one day become the lake—at the right elevation so that they’d become uncovered in 1991 when the lake is drained—it would ensure that Generation Killer never gets ahold of the time-traveling jewel across all timelines. And it would allow for KRSL to have time to find the meteor in order for Event B to happen.”

We would be eliminating Generation Killer outright.

“Does that accomplish anything for us right now?” Kimberly asked. “If Generation Killer never comes to our timeline, does that prevent us from ever time-traveling or… or what?”

Camden sat and thought for a moment.

“No matter how you slice it, this one is risky,” Camden said. “There’s a chance that even if we do manage to fix the timelines, the Generation Killers that are already time travelers will stick around. Or maybe they’ll get washed away to the shores of time. But then, so will we.”

It was a hard decision.

“But another version of us will survive,” I said. “A version that never knew anything about this. If we tell every other timeline to send their meteorite into a relatively shallow part of Lake Dyer, they’ll probably think that’s a logical choice—like maybe sending it into the water is safer. They probably won’t even argue. I think it would work. But we have to make sure that our timeline doesn’t fix its programming error—which should be easy enough, seeing as we are in control of our little meteor magnet device.”

“Wait a second,” Logan said. “If Generation Killer never gets trapped in our timeline… do any of us end up getting born? I know he was trying to be careful not to attract KRSL, but do we know that he actually succeeded with that in our specific timeline? Because it’s possible that by getting rid of him, we’re basically wiping out our own existence.”

It had to be said.

“Not me. My family moved to town when I was four,” Antoine said.

That got a laugh.

Camden stood up.

“Generation Killer was being careful, but more than that, time itself resists change. It resists change at every level—so much so that it ignores paradoxes just to make things happen how they should so that Event B can come to pass.”

He turned in a circle, looking at each of us in turn. “Look, I don’t know if we’ll all exist after we do this. It’s a roll of the dice, like I said. But everything we do is a roll of the dice.”

We sat solemnly for a moment.

“We just have to choose which dice,” I said. “And I’ll always choose the path that involves getting rid of those psychopaths.”

I wasn’t the only one. We were going to end up on the other side of Event B no matter what. We might as well go out destroying Generation Killer and preventing some version of us from this fate.

“So what do we have to do to make this work?” Logan asked.

Camden thought for a moment.

“We have to go back before 2020. Before any other timeline sent out its solution to the equation. I can modify the information I’ve got and send out the solution—but instead of giving a range of coordinates for the meteor to be fired at, I’ll just give them one. The thing is, it takes half of a rotation of the Earth for this thing to send a message—that’s twelve hours. So wherever we go, we need to be safe.”

Logan immediately grabbed the book with all the different tragedies from Carousel’s history and opened it.

“Here,” he said. “There was a plane crash in 2018, about two and a half weeks before the dance disaster. It happened at six in the afternoon. So we travel there, we go to the jailhouse—which is just about as fortified as anything we could ever dream of—and you send the signal. Hopefully, Generation Killer won’t be able to stop us before the signal is sent.”

That was quite a plan.

“We’ll have to survive for twelve whole hours. And it will be survival,” I said. “There’s no way he doesn’t find us if we go back before 2020. We’ll have to be prepared for a fight. That’s the only way we’re going to survive the night.”

But of course, not all of us were going to make it that far.

Because we were just coming up on Second Blood.

And in my memory, I could see Bobby standing at the door, waving his arms.

“We’re not alone,” I said. “Looks like Generation Killer overcame his fear of traveling to 2025.”

■ STOP

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