Re: MORITURI TE SALUTANT!! [S!4]
09-30-2012, 11:58 PM
Originally posted on MSPA by Agent1022.
The room was such that if a skilled surveyor had wandered about the manor with a tape measure and a set of blueprints, they might have noticed a slight discrepancy in the walls of several rooms: say, about fifteen meters square. The first Lord Shrewdish had not been a subtle man.
In the center of the room stood an ancestral Lady Shrewdish. Or, more accurately, the top half of some long-dead Lady Shrewdish, molded into an ancient marble pedestal. A locket on a silver chain graced her neck, glittering on grey in the reflected light from-
-a dozen ghostly figures, and as the eyes adjusted to their presence, a hundred, hundreds, flowing and floating in and out of the walls. All circling the pedestal, like a dance or a spell or-
“Or a shield.” Sam turned to the pearlescent forms crowding the corridor behind them. “You’re protecting it, aren’t you?”
The stricken wails came from every direction.
“It is a curse!”
”We serve it like we served no master in our lifetimes!
”It gathers us!”
“Binds us!”
“Tortures us!”
“It has its grip on our chains, and we cannot pass on!”
“Forever living...in twilight death...”
Chad took it all in. He had been right; seeing the spectacle was a different thing altogether. “What are you doing? What do you want?” Without hesitation, he flung out his left arm, aiming his gauntlet at the locket.
Instantly a mottled, mangled screech tore through the space in between it and him, and a crack of black lightning twisted through the air and shoved his arm aside. It was not so much a physical force as a shimmering field between the gauntlet and the locket, ensuring no matter nor energy could pass along the line connecting the two.
“It knows your intent!”
“No violence, no violence...”
Sam ignored her companion’s attempts at discharging energy at the diamond, and stepped forward into the shield of ghosts. They washed over her like so much memory and unlived life; it reminded her of the uncomfortable strangeness that came with hand-me-downs and third-hand sweaters smelling of cats, their owners’ selves and identities all mixed into an unidentifiable slurry that was hell on her ability.
Then as she reached the center layer of the circling ghosts, she felt, against all probability, resistance from the ethereal shapes. There was no change in the texture of the air, or feeling of pushing through cotton or fog - instead, her forward momentum was just subtracted from her, like walking on an invisible treadmill.
Chad looked up from his gauntlet at a change in the ghosts’ natterings. They were breaking the spherical formation, pressing in around Sam. Just as he expected. A cruel smile played about his features and settled in his eyes, which turned to the pedestal in the center of the room.
The babble of those dead surrounded her - no, the dead surrounded her, their ghostly voices undermining her thoughts. “No! No!”
“You have a talent!”
“Our clothing remains!”
“A part of us may live again!”
She clutched at her own no Sir Gregory’s no hers she clutched at them felt small tears like pain among the voices so many voices Sir Gregory’s and her own and then the hateful one from her memories Sam’s memories the real ones no no they make no sense they are absurd they no no no no
The lab coat towered above her, with the scientist inside peering down. That was what Sam remembered; it had always been down, down, looking down “You can’t skip your tests kid” crying young so young tried to play it but they had no empathy “put them on kid” no no no no no “put them on, you little shit” no no no don’t want to feel self dropping away more tears knees kneeling, cowering, curled up “do the test and put them on or we’ll have to use” voice cruel a little amused so hateful so much hate “punitive measures” no no reach for them reach reach crawl crawl
fifty thousand volts
Chad stepped past the ghosts and crossed the threshold without incident, casting an indifferent glance towards the sobbing Sam embedded in clamoring ectoplasm. The locket sat beautiful on its chain on the pedestal like a envied prize - time seemed to slow and stutter as he came close - he reached out and took it into his right hand, the engravings on the silverwork seemingly gleaming from within. And with a swift motion that nonetheless took an eternity, he flipped it open.
The diamond, embedded within, blazed with light.
It was an unearthly light, playing across the walls of the room, shining and glittering on the silver filigree of the jewel’s housing. It shone right through the ghosts, through the souls of everyone dead, alive, and present; it shone almost through the walls themselves. It shone into every corner and crevice, flowed around obstacles like honey, banishing shadow.
But all that shadow had to go somewhere.
Chad felt something fly inside of him, a shining feeling poured into his being, so that he felt, surely, that he must be glowing like the diamond itself. Time itself slowed into one long drawn-out moment of clarity, dark secrets whispered into his mind- “Oh. Ohhh. Of course.”
<font color="#93001C">Sam found herself freed as the light swept over her; the ghosts peeling away from their crowded huddle. Pearlescent forms fled, trailing gasps of fear and panic-
“It’s all so clear now. Sam. It’s so clear.”
She’d seen that look before. The researchers got it plastered across their faces when they were walking around with news or a discovery they wanted to share.
Sometimes they wanted to demonstrate. It was always easier to comply.
Sir Gregory’s memories had seen it too. It was also the slightly-mad look of her father, the night before he had closed his tampered ledgers and shot himself in the face.
It was odd. The memories were coming easier now, much easier for some reason.
“No wonder there was so much time energy coming off of it. It’s time, Sam.”
She couldn’t resist. “Time for what?”
“It’s time, Sam. The diamond is...a crystal...” Chad’s voice slurred, as if the air was - no, the air was thickening, filling with energy - “It’s a chunk of crystallized time. It has no past, it has no future. It’s a piece of the constant against which time is measured! That’s why there are all these ghosts, Sam! They should never have existed, but the diamond maintains them! It holds an imprint of their timeline...in its facets...”
This must be what it’s like, in the middle of a lightning bolt, was one thought Sam remembered never having thought before in her life yet it was there the clock that makes time: light, - sees none of it itself. They weren’t Sir Gregory’s memories. They didn’t even seem like human memories. They were sharp, concise, crystalline. The thoughts of the diamond if the diamond could think. “Chad! What’s happ e n i n g
His voice was strangled, forced, superseded with something else entirely, dropping in and out of volume as the room’s potential climbed to its peak. “I - I don’t know - I’m thinking things - I think - I think it’s thinking - through me -”
A subtle change, but one that harmonized with the strange memories in Sam’s mind. “Consciousness is not a process. It is a time-dependent entity requiring judicious application of causality.”
The spectre of Endal Shrewdish sighed and closed his eyes. “Here we go again.” He placed a translucent hand on the table, which shook under his nonexistent touch - and then vibrated violently, along with the rest of the manor.
<font color="#582C1E">”Whoa!” Jamie jumped as a low rumble rattled the ancient halls, nearly knocking the kid detective off her feet. “That - that must have been thunder somewhere...” she muttered, not believing a word.
Endal stood. “I’d get out if I were you. Maybe you’ll remember if you’re far enough away. And you can get someone to destroy that damned gem.”
On a visceral level, Jamie knew that this had never been the everyday adventure she’d been expecting. All she had to do was accept the impossible.
“Sticking around?” The ghost began to traipse towards the dining room doors, stepping through the table on the way. “Your prerogative, I suppose.”
After all, the impossible happened every day.
“Wait!”
The be-all and end-all of the Shrewdishes stopped, first and last spectral memory of a once-, and now never-great family paused in mid-step. And waited.
For the first time, Jamie saw him as he was. Not through the cynical detective eye of one looking for flaws and illusions, but as a broken, despairing man, shoulders burdened with infinite deaths and neverborns. As a sinner atoning for his crime. As the scientist who looked into a temporal blast of destruction and said:
“Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.”
An ill wind was blowing, blowing all through the house; the winds of change fierce and erosive, blowing away history and filling in something unrecognizable in its wake. There was no source. There was no wind. The moldy curtains did not move, yet when the moment had passed, they hung differently. “What’s happening, Endal?”
“I-I’m not sure! I never figured this out!” The ghost blurred around the edges as time tried to reconfigure itself. “But I think the diamond doesn’t know how to handle consciousness! It’s not a- a thing that has a position in spacetime, so it always - always aims to eliminate whatever consciousness it comes into contac͘´Ô◊Δ his voice broke apart, the phonemes scattered across yet another timeline ceasing to exist-
Jamie clutched at her head as bit by bit little memories burned away, of things that had never been, snippets of details that had changed, patterns in the dust of the manor, footprints that now took different paths, and she clutched at them, scraps of paper floating in the wind, </font>
Don’t shoot until you see the whites of their eyes! Chad’s eyes rose, pupil-less: “Time cannot be applied to causality-unbound entities...”
There was a palpable snap, that of an atomic whip, as the room popped back into thirty seconds ago.
- time seemed to slow and stutter as he came close - he reached out and took it into his right hand, the engravings on the silverwork seemingly gleaming from within. And with a swift motion that nonetheless took an eternity, he
Traveling up time’s arrow, atoms found their spaces occupied, and disagreed as to who should take residence. Unable to come to a resolution, they decided to go their separate ways.
was in the center of a massive explosion, that blew apart the little diamond-vault, spraying the manor in radiation, killing everyone in it, the diamond’s unsubtle assassination of those it saw could travel through time-
NO
Chad drew on the energy, taking it into his gauntlet, ‘I don’t die! Not today!’ was his wordless scream, as he takes them back, further, still clutching the diamond.
Sam could feel her timeline unraveling as they hurtled ahead of a future the diamond was trying to undo; the universe rolling back like surf on the sands of time...
"Yea, it's a bit complex, but we'll get it and you'll be able to slip out and grab this."
Chad showed Chad a very peculiar gem, one that glowed with energy.
"Oh so that's the power source you-”
“Sorry to interrupt.” Chad cut in, leaping back into time and space between Chad and Chad, and plucking the diamond from Chad’s hands.
“Oh holy fuckballs.” Chad made a grab for the diamond in Chad’s hand, only to be blocked by the diamond in Chad’s other hand - all the while with Chad staring at the two other Chads.
Sam lay on the ancient floor on hands and knees, trying to make sense of the Chadastrophe unfolding before her. Chad Prime - the Chad she had arrived here with to this dusty treasure vault, stood between Chad Alpha - the previous owner of the diamond, and Chad Beta, the bewildered onlooker. Beta looked most like how Chad had seemed when Sam had first seen him, in the Haruspex’s marble tomb. Alpha seemed like Chad when she’d first met him. And Prime...Prime was counting?
“Two...one...stop! Don’t come any closer!” Chad brandished the two diamonds at the ghost girl that rose hissing from the floorboards. “That’s right. The diamond binds you, and it won’t let you near it. It’s mine now, you hear me? Both of them!” He brandished the two gems, one in each hand. “So that means you’re all mine now.”
A strange vibration was coming up through her hands, a sawtooth shudder in the old wood that suggested it was trying very hard not to turn into sawdust. But then Alpha made a grab for the diamond, and the thought was driven from her mind as Chad Prime blew him apart.
“What’s the phrase? ‘There can be only one!’”
Chad did not smile as chunks of charred Chad fell among little piles of golden coins. He did not laugh maniacally, or madly, or abortively. Perhaps if he had, Sam would have screamed, or panicked, or scrabbled ineffectually at the walls for a nonexistent escape.
Instead, Chad stepped forward - sidestepping the remainder of Chad, and faced the remaining Chad. “This is how the timeline’s going to go, Chad...”
Retroactive continuity flooded across the manor, a wave of superlative editation - oozing into cracks in the already malleable timeline, it grew and forced them ever wider, paradoxes spewing from the abyssal chasms of the neverwere...
A lie, muttered the manor, everything that has ever happened in this manor has never been, and has all been a lie.
History books in and about the area were known to burst into flame for no reason. At least, no remembered reason; in actual fact it was because the effort of changing themselves to fit the new timeline took its toll on mere ink and paper.
In the newly paradoxical aspect of the aspect’s paradox anew, Varljiv knew this. Oh, how he knew this. The knowledge was a stabbing dagger in his mind, bridging every thought he tried to think. It didn’t help that his mind was suddenly reticient about existing; he had to think about thinking if <font color="#FFFFFF">.................................................. ...........stop having the faculty altogether. Schrödinger would have been proud at the ripples of existence that fluttered across his serpentine body, scales and flesh presumably vanishing into nonexistence with nonobservance. It was probably a good thing he was in a mirror maze.</font>
Sam watched as the oak floorboards splintered under her fingers, underneath them not the twilight darkness of the rooms below but the bland grey glow that only ambiguity and potential could emanate. The Diamond Time was grinding in on them, stripping away their existences, because of course they had died in that explosion in the future, how could they have come back to the past?
“You are going to be me.” Chad watched Chad, waiting for his reaction.
Chad blinked. “What?”
“This conversation still happened. Everything has still happened, except now you have these.” Chad brandished the diamonds. “Or you will. Because you’re going to escape now, and find her,” he indicated Sam in the corner, “and do everything I did, and we’re going to close this time loop.” Greyness began to seep through the walls of the treasure chamber, leaving behind it undisturbed dust and untouched jewels.
It was true to the very essence of Chad that he stood there and thought about it, even as oblivion curled around his boots. “That’s a nice idea, Chad. But how about this: what if I just take those diamonds now and-”
It was also true to the essence of Chad that Chad took the opportunity to blast Chad into the past, completing the time loop and confounding the paradox even further. The diamond’s timeline twisted and writhed, trying to accommodate the history of the time loop it had just overwritten-
If truth had been torturous, this was something else altogether. Knowing a lie meant being certain about the truth, and the manor’s timeline was stitched, crimped and mangled into such a mess that nothing was certain anymore. There couldn’t be truth or lies when history could -- and did -- change with the drop of a hat, reversing the two or making both statements lies or, horror of horrors, both of them the truth... Varljiv shuddered, an impressive undertaking of stretching and unfolding along his lengthy body.
It was too much. There was no truth, there were no lies. There was only the abyss of uncertainty that lay splayed before him, sucking at his mind, peeling bits and pieces of it away. He was so impossibly far away from what he knew, from the peaceful glow of the Creator, the rage-red energy of the Adversary, both now but a memory he wasn’t even sure of anymore.
NO!
Great muscles uncoiled, launching the serpent into ambiguity. He could be anywhere, it could be anywhen, and so he was in any place and any time - omnipresent.
And what Varljiv wanted to do was collapse the wavefunction of the world, and where and when he wanted to be was where and when uncertainty could die. Death was definitively certain.
Navigating the tangled timelines of Shrewdish Manor was, Sam decided, like having infinitely recursive meta-déjà vu: having the feeling of having the feeling of having the feeling of having the feeling of … having had the same feeling again. Squared. With the Ackermann function taken, with itself as both variables. Twice.
Chad was staring at the single diamond in his gauntleted hand. Sam was staring at Chad. And it certainly felt like the diamond was staring at the both of them. They floated in the remains of a dead timeline, where Chad had broken into the diamond room and stolen it before Chad had even gotten there. The ghosts had fled. It didn’t seem like Chad was ever going to make it to where they were.
An arrow still smoldered where it had pierced Chad’s heart, Sam, shot, lying by him, Blackwell burning by the doorway, equally dead.
Sam felt like this had happened before.
“Of course this would happen. There’s no use stealing all the diamonds in all the timelines. There’s only one diamond. There’s only one of them, sticking out into all the paradoxes.”
Chad cupped the accursed gem in his hands. It was cut beautifully into its ellipsoid shape, nestled in its locket home, yet it teased him for its immutable singularity.
Swooping around the vast veins of existence that the universe oozed through was Varljiv, Aspect of Lies, now observer of the paradox that embroiled Shrewdish Manor.
A glint, below, caught the Aspect’s noncorporeal eye. The diamond. The bringer of paradox. A moment, extended forever, a present without end.
Endal clamped the diamond in place, between the sights of the two ion cannons that dominated the laboratory and ten kilometers beyond (eight of which were not exactly Shrewdish land). One was a fairly ordinary proton accelerator. The other was a tachyon mass-driver, and launched before it was fired.
He had constructed an elegant theory: inherent order always sought to propagate itself over chaos, but could only do so in cases where sufficient energy was available. Sufficient energy to catalyze such a reaction, however, was astronomically high. Higher, in fact: not even stellar fusion could generate the orders of magnitude he needed.
So he turned to a combination of two factors: the generation of energy by the annihilation of past and future, and the exceptional crystalline purity of the Shrewdish Diamond. Crystals were order, he reasoned. The collision of tardyon and tachyon would create a perceived stream of particles traveling from one cannon to another, from past to future, with an energy discharge in between, centered inside the diamond’s carbon lattice. In that way, as the theory went, energy could be converted into mass could be converted into order - against chaos!
That was not how it went.
Instead, Endal found himself before his dead grandfather - and found his universe wiped away, replaced with nothing but a set of inconsistent memories in a ghostly, neverborn mind.
Why?
Because a universe without Endal’s meddling was much more orderly.
Order, against chaos. Timelessness: the perfect order. So the moment of Endal’s unleashing the Shrewdish Diamond: maintained forever, to maintain the Diamond’s existence.
So it was there that Varljiv dived, deep down, amidst roiling columns of gedankenexperiment into the real - or as real as insanity could be called - and on impulse, opened his mouth and swallowed the diamond whole.
Every diamond whole. In every timeline. In every timeline there existed a Varljiv, with every diamond inside him.
Bound together with the wavefunction that was Varljiv, timelines began to collapse in on themselves, their consistencies vanishing with the introduction of the greatest lie there ever had been: That they had existed at all, or could have, with a great big serpent there interfering with the paradox.
Deep inside the serpent, a crack appeared in the crystal...
Chad Prime stared at the Aspect that stood before them. In one moment there had been the diamond. His diamond, in his hand, his power to command, its attempts to murder him notwithstanding. Then there had been...this. Things were getting complicated, but more importantly, they were moving out of his control.
Chad Beta stared at the Aspect that stood before them. In one moment there had been the diamond. His diamond, so close and within reach. He’d left the girl shot and bleeding in the trap chamber, because fuck that future Chad was why, and he’d forced his way through the ghosts, and he had reached out for the diamond on its marble bust, just so. Then there had been...this. Things were getting complicated, but more importantly, they were moving out of his control.
As the introduction of a Varljiv bound the two timelines together, there ceased to be multiple Chads, in the same way there had only ever been one Sam, here, now and forever. The timelines, among others, twisted and weaved among one another, binding to common events; one of which was cladomorph, douchebag and aspect standing in a dining room that had once been a Shrewdish laboratory, with a ghost and a detective to bear witness to the suddenly coherent world.
Chad was less than pleased by this turn of events, and barely noticed Sam being hit in the face with a timeline.
Sam clutched at the fluttering wisp as it snaked by her head, a mote of light drawn out into a line of events culminating in the death of yet another Shrewdish-
But no: this one was more familiar. It was a much more mundane death, one not particularly paradoxical, but nonetheless caused by the diamond, and by the death of the Shrewdish clan.
Sir Gregory Sarfassian came alone, and died.
Sir Gregory Sarfassian swallowed her pride, explored in a group, but wandered off on her own. And died.
Sir Gregory Sarfassian swallowed her pride, explored in a group, but never found the treasure.
Sir Gregory Sarfassian never came to the Shrewdish Manor, for the Shrewdishes were still alive and somewhat opposed to the idea of treasure hunters believing they were dead for some reason.
Sir Gregory Sarfassian never came to the Shrewdish Manor, for the Shrewdishes were definitely alive and living people’s treasure was not up for grabs.
Sir Gregory Sarfassian never came to the Shrewdish Manor, since the last one spent all the treasure on scientfic equipment and laboratory works, and was close to auctioning off the estate to fund more research.
Sir Gregory Sarfassian never came to the Shrewdish Manor, because those timelines in which she had were imploding, disappearing into that of which had never been...
And that’s how Sam found herself naked.
This was embarrassing.
</font>
The room was such that if a skilled surveyor had wandered about the manor with a tape measure and a set of blueprints, they might have noticed a slight discrepancy in the walls of several rooms: say, about fifteen meters square. The first Lord Shrewdish had not been a subtle man.
In the center of the room stood an ancestral Lady Shrewdish. Or, more accurately, the top half of some long-dead Lady Shrewdish, molded into an ancient marble pedestal. A locket on a silver chain graced her neck, glittering on grey in the reflected light from-
-a dozen ghostly figures, and as the eyes adjusted to their presence, a hundred, hundreds, flowing and floating in and out of the walls. All circling the pedestal, like a dance or a spell or-
“Or a shield.” Sam turned to the pearlescent forms crowding the corridor behind them. “You’re protecting it, aren’t you?”
The stricken wails came from every direction.
“It is a curse!”
”We serve it like we served no master in our lifetimes!
”It gathers us!”
“Binds us!”
“Tortures us!”
“It has its grip on our chains, and we cannot pass on!”
“Forever living...in twilight death...”
Chad took it all in. He had been right; seeing the spectacle was a different thing altogether. “What are you doing? What do you want?” Without hesitation, he flung out his left arm, aiming his gauntlet at the locket.
Instantly a mottled, mangled screech tore through the space in between it and him, and a crack of black lightning twisted through the air and shoved his arm aside. It was not so much a physical force as a shimmering field between the gauntlet and the locket, ensuring no matter nor energy could pass along the line connecting the two.
“It knows your intent!”
“No violence, no violence...”
Sam ignored her companion’s attempts at discharging energy at the diamond, and stepped forward into the shield of ghosts. They washed over her like so much memory and unlived life; it reminded her of the uncomfortable strangeness that came with hand-me-downs and third-hand sweaters smelling of cats, their owners’ selves and identities all mixed into an unidentifiable slurry that was hell on her ability.
Then as she reached the center layer of the circling ghosts, she felt, against all probability, resistance from the ethereal shapes. There was no change in the texture of the air, or feeling of pushing through cotton or fog - instead, her forward momentum was just subtracted from her, like walking on an invisible treadmill.
Chad looked up from his gauntlet at a change in the ghosts’ natterings. They were breaking the spherical formation, pressing in around Sam. Just as he expected. A cruel smile played about his features and settled in his eyes, which turned to the pedestal in the center of the room.
The babble of those dead surrounded her - no, the dead surrounded her, their ghostly voices undermining her thoughts. “No! No!”
“You have a talent!”
“Our clothing remains!”
“A part of us may live again!”
She clutched at her own no Sir Gregory’s no hers she clutched at them felt small tears like pain among the voices so many voices Sir Gregory’s and her own and then the hateful one from her memories Sam’s memories the real ones no no they make no sense they are absurd they no no no no
The lab coat towered above her, with the scientist inside peering down. That was what Sam remembered; it had always been down, down, looking down “You can’t skip your tests kid” crying young so young tried to play it but they had no empathy “put them on kid” no no no no no “put them on, you little shit” no no no don’t want to feel self dropping away more tears knees kneeling, cowering, curled up “do the test and put them on or we’ll have to use” voice cruel a little amused so hateful so much hate “punitive measures” no no reach for them reach reach crawl crawl
fifty thousand volts
Chad stepped past the ghosts and crossed the threshold without incident, casting an indifferent glance towards the sobbing Sam embedded in clamoring ectoplasm. The locket sat beautiful on its chain on the pedestal like a envied prize - time seemed to slow and stutter as he came close - he reached out and took it into his right hand, the engravings on the silverwork seemingly gleaming from within. And with a swift motion that nonetheless took an eternity, he flipped it open.
The diamond, embedded within, blazed with light.
It was an unearthly light, playing across the walls of the room, shining and glittering on the silver filigree of the jewel’s housing. It shone right through the ghosts, through the souls of everyone dead, alive, and present; it shone almost through the walls themselves. It shone into every corner and crevice, flowed around obstacles like honey, banishing shadow.
But all that shadow had to go somewhere.
Chad felt something fly inside of him, a shining feeling poured into his being, so that he felt, surely, that he must be glowing like the diamond itself. Time itself slowed into one long drawn-out moment of clarity, dark secrets whispered into his mind- “Oh. Ohhh. Of course.”
<font color="#93001C">Sam found herself freed as the light swept over her; the ghosts peeling away from their crowded huddle. Pearlescent forms fled, trailing gasps of fear and panic-
“It’s all so clear now. Sam. It’s so clear.”
She’d seen that look before. The researchers got it plastered across their faces when they were walking around with news or a discovery they wanted to share.
Sometimes they wanted to demonstrate. It was always easier to comply.
Sir Gregory’s memories had seen it too. It was also the slightly-mad look of her father, the night before he had closed his tampered ledgers and shot himself in the face.
It was odd. The memories were coming easier now, much easier for some reason.
“No wonder there was so much time energy coming off of it. It’s time, Sam.”
She couldn’t resist. “Time for what?”
“It’s time, Sam. The diamond is...a crystal...” Chad’s voice slurred, as if the air was - no, the air was thickening, filling with energy - “It’s a chunk of crystallized time. It has no past, it has no future. It’s a piece of the constant against which time is measured! That’s why there are all these ghosts, Sam! They should never have existed, but the diamond maintains them! It holds an imprint of their timeline...in its facets...”
This must be what it’s like, in the middle of a lightning bolt, was one thought Sam remembered never having thought before in her life yet it was there the clock that makes time: light, - sees none of it itself. They weren’t Sir Gregory’s memories. They didn’t even seem like human memories. They were sharp, concise, crystalline. The thoughts of the diamond if the diamond could think. “Chad! What’s happ e n i n g
His voice was strangled, forced, superseded with something else entirely, dropping in and out of volume as the room’s potential climbed to its peak. “I - I don’t know - I’m thinking things - I think - I think it’s thinking - through me -”
A subtle change, but one that harmonized with the strange memories in Sam’s mind. “Consciousness is not a process. It is a time-dependent entity requiring judicious application of causality.”
The spectre of Endal Shrewdish sighed and closed his eyes. “Here we go again.” He placed a translucent hand on the table, which shook under his nonexistent touch - and then vibrated violently, along with the rest of the manor.
<font color="#582C1E">”Whoa!” Jamie jumped as a low rumble rattled the ancient halls, nearly knocking the kid detective off her feet. “That - that must have been thunder somewhere...” she muttered, not believing a word.
Endal stood. “I’d get out if I were you. Maybe you’ll remember if you’re far enough away. And you can get someone to destroy that damned gem.”
On a visceral level, Jamie knew that this had never been the everyday adventure she’d been expecting. All she had to do was accept the impossible.
“Sticking around?” The ghost began to traipse towards the dining room doors, stepping through the table on the way. “Your prerogative, I suppose.”
After all, the impossible happened every day.
“Wait!”
The be-all and end-all of the Shrewdishes stopped, first and last spectral memory of a once-, and now never-great family paused in mid-step. And waited.
For the first time, Jamie saw him as he was. Not through the cynical detective eye of one looking for flaws and illusions, but as a broken, despairing man, shoulders burdened with infinite deaths and neverborns. As a sinner atoning for his crime. As the scientist who looked into a temporal blast of destruction and said:
“Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.”
An ill wind was blowing, blowing all through the house; the winds of change fierce and erosive, blowing away history and filling in something unrecognizable in its wake. There was no source. There was no wind. The moldy curtains did not move, yet when the moment had passed, they hung differently. “What’s happening, Endal?”
“I-I’m not sure! I never figured this out!” The ghost blurred around the edges as time tried to reconfigure itself. “But I think the diamond doesn’t know how to handle consciousness! It’s not a- a thing that has a position in spacetime, so it always - always aims to eliminate whatever consciousness it comes into contac͘´Ô◊Δ his voice broke apart, the phonemes scattered across yet another timeline ceasing to exist-
Jamie clutched at her head as bit by bit little memories burned away, of things that had never been, snippets of details that had changed, patterns in the dust of the manor, footprints that now took different paths, and she clutched at them, scraps of paper floating in the wind, </font>
Don’t shoot until you see the whites of their eyes! Chad’s eyes rose, pupil-less: “Time cannot be applied to causality-unbound entities...”
There was a palpable snap, that of an atomic whip, as the room popped back into thirty seconds ago.
- time seemed to slow and stutter as he came close - he reached out and took it into his right hand, the engravings on the silverwork seemingly gleaming from within. And with a swift motion that nonetheless took an eternity, he
Traveling up time’s arrow, atoms found their spaces occupied, and disagreed as to who should take residence. Unable to come to a resolution, they decided to go their separate ways.
was in the center of a massive explosion, that blew apart the little diamond-vault, spraying the manor in radiation, killing everyone in it, the diamond’s unsubtle assassination of those it saw could travel through time-
NO
Chad drew on the energy, taking it into his gauntlet, ‘I don’t die! Not today!’ was his wordless scream, as he takes them back, further, still clutching the diamond.
Sam could feel her timeline unraveling as they hurtled ahead of a future the diamond was trying to undo; the universe rolling back like surf on the sands of time...
"Yea, it's a bit complex, but we'll get it and you'll be able to slip out and grab this."
Chad showed Chad a very peculiar gem, one that glowed with energy.
"Oh so that's the power source you-”
“Sorry to interrupt.” Chad cut in, leaping back into time and space between Chad and Chad, and plucking the diamond from Chad’s hands.
“Oh holy fuckballs.” Chad made a grab for the diamond in Chad’s hand, only to be blocked by the diamond in Chad’s other hand - all the while with Chad staring at the two other Chads.
Sam lay on the ancient floor on hands and knees, trying to make sense of the Chadastrophe unfolding before her. Chad Prime - the Chad she had arrived here with to this dusty treasure vault, stood between Chad Alpha - the previous owner of the diamond, and Chad Beta, the bewildered onlooker. Beta looked most like how Chad had seemed when Sam had first seen him, in the Haruspex’s marble tomb. Alpha seemed like Chad when she’d first met him. And Prime...Prime was counting?
“Two...one...stop! Don’t come any closer!” Chad brandished the two diamonds at the ghost girl that rose hissing from the floorboards. “That’s right. The diamond binds you, and it won’t let you near it. It’s mine now, you hear me? Both of them!” He brandished the two gems, one in each hand. “So that means you’re all mine now.”
A strange vibration was coming up through her hands, a sawtooth shudder in the old wood that suggested it was trying very hard not to turn into sawdust. But then Alpha made a grab for the diamond, and the thought was driven from her mind as Chad Prime blew him apart.
“What’s the phrase? ‘There can be only one!’”
Chad did not smile as chunks of charred Chad fell among little piles of golden coins. He did not laugh maniacally, or madly, or abortively. Perhaps if he had, Sam would have screamed, or panicked, or scrabbled ineffectually at the walls for a nonexistent escape.
Instead, Chad stepped forward - sidestepping the remainder of Chad, and faced the remaining Chad. “This is how the timeline’s going to go, Chad...”
Retroactive continuity flooded across the manor, a wave of superlative editation - oozing into cracks in the already malleable timeline, it grew and forced them ever wider, paradoxes spewing from the abyssal chasms of the neverwere...
A lie, muttered the manor, everything that has ever happened in this manor has never been, and has all been a lie.
History books in and about the area were known to burst into flame for no reason. At least, no remembered reason; in actual fact it was because the effort of changing themselves to fit the new timeline took its toll on mere ink and paper.
In the newly paradoxical aspect of the aspect’s paradox anew, Varljiv knew this. Oh, how he knew this. The knowledge was a stabbing dagger in his mind, bridging every thought he tried to think. It didn’t help that his mind was suddenly reticient about existing; he had to think about thinking if <font color="#FFFFFF">.................................................. ...........stop having the faculty altogether. Schrödinger would have been proud at the ripples of existence that fluttered across his serpentine body, scales and flesh presumably vanishing into nonexistence with nonobservance. It was probably a good thing he was in a mirror maze.</font>
Sam watched as the oak floorboards splintered under her fingers, underneath them not the twilight darkness of the rooms below but the bland grey glow that only ambiguity and potential could emanate. The Diamond Time was grinding in on them, stripping away their existences, because of course they had died in that explosion in the future, how could they have come back to the past?
“You are going to be me.” Chad watched Chad, waiting for his reaction.
Chad blinked. “What?”
“This conversation still happened. Everything has still happened, except now you have these.” Chad brandished the diamonds. “Or you will. Because you’re going to escape now, and find her,” he indicated Sam in the corner, “and do everything I did, and we’re going to close this time loop.” Greyness began to seep through the walls of the treasure chamber, leaving behind it undisturbed dust and untouched jewels.
It was true to the very essence of Chad that he stood there and thought about it, even as oblivion curled around his boots. “That’s a nice idea, Chad. But how about this: what if I just take those diamonds now and-”
It was also true to the essence of Chad that Chad took the opportunity to blast Chad into the past, completing the time loop and confounding the paradox even further. The diamond’s timeline twisted and writhed, trying to accommodate the history of the time loop it had just overwritten-
If truth had been torturous, this was something else altogether. Knowing a lie meant being certain about the truth, and the manor’s timeline was stitched, crimped and mangled into such a mess that nothing was certain anymore. There couldn’t be truth or lies when history could -- and did -- change with the drop of a hat, reversing the two or making both statements lies or, horror of horrors, both of them the truth... Varljiv shuddered, an impressive undertaking of stretching and unfolding along his lengthy body.
It was too much. There was no truth, there were no lies. There was only the abyss of uncertainty that lay splayed before him, sucking at his mind, peeling bits and pieces of it away. He was so impossibly far away from what he knew, from the peaceful glow of the Creator, the rage-red energy of the Adversary, both now but a memory he wasn’t even sure of anymore.
NO!
Great muscles uncoiled, launching the serpent into ambiguity. He could be anywhere, it could be anywhen, and so he was in any place and any time - omnipresent.
And what Varljiv wanted to do was collapse the wavefunction of the world, and where and when he wanted to be was where and when uncertainty could die. Death was definitively certain.
Navigating the tangled timelines of Shrewdish Manor was, Sam decided, like having infinitely recursive meta-déjà vu: having the feeling of having the feeling of having the feeling of having the feeling of … having had the same feeling again. Squared. With the Ackermann function taken, with itself as both variables. Twice.
Chad was staring at the single diamond in his gauntleted hand. Sam was staring at Chad. And it certainly felt like the diamond was staring at the both of them. They floated in the remains of a dead timeline, where Chad had broken into the diamond room and stolen it before Chad had even gotten there. The ghosts had fled. It didn’t seem like Chad was ever going to make it to where they were.
An arrow still smoldered where it had pierced Chad’s heart, Sam, shot, lying by him, Blackwell burning by the doorway, equally dead.
Sam felt like this had happened before.
“Of course this would happen. There’s no use stealing all the diamonds in all the timelines. There’s only one diamond. There’s only one of them, sticking out into all the paradoxes.”
Chad cupped the accursed gem in his hands. It was cut beautifully into its ellipsoid shape, nestled in its locket home, yet it teased him for its immutable singularity.
Swooping around the vast veins of existence that the universe oozed through was Varljiv, Aspect of Lies, now observer of the paradox that embroiled Shrewdish Manor.
A glint, below, caught the Aspect’s noncorporeal eye. The diamond. The bringer of paradox. A moment, extended forever, a present without end.
Endal clamped the diamond in place, between the sights of the two ion cannons that dominated the laboratory and ten kilometers beyond (eight of which were not exactly Shrewdish land). One was a fairly ordinary proton accelerator. The other was a tachyon mass-driver, and launched before it was fired.
He had constructed an elegant theory: inherent order always sought to propagate itself over chaos, but could only do so in cases where sufficient energy was available. Sufficient energy to catalyze such a reaction, however, was astronomically high. Higher, in fact: not even stellar fusion could generate the orders of magnitude he needed.
So he turned to a combination of two factors: the generation of energy by the annihilation of past and future, and the exceptional crystalline purity of the Shrewdish Diamond. Crystals were order, he reasoned. The collision of tardyon and tachyon would create a perceived stream of particles traveling from one cannon to another, from past to future, with an energy discharge in between, centered inside the diamond’s carbon lattice. In that way, as the theory went, energy could be converted into mass could be converted into order - against chaos!
That was not how it went.
Instead, Endal found himself before his dead grandfather - and found his universe wiped away, replaced with nothing but a set of inconsistent memories in a ghostly, neverborn mind.
Why?
Because a universe without Endal’s meddling was much more orderly.
Order, against chaos. Timelessness: the perfect order. So the moment of Endal’s unleashing the Shrewdish Diamond: maintained forever, to maintain the Diamond’s existence.
So it was there that Varljiv dived, deep down, amidst roiling columns of gedankenexperiment into the real - or as real as insanity could be called - and on impulse, opened his mouth and swallowed the diamond whole.
Every diamond whole. In every timeline. In every timeline there existed a Varljiv, with every diamond inside him.
Bound together with the wavefunction that was Varljiv, timelines began to collapse in on themselves, their consistencies vanishing with the introduction of the greatest lie there ever had been: That they had existed at all, or could have, with a great big serpent there interfering with the paradox.
Deep inside the serpent, a crack appeared in the crystal...
Chad Prime stared at the Aspect that stood before them. In one moment there had been the diamond. His diamond, in his hand, his power to command, its attempts to murder him notwithstanding. Then there had been...this. Things were getting complicated, but more importantly, they were moving out of his control.
Chad Beta stared at the Aspect that stood before them. In one moment there had been the diamond. His diamond, so close and within reach. He’d left the girl shot and bleeding in the trap chamber, because fuck that future Chad was why, and he’d forced his way through the ghosts, and he had reached out for the diamond on its marble bust, just so. Then there had been...this. Things were getting complicated, but more importantly, they were moving out of his control.
As the introduction of a Varljiv bound the two timelines together, there ceased to be multiple Chads, in the same way there had only ever been one Sam, here, now and forever. The timelines, among others, twisted and weaved among one another, binding to common events; one of which was cladomorph, douchebag and aspect standing in a dining room that had once been a Shrewdish laboratory, with a ghost and a detective to bear witness to the suddenly coherent world.
Chad was less than pleased by this turn of events, and barely noticed Sam being hit in the face with a timeline.
Sam clutched at the fluttering wisp as it snaked by her head, a mote of light drawn out into a line of events culminating in the death of yet another Shrewdish-
But no: this one was more familiar. It was a much more mundane death, one not particularly paradoxical, but nonetheless caused by the diamond, and by the death of the Shrewdish clan.
Sir Gregory Sarfassian came alone, and died.
Sir Gregory Sarfassian swallowed her pride, explored in a group, but wandered off on her own. And died.
Sir Gregory Sarfassian swallowed her pride, explored in a group, but never found the treasure.
Sir Gregory Sarfassian never came to the Shrewdish Manor, for the Shrewdishes were still alive and somewhat opposed to the idea of treasure hunters believing they were dead for some reason.
Sir Gregory Sarfassian never came to the Shrewdish Manor, for the Shrewdishes were definitely alive and living people’s treasure was not up for grabs.
Sir Gregory Sarfassian never came to the Shrewdish Manor, since the last one spent all the treasure on scientfic equipment and laboratory works, and was close to auctioning off the estate to fund more research.
Sir Gregory Sarfassian never came to the Shrewdish Manor, because those timelines in which she had were imploding, disappearing into that of which had never been...
And that’s how Sam found herself naked.
This was embarrassing.
</font>
----
So very British / But then again | People are machines Machines are people | Oh hai there | There's no time
----
Superhero 1920s noir | Multigenre Half-Life | Changing the future | Command line interface
Tu ventire felix? | Clockwork for eternity | Explosions in spacetime