Participants:
| Scene Title | The Way Back Is Open |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | After years of denial, Richard Cardinal attempts to make sense of just what another version of him did. |
| Date | July 8, 2021 |
New Chicago
3:34pm
July 8th
“Welcome to the new beginning, Richard.”
There are still a lot of buildings in Chicago, even if most of them are in varying states of disrepair. The rooftop of one of them is the most unlikely location for someone to be attempting to decipher the secrets of the universe - and yet, this afternoon, that’s exactly what it was hosting.
If a detective stumbled upon the scene, they would have quite the enigma to untangle. At the heart of it all was a faded, dog-eared tarot card - The Chariot. The washed-out colors of the card revealed that the driver, crowned with an eight-pointed star, held no reins and no rope to guide the twin sphinxes that pull the chariot - one white, one black. The chariot held a coat of arms upon it, the focus of which was the symbol of a disc with a rod through it - referred to in Freemasonry as a *mallet*.
Around the card, chalk has been used on the rooftop to create a complex map of markings that look to an untrained eye almost occult in nature, with white being the primary color and a piece of red chalk used to make arcs and circles that connect the straighter lines and angles of the rest.
Richard Cardinal had neither the time nor the space to use string for what he’s been trying to untangle in his head since the conversation earlier in the day. The chalk would have to do.
“My failures are circles, he said,” he mutters to himself as he stares down at the twisted, many-branching timeline of himself that he’s mapped out to consider, crouched there on the rooftop over his design, talking it out with himself, “A new beginning. If I really thought– if he really thought that time would rewrite itself, he would have known something was wrong, because it hadn’t. The Device had already fired. Time hadn’t changed, because time travel doesn’t work that way. Time isn’t a lie. So why was he– why was he acting like he’d succeeded?”
Time hadn’t changed.
Had it?
Glory glances down at Eve, then back around the thinning group in the room. “You keep talking about how making changes doesn’t change anything, how we can’t change a timeline. But that’s… one hundred percent not our experience at Horizon.” Her attention darts about everyone, watching reactions. “When I come back from a Pull—when anybody comes back from a Pull—we experience something called Refactoring. We get like, slammed with this sort of like, fucking migraine from hell. Hallucinations. Vivid shit like, mind-spinning. Shit from your childhood or like, stuff from last week. Parallel experiences layered on top of each other. Because something changed.” Glory rolls her shoulders, feeling tension in them.
“That’s why our off-site Incisions are recommended non-interactive. Observe, report. Because the Refactoring can sometimes be debilitating if you’re changing a lot. Sometimes we don’t have a choice, especially if we need a long Outside time.” Glory explains. “But usually, when we’re risking making a potential event-collision, we do our Incision from the Horizon lab. We get less Outside time because we’re moving in three-dimensional space, but when we come back we’re right back in the lab when the Refactoring hits.”
Glory glances around at everyone. “I—I had an Incision I did. We were trying to recover a little stone pyramid from a vault in Texas. Real Time was December 18th, 2008. Sometimes, if you don’t position an Incision right, it’ll scoop up a chunk of the ground. That happened at the vault. We fucked up the coordinates, must’ve got some attention. An investigation.” Glory’s brows furrow. “I get back to the Horizon lab and I’m barfing up bile, hit with a headache, and suddenly we got somebody new in Gateway that I’ve never met before, except I do remember him. Because he was apparently there the whole time, but I have memories where he wasn’t. Only the people outside of the Native experience Refactoring, so everybody else just remembered him. I file my report and cite the differences in the timeline.”
The words of the time traveler from a future that he’d helped save a sliver of came back to him, circling around in his head. It hadn’t made sense then; it didn’t make sense now. That wasn’t how time travel worked, they’d proven it over and over again.
And yet…
"I asked you a question, up there," Richard adds, voice lifting so it can be heard over the noise of the machine spinning up in the background, "What did it say? There was a note on Ronald Mallett's door when we showed up there. I don't think it was for me. I think it was for you."
"What did it say?"
Face to face with his younger self, Ezekiel is forced to consider an uncomfortable truth. The villain never considers himself as such, he is the hero of his own story. Now, surrounded by water tinged pink with blood, bodies soaking in six inches of ice cold death, he gives that notion due consideration.
“The way back, is closed.” Ezekiel breathes the words out, what the sign said for him. He stares at Cardinal, as if that should hold some meaning to them both. But it only proves something to Cardinal that he had been considering for some time.
It's the meaning of what the sign said when he got there. What was written for the Richard Cardinal of this time on Mallet’s door: Time is not a line. Either someone changed the sign, or two roads diverged in a wood further back than imagined.
“That… doesn’t make sense, though,” Richard murmurs with a deep furrowing of his brow, one hand coming up to scratch his fingers through the thick growth of beard that’s been growing through the trip, “That note would have been written at a point that the timelines hadn’t diverged. The glasses proved that. How could it have been different?”
He pushes himself up, pacing back and forth on the rooftop, breath steaming in the chill and drifting away in trailing mist as he did.
“Okay. Work this out,” he mutters, “What separates timelines? Resonant frequencies. It’s all about frequency. So a– a minor change just– it’s a small alteration to the wavelength, once that’s soon smoothed over by the main, stronger wavelength. Scalpel changes, like what I did with Claudia, what he was doing with the Institute.”
He rests a hand against a chimney, scribbling a wavy line on the brick, with another next to it.
“But if the change is major enough, it’s too large a deviation to just smooth over, so it separates…” He motions between the two lines to himself, frowning, “…and both timelines occurred. That didn’t happen when the Device went off, but– he was still sure he’d won. Why?”
The question, then, became ‘How does the Mallett Device work?
Too many questions going in every direction, and Ronald isn't answering any of them. Instead, he takes a sip of his coffee and turns his back on the machine, walking back towards the computer. "I think it is our responsibility to lead as a lesson to the future. What better way than by educating the past…" Pausing by the computers, Ronald reaches down with one hand and types in a string of commands to the terminal, then presses the execute key.
The ring lasers light up again, and to actually show the beams, a gust of steamy air vapor is funneled up through a whirring motor on the bottom of the device. Now visible, the spirals of laser beams criss-crossing inside of the cylinder look more like a helix. "Imagine… being able not to travel back in time, but to send a message backwards to the past." Ronald looks up to the machine, smiling faintly.
"A message to a loved one you were too young to express yourself to before they were gone…" That's the personal answer. "A warning to a more innocent time about a pitfall to come," is more practical, though bordering on dangerous. "A record of history passed backwards in the hopes of building a better tomorrow for someone." Ronald steps away from the cylinder, and the lasers continue to pulse in a slow spiral, every so often forming a single helix, with three horizontal laser beams extending out from it.
"With a machine like this, the message wouldn't be complicated. Transmitting even a few bytes of data backwards in time is still well outside of the realm of physical application. But… imagine if you could. What message would you send?" Ronald looks to Cardinal, then Monica, then back to the cylinder. "How would you make sure people got it, saw it, knew what to look for?"
“If he’d failed, sure, but we’re working on the assumption that he didn’t,” Richard murmurs, his brow furrowing, “We haven’t seen any signs of any branching timelines from the Natazhat moment, either, but… wait. We haven’t seen signs of any new timelines have we? Despite the civil war, the nukes, everything, we…”
He stares at the brick for a long moment, then draws another wavy line. An x on one point, then an x on the other. “Normal time travel is point to point,” he mutters, “It doesn’t *immediately* effect time because the person is still moving through it at the normal rate, just a– just another point in the stream. But if…”
A sharp, thick line drawn down the middle of the whole waveform.
“…what if the laser from the device… it would travel back not point-to-point but as a– a fourth dimensional spear driven right through it, and… what if it kept the resonant frequencies from separating? The stronger frequency – from the most recent point of origin – would overwhelm the other and… refactor reality.”
Overhead, the lasers of the Mallet device wobble and grind together as they spin. Bit the lasers are being bent upward, distorted by the insane gravitational force exerted by Magnes’ power gone berserk. “I had to think bigger.” The entire facility begins to rumble, pressurized pipes begin to blow.
Ezekiel’s eyes are that of a madman, stolen from Cardinal’s friend. “Welcome to the new beginning, Richard.”.
Richard Cardinal stares at the design he’s just drawn. “Of course. I couldn’t really change everything, he must have realized that somehow, so I– I made it so I could. There’s no way— no possible way of knowing what our timeline was like before he fired the Device, because we were inside the timeline, it– wouldn’t have registered to us. It always would’ve been like that…”
One final gift - or curse - from his future/past self to the him of the present.
“It isn’t inevitable,” a slow grin curves to his lips at the realization, “There’s… it hasn’t happened somewhere that it’ll always happen. There finally isn’t somewhere that – we’re always going to fail. We aren’t always going to die, the world isn’t always going to die. We can save ourselves. We can save the people in the Ark. We can save everyone.”
“The way back is open!”
Richard Cardinal has often tried to believe that there was a plan, that events in the world and in his life were being steered towards something greater. That he was walking a path that was written for him.
The ring lasers light up again, and to actually show the beams, a gust of steamy air vapor is funneled up through a whirring motor on the bottom of the device. Now visible, the spirals of laser beams criss-crossing inside of the cylinder look more like a helix. "Imagine… being able not to travel back in time, but to send a message backwards to the past." Ronald looks up to the machine, smiling faintly.
"A message to a loved one you were too young to express yourself to before they were gone…" That's the personal answer. "A warning to a more innocent time about a pitfall to come," is more practical, though bordering on dangerous. "A record of history passed backwards in the hopes of building a better tomorrow for someone." Ronald steps away from the cylinder, and the lasers continue to pulse in a slow spiral, every so often forming a single helix, with three horizontal laser beams extending out from it.
For the longest time, he believed that plan was created by his godfather, Edward Ray.
"A message to a loved one you were too young to express yourself to before they were gone…" That's the personal answer. "A warning to a more innocent time about a pitfall to come," is more practical, though bordering on dangerous. "A record of history passed backwards in the hopes of building a better tomorrow for someone." Ronald steps away from the cylinder, and the lasers continue to pulse in a slow spiral, every so often forming a single helix, with three horizontal laser beams extending out from it.
Over the last few years, he’s been struggling with the fear that it may have been a path set by the presence they know only as the Entity, a road that would lead them all to utter destruction.
"A record of history passed backwards in the hopes of building a better tomorrow for someone." Ronald steps away from the cylinder, and the lasers continue to pulse in a slow spiral, every so often forming a single helix, with three horizontal laser beams extending out from it.
But as the layers of the glass onion of reality peel away for him one at a time he’s beginning to wonder…
– a single helix, with three horizontal laser beams extending out from it –
…have they all missed the forest for the trees?
