Back To Roots 1 (working title)

Space-time is like a crystal. I've spent a lifetime proving it; it has a flow of development, a source it springs from. It's a multilayered, multidimensional object, but the natural architecture of spacetime itself crystalized from a sort of flashpoint we once thought of as the big bang.

The mystery, of course, lay in our understanding of what dark energy was, and how it related to dark matter, as the startling answer that, in fact, they had very little to do with one another at all. All our mathematical models, most of which I pioneered and about a third of which I developed almost in their entirety, describe the driving force of entropy being recursion. Recursion on the quantum level. On the most basic levels, we are all time travelers; our particles move forwards through the crystalline structure of space time only to hop back on themselves to a prior point in their causal history and move forward again. Our initial observations, of course, gave rise to the usual quantum fuckery and issues of entanglement, particles being observed to be in two separate places at once. The usual symptoms new age hipsters latched onto in order to declare that reality is entirely subjective and you could believe or disbelieve what you want, the sort of asshole nonsense that resulted in antivaxxers, flat earthers, and the resurgence of faith healing as a billable medical practice back in 2032.

But, except in the broadest sense possible, this isn't actually about all that. This isn't even about the science that powers the enormous array I'm standing on, materials meticulously gathered from the Oort, energy taken from the far side of the sun, drawn from vacuum fluctuations, pulled from its own gravitational mass, recursively stored in an ever denser and more causally pretzeled mass.

By my estimates from a mathematical model I keep to myself, the forces drawn from stealing the aftereffects of mass on space and time, robbing it of the gross effects of gravity itself, I have contained on this weightless facility the equivalent of approximately 1.608*10^13 Planck temperatures of energy, far more by almost inconceivable amounts than was required to set our whole universe in motion. Far more energy than the observable universe was believed to contain tied up in its visible and invisible mass and energy. It's all a function of recursion, the bending of spacetime, set in motion by the barest drops of energy gathered from the sun itself and then allowed to sustain its reaction. Turns out the power of compound interest is no less bewildering in physics. I own all the power in this dwarf planet sized space station; it makes me, by the current model of economics, the wealthiest human alive. Our economics are far different than the economics of when I was born and raised. Now, it's all about keeping score as much as anything else but there is no poverty except by comparison in the era of material recombinance.

Which leads me to here, and now. The last of the station personnel have departed; my last will and testament are logged on Sol-net, seventy billion humans wait with bated breath to learn the results of this, my greatest experiment, to temporally clone myself. Or so I have led them all to believe. Because the mathematical model I've presented is a sham, a lie, an enormous hoax based off the real thing, a few numbers tweaked in such a way that none of the review board could spot. True, the whole facility is a temporal engine, of sorts, but the purpose is not what I have advertised.

We always knew that rewinding the universe would be expensive. Something beyond the limits of all the available energy in the universe, we thought, until we learned that thermodynamics and entropy were not as hard coded, nor indeed as inviolate as we had supposed. But while we had initially underestimated how much energy we would need, we ALSO severely underestimated how much energy could be acquired. Could be created. And could, in fact, be destroyed after all, if you knew what you were doing and needed to do so to accomplish something.

Here, and now. This time, this place. The computers running narrow virtual intelligence, recursively writing and optimizing itself until it did what I needed it to do, and nothing else. No living thing to harm, and a facility that would consume itself in its maiden activation. The whole of humanity is watching, and will witness what they believe to be a tragedy, while I know it to be a triumph. And if it fails, I will never know it happened. So in a sense, I can only know success.

"And now, I meet myself."

They are my last words. In my causal past, my contemporaries and comrades, those who shared my time, they will be my epitaph, a monument to a temporal physicist who overreached himself. Who recklessly ended himself after a century and a half of pushing the boundaries of human knowledge. Giving my own statue feet of clay, as it were.

It amuses me to know that in many ways, I am pulling off the greatest prank in human history, veiling my crowning triumph in a mask of failure.

The time comes, when the sum value of the stored mass and energy reaches the quantity required to return my awareness to a new, subsequent temporal descendant whose chronal value is equal to a long, long distant ancestor causal stem.

And just like that, I find myself crouched over a half constructed sand castle, shirtless, and confused. A roar reaches my ears; I turn my head to look just in time for a crashing wave to hit me, my sand castle, and my vanity square in the face. My yelp of protest is high pitched, and I splutter indignantly, coughing up salt water, sand, and the vague taste of seaweed. This... is not where I had precisely expected to discover myself.

My crowning triumph is humiliating; my concealed, arrogant mockery of those who had come to idolize me self-punishing. How poetically fitting.

And I don't have my array and station, nor the enormous resources of a post scarcity humanity to draw from and replace them, as it took me seventy years just to build them, and another eighty five and change to amass my energy budget. I find myself laughing softly in my childishly high pitched voice, a voice that a dim corner of my mind still recognizes, if only barely.

It's then, in my quiet humor, that I notice an old woman, tall, hook nosed, and in startlingly good physical shape despite her obvious age, walking in my direction. Beyond her, a bald, pear shaped man several inches shorter than she is, is packing up beach accessories.

My grandparents. My heart leaps into my chest, and I suddenly have a strong idea of when I have found myself, and it's years earlier than planned. Early memories, child memories, my eyes turn back to the ocean and I see a beach I still visit in my deepest dreams. I grew up here, on this island, for a few years. The only years I had been actually raised. Before everything went wrong in my childhood, really wrong.

My grandpa is still alive. My grandmother too, but she outlived him by almost a quarter century. My grandfather died when I was fourteen. Fifteen? My sophomore year. Fifteen. He lives for at least another three years, if I am here, now. In Hawaii. The date, the date, what's the DATE?

"Nicky, I told you that you needed to build the castle further up," my grandma tells me.

I have no memory of this time. Or maybe this memory overlaps others like it, time spent at the beach, sunburned days followed by peeling nights with balmy breeze blowing in my open window as I slept. I remember grandma always had to be right. 'I told you so' was practically like breathing for her. But in all fairness, she usually had told me so, and I know that a powerful quantity of my intellect came directly from the combination of her sharp wit and my grandfather's seemingly effortless artistry. She was a woman of iron, a trellis on which I was partially grown, so impressive that even after she was gone, one could tell the shape of her personality and will by seeing how I had grown into a man.

"You did," I reply, smiling easily. And it is here that I realize that I have made a mistake. My response isn't what she expected; and in a split second I understand that I have made more than one error today, more than one error in the last hundred fifty years in pursuing this project, this obsession of mine.

I am an old man in the body of a child. I know the shape of a future that hasn't happened and won't happen, because I am not now who I was when it happened the first time around.

It is at this point, it starts to sink in, that I have fucked up.