The twelfth hour

Hello, my real name must stay unknown but you can call me Art, short for Artisan. I am a Time-Traveller and you have no idea how that can stretch your mind to a level so close to insanity that I have to constantly remind myself why I am stuck in this unending whirl of contradictions; why Time-Travel is a necessity and not a luxury. Put simply, to prevent Earth's annihilation. More precisely, how we annihilated Earth.

You probably think I come from another millennium, nothing is further from the truth. Another century then! Unfortunately, again you would be mistaken. Let's just say I am young and was born in the early 2000. Yes, it will become that bad, that fast; no time to brace for impact.

There will be no escape, no way out, and no survivors. Earth's destruction will be total and final, and we are the cause of it all. Imagine the burden, imagine the hyperstimulation that wreaks havoc with my heart just to find a solution, to erase all traces of the horrible crime that we all committed. It is one thing to hear the warnings and say, not in my lifetime. It is another to witness the end and have no time or reprieve to fix things. To actually die with the weight imprinted on your soul that you eradicated not only your whole species but also the very orb that nourished you since your beginning is too crushing to bear. And yet, for the people facing that moment, we all had to swallow it.

Time-Travel was not invented by us nor do we understand any of the principles or concepts involved. The truth is we stumbled on it by accident because it already existed. It is something Nature created and kept secret until the very end. The "Doors" started to appear two days before the end.

It made the news with people claiming they had already lived this day, it became viral when people claimed they had not only witnessed the end of the world, they had lived it, or rather died in it. As time advanced, the news took amplitude. The number of people kept increasing and their stories were so identical and yet adapted to their specific situations it could not be a global conspiracy. The horrible truth became worldwide known with the first Pulse.

It was called that because it was followed by what could only be described as Impulses. The first Pulse was the End of the world for the whole population; we all experienced it. We all carried the memory of it. Even now, I can go back and feel the excruciating pain of exploding into a million pieces all the while with the knowledge: we did it to ourselves, but worse.

When a catastrophic event of this amplitude takes place it does not just kill you, it erases you from any attempt to regain a place within the realm of evolution. You are stigmatized as a failure and you know it. There are no second chances, the human race failed, Earth failed and it will be a totally new species that will have its shot. It is the worse feeling ever but one that is indelible at least to move forward or to move on because the future no longer exists for you.

At that moment, this reality became true for 98% of the population who never made it back. The Impulse brought back the rest 20 days before. Of the remaining two percent a lot of people were actually useless and only managed to turn mad or decided to live their last days free from any knowledge of the end. That left 500 people trying to make a difference believing they had this unique chance to prevent the inevitable, to prevent our extinction.

We strongly believed it was Earth's last attempt to save the species she had carried and cradled for so long, watch evolved with the hope it would be a species worth keeping, worth preserving, not worth destroying. It was up to us to prove her right.

This was far worse than Noah's flooding, this was far worse than anything Humanity had ever faced and the first day was spent shivering and barely managing to say: Hello. Most of us could still hear our cries of agony as we died. Luckily, many of us had reappeared at the same location which was an observatory. One of the people running it had reappeared also and found no difficulty convincing himself of the veracity of what he was saying. They had the technology to detect the "Doors" or time anomalies and the contacts to warn or subtly ask other scientists about such weird phenomena. We had a chance, we had 20 days, or more precisely 19.

We gathered more and more information and the different experiences everyone had being trapped into those "Doors". We realized that two days before the catastrophe their numbers had phenormously increased making them undeniable but their appearances were much older. They could maintain their presence for a while before vanishing and we had reports of people being trapped in them. It wasn't painful but you literally could not move, stuck in this standstill where time was frozen for any exterior movements. Your mind was the only thing not affected as if the brain was not subjected to these laws of time gravity. Most people began to think about where they would rather be and that was the key. They were heard and the "time machine" brought them where they wished to go.

We actually lost a lot of people that way before we found how to maintain the doors with us and get back to our time to give reports of the changes we tried or the discoveries we made. Luckily, the doors were very sensitive to our brain patterns and the energy they generated seemed to be there to serve us. As long as we kept our thoughts alive and constant the "Doors" obeyed. It was nevertheless an exhausting process and we could not stay too long in the past without staying stuck there if the contact was lost. It was primordial that we returned, the information and our attempts to change the future were the only thread that could keep humanity on the map.

Every second counted, hence we always tried to come back on the day Earth had brought us back so that we didn't lose the 20 days before the end. It was eerily and we could not help but feel we were reliving the same day continuously. But it worked, each travel made us lose one hour, and it allowed the people who did not travel to have a constant renewal of information. All we could conclude about such a unique opportunity like this one was that the brain was the most evolved part of our species and that Earth wanted us to grasp and try to gain a second chance with it. You cannot imagine the pressure you feel from having this mission. More than once I thought my head would explode; then I remembered, it had.

We tried to identify the moment that sealed our fate, the moment that made it real that we were gone. We had a lot of theories but to stop it from happening we needed facts. No one really knew what had caused Earth's destruction in the first place. And no one was left to analyze the evidence after the event had passed. We could only agree that the planet had exploded. The scientists contacted other scientists trying to find the causes but it was useless. There were no warnings even 20 days before the event that could tell us why the Earth exploded. This left little alternative on how to prevent it but the human impact was undeniable and we all felt that we were the cause.

So which event to go back to, as to prevent our destructive pattern to take place? How far should we go back? Most of us thought the furthest the better. But then what, how do you change what happened? Most people proposed killing Hitler, believing that would prevent world war 2 and save us. We were desperate and with little time so that was our first mission. With the weapons of today and trained soldiers, it was far from being mission impossible. History told us numerous locations where Hitler was so...

He was the first person to die from someone from the future and...

World war 2 wasn't stopped. It took place as it should killing pretty much the same amount of people. The only difference Germany had another leader not named Hitler. Unfortunately, all our missions ended up with the same result. The people might be different but it all led to the same conclusion. Boom!

The frustrations grew, why were we given this opportunity if it was to be confronted with failure once more? There was no way out, no matter the time, or the event; history always managed to follow its course. For one whole night, Time Travel was postponed to reassess the situation. We were missing something of vital importance but what?

We all perceived this was a gift given by Earth to allow us to perhaps change our tragic end, allow us to continue our evolution. That meant there was a precise time we could act, it could not be random. When?

The "Doors" were the key, they offered salvation. They represented the signal we had to act. So we began studying when the first one appeared. It was a specific year in the twenty-first century and the window was not very long so we concentrated our effort in that time zone. It became obvious that to survive, to perdure we had to have and favor a more sustainable environment and development. We tried our best to influence and direct humanity in that direction and noticed the events were no longer following the first version. This confirmed this was our window to act, we could make a difference and prevent our atrocious end.

We tried and tried, and we became better at using our time but there are so long we could stretch 20 days and we were reaching the end of the rope. We had no certainties, no evidence the improvements we had made would be enough. To tell you the truth none of us believed we would make it. The Earth was barely in a better state and to bring about a different future would take a lot more time than we had. The truth was we were not even sure we would witness the effect had we really changed the timeline. Maybe it was too late for us since we came from the other one and our only chance was an alternate reality. As we conjured on the subject as we had done for what seemed as one or two eternities now, we only managed to agree on one thing. None of us felt we had fulfilled our mission. We had to do more, we had to strengthen our resolve, and we had to reinforce the ties that assured a different outcome.

Instead, we were crushed when one of us reappeared and said that he lived Earth's destruction yet another time. All our attempts had failed, and all our hard work had been for nothing. The final result was the same!!!!

The discouragement and despair that followed gave us all the same idea. We all wanted to die, end it for good, and no longer be stuck in this loop. Maybe the humans were meant to disappear, maybe we were too stupid to go on. Maybe our complete annihilation served a better purpose by showing what not to become. It was nearly impossible to argue with that conclusion now. But before vanishing into nothingness I wanted to do something more, I felt there was one thing we had not tried yet. It was the whole race that was in jeopardy and perhaps it wasn't meant for one group to save them, perhaps... every individual had to make that decision.

So this was going to be our last attempt. I cannot say I had a lot of fate in it because remembering who I was before I doubt I would have cared. If only we could make them feel what we experienced but all we could do was communicate. At least we would not be the only ones carrying the weight. We were also certain we were too small and insignificant to stop this from occurring. If humanity was to be saved it was the whole who had to make the changes, it was the whole who had to prove that they cared enough to prevent the destruction.

I just hope I could transmit the urgency of it to its rightful level so that every individual activated the alarm provoking, forcing even the whole to grasp how it was imperative to take immediate action. Since it was my idea, I was the one to go back. For it to be global and unavoidable we had to make a simultaneous broadcast on all stations, including social networks. To succeed that we had to hack the satellite. Since we had knowledge of the technology of the time and were more advanced it wasn't gonna be hard. The difficulty rested with: would it work?

The moment the broadcast was sent I wanted to run back to my friends, to my people. I did not want to see how people would react, I wanted to go back to my time and witness the result there. An impossibility as the "Door" was gone, I could not go back, I could not know.

I tried to envision the future, I tried to see if I still felt Earth's destruction; if the lethal pulsations were still contained in my body. I came back with one strong sensation of darkness, again I could not know. I hoped and prayed that it was the darkness of the unknown and that we were changing our destiny because the darkness of the known was too horrible to bear.