Time Had Other Plans

The Time Void hummed as I stepped up to the Precipice and stared down into the depths. A lifetime of training had led to this. I fiddled with the electronic band on my wrist - the Time Warper - with a growing sense of foreboding. The glowing purple light below, the waving of the timelines shimmering silver.

Today was the day that time would be turned back and our world would be saved. The Company would right its wrongs and the world would be saved. There would be no starvation or war or climate change. Everything would be righted. It all rested on my shoulders.

My task was simple: use the wristband to find our timeline and then trace it back to the First Fault. Undo the First Fault. Then return to our heavenly future.

It seemed almost too simple that everything could be solved, just like that. But all the greatest researchers at the greatest research centre in the world knew it to be true. The Compound had been made for just this purpose. The Company had designated it so.

The white walls of the Compound roase around me, and in the floor was a deep, jagged hole where at the bottom glowed the Time Void. I could hear the people in the room murmuring as I continued to hesitate.

Then the alarms started. They rang so loud I clapped my hands over my ears, a scream rising in my throat. The Rebels. Fear lanced through me, stealing my breath. Red lights flashed from everywhere and the spectators around me scattered, rushing for the doors. I watched them over my shoulder. Should I run too?

Someone yelled at me to jump. I obeyed.

I turned my back and looked down into the depths of the Time Void again. I felt like my body resisted as I moved closer. I could feel it below me, pulsing, rushing like a river, spluttering like a fountain.

Just as I was about to jump, a hand clamped on my arm. I refused to turn around, pulling myself forward some more until my toes hung over the Precipice. I was pulled back, stumbling. My ears roared with noise. Panicking, I wrenched my arm away and stumbled over the edge of the Precipice. The hand let go.

Falling was easy. I'd done the falling before. We were trained to jump at a young age. But every time I had jumped before it had been a practice. It had been from a bridge to water. Jumping into the river in the Greenhouse where we had played as mere children and knew its depths and knew its creatures and secrets and feel.

This was the moment I had been practising for and it was farther down than I had thought it would be.

It had never been directly into the unknown.

The wristband flashed as I hovered over the silver thread of our timeline. I gripped the slippery silver line and began to climb along it, kicking my feet like I was floating through water as I pulled myself along.

The wristband flashed again when I reached my destination. I tapped the button on its side and was propelled from the Time Void. I flew through the air, exhilarated by the fact that my task was almost complete. I landed on the Precipice with a jolt and found my way to the First Fault.

In a building down the street from the Compound, that wasn't there in my time, I ran into a bald man with a moustache and caused him to drop his files onto the floor. I apologised profusely, as I had been taught to do, hurriedly and pathetically trying to put them back together for him as he grew more and more frustrated at me. Then I followed him to his meeting. I interrupted him whenever he tried to speak. I made sure that another man was allowed to speak and his ideas were accepted by the group. Then I slipped out the back of the room as everyone was packing up and I ran excitedly back to the Time Void hidden in what would one day be the Compound.

I plunged over the Precipice into the spiralling purple and silver as time rearragned itself. I travelled back to my future, vibrating with excitement as I placed hand over hand, eager to greet the future we had always dreamed of. I barely noticed the blue swirls now laced with black around me.

Then I shot out of the Time Void cheering.

I don’t know what I had expected. Maybe fanfare? Maybe a hug from someone?

I’d done it, after all! I'd changed time!

I was not met with applause.

When I looked up, what I found was almost unrecognizable. The building that had been my home was crumbling before me. It was ashen and black, as if burned. The room smelled acrid and musty all at once. The air was thin. Breathing in gave me none of the usual relief. Instead, it was revolting, nauseating.

My heart sank. The pristine future in my mind dissolved.

I needed to see more. I looked around, my eyes watering. I could see one particularly tall structure that looked to me as if I could scale it. I had to crawl on my hands and knees to make my way up the rubble. The knees of my pants ripped and I could feel my skin rip on the rubble also.

I tried to ignore this but when I did look down I could see my blood, darkened with dirt, dripping down from my knees. I tried to be more careful after that. But I was stumbling, my fingers numb, breath catching in my throat.

The air felt thin, it didn’t seem to fill my lungs the same. I was having trouble catching my breath. I tried harder to breath, panic rising in my chest, my head feeling light and heavy all at once. My throat caught. I coughed. Then again and again until I couldn't stop. I leant against my knees, my chest growing tight. I coughed again. The air itself seemed to be burning me. My eyes began to water.

I felt too hot inside but my skin was cold, sweaty.

I tried to reconcile the feelings for a moment, but couldn’t quite comprehend what was happening. I was shaking. I felt weak. When I reached the top of the rubble, I retched. My face was a mess of snot and tears. My eyes were stinging, my ears ringing.

I felt my hands shaking. My breath was coming harder and faster. I dropped down on my side, my muscles shivering. I took a moment, laying flat on my back and trying my hardest to breathe, in an attempt to regain my composure. It took far longer than I thought it should. My chest was hurting from the effort and the world was blurry and I felt disconnected from it.

After a moment, I started pulling myself slowly into a seated position. My body felt heavy and clammy. The world I saw stretched out to the horizon when I was finally seated was blackened, dark. There was a fire burning somewhere and the world reeked of acrid smoke.

I glanced down at my wristband and found that the year was unchanged. I was at the right time, just minutes after I should have left to travel to the First Fault.

I looked around again and tried to conjure up information from my discombobulated mind. The closest image I could guess was some kind of nuclear event. I looked around at the blackened masses around me. Some kind of fire.

I thought of my last moments before I jumped into the Time Void. I thought of the alarms going off and of the frightened faces I saw forming lines before me. I chewed my bottom lip.

How could that be? I'd changed everything. My actions should have saved everyone.

I returned to the Time Void and dropped down into it again. I travelled to ten years ago, a few years before my birth, twisting my Time Warper to the right year and letting myself get carried by the Time Void.

I again landed on the edge of the Time Void.

I could finally catch my breath, but I noticed that the air still felt thin and I was breathing harder than I needed to. There was, again, no fanfare. There was nothing. The room was empty and dark, but not crumbling as it was before. Just abandoned.

I travelled through the world, trying to track down a place of information and learning. There were people but they did not look at me. They wore masks on their blank faces. Their eyes faced the ground.

I soon found a library. I spent the rest of the day between books on history, looking for the event that changed the future. I found what I was looking for.

Bushfires were on the rise, the heightened temperatures and the poisoned air caused by pollution were evidently present. But, as I read newspapers and gained an understanding of the perspective of the people in this time period, I slowly understood that hope was failing people.

I returned to the Compound, climbed the six foot high chain link fence to get back inside. I searched through the computer records and found that people in the Company had just given up. I assumed, although I could not watch it in real-time as I would have liked, that the principles that drove the Company from the time of the First Fault had been swayed by public perception instead of remaining strong in the face of them.

I returned to the Time Void.

The next time I jumped out of the Time Void was oldly similar. The building was still standing when I landed on the Precipice again. I searched through the halls. My breath was visible in front of me and I was beginning to shake again. I shoved my hands under my under arms and continued on through to the control rooms.

I had been there only a few times before, simply to see the land to the horizon. The land owned by the Rebels. It had been a city then, you could see their buildings beyond the gate. You could see them stacked high like the building blocks that children learn with.

A thick cloud hung in the sky, looming low over everything. It felt so close that I thought if you were too high up in a building or flying in a plane, you could be trapped in it, touching it, having it smother you. Everything was cold.

As I watched on, the wind kicked up the dusty white that lay over everything. It swirled it around and tossed it against the ruins of the buildings. They had been flattened.

I did not know what was wrong with this future, but in my future, there had been growing tensions between our country and a neighbouring country. I figured that that debris, along with the obvious lack of technology... maybe this was some kind of nuclear fallout?

I returned to the Time Void and moved events in the past around trying to find the Fault. My efforts were in vain.

The next future I found was awful. I was ejected from the Time Void and instead of landing on the ledge like I normally did, I felt a pull.

I was wet, soaked through and underwater. I could not breathe. I watched bubbles rise around me. Water filled my mouth. I swallowed it, completely in shock. It was salty. It filled my nose.

I started kicking, frantically fighting for the surface. I could barely make it out. It must be vaguely above me. I fought, harder and harder, flailing my limbs in an attempt to push towards the surface. My clothes were weighing me down. I felt my lungs and legs burn.

It seemed like an eternity.

I swallowed water again. My stomach hurt. I gagged and again nearly took on some more water. Salt burned my nose. I was panicking. I couldn’t find the surface. I couldn’t do it. I felt too heavy. I felt my strength failing me. I was going to sink back down.

I gave one last desperate stroke and felt air. I tried again and pulled myself above the surface. I breathed. Then gagged again. I nearly fell back under. I used my remaining strength to propel myself forward. There had to be a wall somewhere. I found it, eventually. But by the time I had pulled myself free of the salty water I was vomiting up seawater.

I retched for a good few minutes, pouring stomach fluid and seawater onto the damp ground. Unsure of whether I had breathed any in, I forced myself to cough for the next half an hour, beating on my chest.

Then I flopped to the floor like a rotten fish and lay spread-eagled on the ground. I shivered and shook until I finally fell asleep, shuddering as I moved my wrecked rib cage up and down to breathe. The coughing had scraped at the back of my throat. Every muscle was sore.

I fell into an uneasy sleep, curled into a ball until morning.

When the sun did rise and I could take a good look around, feeling nauseous to my very core, I realised where I stood.

Everything clicked in my head. I remembered the lectures we were given as children, about protecting the planet from global warming and the melting of the ice caps.The water levels must have risen, the ice caps must have melted. It was hot and humid aside from a cool breeze making its way through the walls of the compound.

But… the Company had promised to solve the problem of the ice caps? They had told us that that was one of their missions. Surely, I had not changed too much.

I looked again at the Time Warper on my wrist, frowning as I paced back towards the Time Void.

Dear reader, as you may have already noticed, I am a stubborn person. I have never given up on a single challenge put before me.

I was given the challenge of changing the future. I was given the challenge of changing the world, for the better. By the Time Void, I was going to do just that.

Over the next … I guess I don't know how long, I jumped back and forth in time, each time tweaking something here and something there.

I spent days of time in libraries researching and pouring over records. I spent several weeks pouring over the records from year 2178 so that I could figure out exactly who and which John Smith was in 2245. This was in an attempt to change the timeline further down from the First Fault. The future I returned to was strange. It involved

I went so far back in time, I even visited a poet who would inspire the creators and potentially lead to the First Fault. Let me tell you, Dear Reader, that 1803 is not a good time in history for a woman. The future I created this time was overrun by communism and the Company was never actually created, only existing as the by-product of some idea that a person had once. I found the writings of it on the shelf at the back of a library, filed at the very top, covered in dust and smelling strongly of mildew.

Although the fact that the Company was never created was the strangest thing, I thought, about this timeline, I could not rally behind the idea of a world where zombies existed. Crazed humans eating healthy humans was beyond me. After meeting one zombie face-to-face and having the ravenous being try to clamp its teeth in my arm, this was an experience I could not allow anyone else to have.

I erased this future by going back and stopping myself. My past self turned to a bluish dust the second I caught up, staring at me with wide eyes. What have you done?

What had I done? I wasn't sure.

So I tried again.

I stepped on a leaf in 2041 which led to it not being picked up by a certain scientist on the morning commute who did not, in fact, have a burst of inspiration that morning. He had that burst of inspiration later that day instead which resulted in his theory being unanimously denied in response to another theory, later proven to be wrong. For whatever reason, this plan, far from creating the utopia I had thought it would, created a world where individuals had purple hair.

It took me weeks to figure out how that happened. Genetic engineering in embryos. Twenty years before, everyone had wanted blue hair. Now purple. Go figure.

I went back and converted the future again, targeting a different area. I accelerated the discovery of a particular element that could potentially be used to help in the establishment of technology to save the planet. Nothing seemed changed when I returned again to my present. Except there were no people. No humans, at least. Green, bug-eyed humanoids stared back at me, blinking strangely.

I just turned around and jumped straight back into the Time Void. I guessed, rather than researched, and figured that the change I had made had led to the advanced development of a weapon that potentially threatened the future of alien peoples and they took steps to eliminate the human race rather than be conquered in the future. I figured this wasn't the future that anyone at the Company had predicted.

I tried again and again. I manipulated tiny fragments in time. I manipulated large events. I manipulated who and what and where and how.

Over here, a world of animal hybrids consuming the world. Over there, the death of society, humans slaughtering humans, all out war. Fractured countries. World-wide plague. Inability of the human peoples to reproduce entirely. Gun violence. Knife violence. Again and again. Then more and more, over and over. And, strangely, far too many zombies.

It seemed to me that getting rid of one Fault simply created another. Better the devil you know. An old saying that kept sticking in my mind. I shivered.

Some "days" I would fall asleep in this new world I had inadvertently created. I would lie on the cold ground of the destroyed Compound and shiver the night away. Sometimes I would sweat the night away, as the world around me burned. That isn't relevant.

All you need to know, dear Reader, is that I tried. I tried my absolute hardest. I tried until my body hurt from exhaustion and I fell on those cold grounds, shaking and stuttering. I tried until my fingers bled from climbing through the Time Void and I had to wrap my hands in strips of cloth I ripped from my clothes. I tried until I was a mumbling pile of human disorientation and scattered chunks of hair I pulled from my own skull.

I was sat like this, ripping my hair from my head, rocking back and forth after yet another failed attempt at changing the future, when an idea occurred to me.

It wasn't a new idea. In fact, as soon as I thought about it in my mentally deranged state, I remembered thinking this the first time I had found a world sunken by melting ice caps. That first shred of doubt.

But what to do? What to do?

I rocked back and forth, clumps of hair curled over my knuckles. It had grown long over the time I had been travelling through from future to past and back again and back again. The Time Void had not preserved me in my current state as had once been theorised. I would get wrinkles one day.

With a strangled noise, I began to laugh. The laugh grew louder and louder, racking my chest and strangling my airways. I leaned forward, unable to contain my laughter. My sides hurt. My lungs burned. Tears clustered in my eyes and poured down my cheeks.

I laughed at all the lies I had been told. All the fears I had thought would vanish. It had sounded so easy. I knew it had sounded too easy. I had known then, as I stood on the edge. I had known that it wouldn't be that easy.

The laugh eased in my throat and I was able to gasp for air again. I used the moments to crawl on my hands and knees towards the Precipice of the Time Void. I stared down into it, watching the silvery threads so far below sway in the purple light of the Time Void. There seemed to be so many more now.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I wondered if I had seen them all.

Then I fell. I tumbled down, down into the purple of the Time Void. I plunged into it and let the cold sink into my bones.

I knew which thread I wanted and I swam for it, ignoring the beeping of my wristband. I snatched up the thread and began climbing down it ferociously. In what felt like moments, I was being thrown from the Time Void and I landed on the Precipice.

I hid as everyone filed into the room. I watched my past self, with all her hair and a shining hopeful smile, step hesitantly to the Precipice. Then I reached for the alarm on the wall and I smashed the glass covering with a weak elbow.

The room exploded into motion as the alarm rang out. People ran for the doors, screaming, scrambling. I ignored them. My eyes were on my past self, she turned her head to watch the commotion, her mouth dropping open, hands clamped over her ears. I pushed my way to her through the crowd.

"Don't jump!" I screamed, my voice ripping through my throat. She turned back to the Precipice, looked down into the Time Void. I remembered that someone had screamed at me to jump and swore.

I ran now, shoving people out of the way as I went. There were still more people in here. Their eyes were frantic. I didn't care for them. Let the Rebels come, we deserved it.

I reached the Precipice as my past self toed the edge and I grabbed her arm. She tried to pull away, as I knew she would, and I dragged her back away from the edge. I wrapped my other hand around her other arm and held her steadfastly. I would not let myself jump this time.

She struggled. I did not give in.

Then, finally, she turned and looked at me, her eyes meeting mine. She froze. I watched as a horrified recognition came over her face, as realisation dawned on her. We would fail and we would keep failing. The past wouldn't change anything.