Infinite Betrayal

Jason wiped the tears from his face, then pressed the lever. “Here we go Sparky” Jason muttered to his dog, as he sent the ship tunneling through space-time. Blinding light shone into the cabin when the ship crested the event horizon and traveled down the dark and light spiraling bands of matter and anti-matter that twisted like a tornado before him.

Here he was, once again reckless tunneling through time and reality, without regard for disrupting timelines or creating alternate universes, or even his own life. The ship groaned, and knocking sounds resonated down the hull. Reminding him that the spacecraft had been designed to sustain only one such trip. Still though here he remained, the sole survivor, pushing the pinnacle of human engineering to its threshold. The loud groan of metal bending resounded starboard side, the dog barked at it. Perhaps thinking someone was knocking at the door, he was growing fond of the idiot dog.

Initially, he’d been wildly opposed to the idea of having a dog. Though as it usually went, the will of his better half won out. Shortly after the topic of a dog was broached, he found himself somewhere in Saudi Arabia tracking down a very hard-to-find breeder. He never could say no to his beautiful wife, her eyes melted him, and her voice softened him. He found himself clutching at the digital locket around his neck, grasping for the picture of her, her freckled sun-kissed face, and windswept golden hair, with the Mediterranean ocean and a warm august sun setting behind her silhouetting a faraway sailboat. He’d taken that photo of her during their honeymoon in Santorini. They’d traveled the world, before venturing into the cosmos.

Sparky chortled, then vomited all over the chair and himself. “This is why you canines went out of fashion hundreds of years ago”. The dog burped and looked at him mouth agape looking quite happily. “Charming”, Jason said aloud. Lauren would’ve chastised him for talking to the dog like that. For some weird reason, he’d always suspected that she and the dog had some kind of supernatural connection. Like if he ever was mean to the dog she would know. “Sparky… I didn’t mean that… don’t tell your mom I said that.” He looked over at his co-pilot who was preoccupied with the flashing lights in front of him.

It was a cruel irony that it was just him, and this salivating dog lost in space and time. It was never supposed to be like this. Jason had been sent out with a team, tasked with the colonization of the exoplanet, GAIA. The trip had gone smoothly. Everything from the launch to the worm-holing. The first few trips to the surface of the planet had gone smoothly. He’d docked his aircraft in orbit around the planet. While his team went to the surface and got zoological samples. It had been exciting, promising work. The planet was conducive to growing earth crops, and the aliens had seemed so friendly, so small and docile. Never did Jason suspect that they would be capable of such savagery.

He and Sparky had remained on the ship that day. He’d kept an eye on the team. The ship had cameras, capable of extreme magnification. It had just been another day, the team was out in a gentle meadow, with all sorts of alien flowers and fruits that grew on the ground. The aliens had been amongst them. They mimicked the team members and eagerly picked plants out of the ground and presented them to the humans. All looked well. Jason had gone to the back of the ship to check on the eggs. When he’d come back, he pulled up the video feed and saw bodies sprawled out across the meadow.

He’d desperately tried to make radio contact with his team. There was no answer. He’d quickly gotten into a Pod, and shot down to the surface. With a firearm and medical supplies in hand, he’d run to her. There she had been, face down in the alien soil. Blood-soaked blonde hair, her face mangled and hemorrhaged. He held her still-warm body and sobbed into it. He told her corpse how sorry he was. That he should’ve been with her, that it was his fault. He had failed her as both her captain and husband.

He sobbed into her until her body grew stiff and cold, and the sun had set. It was then that Jason began to notice amongst the bodies of his crew the furry little mounds. Something had happened to Lauren, it looked like these bastards had murdered his wife and the crew. His dreary exhaustion gave way to hot frothing rage.

He left Lauren behind and set out across the meadow, towards the little alien village in the woods. Jason walked into the silent village. The diurnal aliens were asleep, inside their lichen-covered wooden lean-tos, no taller than waist height. He went from home to home, toppling them with a kick of his boot, before smiting the quaking creatures inside. Soon the village was in a dissaray, strange disabling terror took the furry creatures and they just froze in place when they saw him and shivered with fear.

Somewhere during his rampage, he remembered Lauren telling him that they had no natural predators on the planets, that all the animals were herbivores. So they didn’t respond, a few ran off into the bushes. But most just stared at him and died. If he kept this up in a few generations, they would evolve a flight response. If their species made it into the future. Exhausted, and dehydrated, he stumbled back to his pod and blasted off back towards the ship. Jason stumbled in and found a very distressed dog awaiting him. Jason made his way to the piloting seat. And programmed the ship to collide into the planet at full speed. He intended to duplicate what happened to the dinosaurs on earth, an extinction-level event. These murderers wouldn’t be allowed to survive.

It wasn’t until he had his hand on the accelerator, ready to crash into the planet at full speed that hope stirred within him. He realized that somewhere, in some time or someplace. His precious wife was still alive, and he may be able to get to her. As he understood it, his ship traveled back in time, to when the universe was much smaller, and moved to a location that would become the destination in the future. Then would travel forward in time to arrive at the destination at the desired date. Based on the “Onionverse” theory of reality, which the ship's physics were based on. He could wormhole on one plane, and travel to alternate realities at the same moment in time. Or he could tunnel forwards and backward in time, and travel amongst the realities.

The differences between realities could be as minute as today he wore a different shirt, or as significant as the earth never came to be and the universe was controlled by a race of telepathic squirrel-like beings. He had two issues to contend with though, he would have to leave this reality and go into an alternative one. Because he didn’t know what would happen if he encountered himself on the same timeline. His second problem is, he lost his crew, who knew how to expertly navigate the ship. So his plan was simple, travel to a reality similar to his own, intercept his alternate wife, displace his alternate self without her awareness, and resume his life.

In his quest to find his wife, he’d run into some disturbing differences. In an eerily similar reality, he’d discover that his wife had been having an affair with another member of the crew. Upon finding this he’d killed alternate Lauren, and left evidence for his alternative self of the affair. How could Lauren do that to him? Doesn’t she love him too? He wondered. He left that reality feeling very disturbed. But he reminded himself that he wasn’t an expert navigator, so it was likely that was merely a significantly different reality, bearing nothing on his own. There was no way his sweet darling Lauren would’ve cheated on him. Sparky moaned at him. “Don’t worry Sparky, that wasn’t your real mother” He punched the drive, and the ship descended into the light.

He entered another reality, the ship was in orbit, just as had been in his reality. He quietly boarded the ship, slipped by the captain’s cabin, where an alternative Jason sat affixed to the steering of the vessel. He went down to the crew's quarters, passed a crew member who greeted him, and looked at him strangely. Then he heard moaning and giggling coming from one of the rooms. He stormed in and found Lauren beneath another man. She looked at him shocked, and the crew member jumped off. Saying something to the effect it’s not what it looks like. But their glistening naked bodies told no lies. Jason locked the door behind him and beat the both of them to death.

He went from reality to reality, exploring this same moment in time, and in all of them, she cheated; again, and again, and again. He’d gone on a rampage killing alternate Laurens for the sake of the other Jason’s. he’d choked her, he’d clubber her, shot her, pushed his thumbs into her eye sockets until she struggled no more. He grew tired of this and wished to unleash a superior form of terror upon this adulterous whore, and to get some answers.

He didn’t even need to verify if she cheated on him anymore. He knew these realities well enough. So this time, he waited for the team to descend upon the planet. He watched them from the Alien woods, as they scoured the meadowland just outside the shadows in which he hid. Furry bat-eared, creatures walked amongst them making clicking sounds and ripped up roots offering them to his wife and crew. Jason went through the woods, and out into the meadowland. One of the team members looked at him quizzically “captain I didn’t see you come down from the sh—“Jason cut him off with a shot to the chest from his blaster. That one had done her doggy style. The shocked team made easy targets, as he systematically gunned them down. Until only a trembling crying Lauren stood amongst the bodies of friends, friendly little aliens, and lovers.

“I don’t understand.” she sobbed, as Jason approached. Her voice which had once made his heart flutter, and brought peace to him on the worst of days. Now grated against his eardrums. He leveled the blaster at her face. “Why did you cheat on me?” he asked through gritted teeth. Laurens face contorted and she began denying it. “Shut up bitch!” he screamed “I know you’ve been fucking Collin and Ryan. Hence why I shot them. Just tell me why!” her face ugly from the terror, tried to concoct some hideous story, where it was his fault.

No matter. He shot her dead mid-sentence, her golden head crashed to the mossy ground. In the woods he saw a group of the little aliens, huddled together, trembling in terror. “remember people are assholes”. Jason laughed, holstered his gun, and made his way through the alien forest back to his landing pod. It was at this point that it dawned on him, that it wasn’t the aliens that had killed his wife, it’d had been a future version of himself that he had now become. “Huh” he cast the thought aside, as he turned his head towards sparky who was awaiting him inside the pod. “where to next bub?” he patted the drooly dog's head. The doors closed and the pod blasted out into space. To resume his blood-thirsty war, forever stuck in hell.