The Gaming Outpost

We raced over an arching bridge that spanned a great flood heading to a distant sea in the black government limosine.
“So….war against Courage. Some utopian idiots thought Courage was standing between them and Utopia?”
“Right,” Said Capt. Eldon Cooper. “Hard to change the world to Perfection if some reactionary idiot has the nerve to stand up and shout ‘No!’”
“Slows down Progress.” Sergeant Branson said with a smirk.
“Chocolate.” Whispered the sleeping seer in a voice of inexpressible longing. It seemed that the Great and Wise had decided Chocolate was not part of Utopia, and people had been evolved enough not to need it anymore. So a gengineered virus, and no more cocoa plants existed on this timeline.
“No Courage….Ragnarok.” They had been telling me that Ragnarok was coming.
“Oh.” I said.
“Oh?” Said the grey-suited man in the glasses.
“I understand.”
It was at that moment that I heard the whop-whop of a close-in stealth helicopter. The car swerved under the grey-suited man’s hands, and tracers cut a line across the trunk of the limo instead of the mid-section where I was sitting facing the other three.
“Oh dearie me.” Sergeant Branson said, sounding completely wimpy which had to be a survival skill in the brave new world where the brave were operated on to correct their abnormality. He smoothly pulled an autocannon out from under his seat, and tabbed the power window down with the other. But before he could get a bead on the chopper, it ducked under the bridge we were running over.

Captain Cooper had the other window open, and he too had a weapon, but a simple rifle.
BLAM. The Captain fired. The enemy chopper had gone under the bridge and up on his side. More tracers from the chopper ripped up chunks from the empty roadway of the bridge in front of us.

A micromissile launched from the chopper and wobbled out to hit a strand of bridge wire.
“They’re going to take down the whole bridge if they have too, to get us.” Sergeant Branson said meditatively.
“Mmm-hmmm. Thats if they can’t just gun us down from their high rest, right now. Pray for a lucky shot.” The Captain replied as both prepared to stick their heads and guns out of the armored limo to shoot at the chopper above us.

I reached forward, and used a separarate hand on both to yank them back.
“Let me.” I said, and chirped a bit to the bio-mechanical finch on my right shoulder. His name is Chipper.
He was out a window, uncertain which as he was so fast, and rocketted straight up at the chopper. He hit the brakes ten inches from the swirling chopper blades and chirped derisively. Then with talons that could rip steel, he pulled out essential wires that controlled the chopper blades. Suddenly it was no longer a flying vehicle, but a large coffin.
Chipper chirped again as he zipped back to my shoulder, just before the chopper smashed into a ball of flame on the bridge behind us.
His chirp loosely translated to ‘losers’. They had to put a lot of things into an ordinary finch to turn Chipper into the lethal thing he is now. They had no space for empathy. In Chipper’s world, he’s the baddest of the bad, and the rest of you (except for me) are targets.
The Captain and the Sergeant were staring at my three inch tall finch with mouths open in complete shock. Chipper chirped something very rude at them which I did not translate.
“So,” That vehicle had what looked like official governmental insignia on the outside. It had said ‘Noreastern Multi-Provincial Authority’ for those curious what the local governance called itself in this timeline.
“The Sergeant was supposed to be the third under the knife.” Captain Cooper said. “I objected.”
“Strenously.” Said the grey-suited man up front driving off the tail end of the bridge toward a large plateau in the dessert distance.
“They did not need that building anyways. Besides, I gave them five minutes to evacuate.” The Captain seemed a bit cross to be interrupted, and forced to explain.
“To be more clear, Mr. Montgomery,” Said the driver from the front. “The Health Commissariat has started its final step in the slow-motion coup. Independent and semi-independent sources of power are being crushed. Which includes the Temporal Corps.”
“I thought you were named that long, something about time velocity.” I said.
“That was a joke.” Sergeant Branson said with a small smile.
I banged my fist on the window so as to not slug the Sergeant.
“Ok.”
“We’re legally allowed to defy authority to preserve the timestream.” Captain Cooper said.
It made sense. If someone changed time to say, let Commies rule, you would not want your Time Team to just obey the new rulers. You’d want them to rescue you from limbo, which is where non-potentiated, but activated timestreams go, I think.
We ran across the dessert, and still there was no one else on the road. Upon coming to a side road of dirt, we turned on to it, and as I suspected headed even more directly to the plateau in the nearing distance.
“The Health Commissariat argues that they are the ultimate authority, and Congress has granted them that. Mostly for fear of being declared insane and treatable, but still it was done.”
“And you have not yet done any time jumps. So they say your special authority does not apply.”
“Correct. But note that our authority is not after a jump, but to preserve the timeline. Since our seers assure us that Thor is going to…”
“Create a culture without Courage, and Thor is going to come down and smack the living daylights out of said culture as he finds cowardice to be disgusting.”
They nodded as if I were a slow student.
“Worse than that. He’s planning on separating Midgard from Yggdrasil, and tossing us onto the Chaos Fire where this whole timeline will be reduced to memories and souls.” Captain Cooper finished.
“Well, Thor doesn’t play around.” I said.
They nodded.
“So you’re lawyering.”
“That or die.” Sergeant Branson said. “And how did you know we had not timejumped.”
I shrugged.
“You’re smart guys. The Sawtooth Snap had to occur to you.”
“We call it the Bounceback Effect.” Said the grey-suited man from the front. It was the same thing I am sure.
Jim has a pretty, pretty truck. Bob steals Jim’s truck on Wednesday. Jim takes a time machine on Thursday back to Tuesday to wait for Bob with a shotgun. Bob goes to jail on Wednesday. And that Thursday, Jim has no reason to go back in time to wait for Bob with the shotgun so he doesn’t. And that means, it did not happen, and thus Bob stole the truck. Which means that next time, Jim is heading for a time machine…
Simply put, it creates a two-moded time loop. Theoretically, you can cause enough modes to arise, with varying actions by Jim as to have many, many modes. Somewhere around a hundred thousand modes, and according to theory, the local timefield collapses, and time goes back to normal, except that everything within one lightyear is reduced to quarks.
No one has ever tested that theory that I’m aware of.
“We have a way around that difficulty.” Captain Cooper said, and I restrained my mouth from incredulity.
“We’re not mad.” He said, reading my expression. I gave him a bitter smile.
We rode the rest of the way in silence.

Upon reaching the plateau, I saw nothing out of the ordinary as we drove up to a small cave in the side of the hundred foot tall natural stone tower formed by a collossal flood. And then we drove into the cave, and once inside, I saw the robotic rapid-firing cannon, with five inch shells tracking our car.
I told Chipper to make no move.
We all stayed very still until it was thorougly verified that we were who we said were. For me, they centrifuged a bit of my blood to find scriff.
Very interesting.
We drove the car in, parked, and then took a secret door down ten flights of stairs into the underground.
Another plain gray metal door, and it opened up into a vast cavern.
“And the fountains of the deep opened up…” The grey suited man said. “After they got smashed open by Chixlcubl and a whole lot of her kin. Leaving us this very nice underground bunker. Max height of the center is three hundred feet from the bottom. Max width is five hundred twenty feet.
It was a giant, fat egg, and we were only near the top. We took an elevator of the cargo variety down the rest of the way.
A certain white flickering seemed to come at me from the corners of my eyes, but no one else seemed to notice it. As I walked on, down a long, staight corridor to a smaller cavern on the far side and below the Great Egg Cavern, I began to feel as if the air had a richness to it, like a delightful soup.
Nobody mentioned anything, and I studied them and saw no notice. But I felt as if I could scream and the mountain would explode from the power of my voice.
As I walked up to the last door, I remembered only one time I had felt like this. And when I saw the sigils on the solid gold door I knew.
A man opened the door, and we walked in to utter radiance, to light so bright that you could not see, and yet it did not hurt the eye.
“Hello, Chronos.” I said.
“Well met, Montgomery, and Chipper.” Said a Voice that came from all around me, that was heard before I was born, and echoed after even I, a quasi-immortal verser died for the final time.
Chipper launched himself from my shoulder and flew chirping wildly and joyfully into the mass, the physical substance that was Light.
It was how he always reacted when he met an Archangel. No loyalty, I told myself.
“I still have your sword.” He said, and trumpets played, and all the expanses of space unrolled before me, and I stood at the moment when He Who Is said ‘Let the be light.’ and at the moment when His second-tier servant Thor said…”All right, you cowardly dogs, I’ve had enough of this!” and swung his Hammer to break Earth from Yggdrasil.
“Its not fated.” I said.
“Course not. Otherwise the game would be rather boring.” Chronos sang as much as spoke.
“They can’t go back in time, and change their past.” I said. “Not even you are allowed to undo Cause and Effect.”
“So true, so true. If I did so, I would destroy myself.” He replied.
I waited.
I waited some more.
“You really can be blockheadedly stubborn.” He said.
“I feel sorry for these folks, and I would love to help them. I would help them if I could, but I can’t.”
“You just did.” And there was great excitement in Chronos’ voice as if something important had just happened. The men around me were slapping their shoulders and grinning as the light dimmed until I could see the incarnate form of Chronos.
He was twenty feet tall, and clothed in light, and hanging in the midst of the air.
“After the War in Hell, I told each of my champions that I would aid them if they but asked.”
I had asked.
Still, he could not undo Cause and Effect.
“But I can Recreate. I remember every bit of everything that happened twenty years ago. Now I shall create that world out of this world, and add to it my time travellers. Thus they will have the chance to change the Future they desire. And I will do the Favor you ask, if this is truly what you desire.”
I thought.
“Um, what about all the kids and such that are alive today. We’re killing them…”
“They would die anyways under Thor’s attack.” Captain Eldon said with tears in his eyes.
“I shall hold the lives of all that Are Not Yet in Limbo, and shall arrange for them to be born as close as possible to how they were born the first time. I shall lose no soul to Limbo.” Chronos said, and I nodded.
“Ok. Tempus flies…” I smiled. “How do you say that in Latin…?”
And time and space unspooled around us, and respun under the power of an Archangel.
We stood with our present memories in a room overlooking a small committee where an earnest and unattractive woman was badgering a congressman to take up her “Caution not Courage Program.”
“I only need a million dollars to get started.” She pled, and I considered shooting her there and then, but now that we were on the knife-edge of the Present, there was the question…
Was this the best way to a good future? Or would shooting her merely make her a martyr?
Everything is always more complicated than you expect.