Chapter 7

After the meal was served, Kevin asked the girls to settle down for a serious family conference. The AI went into more detail about her genesis, the sudden reversal of the wormhole, the time differential enigma, and the first group’s survival during the storm. He and Alice related the previous conversation, including the known facts, extrapolated suppositions and likely conclusions. “This can affect our future and the future of humanity. Our goal in the beginning was to stay alive. That became staying alive 2500 years in the future where we were expecting to be the primitives. Fortunately, we arrived with the tools we needed to survive in this world.” Kevin asked, “Are we the only ones who arrived with tools? Are there people from the future thrown back? Dare we assume good intentions from all?”

The girls did ‘serious up’ immediately. Thoughts and questions flew almost at random, often several at once.

René said, “We might only have that to deal with half. The future is not what it was. Not what it was supposed to be.”

Marly caught on quickly. “The classic paradox. If you travel back in time and prevent the birth of your mother, how can you exist in the future to travel back? If you prevent the birth of everyone, the future is empty.”

“And if you did not exist, no one prevented the birth of your mother, so you were born to travel in the second cycle, and repeat the sequence. Can you escape the loop?” Ruby expanded the thought. “K’ung Fu-tzu, himself, could not have anticipated this situation.”

“If you travel back in time, you have a second copy of yourself, essentially matter created from nothing. That’s not possible,” I said, “unless there is a sufficient amount of energy converted to mass. When does it come from? When you travel back to ‘your’ time, you travel with the version of ‘you’ moving through his or her own time line that you visited and the version of you that went back, only they are moving backwards in relation to their original trip into the past.”

“And here we are anyway. Could the temporal tempest have shuffled, erased or moved chunks of separate parallel universes to prevent duplication?” Marly mused. “Maybe we did not exist in this fragment of this alternate reality at this time? We can’t know if this mountain existed in a universe that included the sand outside the door.”

Patty asked in turn, “Alice said the time storm scrambled previous history and future history fifty thousand years each side of what was then the current ‘now’. Did the mishmash void everything from that point forward? How did that time even exist if it’s history was altered? Did it create a parallel timeline? Did it break time itself?”

“Have we witnessed the rewriting of the Laws of Thermodynamics?” René wondered. “Quantum Philosophy?”

“The temporal mishmash voided everything local because the future we found was this and we traveled two weeks before Patty’s escape during the storm. Alice’s originators did not revert or disappear but their timing was different.” Andrea wondered, “Did we, as a species, travel to the stars in the fifty thousand years that might have been? Is that undone totally or just crease to be a perceived reality inside the local bubble?”

“If we have colonies and human outposts among the stars, how do they exist after their history is destroyed?” Jade suddenly sputtered. “Before we were flung into the future, I would have declared it impossible to travel to a reality not yet formed. Now that I know it is possible, it seems everything we do or not do changes the potential future. How could it not?”

Amber picked up her sister’s thread. “Remove Heinrich Hertz and Guglielmo Marconi has no work to build on. Practical radio transmission is at least delayed. Other inventions and improvements based on that one machine may never come to fruition. Perhaps a delay would have resulted in the discovery of scientific principals unknown now because the need never existed in this reality.”

“Can the timeline repair itself? Does it need to?” Marly proposed, “Maybe the temporal chaos was ‘written’ already and this reality is all that was ever possible.”

“Humanity might have been doomed from the beginning. If not the Aurorans, then an extinction level asteroid collision or a cosmic dust cloud would have accomplished the same end.” Jade added. “K’ung Fu-tzu did teach that heaven sends down its good or evil symbols and wise men act accordingly”.

“There is strong evidence to suggest that this particular chaos is limited to our sector of the universe. History may be quite different elsewhere.” Kevin addressed the group, resumimg the lead. “You triplets seem to have learned a lot in the few hours you have been here.”

“We were out-of-date, uninformed, not unintelligent.” Jade admitted, “Alice gave us most of the historical information during the treatment. It was hard to assimilate until we needed to use it. Now all the disparate data has a logical framework.”

“I do think we have enough information to know when we need to ‘sort the recycling’. A central tenet of the ancient philosophy is doing the proper thing at the proper time, balancing between maintaining existing norms to perpetuate an ethical social fabric, and violating them in order to accomplish ethical good.” Ruby added. “I have no problem thinning the admittedly shallow gene pool if it seems necessary within the bounds of our knowledge base. Some traits would do more harm in the future if allowed to propagate.”

“So there is seldom a purely wrong thing to do if it doesn’t become a self-serving habit and it preserves the ethics of the greater society.” Amber said. “Andrea and Patty will be more able to judge the minimum diversity necessary to keep humanity viable, but allowing evil ideas and defective DNA to propagate is senseless pollution of an already fragile system. Those racists would limit the diversity even more. There would be no greater society, only short lived misery.”

“So. The effects of this phenomenon are understood as far as we can extrapolate from observations. We have the technology to duplicate our experience but I think it not wise to deliberately experiment further until we know the fine details and side effects.” Kevin noted the girls’ nods of approval. “The possibility of parallel realities, though theoretically fascinating, is irrelevant to us here and now.”