What if I told you I invented a time machine? Or rather, I thought I had, but it had limitations. Consequences. Unintended consequences…
I suppose all new inventions do. Whether they be impacts to future technology, the rise and fall of nations and empires, the destruction of the environment, well…inventions are simply decisions. They may be decisions with larger or more noticeable impacts to history than most decisions, but they are still ultimately just the act of carrying out an idea. I made one great, terrible, and cosmic-altering decision when I created that machine and then stepped through it. At first I tried to travel to the future, but the machine would only display darkness as if the "future" does not yet exist and therefore cannot be travelled to. Like an unfinished book, you cannot skip ahead to the end. So I decided on the past. The portal screamed to life with images. Images of what seemed to be my same geographical location but in the very near past. It seemed I could adjust my device to any point in the past by adjusting the strength of power I fed to it. At first I started very small. Mere seconds in the past, and by tossing through mundane things through the portal like paperclips and pencils. Each time I did, I'd notice the item duplicated in front of me and a strange feeling like it had always been there and that I was almost…different…somehow. Like a new me and a new timeline existed and that, in a way, I had destroyed and made new universes with such simple acts. I started growing bolder. "Dialing" further and further back in time and tossing through larger or more impactful items. Eventually I tossed a brand new cellphone with no personal information on it through the portal in what would be the middle ages. Perhaps for the best it was never truly understood at the time and was eventually discarded, but I suddenly recalled a new "memory" of an unexplained news story from my childhood where a seemingly 800 year old cellphone (based on where and what it was found with) of now modern design and technology was discovered sometime back by archaeologists. Finally, I decided to dial back further and further. Into the blackness, I changed the power I was feeding it by orders of magnitude. I was working on this as a top secret mission for the military and had access to every power grid if needed, but as I was doing this on a mere whim and without explicit authorization, I knew the temporary blackouts I'd cause would "ruffle" feathers. But I didn't care. I had to know. I made it all the way to the big bang, and somehow was able to keep going. I kept increasing the power. I began getting messages. E-mails. Phone calls. I kept going. I engaged the bunker walls to the room knowing they'd be barging in soon if I persisted, but I did anyway. Sure enough people were banging on my blast doors. Screaming and yelling. Orders being barked from behind them to get in to me as soon as possible before I sent the whole hemisphere into the dark ages. I audibly laughed at the ironic reference. While they were still breaking through, I realized that time must loop. Or loop in a sense. I was able to delve back even further before the big bang, and eventually I was back at my same geographic location, or what felt like it, on Earth or some version of Earth. But everything I could see was so very different. As they finally broke through and trained sights on me to cut me down where I stood, I dove through. As soon as I did, the "portal" behind me was gone. Only much, much later did I realize this was because the simple act of stepping through that portal…my mere presence in the past…changed everything completely.
My old world…my old "future" world was gone. It never existed. Yet here I stood in seemingly strange paradox. I would also much, much later find out that only one timeline can exist at a time. Objects and persons can create new ones and continue to exist in them, but simultaneously destroyed the old ones with no way to go back. Only the deities could do that. And only they could "see" all timelines that have or could be. Appealing to them to right the wrong I would realize I had made, however, was another story…