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visit-ba-sing-se · 2 years ago

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"A butterfly flaps its wings on one side of the world and causes a tornado on the other."

We've all heard this term, or one variation of it.

Closely associated with mathematician and meteorologist Edward Norton Lorenz, it is used to describe how the change of a small, initial detail can cascade into a chain of events and thereby lead to a significantly different outcome.

Kind of ironically, Lorenz originally used a seagull causing a storm, but changed this detail in order to make his metaphor more poetic. Now, no one knows whether a 'seagull-effect' would have equally found its way into mainstream culture and been used in as many books, movies and TV-series about unwanted consequences of time travel.

Anyways, this isn't a story about butterflies or seagulls. Or time travel.

I mean, to be fair, in part it is.

But mostly, this is the story of a letter. Or, to be more accurate, two letters arriving in one envelope.

The first one was written by my mother.

She is one of the few people who still writes letters, and one of the even fewer people who know where to reach me.

After a familiar intro of how I should make time for a video call more often and come home for the holidays, she wrote:

“Remember that time capsule your school had from a hundred years ago?

They found this letter when they opened it. It seems to be addressed to you, and no one here can make any sense of it - is it possible that this is a prank? Do you know anything about it?

(If it is, someone must have been very dedicated - the principal swears that the capsule was sealed shut.)

Anyways, they asked me to send it to you.”

I stop reading to shake the envelope. A smaller envelope falls out, with "Charlotte Singer" written on the back in beautiful cursive letters.

In my field of work, letters from the past aren't as strange as for the average citizen. Not like the people back at my highschool know. Even if I still were in touch with any of them, disclosing it would be considered treason.

For some people high school might be the time of their lives. For me, it was not.

I've always been a nerdy kid. And I don't mean in the quirky Hollywood nerdy way. I mean the "is a pleasure to have in class and awkward to be around '' nerdy. From my first day until graduation, the only time I didn't feel out of place was in math and science classes. As opposed to the muddy waters of social interaction, the calculations in those followed clear rules and always had the same, predictable outcome.

a^2 + b^2 was always c^2. (a+b)^2 was always a^2+2ab+b^2. You could never divide by zero, and you could never take the square root of a negative.

I liked the clarity in them, with their absolutes and clear cuts between right and wrong.

Which, as I later discovered, were as much of an illusion as the linear passage of time. Unlike me, the universe prefers relatives. But now I am getting off track. This is a story about a letter.

“Dear Murphy,”

I read the first line, and it's already enough to make my heart skip a beat. There is only one person who calls me Murphy.

Or used to, back then when we were still on the same side, before there even were sides.

When we were still drinking the same substance that had the audacity to call itself "Coffee" in the break room at 2 a.m. That’s where we talked for the first time, barring official meetings.

She stood in front of the coffee maker, her black, curly hair held together loosely by a red tie, filling up a big, porcelain mug with a sunflower on it. As I entered, she turned around, the pot still in hand and the hint of a smile on her face.

“Well, if it isn’t Murphy.”

"Murphy?"

"Yes. Like "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong"- Murphy's law Murphy."

I raised an eyebrow. "Huh, how did I earn that title?"

"Have you ever heard yourself talk? I've never heard anyone talk about possible risks as much as you before."

"Okay, that's probably fair. But I also don't think you have ever worked on programming and testing the first time machine in human history before."

She laughed. "Probably fair."

"Now, are you going to share the coffee or not?"

"Are you sure you want me to pour you some? You know in the worst case, I might spill it."

"Wouldn't be the greatest loss, considering its quality."

"Well, on that we can agree."

It now seems ages ago. In a way, it literally is, if you consider all the different points in time at which we have faced each other.

After everything that could go wrong had gone wrong.

After we had stood in the exact same room I am now sitting in and she had pointed outside the window, towards the big memorial for the victims of the second world war and yelled: "Is this really the reality you find worth fighting for?"

A question to which I still owed her an answer.

“I hope this letter finds you through time and space, and that you will actually read it when it does. I know that this is risky, but I could not think of another way to reach you. I also know that this might be a mistake for more reasons than I can count, but if everything goes downhill, I can still blame the butterfly I saw today (because it reminded me of the one we saw, on the day of our first trip. Maybe you were right about it after all, considering that what has happened since amounts to more than one storm - at least in my opinion. Do you even still remember it?)”

"Of course I do," I say, as if she would hear me through time and space, the way I am hearing her voice again now.

The test for the timkey was set up for noon, and she dragged me out for a walk in the morning. It was on the verge between winter and spring, the time of the year where nature just starts waking up again.

“Well this has to be a good omen!", she insisted when a blue winged butterfly landed on my arm. “It wants to wish us luck!”

I chuckled and shook my head. "You know what they say about butterflies and tornadoes?"

"Heavens Murphy”, she motioned her hands towards the sky as if she was hoping for a higher power to help her with the lost cause that I seemed to be.

“Others admire a butterfly. You start calculating the odds for a tornado to happen."

"Ouch. In my defense, we are about to attempt traveling through time. It’s not that absurd for my mind to go there.”

“Oh right, because of all the risks that come with it?”

“Exactly! What, for example, if one of us gets lost in time? What if I end up in ancient Rome where no one comes to look for me and I have to speak Latin for the rest of my life?"

It was a sad attempt at a joke, even for me.

But instead of laughing or calling me out on it like she usually would, she took my hand.

"Let's promise each other something."

"Promise? Promise what?”

"To always look for each other. No matter where we might end up."

“Deal.”

None of us got stuck anywhere that day. We successfully made it to the 22. February of 2003 and back, and so did the others on the following testing missions.

The months that followed were the best part. The month where we just explored, where we walked through the hanging gardens of Babylon and the halls of the library of Alexandria.

Until eventually, we were fully confident in the technology. That's when the fighting began.

The fighting about whether or not we were supposed to kill the butterfly.

It sounds strange, but that is what it all gets down to.

Assume you know that the butterfly flapping its wings caused the tornado, and that would have a way of going back to the moment it did.

What you still don't know is whether killing the butterfly would prevent the tornado, or if it would still happen in another, not yet foreseeable way - leaving you not only where you started, but with a dead butterfly on top of everything.

You also don't know if, given it would prevent the tornado, the death of the butterfly might cause a famine 20 years later. Or if the negligence authorities showed in handling the crisis was the reason people finally rose up and got rid of their oppressive government.

And so on and so forth, I think you know where I am going with this.

Normally, those would be questions you'd try to answer by carefully designed experiments. But how do you conduct an experiment which, by its very nature, makes it likely or at least possible that you won't be there to assess the result? Where every test might destroy the very fracture of reality as we know it?

The answer is you don’t.

Or, of course, you can also just steal timekey and try changing major historic events on the mere chance you might improve the current timeline.

I turn my head away from the window, where my eyes have wandered without me even noticing. I have to focus on my letter in my hands and the present, not the memorial standing outside and the past.

“As you likely have figured by now, we have reached our final destination. The timekey ran out, and we are stuck in time. It's all going to end here, one way or another.”

The next lines only confirm what we already assumed. They are only in possession of one stolen timekey, and all of the timekeys are connected, with every timejump being traced by the system.

So when the signals finally stopped a couple weeks ago, it seemed likely their key had stopped working. Resulting in them being thrown somewhere into time between their starting point and destination, invisible to us, but also trapped them in time.

Which finally ended our game of cat and mouse through the centuries.

My eyes wander outside again. A seagull has landed on my windowsill, now watching me curiously. They often fly over from the nearby river, blissfully unaware of the lack in metaphorical poetry.

What only has become of us now? What has become of me?

I have helped prevent assassinations of dictators. I have made sure that Archduke Franz-Ferdinand was shot so that World War I would break out, and that an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

All while battling those who I used to call my closest friends. And for what?

Against my will, I see her standing in my office again, pointing out my window.

"Is this the reality you find worth fighting for?"

"It is the one we have!"

“And that makes it the one we should have?”

“That is not what I am saying!”

“Oh, and what are you saying?”

"That reality isn’t a game of pick and choose! That there is too much at stake. There are a million ways in which the timeline could change for the worse."

"There are also a million ways in which it could change for the better. I don’t understand why you won’t at least consider the lives we could save! The horrors we could prevent”"

“Because I am not willing to gamble with our reality! I am not up to playing god! No one should be!”

“Right. You’re just a coward, who’s pretending that choosing the status quo is not a choice just because it’s the status quo”.

When she stormed out of my office that day, with tears and anger in her eyes, I was sure that she would not come back. Just as I knew that I did not have what it would take to follow here.

And yet she now has returned to it in a letter.

“I am not writing to you to remind you of the stakes. You know those better than anyone.

I am also not writing to you to argue for our cause again, since I believe that everything that could have been said has been said- by words and guns alike.

I am writing to you because I don't want this to be how our story goes. And because I refuse to accept that we cannot change the ending.

And because I - the next word, 'hope' has been crossed out and replaced with 'trust' - that you feel the same way.

If you do, you now know where to find me.

Yours,

Esti”

Of course. The letter must have gotten into the time capsule before it was sealed. The clue where, or more accurately when she wrote it could not be any clearer.

I shake my head. "It's a trap," I say, out loud, hoping to convince myself.

"You know it has to be a trap. And you have to report this letter."

We are at war. And trap or not, it does give away the location of the enemy. Keeping it to myself would be nothing less than treason.

"But handing it in would be, too,” another voice whispers in my head. And it's the last line on the page which makes that voice impossible to ignore.

PS: I have never stopped looking for you.

It's strange. No pointed gun, nor grenade nor knife have ever made me consider quitting or leaving a job unfinished. Some lines of ink on a paper should not be enough to make me doubt.

And yet- these aren’t just words. This is her hand reaching for mine, despite everything that happened. Despite everything that could go wrong. Because Esti still believes in us. In me. Against the universe and against the odds.

I stare out the window. The seagull stares back.

I have always liked rules for the clarity they had in them. But I have a different kind of clarity now.

I open the drawer next to my desk and take out a timekey. The very first one ever constructed. A prototype that has never been connected to the network. I activate the interface to set a time and place, then I carefully put it down on the floor. An orb of green light manifests around the device.

As soon as I do, a timer appears and starts counting down from 30 seconds, granting me just enough one last glance through my window. Like always, my eyes are caught by the memorial. Maybe, hopefully, it will be the last time I ever see it.

"I am done fighting for you," I say.

The seagull on my windowsill flaps its wings. And I start falling through time.

Your school digs up the time capsule from 100 years ago. Inside is a letter addressed to you.

#i am sorry if this is too far off #but this came to me and i worked on it for like a month #time travel story for new years #one reblog = one validation #this was good in my head #i had so many more scenes that i cut #shaking like a chihuahua #on caffaine uploading this #my writing #also yeah i could never be trusted with a time machine

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