310
A Fear knocking at the front door. I know out of all the other things that happened should be clamoring for my attention it’s a minor detail, but it’s the one which is sticking out. I never imagined one of them doing something so mundane. The novelty of it makes everything else that happened sound sensible.
I was spending the night at one of my safehouses when I heard the knock. So much for that whole plan of avoiding being found. I was wary when I heard the knock, as I hadn’t interacted with the people of this timezone much. Pulled the door open just enough to see who was out there. Looked like one of the city’s regular denizens, but time was bending away from him. Just like those people at the dock.
Slammed the door shut, grabbed a gun, quickly checked every other entrance to see if anyone else was there. Didn’t see anything that looked like a trap. The man knocked at the door again, patiently. This time I opened it the whole way, with my gun aimed at its head.
“Hello, I-330.” Its emotionless voice said. “It’s time we talked.”
“What are you?”
“Your species has given me many names. The one I am most partial to is the Epping AquaTarkus. EAT, as it is oft abbreviated to.”
Ah. That… would explain everything about those people at the docks, wouldn’t it. “Why are you here?”
“As I said, to talk. Given your destructive behavior when you last encountered me, it has become clear that we can no longer afford to stand by and hope your random flailing through history work to our advantage.”
“My random what?”
EAT stepped inside. I kept the gun trained on it, but all it did was get a chair. “Your actions have not shown the greatest of consistency or forethought in them. Thus far all you have managed to do has been to blindly chase Grendel through the history and across the Dreamlands, cause more collateral damage than is really necessary, and fail to do anything to prevent or delay his plan’s fruition.”
A surge of anger shot through me, and I jammed the gun in its face. But all it did was calmly swat the pistol aside.
“Do not waste either of our time with your guns. If you kill this body I will send in another. We would gain more working together than fighting.”
“Since when did Fears start working with people?”
“Have you already forgotten riding with the Archangel against Lupine’s ritual?”
“Yeah, and the next time I saw the Archangel after that it was massacring an entire town and trying to kill me.”
“It was not trying to kill you. It was trying to kill Grendel before he could be born. You and the town only happened to be in the way.”
I… well… okay that maybe makes sense, but still. “How did Archangel already know about Grendel back in the 1800s?”
EAT’s face had been completely passive for the whole conversation thus far, but my comment caused a short flash of annoyance. “An explanation of the metaphysics behind time and our relation to it can be dealt with later in this conversation. For now, what matters is thus: we both wish to prevent Grendel from launching his revolution. Therefore, it would be advantageous for us to pool resources rather than spend them in pointless conflict against each other. We may resume hostilities once the multiverse ceases to be in danger.”
“Hm. You know, I never imagined you all to be the saving the world type.”
“Why not? This is our reality. We have expended a great deal of time and effort in ruling it. We are not going to let it be taken from us without resistance.”
“So what, I stop shooting the Fears with a shotgun, and the Fears stop trying to murder me?”
“No. Do not make the mistake of assuming we Fears are a collective entity. I only speak for myself and the Archangel in this negotiation.”
“Just the two of you? What about the other Fears? Aren’t they also trying to stop Grendel?”
“No. Fatalism and willing ignorance are the ruling mentalities amongst us. Most are trying to avoid Grendel entirely, with the hopes that the problem will somehow fix itself. Others are ignoring the threat of Grendel, acting as though the status quo was still in place. A few have even chosen to ally themselves with him. Only some of us have taken the path of active resistance. And even amongst us, there are differing opinions in method and goal.”
“Wait wait back up a minute there. There are Fears working with Grendel?”
Another moment of annoyance. “Vocal communication is such an inefficient means of transferring information. Were you Outer Gods not immune to my Ink, then this meeting would take moments to conclude.”
“What do you mean by ‘you Outer gods’?”
“And there you illustrate my point on the inadequacies of human conversation.” It appeared to think for a moment. “Your first question was in regards to our relation with time.”
“Wait don’t change the subject….” Too late.
“Explaining how a Fear views time is as difficult for us as it would be to explain how you view time to a human. This language lacks the syntax needed to convey the appropriate meaning.
Think of how you see time. You are at a central point, from which you view may view timespace branching out from you, dividing into infinite different universes from moment to moment. You are part of this process, capable of manipulating time and space, but only from within: you remain indivisible from the multiverse and its reality.
For us, the opposite is true. We are not a part of the multiverse’s reality; rather, we stand as outside observers. We may interact with reality, but are never one with it. Hence our perspective on chronology. You are a part of time, therefore you see the cause and effect of the universe as it happens to you. As we stand separate, we may look ahead, so to speak. When we see the branching lines of time, we do not merely see their presence, but also what they mean. We see everything that will happen along the timeline, and along all the timelines which branch off from it.”
“You mean you things are omniscient?”
“In a way, yes. In another way, no. We see everything that will happen, but due to the very nature of the multiverse, this rarely is as helpful as we would wish. We see every parallel universe; ones where an event happens, ones where it doesn’t happen, ones where the conditions are so different that the possibility of the event happening is never raised. The advantage offered by our abilities to ‘see the future’ rarely translate into allowing us to act on foreknowledge, for that foreknowledge usually only applies to one amongst an infinite number of universes. And even then, there are those amongst us who choose not to look ahead along the timelines, and act only on the knowledge they have gathered through chronological experience.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Personal reasons, I suppose. I do not try to understand why they would willingly handicap themselves. I believe the Rake has mastered the art of predicting the course of events without needing to look ahead. And the Wooden Girl has ‘gone native’ and seems to find amusement in imitating humans, even if it means forcing herself to act based on temporal cause and effect.”
“Imitating humans…? I saw it rip off a man’s arm while laughing!”
“Indeed. Her imitation is frighteningly accurate.” It said that with the same impassive tone that I couldn’t tell whether or not it was supposed to be a joke.
“Anyways, even if your ability to see the future being all watered down because of the multiverse stuff, shouldn’t that still give you a huge advantage over Grendel? Like, even if you fail to stop him, all you’d need to do is go to a universe where he lost, and act like nothing happened.”
“That won’t work. The very nature of Grendel’s revolution is such that if he succeeds in one universe, it will mean the destruction of the entire multiverse.”
“Well if that’s the case, then shouldn’t you know if you succeed in stopping him or not? You just need to look into the future, and if the multiverse is still there, then that means you won.”
“We already have done that.”
“Well there you go! Looked ahead, saw reality was still there, and then decided to go back and ensure that reality stayed there?”
“We never said the multiverse was still in existence when we looked ahead.”
Pause as that sunk in. “But….”
“There is a reason for the prevalence of fatalism amongst us.” It steepled its fingers and leaned forward, one of the few signs of body language it had shown in the whole conversation. “I have seen my death, as most other Fears have seen theirs. When the Archangel and I chose to defend the multiverse, we were not enacting a course of action we had already witnessed in the future. We are trying to do something neither of us had even considered until recently: We are fighting against fate. We have chosen to try and change what has already been preordained, even when we already know that our resistance is a part of the path leading to our end.”
“But… why? If you already know you’re going to lose….” I had a feeling in my gut, like some weight was sinking down, pulling my heart with it. I’d assumed fighting Grendel would be tough, but to be flat out told that it was completely hopeless….
“I am the embodiment of evolution. It would be uncharacteristic for me to give in without struggling, would it not? And even then, there is still a factor which is unaccounted for by our visions of the future. You.”
“Me?”
“Tell me. What is your understanding of the nature of parallel universes?”
Had to think for a moment to figure out what to say. “It’s the idea that whenever something happens, there’s another universe where something else happens, right? Like, if a person flips a coin, in one universe it lands heads and in another it lands tails-”
“False. The multiverse does not care about the result of a coin toss. Nor does it care about the human flipping the coin. The mistake most humans make in their understanding of the concept is to overinflate their own importance, and to apply determinism even where determinism is not true. The result of a coin toss is not random. It is determined by a number of factors, including air friction, gravity, the force which the human flipping the coin applies, and so on. If time was turned back and the toss was repeated, every time it would end in the same result, as all the factors would be the same. Parallel universe are rarely the result of decisions made by humans; more commonly, they come from events occurring at quantum levels where cause and effect as broken down, which then butterfly out into the larger world. A parallel universe where one faction wins a war instead of the historical one? No. A parallel universe where an electron moves in a slightly different direction and the sun is never formed.”
I let my brain digest what EAT was saying. “But what’s any of that have to do with me?”
“For most humans, it is rare for their actions to create a single parallel universe in their entire lives. For beings such as you or Grendel, however, the opposite is true. You are the very representations of chaos within the multiverse. You do not just create parallel universes from your decisions, but from your very existence. As you stand there, doing nothing but listening to me, I am watching an uncountable number of universes being born from you. You are an agent of change, and therefore within you is the possibility, however small it may be, of altering fate. As we Fears are detached from the multiverse, our actions cannot create new universes. This does give us the advantage in that when we succeed we need not worry about creating a universe where we also fail, but it means that we cannot enact create new possibilities beyond what already exists within the multiverse. You can, and therefore we are relying on you to create the possibility for the multiverse to be saved. Once such a possibility has been created, we make work to ensure that it occurs in every necessary universe.”
…. Wow. “So no pressure then?”
EAT ignored the comment. “But for you to create any meaningful change, you must cease chasing after Grendel without purpose, and begin actively working to stop him.”
I was still a big pissed at this repeated reference to everything I’ve done so far as being meaningless, but I went along with it for the time. “What is it you want me to do?”
“Many of Grendel’s plans are revolving around the events of August 1, 1944, in the city of Warsaw. The Archangel is currently active in July of that year, but he alone will not be enough to stop Grendel.”
“So you’re saying I need to jump over there and kick Grendel’s ass because you Fears can’t do it yourself?”
“To put it simply, yes. Be cautious, though. That date is quickly becoming a nexus for Fear activity. And most will not be as willing to assist you as the Archangel and I. Grendel’s allies amongst the Fears will be active.”
“What kind of allies are we talking about? Someone like the Wooden Girl?” I was betting on the Wooden Girl. Crazy psycho puppet.
Another moment of EAT’s rare expressions. This time, it was one of reminiscence. “Have you ever heard the story of the Brute and the Burning Bride?”
“No…?”
“The events it describes occurred a long time ago. Before time had any real meaning. They were the only dual Fear to ever exist. One Fear, existing within two entities. In them was embodied war and destruction, in all its brutality and fire. Together, they represented too great a threat to the established order of the Fears. So the Brute was locked in the deepest levels of the Empty City. But his Bride still lives in the multiverse, seeking the means to free the Brute. If she believes Grendel offers those means, she would not hesitate to join him. And in a year such as 1944, her powers will be immense.”
EAT rose from its chair. “I have told you what you need to know. Whether you succeed or fail in stopping Grendel now rests entirely on your actions.” It walked out the door without another word, leaving me to think.
So. 1944. You know, I HAD been thinking about stopping by World War II and killing Hitler. And now I’ve finally got an excuse to visit the neighborhood.
Alright then. World War II. Kicking Grendel’s ass and killing Nazis. What more could I ask for in a party?
I-330
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