7 Splinters in Time Page #4

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Your friend. John Luka.

Who?

Oh, man.

They really messed you up.

Okay.

He says he'll talk to you.

He owes me a favor.

Your hurts are always

gonna be with you, Daniel.

They'll show up

on the side of the road.

You'll get a postcard

reminding you of them.

Who is there?

The destroyer of worlds.

Or is that you?

The librarian?

He built Omphalos.

Hello, Daniel.

Come this way.

Have you noticed,

besides the multiple selves,

some funny business in the world

as it should be?

Changing objects, landscapes

there one minute, gone the next?

Yes.

It's time to stop popping pills

and open your eyes.

You're a time traveler.

You both are time travelers.

My brother owns a circus.

We found you both for cheap.

Damn everything but the circus!

You came to Omphalos,

the navel, the nautilus,

the "om" of the first sound.

In the beginning,

there was the sound.

I don't remember any of this.

People split into pieces have

trouble remembering, Daniel.

Why are you calling me Daniel?

When you time traveled,

you fractured into about seven

different versions of yourself.

But if Luka time traveled as

well, why didn't he fragment?

Ah, simple difference

of internal architecture.

You had hairline cracks.

You had internal conflicts.

If a subject is not

psychologically whole,

chances are he'll fracture

during time travel.

I should've flagged you

in the entrance interview.

Why wasn't I whole?

Sparrow.

We were each given a mission.

What was your mission?

It's already accomplished.

They use time travel

to commit political murder,

revise history for more

satisfactory outcomes.

One should be a

surgeon with time,

not wield a blunt instrument.

Who did I kill?

Well, that's the problem.

You killed yourself.

You broke apart

into splinter avatars

of the original self.

One of them happened to be

a psychopathic killer.

We call him shear X,

destroyer of worlds,

Freud's Thanatos embodied.

This version of yourself

went to town

hunting the other versions

of yourself

like a virus eating

the host body.

You... he, killed

the original specimen first,

the 20-year-old you on holiday

with his girlfriend.

You totally ruined

your own afternoon.

This version of you won't rest

until you're dead.

So we just go back and fix it.

You can't go

back anymore, Daniel!

You can't fix things!

That was my original sin

back 10 years ago,

back at the hotel Babylon

when I invented Omphalos.

But you, you took it

to a whole other level, man.

You, um...

Well, parallel realities.

Quantum superpositions sprout

as the universe tries

to reconcile

conflicting storylines.

What do you mean

by conflicting storylines?

For instance,

you exist in the future,

you killed yourself in the past.

That's sort of hard

to reconcile, isn't it?

See how your internal conflicts

are a liability for the planet?

And it's getting worse

with each paradox created

by your multiple selves.

String theory

becomes string cheese.

Eventually,

curtains for Schmedley,

endgame for Oedipus,

Finito for Fyodor.

How do we fix it?

Leave the world alone.

I'm going back to music,

food, and sex.

Embrace the fractured universe.

No, no.

What if we go back far enough?

You'd have to kill father time.

Go in to the darkness, Daniel.

It's all you can do.

Really.

Humans are a pack of wolves.

We destroy the best

in ourselves,

the sky, the ocean.

Where you going, brother Daniel?

He'll be back.

Omphalos is kind of like

a car with only three wheels,

but you don't realize it 'cause

you've never built a car before.

You just throw

something together,

and you don't realize

there's a fourth wheel

over on the other side

but you couldn't see it

when you were building it,

'cause you were building it

based off a picture

and you never see four wheels

of a car all in one picture.

Hi.

I hope you're not too tired.

Oh, thank you.

I've realized a lot

since that day on the highway.

Something happened.

I don't know what.

I know we're here now

and I know how I feel about you.

How do you feel?

I'm glad you're alive, Daniel.

I don't understand it.

But I'm glad.

Listen, I...

I want you in my life.

Daniel,

I don't know who you are.

I mean, I don't know

who you are now.

What do you mean?

We were young.

We were kids.

It was 10 years ago.

I still feel this.

I still love you.

I'm with someone.

You are?

Yeah.

That's, um... that's...

No, Daniel, don't go.

Daniel!

My name is not Daniel!

Just wait!

Daniel, please!

I was sparrow.

That's what you called me.

That was your name for me.

Um... I'm gonna go.

I'm sorry.

She was the one who died.

What?

Alise.

She was the one who died.

You understand.

We were driving and he appeared

out of nowhere on the road.

We swerved to

crash because of him.

She was killed.

I was an empty shell

for 10 years.

I joined the circus.

And the Omphalos program.

I thought if I could go back

to that very moment...

Push him out of the way,

I could prevent everything.

I saved her.

Were they both naked?

And now that reality,

the one in which Alise dies,

is only in your mind

as a recovered memory.

You did save her.

She lives today. We were

supposed to be together.

And are you?

In your end is your beginning.

Omphalos.

We're going back.

Wait, wait.

That moment, the moment you want

is already littered

with fractures.

You can't get her back.

I'll go back even further.

If it wasn't for you,

we'd still be together.

You needn't do this.

You in or you out?

In.

As long as we stop at the

dumpster with the light bulbs.

The universe is not about you.

I did not invent time travel

so you could get the girl.

You never get the girl.

Accept it.

It's just pain.

There are worse things

than pain!

Where the f*** have you been?

I almost called the cops.

I have to go away

for a little while.

I know.

You know?

Just because I'm old

you think I'm stupid?

I'll be back soon.

Take your time.

Yeah.

Good-bye, Babs.

So long.

What you find is

that the person's just gone

and then there's just

a big empty space

where there was someone before.

"In my end is my

beginning," said Fyodor.

Flying to the town of Omphalos,

Luka asked, "back to when?"

And I told him,

"the moment of inception.

The moment Fyodor wax

invented time travel."

You see, I wanted

to head him off

before any of it even started,

erase that original sin,

that original mistake.

But I wasn't quite listening

to what Fyodor had told me.

There are no mistakes, you see.

Parallel fragmenting.

It's getting worse.

Let's hurry up then. Fyodor would

talk to me about Omphalos.

All over the world, he says,

are these Omphalos points,

and you can use them

if you have

the right technology.

It's supposed to be right here.

I always liked the design.

It's like one big

high frequency chamber.

How far back am I going?

11 years back,

back when he first put

everything into motion.

It was the same day two planes

collided over the prime meridian

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