Shatterworld #1

Later

The not so distant future…

"Look, I know it's not a lot to work on, or with, but you lot are all I could find." Nathan Christopher Charles Summers Dayspring Askani'son said slowly, holding up his hands. He had lived in interesting times, and they had left their mark on him, his face was scarred, his eyes were tired, and he was beginning, finally, to look old. He was best known as Cable in most timelines, he even thought of himself by that name. He was dressed in his leather uniform, festooned with weapons and leaning on the the hood of the well-preserved and heavily modified silver DeLorean DMC-12.

How to convey the sense of abominable desolation that hung over the dark, empty, dying world that was his life now? The dark and sullen sky was no longer blue. Instead it was dark and cold as a night, stretching along until it reached the huge red-hot dome of the sun, bisected by the horizon, motionless and angry, which had come to obscure nearly a tenth part of the darkling heavens,,hung heavy with the ancient light of livid swollen stars. The city around was gutted ruins, cracked and decayed like broken teeth, the ocean had evaporated, and what light there was came from residual volcanic activity more than the sun. There was no sign of any life, bar Cable and his three companions. It wasn't so, some others survived, in great redoubts powered by the Life Current of the world, but the numbers were dwindling. Soon… well, it didn't bear thinking about.

Wolverine didn't share his philosophical view, he was firmly in the moment, his enhanced senses on full alert. Manhattan might have been quiet, but it's sidewalks were stained with old blood - and every so often the scent of a decaying corpse hit him. He tried not to look at the sky. The sun was a dull reminder that nothing could get better. The world was over, all that was left was the wait for it to become unable to support life.

Wolverine had expected an answer. Or at least a reaction. Given neither, he uncrossed his arms, and held them out, a little lamely. "So can you work with this? Because far as I can see, this is our only hope. Our only way to set things right."

"You two are the closest things to experts we have left, right?" Cable added. Wolverine sensed something unsaid in his cohort’s words and studied him. To anyone else, Cable's dour expression would have seemed no different from any of the other dour expressions he wore day in and day out; but the other mutant had been partnered with him for a long time in this desolate world trying to save it, and he could read moods in the man that others missed completely. Cable was all but burned out. Another set-back would probably kill him.

Hope was a hard thing to cling on to, in this world. And impossible to regain, once you lost it.

The man he addressed stared at him. He was a skinny, somewhat ungainly looking person, dressed in what had once been a blue suit and brown coat, with spiky hair and an expression of perpetual wonder on his face, the sort of man who is enthusiastic about every single subject, and who knows far more then anyone else, but can't express it as well as he'd like to. His eyes were deep and haunting, and seemed to contain all of forever. At last, coming to a conclusion, he crossed his arms and shook his head. "Talk me through this again."

"We need to travel through time. This is a time machine." Wolverine said, calmly. "I'd think it was obvious."

"Well…" Booster Gold started to say, but Valeyard interrupted him, stepping forward. 

"Great Rassilon, if only it were so simple." He stated. "But look at it. Time Machine? Hardly. It's a brute force approach joke. It's about as much use as trying to break through inter-dimensional walls as a sledgehammer."

"It can go back to the past."

"Which past? Time isn't like a river, or even a river that flows both ways simultaneously. It's a lot more complicated. Much, much more. The past isn't some fixed, stable construct. People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually — from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint — it's this wandering, meandering thing that just goes in all sorts of wibbly-wobbly directions."

Wolverine paused. His eyebrows wandered about his forehead in confusion. That was just maddeningly unhelpful. "I don't follow."

"Look, I do know how Time Travel works, thank you. I attended Preston and Logan university, class of 2688." Booster Gold interjected. Not that such a thing was likely to happen, what with the looming global extinction event and the techno-barbarians and scavengers tearing apart what was left of the world. But causality would take a while to catch up with his timeline. Give him enough time to fix this before he stopped existing. At least, that was the plan.

"On a football scholarship, sir." Skeets added helpfully.

"Well, yes. But that thing can go to the past and the future quite…"

The Valeyard sighed. "OK, I want you to understand that this is in pretty much every single way inaccurate, but it's dumbed down enough, and using small enough words that it should make sense. No offence intended, but if this was easy to explain, everyone would do it. Now, time is not like a river, but if it was it would be a river with a nearly infinite number of distributaries - alternate timelines -branching off in every direction. Now these alternate timelines tend to go off on their own and never intersect with the main timeline. On occasion, the branches return, feeding back into the main timeline - sometimes permanently, sometimes temporarily. Thus, history can sometimes change momentarily and then change back (or not)."

"So we can't change the past, because we already changed the past?" Wolverine asked, face falling. A terrible futility welled up inside him. He'd spent three years tracking this machine down in China. He'd seen nightmarish things, nearly died twice and lost some of the only friends he had left, who had survived this long like him. He'd had to kill the Rainmaker himself, and the man had begged him to do it. His claws began to slide through his knuckles, and he kicked the machine, then kicked it again, harder.

Cable grunted. "It's never happened that way for me before."

Booster Gold put a comforting hand on Wolverine's shoulder. "It's not like that. Keep listening to the man." There was almost nothing left of the man Wolverine had once known. Michael Carter's blond hair had faded to a uniform iron grey. However old he was - it was always hard to know with time travellers - he looked tinned out and used up. Gone was the familiar figure of limitless self-promotion, and in it's place was a man too stubborn to give up, tormented by his own helplessness.

The Valeyard was warming to his subject matter now. "I mean, in all honesty… well, we can do that. We can. Of course we can. But you're not just talking about moving from point A to point B. No fixed points, not so simple. And even if we can get to the right time and place, which I doubt, you're not just going there as a tourist. You want to muck around with causality, and that's not cut out for it. It's hard. Seriously, I have some experience in the subject. Normally you're better off simply forcing the world into whatever shape you imagine, and telling everyone that you changed the past. I mean, paradoxes notwithstanding, we are living in a pantheistically solipsist multiverse, where every single moment can be divided to a number mathematically interchangeable with infinity, where every thought and dream, decision and idea spouts a new possibility. That can take us back in time, but it doesn't offer any security, and the past is a general target, and it's the size of a pinhole in an infinitely refracting universe of possibilities, which we have no tools or even target to aim at whatsoever. Furthermore, changing the past only has an effect if you also change the present, else it just sort of slides into an alternate timeline, and even if you do somehow create a stable timeline, it has no more primacy then any of the other potential pasts…"

"OK, now I definitely don't understand." Wolverine grumbled. He'd caught maybe a third of that barrage of words, and while he got the gist (that they were trying to do something without the necessary tools) he felt that The Valeyard was failing to explain what exactly the dangers were.

"Potential pasts work the same way as potential futures. There's no definitives, it's all might have beens." Booster Gold said, with a shake of his head. "Nine times out of ten, the present just reaffirms itself anyway."

"NO!" The Valeyard protested. Then he thought about it for a moment. "Actually, yes." He said. "That's actually only mostly wrong… look, rewriting Time has consequences. Which wouldn't be a problem, or at least a big problem, if we had the right sort of instrument. But chronal energy has to come from somewhere – and it’s coming from the past and the future. The more you muck around, the more the past is steadily being eaten away, and the more the future will never be."

Wolverine unfolded his arms. Finally. Down to brass tacks. "What's the worst thing that could happen?"

The Valeyard rolled his eyes. "What, aside from the obvious? This thing hasn't any protection from making changes to the timeline. So assuming this thing does head back to the right place and doesn't implode into a quantum singularity that erases the entire universe, given that we haven't any temporal uncertainty compensator arrays there's no buffer between us and causality, we'd be lucky not to just erase ourselves simply by observing. And we so much as kick a pebble and then collapse into uncertainty limbo as the universe constantly morphicly reasserts itself, recreating and destroying us indefinitely as it tries to diverge our old and new existence."

Wolverine sucked on his teeth. "That is pretty bad." He allowed.

"Don't worry, it probably won't happen." Booster Gold reassured.

"Well sure. Because this stupid thing probably won't even get that far."

“Don’t give me that ‘we should just give up’ nonsense.” Booster Gold snapped. “You’re here, aren’t you? Not heading into the night lands and waiting for one of our new neighbours to gobble you up as a snack. You want to contribute, fine, but that defeatist attitude isn’t any good to anyone.”

“We probably only have one chance and this - we don’t have the resources for more, so we need to make the most of it we can, not just throw all to the wind at the first opportunity. That's just basic good sense.”

“And this is it. So we understand the risks." Wolverine said, still calm, perhaps infuriatingly so. "Now I got a question. Just one."

The Valeyard stared at him. "What?"

"What would Rose want you to do?"

For a moment, his eyes flashed, then he slumped, defeated. "Oh, to Timesend with it." He snarled, pulling something small and metallic out of his pocket. "Fine, let's roll the dice." He said against his best judgement though it was, then walked over to the car and popped the hood, his movements resigned and yet determined. In place of an engine was a glittering metallic framework, very delicately made. Parts were of nickel, parts of ivory, parts had certainly been filed or sawn out of rock crystal. He sighed, and shook his head. "I can't believe how crude this is. I couldn't use this to build the tools to build the tools that I need to get a working model out of this. I mean, nuclear power? A time machine that runs on nuclear power?" He shook his head at the absurdity. "I suppose we're fortunate that it's not a hamster on a wheel. Anyone have a grade 19 temporal transfixer conduit? How about a tachyon counter-weaver?"

They stared at him.

"No?" He sighed. "Fine. I'll jury-rig something. But if this lands you all in the Jurassic, and you fail to avert this, then remember I warned you all."

A few hours had passed. The car looked much the same, to the untrained eye, but The Valeyard rubbed his hands. "Right. That's a start."

"So it'll work now?"

"Yes. No. Sorta. Look, it's a paradox machine. A very crude paradox machine. As long as we keep it running, it should stabilise existence enough that we can make changes. Small ones. Inconsequential ones. But small changes grow into larger ones. Now the window will be small, so you have to work quickly, and figure out what you want well in advance."

"So we couldn't change the past before, but now we can?"

"No. No we can't. Only Rassilon can do that sort of thing, and he's not here. Or anywhere. Or anywhen. At the moment. So we aren't. What we're doing, is fixing the timeline so we can use brute-force to push reality into the shape it would have taken if something had been different. What was done was still done, we just made it pretend it didn't hard enough that the universe doesn't bother arguing and just plays along."

"That's not really the same thing."

"Isn't it? Who's going to know?" The Valeyard asked, looking genuinely curious.

"Well… Good point."

"Of course, on it's own it isn't much use. See, we need to know what shape the universe should look to fix it. And to do that, we need some kind of device capable of calculating and measuring everything. Something capable of holding every single detail about the galaxy, since the machines not going to do it for us. And I have no idea how to get something like that."

Booster Gold smiled, and handed him a gadget. The Time Lord/human hybrid gasped, overwhelmed by the gadget. Indeed, the device looked so terrifically complicated that even the assembled intellectual might present felt somewhat intimidated and overwhelmed by it, which was why it was a tremendous relief to see it had 'Don't Panic' written in large, friendly letters on the front.

"That…" he breathed "that'll do nicely."