The Coexistence Property

“You cannot step in the same river twice. Time is a river.”
—Janet Fires, in her book The Chronological Regime

Pennsylvania, Two Days Ago (Log 1, T-00:00:00)

The woman’s contracted pupils surveyed the small crowd that her presentation in metaphysics had drawn; to them it was all a bunch of “what-if”s, and “if-only”s. She scanned the first slide of her presentation; it read, “The Chronological Regime.” What a fitting name; after all, a free man was the slave only to time. But these ignorant people! They didn’t understand the real, literal importance of her branch of philosophy. In the recent years, the public had become even firmer doubters and skeptics, knowing that they knew nothing of this subject, but still supposing naively in their own omniscience—after all, what was a class in “what-if”s and “if-only”s to a modern-day, very real, no-nonsense society. Every time she presented, every single reiteration of the dwindling, feeble crowd turnout, made her burn in her chest to tell them everything, about the Metronome, about how their very lives could be devastatingly altered—could have been already, millions of years ago—but every time she felt this nearly irrepressible urge, the discontented metaphysiologist pictured his face, mangled it in her mind, tore it to shreds, and she knew that it would be worth everything to keep the secret.
She addressed the crowd: “The first principle that we will be considering,” she spoke into the whining microphone, “will be the Coexistence Property.”

*   *   *

Present Day (Log 2, T-00:04:53)

A man lingered in the shadows; he had a gun. He was waiting for someone. When the time was right, he would shoot himself. He didn’t know it yet, but he would.
He fiddled with the silencer, nervous about what would happen if his plan went wrong, and further about what would occur if it went right. And rightly so.
Even though the lights were off in the room, he could see everything, but that wasn’t much. Only four walls, a tiled floor and a plaster ceiling. And two doors. The one he faced was of an undeterminable hue in the absence of light, and had a small tinted window that didn’t do much for him in the darkness.
He was an assassin. But for the first time in his career, his mission was not to kill the man he planned to ambush, not even to capture him. He actually planned to reason with the man. He was not used to the feeling; there was no adrenaline, no excitement, no hunt, no sensation of impending vengeance—just an awkward, lengthy silence between each of his extraneously serene heartbeats. But the gun was his failsafe; its safety was flipped to the off position, and it made him feel better in the revealing dimness, a shade he had unintentionally taught himself to prefer rather than light.
For the second time in his vocational history, he had not been commissioned, but had instead been driven to do what he did best by the incessant nagging of his own personal issues, lingering scraps of his shredded past that were not ever advantageous for a man of his skillset. Being what he was, there was only one way that he knew of to deal with these issues: they had to be crossed off. And though his heart was not palpitating, his muscles not shivering with anticipation, he knew, deep in his cavernous, arcane heart of stone, just how long he had been waiting for this moment, to be sitting in the darkness, still, serene and ready for what was approaching, down to the minute. His timing would be immaculate; he was not a man who was known for being late.
The claustrophobic emptiness brought back memories, ones he didn’t like; memories of before he had devoted his life to slaughter, the very memories that had driven him to do so. Memories of the back of a truck, at night, tossed in with the eclectic garbage that had collected. Then, through the haze of the retentions came a belt, again and again, his father’s arctic blue eyes staring frigidly down upon him, a frail old liver-spotted hand swinging the makeshift leather whip. The man had been old and spindly, true, but the boy had been so young, so small, so innocent—so weak. The boy, of course, would follow in his father’s violent, drunken footsteps.
There were more memories, too, of this very room; not just places like it. There was the memory of Isaac’s face, half blanketed in the asphyxiating, velveteen shadows. The memory of his mouth, quivering with pure, uncut lividness, speaking the fatal statement of a loathing beyond mental capacity. “I want him to perish,” the man had said, “slowly. I want him to know that I killed him, and I want to laugh at his dying, voiceless body. And I look into your eyes, boy, and I see something else in them—a maniacal rage so fierce in its nature that there is so much more than just that that you want to do to him.” The shadow had moved down the man’s face, covering his the corners of his taught mouth, revealing something in the man the assassin had never seen before. “So go. No one can stop you now.” He had awakened something in the boy that had been stirring for a while; revenge had been starving in his trigger finger, driving it to convulsions. And there was a flashback to this incurable night itself, in this hall at the University, finally taking off on his all-devouring journey to realize his homicidal reveries.
Shaking himself from his ironically nightmarish daydreams, the assassin took a strange device out of his pocket. It looked like a metronome, and in a way it was; this had aided in its christening. It was shaped like a rectangular prism, and one face was smattered with dials and buttons. A small screen read in bright green letters that glowed in the darkness. It read, “T-00:02:18”; it was later than the assassin had thought. He crouched in the barren corner, shielded only by darkness, and readied himself for his target to burst through the door.

*   *   *

About Two Days Ago (Log 1, T-00:00:00)

“The Coexistence Property is one of great interest and importance to this branch of metaphysics, and yet, sadly, it is seriously mislabeled. It states that, while two versions of the same person may simultaneously exist in the same moment, they may never be the same person; thusly each log is not a separate or parallel universe or dimension of that nature. There must be some variation of age—it could be millennia or milliseconds, scale is of no significance in this branch of scientific philosophy, only sequence—at all times between two coexisting and separate same persons. It is by this property that it itself is inaptly termed: if a person were to stand next to him or her self at a different age they would find that if not in appearance at the very least in personality, they are, no matter how slight the difference, not the same person. They would follow separate paths, go their separate ways; they would answer to the same name, but what is a name, really, but an inept unit of language whose single and unfulfilled function is to identify a person uniquely, a task which no dialect is able to accomplish; you cannot step in the same river twice. Time is a river.”

*   *   *

Present Day (Log 1, T-5 yrs.)

Alexander Reeves, 23, was in his first year of college, for which he had spent the four years of toil and intense labor saving up. His hair was sun-bleached, and you would not have guessed his Caucasian ancestry from looking at the man, for his skin was so deep a tan that his ethnicity was impossible to guess. His eyes were an elusive green-grey that looked blue in a different light than the spastic fluorescents whose glare through which he waded currently. His back was nearly exactly vertical, so straight that it almost looked unnatural, and he looked professional in a black suit with a silver briefcase, and with his grey-streaked hair, despite his age. He was about to become a professional. He could think only about how there would be no second chances.
Isaac had said he was close with his calculations. Janet was in the final stages of developing her chronological theories; the device was due for its first human testing tonight. Isaac was the physicist, Janet the philosopher, and he the muscle, the test subject. And tonight could be his last.
He watched the reflections of the lights on the tiled floor, shining obtrusively into his squinting eyes. Resisting the urge to run, he observed through the glass panels on the doors small classrooms, tinted by the windows, and the sheer uniformity of every hall into which he turned. The light bounced off of the windows, too, so he couldn’t tell if there were people on the other side of the glass; he hated the light.
In the light, you were always at the advantage if you found a good place to hide: you had time to conceal yourself, one had time to find a remote, strategic, dim place. But in darkness, the person at the upper hand is the man with the most skill, the best tactic. In the darkness he always won.
So he willed his feet to move slowly, to resist the urge to sprint to the professor’s room, the urge to kill a man. He controlled his breathing, slowed his heartbeat, kept his pupils a little too small in diameter to absorb all of the shocking light that invaded his skull. Because vengeance was coming, his vengeance. Years of torture, of neglect, of abuse all welled up inside of him, and as he walked calmly down the hall he smiled: the pretext of calm meant his ages of fantasies of murdering his father were at long last being realized.

*   *   *

About Two Days Ago (Log 1, T-00:00:00)

“The Coexistence Property of Metaphysics applies to all five branches of this broad category, including those of Being, Knowing, Cause and Identity, in that it addresses these issues in its buildup, citing Being and Knowing as givens and yet still questioning them, and directly challenging the metaphysical pillars of Cause and Identity, but chiefly the Coexistence Property addresses the issue of Time, the final and most misunderstood pillar of Scientific Philosophy. It is for this reason that it was originally named the Coexistence Property of Chronology, until the name was recently challenged when the argument was made that in metaphysics, nothing is a given save for events in purely hypothetical scenarios, thusly implying that any theorem proposed in metaphysics is a breakthrough in understanding not one but all five of the metaphysical branches.”
A hand shot up in the audience—she leaned around the podium to see who it was and rolled her eyes: Isaac. She had been over this a thousand times with him. Did he really have to interrupt her now?
“Yes, Isaac?”
“Ms. Fires, if all that you have said is true—that this property assumes Being and Knowing as givens, and that any metaphysical scenario dealing with givens is purely hypothetical—then the Coexistence Property of which you speak is, in fact, purely hypothetical. Is this truly what you intend to insinuate?”
It was a good question, too. One she hadn’t been prepared to explain. Damn. She liked to think that a person in her area of study was far more of a free-associative thinker than an eccentric, closed-minded researcher man like Isaac; she had a strange compulsion to constantly glorify herself in her mind. She drew a blank at the question, and stood for a moment, and for that moment it seemed as though she was speechless. But at last, she opened her mouth. Janet Fires always had an answer.

*   *   *

Present Day (Log 2, T-00:02:17.)

As the assassin sat, wrapped in the icy blanket of darkness, he shivered with warmth. The irony made so much absurd sense it hurt him. Just seventeen seconds until the target date, but he didn’t feel safe yet; if there was one thing that he had learned over the years, it was just how much could change in seventeen seconds—no, it was how much more time than you realized could be packed into seventeen seconds. He took a deep breath, and leaned back against the wall behind him, facing the door through which his target would enter and running through the extraction plan in his mind. Everything will be fine, he thought. He was almost immediately proven wrong as he was hit in the back of the head by the door behind him.
He fell forward onto his palms, his right palm bruised by the impact because it landed on the poorly positioned butt of the gun, and twisted around. With uncanny speed and agility, he whipped to his feet, quickly hiding the gun in his pocket—no need for anyone at the University to be alarmed and cause a commotion—and then brandishing his fists in front of himself defensively.
“Alex?” inquired the man who had opened the door. He had spoken one word, and yet the thick Russian accent was so strong that the assassin could discern it from that single name.
“You startled me, Isaac.” He had forgotten that the man had greeted the boy here on this night five of his years ago.
“Come in; I have much to explain, and so little time.”
“Ah, yes—although I trust that after tonight, time will no longer be a constraint.”
The man called Isaac turned around and reopened the door; he could hear the assassin’s heavy breathing behind him, escalating, getting more noisy and quick. He showed the intruder into a dimly illuminated room. It was full of black computer equipment, and in the center was a black box, rather small, maybe one inch tall and nine or ten inches long, the width no longer than the length of a clock’s hour hand. The upward facing plane was covered with dials, and there was a small screen that was not illuminated.
“Behold—fifteen years’ work, finally ready for trials. I suppose I should wait until Janet gets here before I explain the whole thing.  But I really can’t wait, can you?”
The assassin breathed deeply. “Fine. Show it to me.”
Isaac grinned. “For the first time ever, let us watch it work. Let us Travel.” The scientist bent over it, not picking it up, with an odd air of reverence, treating the small plastic prism with extreme care. He heard the assassin’s breathing crescendo.
The killer raised his gun. “I’m sorry, Isaac.”
“What?” The little balding scientist had just barely had time to begin rotate his head when the bullet pierced his temple and spilled him all over the floor. The man called Isaac died instantly. He never felt any pain. He never saw it coming, not from a friend.
Standing over the body, the assassin trembled, remembering, knowing that this was but the second time he had ever killed a man he knew. He looked up at the device on the table and pulled the similar version from his pocket, pressing one of the preset controls. The humming of machinery, the computers’ fans, the air conditioner in the corner, the blinking green lights on the piles of machinery all ceased to him.

*   *   *

About Two Days Ago (Log 1, T-00:00:00)


“The answer, sir lies within a common axiom: The only certainty is that nothing is certain. In our daily lives, to function, just to whack the snooze button in the morning, we assume certain things about the universe, about metaphysics; we take four out of five pillars (Being, Knowing, Identity and Time) for granted; as givens, that is. The fifth, the question of Creation and Mortality referred to by metaphysicists as Cause, is addressed generally by religion, and I may be so bold as to say the foundation of, in fact the very reason for the thing we know as Faith. That pillar in particular has been a source of the most toil throughout history. And it is the leading purpose of metaphysics to address these questions, head-on with no assumptions being made—after all, both yours and my own being are purely hypothetical. But there comes a certain point in time, a gray area between the light and dark of existentiality, where one must assume that one exists to get anything done, no? But within our assumption, there must always remain some level of question, too, for advancement to take place.
“Therefore, metaphysics must be categorized into two major sections, hypothetical and realistic, hypothetical ironically dealing with things that are real to us, and therefore assuming Being, Knowing, and Identity as absolutes. Up until recently, that list included Time, until, that is, I introduced to the scientific community the Paradox Property of Metaphysics, eradicating the long-held assumption within the community of metaphysicists that the paradox created by time travel would make it impossible to carry out; I shall explain that on the next slide.
“In conclusion, the answer to your question is that the Coexistence Property is, in its full appellation, the Coexistence Property of Hypothetical Metaphysics; however, when introduced as such, it is considered by most rather redundant.
“But I came here not to give you an overview of metaphysics—I stand here to tell you of the new discoveries, documented in my book, in the scientific theories of Hypothetical Time. And I must continue, ere I run out of just that.”

*   *   *

Present Day (Log 2, T-00:01:34; STAGNANT)

The murderer collapsed to the floor, his head in his hands. Not because he had just killed a friend—he didn’t have friends, just allies—but because what he had just done made him feel weak, weak because he had not planned to kill his target, and by not being prepared to kill, he had not been prepared at all; he had forgotten about Isaac and compromised his mission by allowing himself to be distracted by emotions, by fear. And the only way to conquer fear was to be in control.
He shook his head; he wasn’t thinking clearly.
The man supposed to be Alexander stood in a sudden fit of fury, and pulled back his foot and kicked a metal table; pain shot up his leg through his hip. The table did not yield. The pain would help him think, so he kicked again. And again, and once more. He thrashed until he could no longer take it, and he collapsed again to the cold, hard concrete—it called him to it as it always did.
The table was small, but it had neither dented nor moved during the barrage of attacks. It had not clanged, although the dull, low thunk of the shoe against rock-hard time had been audible. And through his agony, Alexander found clarity. This was, in fact, the very reason no man had ever before had the capacity to understand time: it was solid and undeterred as rock, and yet fluid as the water the flowing through a creek bed, and as lacking in substance as the air we breathe. Philosophers had asked, “Is it another dimension? Is it a particle like the graviton or the gluon? What constitutes time?”
And yet, the table was frozen solid in time, but for the assassin, time flowed forth as it had forever; everything save for the man and the air around him was Stagnant. The table could not jolt, it could not dent, it could not reverberate with the impact of an enraged foot and clang obtrusively; it was in a way trapped--and yet so was the man who lay on the floor, clutching his leg.
He smiled into the face of his pain, as he often did darkness, for he knew it was true of each that once it overran you, you could never get it out, and his cathartic anguish led him to realize his cowardice—when one is faced with a choice, all instinct throws them toward self-preservation, but true courage, as many others had told the assassin, was the selflessness to sacrifice oneself for the greater good. But all the others had left unstated the meaning of true cowardice, and through his pain he could see the letters dimly forming a definition, leading him to understand himself for the first time. True cowardice, in essence, was to be so afraid that you would not only sustain your own livelihood, and sacrifice others for it, but you would be so afraid as to not permit yourself to feel for another person. True cowardice was a vacuum, a vacancy of empathy, a void where caring should be, and the existence—or lack of existence—of these within the man sucked him up, made him implode, made him frigid inside, made him a killer so bone-deep that he was no longer a man, and yet made him worthless.
It was with this knowledge that he pressed the Metronome’s Stagnancy button to resume reality, scooped up the gun, and limped back through the room of computers. He passed through another threshold and retreated back to the shadows. He held up the gun at face level, and directed it straight at the door that had not escaped his mind for five long years; he scratched his previous plans, and for the first time in his life he was going to do the right thing.
He was going to take the kill shot.

*   *   *

About Two Days Ago (Log 1, T-00:00:00)

“Before, I briefly mentioned a very important topic—I said, ‘You cannot step in the same river twice; time is a river.’ This concept is the very essence of the Coexistence Property. You see, some day someone will travel back in time; it is quite more possible than you think. And it will happen.”
In the back of the room Isaac let out a spurt of coughing. Janet continued.
“And when they do, the metaphysicists will begin to quarrel, as they always do. Because will it truly be traveling back in time? You see, time is a river in that it always flows forth, tumbling downhill, towards the bottom. But it is here, this soon, that the metaphor begins to become invalid--for instance, this hill we speak of is interminable; time marches on infinitely, thusly there is no bottom toward which we “tumble.” And another issue is that, in this theoretical river, each particle travels with insane mathematical symmetry at exactly the same speed, perfectly in the same direction. Within this river there is only one dimension, like a line, and we are only on a single, infinitesimally miniscule and zero dimensional point on this line. There are no rocks, no incongruencies, no turbulent vibrations. This is, of course, until we begin to interfere.
“The first interference, the most basic, will be isolation: the large point stops moving along the line, and yet an infinitesimally miniscule part of it keeps on moving. But this is where it gets complicated: that part that continues to advance advances on its own parallel line in a fashion such that when the isolation is terminated, it has moved forward and the rest of the point has not, and yet it is still on the point. It is this principle that has been misunderstood by metaphysicists for ages. They presumed that the existence of the parallel and yet concentric infinite line must be some sort of unit of space beyond our comprehension, as though the fact that they couldn’t find an answer meant it was too difficult to understand. And it is when humans presume in their own sagaciousness that they then decide the things they don’t understand cannot be understood. Thusly, years of false presumption have wasted valuable time. Time that we will someday regain.”

*   *   *

Present Day (Log 1, T-00:00:04)

Reeves Rounded the final corner and in spite of himself accelerated ever so slightly. The door was at the end of the hall, and he was burning with anticipation. He removed his hand from his pocket and reached for the handle, moving slowly now; he couldn’t tell why. Perhaps it was because once he turned the handle and went inside, he would literally have all the time in the world. He savored his last moments of powerlessness, of absolute weakness, because he would save them as a reminder. A reminder of the small child under the burning lash of a makeshift whip. A reminder of the ignorant firebrand, the runaway, who thought he could pull the trigger. He savored them because with them he would forever be able to remember his purpose, remember why he had devoted himself, dedicated not just his life, but his death, too, to this plan. And he saved them in his mind maybe a little for the sentiment; he knew he would never be so innocent again. It was with this understanding that he exhaled his last breath of the sweet air of blamelessness and slowly pushed forward the door to his reincarnation, and as he peered into the gloom he inhaled his first breath of the pervasive, stale, underground air. Just then, he stopped. There had been a noise. Slowly, he surveyed the room. It was then that the man emerged from the shadows.
It was Isaac. The little man was quivering with excitement, and he seized Alexander’s hand, pulling him toward the door.
“Come in! Hurry up. We really should wait for Janet, but I just can’t anymore. I can’t wait to see it happen--not the implementation of the device, the execution.”
“Why the rush?  And you cannot use the excuse that we are running short on time, for if you’ve held up your end of the deal, we shall find that the only one whose time runs short is him.”
Isaac Katzarov’s eyes leveled with his; they were impossible to read. But the skin around them was taut and reddened. “I want to know,” he said in a tone that was suddenly quiet, and yet shaking with lividness, “I need to know. I need to know whether I can kill the man I’ve had sweet, sweet dreams of killing for so long.”
There was a silence; then, Isaac seemed to regain control of himself and Reeves was yanked into another dim room, full of computers and flashing LEDs. He observed that there was a stainless steel table in the center of the room, topped by a strange, intriguing sort of box. It was this box to which Isaac gestured mutely.
“This is the unit that you will carry,” he said. It comforted Alex to observe that his voice was normal once more. “It would be impossible to store all of the programs and wave accelerators on the personal unit; this device simply communicates with the main computer. I will wait till Fires gets here to explain the technical details—they’ll mean less than nothing to you—but please, just once: try it. Go into the past.”
He thrust the device into Reeves’s hands.
“Wait, Katzarov.”
“What?”
“Don’t you want to be sure we have Janet’s approval? We wanted her on board for a reason—she’s of use. We need to listen, because if we don’t, then... Look, you’re the expert. I don’t need to remind you what we’re screwing with.”

*   *   *

About Two Days Ago (Log 1, T-00:00:00)

“The second and third disturbances that shall be achieved within the chronological continuum, the second and third simplest, that is, shall be reversing the movement of the dot over the line through space-time, and managing to Isolate specific articles from this change, most simply referred to as traveling back in time, and allowing the dot to move forward, and freezing specific things so that they have not aged or changed until the target date—the opposite of Stagnancy; travel to the future. The main problems with these similar maneuvers, aside from those inherent to time travel, addressed by the Paradox Property, are these: the time between the present moment and the target moment in the so-called ‘past’ or ‘future,’ and the location of the Isolated person—how would the universe cope if, when the Isolated awoke, they were in exactly the same spot as something else? And what if the Isolated changes history—and they nearly surely will—whilst they are frozen chronologically during the period of time in fast backward, or forward motion so to speak, in between? We know nothing and can hardly speculate about the would-be principles of time in ‘fast backward.’ While we can only produce poorly founded conjectures, metaphysicists are rather certain that whether or not experimentation with these issues would mean the end of everything, the results would not be pleasant. The solution to these problems, we believe, would be something that could be considered different from Isolation by a few. This concept, most simply explained as chronological teleportation, is one in which the Isolated object is not simply chronologically frozen in the intermediate time period but rather nonexistent, thusly eliminating the intermediate interference issue. The placement issue remains metaphysically unresolved, but can be skirted by utilizing knowledge of the period in time to which the Isolated plans to go.
“The River Metaphor, The River Metaphor, a requisite concept published in my book that describes the advancement of time as the flow of water in a river or the movement of a perfect dot along a perfect line, is good only for understanding exactly how time has been misunderstood in the past: how it was supposed for some time that time travel was the utilization of another dimension or some sort of parallel reality, or even that such endeavors were simply impossible. It is a perfect demonstration of the implementation of the illogical logic that has been trusted for so many years by even the greatest of scientists and metaphysicists. In order to truly comprehend Chronology, to truly understand its complexity, one must come to understand the basic skeletal makeup of time. They must look to the Paradox Property of Chronology.”

*   *   *

Present Day (Log 2, T-00:00:14)

Reeves strutted down the hall with immaculate posture. He appeared calm and cool, and ready. But he wasn’t so sure he was. His emotions were a confusingly layered lattice—indescribably deep and yet incredibly shallow. He just wanted his father dead; more specifically he wanted the man to die slowly, by his own son’s hand; he put the hand he planned to use into his pocket and felt a small, clear jar.
He turned it over in his fingers, and thought about this plan; he had only seen his father cry once before, at his own pain, of course. It was the only thing that had ever seemed to sober him up. Alex had promised himself, he remembered, that he would once again see that man cry, that he would make the man cry for himself, that he would make him understand just how much he had taken away. In the jar he would collect the man’s tear. And he would savor it forever.
This burning hope within him propelled him forward, and he opened the door. He stepped into the room and heard a mechanical humming emanating from beyond. But there was something else, too. A breathing, heavy and labored. He froze, then took a step back, but it was too late--he had already been spotted. Out from the shadows emerged the trembling figure of a man. The stranger was pointing a gun at Reeves’s face; it looked like he was trying to pull the trigger and yet somehow failing, like he just couldn’t think. His trigger finger was trembling and weak. Reeves was stunned; he couldn’t speak, he couldn’t move, he couldn’t save himself: for one horrible moment, all he could do was stand frozen in terror. But the man, something was wrong with him; he shouted something in anguish, for some reason cursing his hand, as though it had suddenly turned a traitor and refused to pull the trigger.
It was no mystery to Alexander why exactly he was being attacked--no doubt someone had discovered the machine, and wanted it--but there was something that was not right, still; something that was off. When he looked at the man, it was like he was looking in the mirror; the man was trembling, hesitant, weak. And he bore a resemblance that Reeves simply could not place. It unnerved him. All he knew was that he was being given a chance.
Alexander tackled his assailant to the ground with a shout, and there was a struggle for the weapon. Legs kicked, arms flailed, voices spiked; the noise was deafening, impossible not to notice, and Alex vaguely wondered why on earth the scientist hadn’t come to help yet.
Both men had hands on the pistol, but the younger one was stronger, and he slowly managed to point the barrel away from himself. Panic rising in the assassin’s eyes, he kicked more forcefully, and more adrenaline pumped through his system. He began to push back, and rolled away; it was then that he felt Fires’ kicks to his head. He tried to catch his breath but inhaled his own blood and exploded into a fit of coughing. Managing to pull the trigger twice, one time hitting a door and another taking a large fragment of cement out of the ceiling, the assassin flailed blindly in a final vain effort to complete his mission; he had been this devastatingly crippled before and still managed to kill a man. He was tackled again by Reeves. The gun was out of his control at this point, and he felt a led lynch tear at the flesh in his neck, numbering his precious breaths, and he began to understand his father’s dying words. So he spoke. “The Greeks were wrong. Heed the Romans.”
There was a terrible silence as the failed assassin tried to form more words with his mouth. Then the sound of tiny explosions.
Bullets, one by one, exited his abdomen and embedded themselves in the floor. He squirmed around on the floor as each of his senses left him, and all that remained was the bleeding; first, he could no longer see his murderer, then his final echoing shouts faded from his own ears, and the taste and smell of his blood left his gurgling mouth. All that remained was the pain. And in his prison of blackness and adrenaline and oscillating nerves he knew that all he could do was leave one last short message. He chose his last words meticulously. Lying prone, he read his obituary off of the bitumen floor.
“Do not die as I die, without a cause,” the words became slowed and slurred as the brain lost oxygen. “You will understand with time.”
When the man’s agonized moaning was finally done, Reeves stood to brush himself off. Fires looked at him and inquired: “Have you seen him before?”
He shook his head no. “Probably just a mercenary; hired by someone else. Someone who wants to steal the machine.” It didn’t occur to him that someone might have wanted to stop it. And despite what he had said, for some strange reason, it felt like he had seen the man before.
“Then how do we find out who he is—was?” the woman asked.
Reeves bent down, and found wallet in the man’s worn blazer. That, too, looked familiar. He opened the wallet, and peered inside, then snapped it shut.
“What the hell…”
Fires looked up from the body. “What?”
He held out the wallet to her, and she squinted at the ID. The picture was identical to Reeves. Under it, letters confirmed the notion: “Alexander Reeves, 28,” they read.
Just a minute later they would find Isaac.

The Paradox Property

“The constitution of time is, in essence, change.”
--Janet Fires, in her book The Chronological Regime

About Two Days Ago (Log 1, T-00:00:00)

“As we move into discussing the Paradox Property, we learn that its purpose is even more broad than that of any other Metaphysical property--to address the common issues that would lead most people to consider time travel impossible to achieve. The first and foremost revelation that it deals with is the one for which it is named, and the one by which it is defined in most metaphysics textbooks; it elucidates the controversies about the paradoxical problems created by time travel: if one were to go into the past, and thusly change it, then that should technically change the entirety of the time between the arrival date and the termination of the Chronological system, and in doing so eliminate the future from whence the traveler has come, thusly eliminating the possibility of their existence; then, at the very least, the traveler, according to this logic, shall cease to exist. Also--if said traveler should wish to explore the future, and they were to make a voyage there, would they be able to meet themselves in the future? Or would they have taken themselves out of the past? The relentless confusion surrounding these issues is resolved easily if one knows the key to the essence of understanding time: the determining factor that makes up the structure and properties of the concept we know as Time. It is quite simple. Time, from our perspective, is the debatably infinite string of continued events that makes possible history and future, without which all that would exist would be the present; everything would be Stagnant, unmoving. The constitution of time is, in essence, is change.
“This explanation answers a lot of questions, starting with the Paradox Problem--if one were to go into the past, they would, in fact, be creating a whole new past; erasing the old one. This new past is technically referred to as a Log. But if this were the case, critics say, what of the Traveler, of the Isolated? Shouldn’t they disappear from the mizzen horizon of existence? And it is the Change Theory that addresses these issues: because time is made up of constant deviations from a former present, the erased Log is gone forever--inaccessible through Travel, unresolved--yet the Traveler remains, because, in a sense, the version of reality still exists within him, through his memory, his epigenome, his experiences, and its being is existentially significant because it led to the present present.”
Near the front of the room, near the podium, a tall man had raised his long arm and held it up through half of the speech; Fires had been doing her best to ignore him. She was annoyed that the only ones asking questions were the two people in the auditorium that she knew. They were testing her. To be fair, their eagerness was rather justified in that they were making sure they wouldn’t cause the end of Everything. But then, he just shouted out. Regardless of the existential predicament, that was just not acceptable.
“Ms. Fires, what happens when someone goes into the past? Are they missed in the future?”
She took a deep breath. She wanted to yell at him: Damn it, Todd. How hard is it to shut up and stay unnoticed? But all Janet Fires could do was make sure he knew his outburst was unwelcome without losing her already miniscule audience.
“If. If someone went into the past. I apologize; I was speaking under the presumption that you are aware that we are so far incapable of time Travel.”

*   *   *

Present Day (Log 1, T-00:00:00)

In the end, neither Isaac nor Alexander backed down. Isaac seemed near the brink of insanity after years of dreaming of this moment, and Reeves was inclined not to die and inadvertently trigger Armageddon in the process; in their varying and wavering mental states they each drove rather persuasive arguments. The argument was halted only when Janet walked into the room, accidentally knocking Isaac to the ground in the middle of an angry, punch-drunk monologue. There was an awkward moment of silence.
“Sorry I’m late. Did I miss anything?”
Isaac and Alex looked at each other for a moment. Then in unison said, “No.”
“Then let’s get started. I think we’d all agree we’ve waited long enough for this.” Isaac coughed. “Is that it?”
She indicated the small, black box on the stainless steel table. Its rounded edges glistened in the blinking multicolored lights of the black machinery that lined the basement-like room.
“Yes and no. That is the personal unit, to be carried by the Traveler; it is far too small to be the entire device. The rest of the computer, the calculators, the wave generators, is placed around the rest of the room. What you see on the table is actually a remote control of sorts: it sets the Target Date and the Isolated Particle Group variables and communicates all of the information to the computer.
“Now, the thing about the remote control is that it will always work, so long as it remains intact. You see, the remote also has tiny, fairly weak wave generators that allow it to communicate with the computers in this room in the moment of their most recent update that had been entered along with a security code, no matter where exactly that is in time. Therefore, if the larger computer is ever stolen or even destroyed, we will still be able to use it. By implementing these same settings and wave frequencies I have also managed to eliminate the need for the remote unit to rejuvenate its power supply; it leaches from the computer.”
Fires frowned at a small notepad that she held in her hand and then looked back up at Isaac questioningly. “You talk often and fondly of a… wave. You make it evident that this is the implement by which this conspiracy is made possible. But what is it? A particle disturbance? A metaphysical turbulence?”
“Well… In that department there is somewhat of a grey area. I would say both, from what I have learned so far.”
“From what you have learned so far? Isaac, need I remind you that what we are dealing with here is not just some piece of technology, some implement of vengeance, but rather a risk imposed upon the very constitution of space and time? Each mistake made is a gamble that our very race shall not survive another moment. Each mistake could euthanize our coalition, keep us from our revenge, put him out of his misery.”
With the last statement, Janet’s lip curled and her eyes flared, and she nodded toward the time machine. He alone had marred her.

*   *   *

Present Day (Log 2, T-00:00:00)

Janet’s eyes stared into Isaac’s. His did not stare back. After the ringing in her ears cleared, she broke the seemingly unprecedented silence. “What do we do with the bodies?”
Alexander replied with acute speed. “Get a tarp. Find a dumpster somewhere far from here. Meanwhile I’ll find a mop.”
No one moved. It was awkward and stiff, as though the only ones in the room for whom the rigor mortis had not yet set in were the dead. The stiff, corpse-like noiselessness twitched but stayed firm.
Janet spoke unexpectedly.
“How did it feel?”
Fires looked up to see a tear trickle off of Alexander’s nose. She exhibited no sympathy.
“Well, you had better get used to it.”

They had taken Alex’s van to do it. When they had finally stuffed the heavy, dripping, tarp-wrapped package into the trunk, they had realized they had no destination. They had driven off anyway.
“Where, then?” Janet sat behind the wheel of the large vehicle, humming to herself.
“I hadn’t given it much thought.” Alex frowned. He didn’t like that she was so lighthearted. He hadn’t liked her from the start, but tonight, she had been… Well, she had saved his life. And that was all he should think about.
“Fine, then. I’ll take the next exit; find a dumpster somewhere.”
“Won’t someone find them there? We should try somewhere outdoors, maybe bury them.”
“No; we don’t have shovels, and it would be far too dangerous to pull into a parking lot with our cargo in the trunk. We don’t even have flashlights or a map; we could run into any number of problems at night, or run into any number of people for that matter. I don’t like it at all, but a dumpster is better. We know our way around the city, so escape and not being detected will be easy. The bodies will be discovered, yes, but in the city they can never be connected to us.”

There was a loud thunk as they rolled off the tarp into the metal, scum-lined dumpster. Janet slammed the lid before Isaac could catch her glare once again. Alex opened the lid and peered inside. Then they put the green bin to their taillights wanting never to return.

*   *   *

Fifteen Years Ago (Log 1, T-00:00:00)

The balcony reminded Janet of where she and Cristian had met. It was large, and from the river below could be seen arch supports that sloped like tears trickling off the end of a broken nose. Sunrise was long since passed, and it was a cold, moonless night; the sky was a black haze of clouds that made it nearly impossible to see anything. Even in the artificial light, the blackness was so pervasive that it dyed the white balcony a greyish color, like the pulp of a rotten nightshade fruit. Of course, that was not the only reason Fires had chosen this restaurant. It was also because the servers had been so responsive to small tips. They had agreed to comply. And if they followed through, all would go spectacularly.
The metaphysicist turned the ring over in her fingers as he sat facing her beau. It was thick, and made of gold, and the focal point was filled with a large, blue rhinestone. On a whole, the small circlet was fat, and ugly. It had been chosen with little care; it had but a miniscule purpose to serve on this night. It was but a tiny inanimate artifact, like a word, that society mistakenly entrusted with the immense power of communication. It could easily be manipulated to falsify. She wondered whether it would even fit his finger.
Cristian tried to look at Fires. Everything was fuzzy in his eyesight, and the uncomfortable light danced on them strangely like a poor actor, dark blue electricity coerced by humans to mimic a glowing cardinal flame. She wished the pseudo-torches on the marble exterior wall would admit the truth, just be fluorescents and shivered in the cold. The world was growing fuzzier. Everything in the light was surrounded by an unholy halo of concealing brightness, and all that was concealed by darkness looked the same as before, if not clearer. When Cristian was pumped full of adrenaline, his right eye drifted over to the side. He felt it look haphazardly in an irrelevant direction, the inception of a migraine. The silence was terrible.
Fires, knowing Cristian, noticed that his eye was off course. Adrenaline rushed through her, and she wondered what life would be like after tonight. It would be so… odd. Yes, odd to when everything with her and Cristian had changed. After all, the setting was almost exactly like the restaurant where they had met. The strings could be heard at a pleasant volume out here, as they quietly rattled the panes of the closed glass doors, over which the curtains were drawn. The atmosphere was vaguely Italian and old, without the must, and it was pleasantly quiet in the brackish of the music and the sound of the waves lapping the stone wall far below. The only difference was that they were at the only table on the balcony. It would be evident to Cristian that she had clearly reserved it specially for them.
“Lovely night,” she said, shivering. It clearly wasn’t.
“Of course,” muttered Isaac absent-mindedly.
“What do you suppose you will order? There’s just so much I’d love to try.”
“What? Oh, to order. I--I hadn’t given it much thought. I do wish I could get the attention of a waiter, though. The bread ran out ages ago.” The food was clearly not the most pressing thing on his mind, and if he intended to hide that fact, he was doing quite poorly. He rubbed his eye.
Janet was insistent on making a conversation, no matter how trivial the pleasantry: “This restaurant… Doesn’t it remind you of somewhere?”
“This place? I really I suppose, but I couldn’t guess what.” He paused. For a miniscule fraction of a second, a cringe was visible on his face; he could feel his girlfriend’s pulse in his eyelid. It quickened. It felt to the scientist like he had a pulsating black eye. “Unless you mean… Where we met?”
She nodded.
“It’s uncanny,” he said, and the added quickly, “I like it, though.”
Just then, two waiters emerged.
“Waiter,” Fires said, and raised his left hand slightly. The effect was rather comical, considering they were at the only table in sight. One server already had bread in a basket in hand. Each pulse quickened. “More bread, please.”
The man’s arm extended and held out the bread; Janet reached for it but clumsily knocked it to the floor. The waiter jumped back in surprise, and the metaphysicist bent over to correct where she had erred. And, like a magic trick, she produced from the basket the ring that she had been hiding in her palm. Cristian’s jaw dropped in surprise as she moved from a squat to a one-legged kneel.
“Cristian Grey,” she began.
“Oh, my gosh…”
“Will you marry me?”
There was a long pause. Cristian stared open-mouthed.
“Do you have a problem with it being… this way?” She stared at him vaguely intimidatingly.
“Janet, that is what I love about you. You are not afraid. You are unique.” Another pause. “Yes. The answer is yes. For God’s sake, I will marry you.”
They ran to each other, and embraced, then caught each others’ hands. Cristian was slightly taller, and he had to bend down a little to kiss her. He smelled her soft hair, heard her slow breaths, tasted her lipstick, felt… Felt a prick in his arm. It was sharp, and he felt a lethargic burning spread from the spot, as though he had been caught by a fire he was too debilitated to fight. He tried not to move, not to destroy the moment, but it was too strong, he was too weak. It spread through him, spread to his legs, to his knees, and he collapsed. Falling backwards, he felt his fiance catch his head just before it hit the ground. And as he looked up at her through the blur and ringing in his ears that was the world, he saw her still holding a syringe in his wrist. And he saw her let him go.
He was too weak to hold his head up the last few inches by now, and it fell painfully to the stone floor. His arm throbbed as the last of the liquid was injected; the needle had slipped around in his arm during the fall. He felt the men grab him and pull him up by the arms, until he was level with Janet, but he could not stand, for his legs were too weak. He tried to struggle, tried to shout, put all of his energy into it.
“Help,” he whispered hoarsely. “Oh God, somebody help me…”
“Hush, Cris.” Fires put her index finger over his mouth. She looked into his hazel eyes, sweet and innocent and afraid, like those of a cow in line at slaughterhouse. She could not see his right iris any more; it had drifted too far into his skull, and all that she could see in its socket was a veiny, white, pulsating orb. She leaned in to whisper in his ear. “This is all for your own good.” His eyes closed.
The woman stood, and acknowledged the servers. “You know what to do.”
They dragged the incapacitated man off into the dark. It had gone perfectly. The ring had served as a lie, a distraction. Tomorrow she would start her work. She looked out over the river. It was a beautiful night.

*   *   *

Present Day (Log 1, T-00:00:00)

“I discovered a wave. Well, two, actually. It was an accident. We… we were experimenting with particle waves because we wanted to study the orbitals; we wanted to watch the curve, watch the electron move slowly. And so we observed the atom under streams of particle waves, waves designed to make the atom become more clear under our microscope. We wanted to watch an electron. And so we sent the vibrations through the testing environment, and noticed something odd: we noticed the electron slowed. And yet within itself, it acted the same, as though physics had not realized its speed had been reduced to close to nothing. But that was only one of two frequencies we were testing. The other seemed to make the electron disappear. No matter how we zoomed in, or adjusted our machine, the electron was not there. But soon, we found it. It was moving rapidly, its speed increased tenfold, the whole atom positively convulsing with the speed. And yet, hardly a change could be observed in any of its properties. That is, aside from reactivity. The new atom did not react; it refused to deal with substances moving at a rate that was so dramatically different. We had found a way to move a particle separately from all else without affecting its self-contained properties; because of relativity, to the atom, the rest of the world was just moving abnormally slowly or quickly. And so the atom was in its own environment, and quite disobedient; it refused to acknowledge the existence of any of the things we had so carefully set up in the testing environment. In its world of Isolated relativity, it stood alone.
“The next step was to try our discoveries on larger atom groups; first tens, then thousands, then billions, then quintillions. We fiddled with the frequency, intensified it, observed the outcome, and soon the atom began to fade from visibility; entire atom groups seemed to disappear from existence. And yet, in their strange state, they seemed to react in a familiar way with each other; sped-up sodium still combusted in water that had been relatively increased by the same frequency; the same went for groups that had been slowed. You see, when a particle group is vibrating at the same frequency under this new wave, it will acknowledge anything at that frequency