Chapter 39:

Paradox

A Place between There and Now


- positional_data_report // error

- object_location-z_axis ≠ ground_mesh-z_axis

- set object_location-z_axis : ground_mesh-z_axis + 0.63 object_diameter

- positional_data_report // no errors found

- loading object

- booting #25

25 times? So many times, already? How time flies, I thought to myself.

I opened my eyes, I was lying in the middle of the snow. Only now did I notice the unbearable cold.

What was that just now? 25, where did I just pick that up? I tried to remember but I couldn't think of where I could have read it.

I stood up and zipped up my jacket. Shortly afterwards, however, I noticed that large parts of the inside of my jacket were wet from the snow.

It was still dark and I couldn’t see a thing. In my pain I grabbed my lighter which to my surprise still worked. I couldn’t feel the flame, but I was at least able to see again. The light the little flame emitted painted the snow in a dark almost non-visible orange.

But as I walked a few steps even that became pointless. The sky around me lit up, the snow now painted in a pure white and the shadows that the mountains before me created stretching over the entire valley as the sun slowly emerged behind them.

I put the lighter back into my pocket while marveling at the sunrise. The reflection in the snow blinded me but it didn’t change the beauty of the scene I was able to witness. Describing it wouldn’t do it justice but through all the bleak times that I spend most of the time writing about this far, this sunrise I could witness every, no, almost every morning was definitely a part of what kept me going.

I heard a sound and turned around. Something had landed in the snow next to me. It was a gray square. A battery box? No, it was finer, a smart phone?

My gaze wandered up hill from where the strange object must have come from. The first thing I noticed was that the avalanche dragged me downhill a few hundred meters and the concrete structure was a lot smaller. The second thing was where the object came from, a shadow stood on what I assumed to be a balcony just barely visible. He looked at me then vanished.

After waiting for a few seconds if he would come back and maybe throw something else, I turned around to finally see what it was he had thrown down.

It was a small metal box, inside a piece of paper, a bandage and what seemed to be a gun. I unraveled the piece of paper, it was my handwriting.

“No, it’s not a gun, it just looks like it. Shoot it in your left arm. You can thank me for the bandage later. Sorry”

I was wondering what the sorry meant, but honestly, I didn’t want to know it.

I took the gun out of the box, it was entirely made of plastic and due to that much lighter than I expected. I didn’t know how to operate it and as someone who had problems reloading a toy gun, I wasn’t planning on inspecting the thing.

I just followed the instructions and pressed the gun against my left arm. When I pulled the trigger, I was about 80% sure that it was an injection and about 90% sure that it wasn’t a real gun.

Luckily, I didn’t hear a bang and to my relief didn’t receive my first wound via a firearm. I pulled the gun away from my arm and threw it into the snow.

Even though it wasn’t a real firearm it still hurt. A drop of blood hit the snow, painting it in a deep red. Then another one, and another one.

I looked at my arm and began to think that it was a real firearm after all. A huge amount of blood was flowing from the wound, my pain was growing. Another drop hit the snow. I took the bandage and quickly wrapped it around my arm. Neither could I cut the bandage, nor did I know how many layers it needed to have. I just wrapped the whole thing around my arm. I got back up, and continued walking, or rather started it once again. The metal box with the gun and the latter I just left behind, I didn’t see a use for it anymore, and after all if there was a use for it my future self would have writen something about it on the note.

I walked for almost 5 hours until I finally reached the concrete structure, my destiny. My journey finally ended after, who would have guessed, two days.

But something was strange about the structure, simply said, it wasn’t built. There was no road, no other way to get up here or in other words no way to get the resources and equipment needed to built anything here. It also didn’t fit the terrain, like the bridge it looked like it was edited in. Not only that but it also looked… familiar. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I knew that something was off.

After a short walk I finally reached what seemed to be the entrance, a large gate that faced a cliff with no path leading to it. Next to the gate stood a small steel door with a sign on it.

“Trespassing prohibited - Employee-Chip (EC) Check left”

Unlike the other doors labeled “trespassing prohibited” this one actually was closed, and it seemed that without an EC I wouldn’t be able to get in. My shadow is in there, that means I would find a way to get in, I thought. I stepped to the device to the left, it looked like a hand drier, put my left arm in, and the door swung open. I stepped in, thinking that I just caused yet another paradox.

A paradox, something that is impossible, that can’t be, a problem with out a solution. Most people will either think of Back to the Future or the Grandfather-Paradox when hearing the word but in both cases, is there really no solution? I disagree, at least from my experience, and I know you can’t apply that to fiction but shut up, there are two solutions.

Solution 1: Creating information with out a source. If I kill my grandfather, I will become something without source. It’s kind of a stretch based on what happened this far, but this happened on multiple occasions if you remember, we are creating information out of nothing, for example I went to the mountain because I was told to go the mountain by a version of me that was told to go to the mountain. There is no source for that information, there must be some version of me that discovered the thing without getting that information and then gave it to a past version of itself, but we created a loop where there is no me without the information to go to the mountain, at least after that iteration of the day where I got the information.

Solution 2: Deleting information. This doesn’t happen, it’s pure fiction. It is the opposite to Solution 1, the thing that happens in our reality. When you kill your grandfather, you delete his information. This doesn’t cause a paradox, let me explain. Imagine that you program a cube moving acrose a screen. That action happen over a timespan, but you can delete the code for the entirety of that time. You just delete the timeline of one or two objects in a world made of what’s the closest thing to an infinite number of objects we know. The only difference is that there isn’t a simple script where now two roles are missing but an adaptive script, ever changing and evolving to every change you’re making. But because all changes are a part of the script you are never writing it, maybe you think you do, but you don’t so every paradox, every role deleted from the script was always planned. In the script with an infinite number of pages there is one that says that you caused “a paradox” and what happens after that is simply something that you can’t predict because it never happened, that doesn’t mean that you can’t understand it. It’s a role being deleted, not a person dying, but the removal of the existence of a being or object entirely. Funny thing being, if this would happen, you wouldn’t know, in our world this could be normal, something that happens every day, but because the existence of that thing is deleted, we will never know. Because what never was will never be remembered.

Sorry for this, I just wanted to write this down as a note, it might even be useful to you, I don’t remember, you will see.