The Time Surgeons

The night was cold, its clammy fingers caressing his skin and reaching into his soul. He knew the night was no colder than any other, and that the chill lay in his soul not in the air. Or perhaps the climate system too was finally failing.

He knew he had little time remaining. His own parents had been gone many years now, and he would soon be following them into whatever night had already taken so many others before and after them. When he was young he had faced his life with fire and passion; knowing one day he would die, as all men died, but hoping that on that day he would look back on his life and feel the pride of a life well lived. As if some judge, be it the gods, the universe, or his own conscience, would pronounce the words ‘Well done!’ over his life, and thus give their sanction to his existence.

But somehow the years had passed into shadow and were gone, and he sat looking back at them unable to give them sanction, yet unable to see how he could have done better. Perhaps all who feel their end coming look back at their life and feel its sum. But whatever they feel, be it the flame of triumph or the ashes of defeat, have any come so close as me to the cusp between the two, and failed so utterly?

The work that stood before him was not his alone. Out of the many brilliant minds who had labored within the Egg, maybe someone could trace the paths that led to this final solution if they cared to try. Perhaps Baronak had been the key: certainly the condensation of the formulae into their essentials that glowed at him from the screen was his. But it did not matter. All that mattered was the solution.

And that it was too late.

Decades ago, in its last gasp humanity had built two precious Eggs and cast them into the future, hoping that one day those within would learn how to tunnel out of their shells onto a new world. Of the other one nothing had been heard since the Fury. At first they had hoped that it was merely a failure of communication, not unexpected. But as years had passed and turned into decades, and their own communication technology had improved, still no whisper had been heard, and they had long given up hope that it remained.

Perhaps it had, and those within it had escaped to their own destiny, unable or unwilling to communicate with this Egg, but still carrying humanity’s future with them to the stars. Or perhaps they still lived on, laboring as Baronak labored, living on a dying hope. But most likely they had perished and this Egg held all that was left of the human race.

And so his parents and their generation had carried the lone surviving Egg, the precious package now passed to Baronak and his generation in their turn. Their ancestors had done their best and could not have done better. But nobody knew all the details of what happened inside a supernova, or all the effects the hellish brew it emitted would have on a nearby planet or its biosphere. The other Egg had succumbed. This one had been damaged: not fatally, at first not even inconveniently. But the damage was done, and as the years went by both the delicate bodies inside and the systems keeping them alive decayed and degraded faster than hoped.

So now Baronak stared at the essence of the solution, hoping to feel hope while seeing in it nothing but doom. The solution was not what they had expected, and contained in itself the seeds of its own peculiar type of tragedy. It also held hope. But the twisting of spacetime was not without cost. Vast amounts of energy had to be concentrated to bully the laws of physics into giving up what they did not want to surrender. And the power plants were no longer capable of providing that amount of energy. They had done the experiments; calibrated the energies; refined the equations. Perhaps there were other solutions: better ones. If he were younger, with the brain he had as a youth, he might have found one. If the power plants were younger, perhaps they would have found the energy.

He looked at the mighty twin achievements, both mocking him for his and their own inadequacy. The equations, startling in their power, deadly in their effect: just scrawls on paper, with no agency to achieve either. The experimental apparatus, with its eldritch powers, backed by unimaginable energies: both no doubt would seem like magic to past generations, but were too close to death to reach either far or long.

He felt as at the end of a long relay race, where many had fallen along the way, yet the golden egg was still borne along its path. And now it was he who held it, and finally he could see the end of the race in the distance, but he no longer had the strength to finish. He would struggle until his lungs burned and his heart struggled for release, until he too fell, and this time there would be no others.

If only there was another to whom he could throw his precious egg, then he could collapse at last into peace. Not in victory, but at least knowing that someone else had shouldered the burden, so hope may yet live.

He sat still, held by that thought and his earlier one. There is not enough power for much, but perhaps there is power enough, if only I can find where to apply it. Perhaps I can find a place to stand, and move the Earth. But who can I find who might understand, and how can they even know they need to understand, in the time they will have?

Then for the first time that night he smiled, though he saw death in the equations. I just need the right time, the right circumstances, and the right frame of mind. And I think I know where to find them. I just need to remember. Remember my youth.