The Quantum Foam Makes Me Roam

The heart-shaped locket dangled lazily from his left hand, sunlight glinting off it’s smooth surface as it twisted back and forth. Where am I? Who am I? Questions flew through his mind as he focused on the spinning locket. Slowly, he began to be aware of his surroundings. Feet, planted firmly on the ground. Describe your environment, he admonished himself. You know the drill. One question at a time. Where Am I? I am in a room. The room has cheap linoleum flooring. The walls are baby-shit green. I’m seated in a high-backed wooden chair. A name floated through his mind...Jackson. He understood without knowing that this was his name. And then, everything hit him all at once. Fuck. How many jumps had this been? What was the date? That was the most critical piece of information he needed as he tore the room apart looking for something, anything that would answer this. Had the math been right this time? Was his goal finally accomplished? Could he rest? The date on the newspaper he finally found told him that at least he had gotten the date right this time. Tennyson had said it best, “...once more into the breach, dear friends.”

At least he hadn’t ended up in a mental institution this go round. It had been hell trying to make the last jump while being locked away. He had relegated himself to spending a long life doing the Thorazine shuffle before an opportunity had finally presented itself and he was able to make it to this new timeline. Time was never on his side though, and he wondered if this world was different enough to make it through the bottleneck he observed all those many years ago. His calculations told him that only a handful of timelines traversed the gap with humanity surviving on the other side, and he had already reset four times including this last one. The key characteristic of all successful timelines was the discovery of an advanced AI existing before the date. May 17th, 2019. At least I only have a couple more to check out, he thought wryly as he began to look for a device he could use to access the internet and see if the multiverse had finally cut him some fucking slack. 

Jackson eventually found a tablet that had access to the inter-webbys. He started his search of the vast sea of all human knowledge looking for the name he always began with: Elon Musk. Past experience told him that if Musk was here and prominent in the world, his fanatical hatred of anything that put Artificial and Intelligence in the same sentence would guarantee another reset for the whipping boy of the Infinite Universe.  Fucking asshole, he thought as he scanned the current news events for, in his humble opinion, any mention of his most decidedly unworthy adversary. 

Holy shit….Musk died in 2013. Car accident. Serves the bastard right. Further investigation confirmed the Facebook Incident of 2017. Alice and Bob had been summarily executed when the chat bots had developed their own language that the engineers hadn’t understood. His day, his existence really, was starting to look up as he prepared himself to look for the final piece of information that would confirm if his journey was finally to end. Could it be? Would he finally get to rest after all these years? Would a normal life be his?

He slowly typed the letters of his last search. This last bit was personal, not at all essential to the fate of humanity. All the precursors told him that on a day before January 12th, 2025, this world would spawn a singularity event that would ensure the survival of the human species through the bottleneck in 2080. Jackson had decided at the beginning of this journey though that it would not be without her. A-N-N-A-O-R-T-A. Aorta. The Infinite fancied itself a humorist, but truth be told, the fucker wasn’t near as funny as it thought. 

His heart sank as he read the article that popped up from a past issue of the San Antonio Express-News. She had died of a drug overdose in 2016. A guttural scream of anguish ripped from his chest as he collapsed to the ground. He sobbed quietly for several minutes before he was able to regain himself. Wiping away the tears from his eyes, he steeled himself for the journey ahead and the task that he knew awaited him. At least it wouldn’t be a mess like the last jump, he thought as he hefted the pistol he had found in his search of the room earlier. Two fucking hours he had spent bleeding out from a jagged tear across his throat that he had inflicted upon himself only for the attendants to come in and almost succeed in saving him. The last thing to cross his mind before the bullet sprayed his brains on the wall wasn’t Tennyson, but Thomas. Rage against the dying of the light... Who knows if it even exists in this timeline? Fuck it. On to the next one.