Helen Chapter 2: The loop

Filed: Helen @ 5:13am on September 21, 2010 No comments yet! :(   Word Count: 1,589
This entry is part 2 of 3 in the series Helen

“How did you bring me here then ?”

“Listen to me Helen, I have a time machine. That means that I can go at any point in time.”

“Then you can return me home ?”

“Sure, and that’s what I’ll do once you decide to leave. I may have brought you here without asking you first, but I’ll bring you home if you really don’t want to stay. You’ll see, you’ll get used to it and choose to stay”

“What makes you think I’ll stay ?”

“It’s easy. You’re standing in front of me.”

“I don’t understand”

“I have a time machine Helen, think about it…”

“You keep saying that ! I don’t see how that applies !”

“When I drugged you last night at my apartment, I waited 2 hours before bringing you here to give me time to come back from the future and tell me to let you go. I didn’t. That means you eventually said yes to my proposition and decided to stay. Had you decided to leave, I would have gone back in time and told myself to never bring you here at all and your time spent in his place would vanish.”

“Doesn’t that create a paradox or something ?”

“In movies yes, but I’ve discovered it doesn’t do so in real life for some reason. Not that I was able to test it scientifically a lot, I haven’t shared my discovery with anyone and I don’t plan to”.

“You’ve invented it ?”

“I built it by accident. I am not even sure I would be able to replicate it. I was building a de-ionizer. A machine capable to reducing the ionization of anything that passed through a big loop. However, once I powered it, anything that went thought it disappeared. If it wasn’t fully in, I could pull it out, but as soon as I dropped it on the other side, it was lost. I tied a video camera to a bit stick to film the other side only to discover it was still my lab with everything I had dropped on the floor where it was supposed to be.

I thought it was perhaps in another dimension until a few days later, all of the things started to magically drop from my loop in the same order I had dropped them. I quickly realized that everything that I had put in on one side exited on the other side exactly 4 days, 3 hours and 22 minutes later, give or take a few seconds.

I waited until a moment I knew I had gone away from my lab 4 days earlier and I reinserted my camera from the other side. I was able to film what was going on in my lab 4 days before. If I put my camera from the front, I got 4 days and 3 hours into the future. If I entered it from the back, I got 4 days and 3 hours into the past.”

“That’s amazing…”

“Yes, that’s what I thought ! I had a time machine which allowed me to move objects 4 days and 3 hours to the future or the past. I of course bought lottery tickets, but soon enough, I tested it on animals and discovered I could also go through it without any problems. It was a full portal”

“But only 4 days in each direction ?”

“Ha, but that’s the beauty of it… Now that I travel in it, I was able to go way into the future. I would enter from the front and exit 4 days into the future from the back. Then, when I repeated the process, I was 8 days into the future. I couldn’t go back into the past because the device didn’t work then, but the future was wide open. It was long and tiresome, but I realized I could go years into the future and talk to me about my mistakes in order to erase them. I simply made sure to note them down and avoid them to bring my perfect future. As long as I myself kept notes of changes I was making, there was no paradox.

But 4 days meant a lot of steps. I didn’t want to break my magical device in the present, so I told my future self to modify it in a certain way and come back to tell me the results. If they did come back, the change worked. If they didn’t, I would go back to the moment I explained the plan to myself and tell me to use another plan. After several changed futures and weird conferences with over 30 copies of me from various alternate time lines, one of my future me managed to build a device which allowed us to change the ratio at will. I still couldn’t go back before the device existed, but to move to the future, I needed to protect the device at all costs.

You see, if someone ever found it, they could go back to the beginning and kill me, taking control over it. That’s when we added the genetic lock to ensure that only me could operate it. You could still exit through any loop in time, but to enter it, I had to unlock the lock first. Took some advanced technology, but then again, I had a time machine. Once I had the technology, I went back to the first minute it came online and I added it, therefore protecting the device from ever being stolen.

I discovered that in the year 5124, there is a major war which bring the world back to the stone age. I tried everything I could to protect my portal but something always went wrong. Always. I couldn’t travel further into the future, and I was powerless to stop the war.

So, I did everything I could to send my time machine on a rocket to find another habitable planet. Having a time machine made it really easy. I would give a destination to my rocket and then zip across the future until it arrived. If it didn’t crash and if I found a habitable planet, perfect. Otherwise, go back in time and change the destination. I eventually found only this little gem of a planet. Ice cold, but full of oxygen. I slowly built a city here, importing the material thru the portal, working with several copies of me from various past times. Sometimes, there would be hundreds of me working at a time.

But the best of the best was that even if I prevented one of my copies from coming here, the work they did still remained done. It was brilliant ! Science-fiction never anticipated it.”

“Wow. So even if I kill you, this remains in place ?”

“Yes, but you wouldn’t be able to leave, because the loop is locked. I need to be alive to unlock it. You and all of my other guests would die of hunger after a few days.”

“So, if I stay, what am I supposed to do ?”

“Have fun most of the time, and do a little work. If you want to work on a garden, one of the other girls will show you how. You could also cook, clean up, help with the decoration”

“That’s all ?”

“Well, this is my harem. Eventually, if you want to stay, you’ll need to have sex with me. But I don’t want to rush you. Since I am the only man on the planet, most of the girls fight to get my attention, some prefer to avoid me, I might even forget about you”

“That’s flattering… how many women are there around here ?”

“I usually keep roughly 50 women from different time periods. You’re one of the rare from my own time. You’ll get to know about the future by talking with your other friends. They’ll get to learn about the past. They all wanted to hear about my own time period and you’ll be able to give them another perspective.”

“Won’t I be able to change the future when I get back ?”

“No, because you are not coming back home. A least, not you. That’s the best part of it !”

“What do you mean ?”

“When you are done here, I’ll go back in time to the moment of your arrival, and return you home to roughly 5 minutes after you left. You will have only visited this planet for a few minutes, but because of the weird way time changes actually propagate, you will still be here for the entire time. Weird isn’t ?”

“So, I will both return home on the same night and stay to be your slave ?”

“Yeap. If you want. Because I could return you right now by preventing you from coming here. But we would still have this conversation, and the woman who waved at you would still see you”

“This is really overwhelming. And is every girl naked ?”

“At all time. It’s my harem, and I liked to keep you naked. Well, there’s one additional thing. Everyone just stays here for 2 years. In 2 years, if you want to stay for longer, you’ll just return to the day of your arrival and continue as normal. I just add a tattoo somewhere on your body to mark which one of you, you are”

“What do you mean ?”

“Helen, the woman who waved at you from the garden, is you. From a future iteration. You are my girl who went through the most iterations. There are 4 other copies of you around the compound somewhere. You’ll get to meet them and they’ll tell you why you should stay. Don’t take my word for it. Just take yours”

Series Navigation«Helen Chapter 1: Waking UpHelen Chapter 3: Meeting myself»

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