“Get me out of here!” Rook’s helmet moved sideways as if he were trying to figure out the best direction to run.
Assuming his wings had been damaged, it didn’t look good for him. To the left stood the lake and aside from the copse of trees there wasn’t anywhere to run to and trees were occupied.
If that weren’t enough, Victor appeared to be having a hard time concentrating under Jaclyn’s assault because he wasn’t even teleporting himself out, much less Rook.
His purple beams flew randomly around, never hitting Jaclyn, but one hit me, heating my armor and knocking me sideways.
Rook screeched, a long sharp piece of metal extending from above his hand, the edges showing the same blurriness as Cassie’s sword.
He brought the blade down toward the side of my head, where it hit with a thunk instead of carving in. It was nice to know that my current anti-monomolecular blade protections worked.
I reached up, grabbed his arm, and rolled onto my back with all the strength I could manage.
It was enough to pull him over and hit the ground to my side, rolling onto his back—which made two of us for a second. I pushed myself up to my feet, showering him with sonic blasts as I aimed a punch at his left shoulder.
I connected.
Had he been unarmored, I’d have killed him, but in armor, I only bent the frame a little and damaged the joint at the top of the arm. That was what I’d been going for.
He had no way to move that arm, much less aim the weapon hanging under it.
He tried. The joint screeched and a whiff of smoke floated upward from it.
It wasn’t the only spot that smoked. Knowing that Rook studied Grandpa’s and my tech, I hadn’t tried the sonics at first, but having seen the damage from peppering Rook with boombots, I’d given it a shot. Whatever insulation against sound he created couldn’t be where it was supposed to be after that.
It wasn’t. The forearm that the boombot had destroyed smoked from the cracks and the hole where Rook’s prosthetic claw should have been.
Screaming at Victor, Rook tried to move his left side up enough to point the gun at something, probably me. I missed Rook’s exact words as I tried to respond.
As I bent over to flip him on his front, he disappeared in a blast of purple. Victor must have gotten himself together enough to teleport Rook out at least.
I did a quick once-over of the area to get a sense of the situation. Cassie had taken out at least five of the 17 henchrooks I’d seen in the air. It might have been more. Her gun had an impressive range. So she might have hit a few before they’d even left the trees.
More to the point, they’d retreated into the trees or at least they were trying to. A few had gotten far enough across the lake that the best they could do was fly low toward the direction they’d come from.
Also, of course, the guy Marcus had stripped of his armor, hadn’t stopped at the group of trees the (now visible) henchrooks had decided to hide behind. He was still running toward the far side of the lake.
That left our nearest opponent.
I turned toward where Jaclyn had been battering Victor against the ground. The ground looked worse than he did. Don’t get me wrong, he didn’t look good, but the ground had been beaten down more than a foot deep.
By contrast, while dirt covered every part of Victor’s body, he didn’t look hurt. He wasn’t smiling, and he cursed and spat out dirt every time Jaclyn smashed his body against the ground, but from the way he tried to protect his face with his arms and kick out of Jaclyn’s grasp with his legs, it was clear he had full movement.
If he could stand up to that, I wasn’t sure how I’d be able to help short of sending a killbot up his nose, mouth, or possibly butt. Marcus had the right idea when he went in through Victor’s nose, mouth, and eyes.
As I turned, Victor did the inevitable, teleporting away, reappearing close to the lake putting Marcus and Cassie between him and Jaclyn. Despite the dirt, I could see that he was beginning to glow a brighter shade of purple.
Marcus faced him, “I don’t know what you’re doing, but I’ve already killed you once today. I’ll do it again if I have to.”
Victor’s brow furrowed and he asked a reasonable question, “What?”
Nodding, Marcus said, “Yeah. That’s right. You’re going to be ordered to go to the moon in the past. I don’t know how far, but you were still there this morning when we got there. We freed you, but then you tried to kill us. Here’s the funny thing though. You asked us to kill you—probably because you’re controlled by the Dominators and couldn’t face going back and being controlled forever.”
The purple glow faded and Victor’s jaw dropped, and he said, “No…”
“Wait,” Marcus said, “did you already get that order? Because if you did, it doesn’t go well. You can go to the moon and see your body if you want.”
In a flash of purple, Victor disappeared.
Marcus glanced at me, “I hope I didn’t just destroy the space-time continuum.”
Messing with time travel, even indirectly, has consequences. Of course, that depends on the story’s model of how time travel works.
Note: I’ve been posting at reasonable time of night recently. Don’t get comfortable. That could change.
https://topwebfiction.com/listings/the-legion-of-nothing
I always find it annoying when time travel allows the traveller to change their own personal past. If someone can physically travel to the future, that destination must already exist, so any change you would have done to yourself in the future would have been the case since the beginning of time.
So time travel paradoxes are metaphysically impossible. The timelines in which they would happen can’t exist.
I can think of two (or three, depending on how you count the variants of option 1) possible resolutions:
Parallel Universes: Either “time travel” actually involves going to a different timeline entirely (and you can only go back to your own timeline to a point after you left it) or the act of traveling back in time splits off a new timeline. In either case, the Victor that Marcus killed was from a different timeline from this one, and his interference may cause this timeline’s Victor from taking the same path. GURPS’ Infinite Worlds setting uses the former approach (and calls an identical world at a different point in time an “Echo”). The webcomic Magellan uses the latter (although in the current story arc – if it ever resumes – they appear to have managed to do a sort of time travel without causing the branch-off, with several characters’ minds traveling back a few hours to inhabit their bodies; this was an extremely special case, however).
Maintained History: I think Donnie Darko suggests this. Going back in time doesn’t change anything that happened before – for the time traveler, that all still happened – it just kinda resets the state of the rest of the world. This is probably the simplest one to manage. It’s also how Chrono Trigger’s time travel seems to work.
Forgot to mention, sometimes Maintained History can have a “memory merge” built into it, where the time traveler winds up with memories both from their original timeline and the new one. This is generally the case if they make the change then come back to their own time. Butterfly Effect used this variant. An easier one, which you find in a lot of “Hero gets a second chance” stories, is when the character basically takes over their own body from the past permanently.
Well, we already know there are “infinite variations” in the Legion-verse, because of Infinite City, with multiple parallel world variations of any given person. So we actually already know that there are at least 2 Victors — the one that Marcus killed, and the one that Marcus forewarned just now. The fact that both can exist at the same point in time in the same 3-D space means there must be more than one.
The problem with a “fixed time causality” loop is that it excludes the idea of free will. However, where there’s a time-space with infinite variations (which is a 5-dimensional matrix), free will is still reasonable, with any given “you” at any given moment being the culmination of all your decisions up to that point, placing you at specific coordinates (x, y, z, t, v) in that 5-D continuum. And every future decision you make moves you to another point in that matrix. And since there is an infinite number of points in any given bounded matrix (because the set of Real numbers is infinite), there is no conflict.
Or something like that.
Hg
Well, even completely deterministic universe isn’t mutually exclusive with free will. Your will is just the result of applying physical laws to the structure of your brain. It’s still your brain doing the decisions, no matter how non-deterministic the machinery actually is. The original meaning of free will is that it’s free from God’s influence, i.e. it’s all you, all the time. It’s a way to try make “a good God” compatible with “a bad world”, not a metaphysical statement that your will is magic that can do literally anything.
Besides, time can seem fixed from a time-traveller’s perspective even when the actual universe is non-deterministic. Then there’s just infinite variations of the time-traveller each seeing a self-consistent timeline.
And I’m personally not comfortable with the concept of time travel that can overwrite the entire universe. That’s just a doomsday weapon.
Marvel has always used the parallel universe theory. I think the first time was in Marvel Two in One #50 where Thing goes back in time to give his newly transformed self a cure that wouldn’t work on his current evolution and when he returned he was still The Thing. Decades later it was touched on again in an issue of Fantastic Four (don’t remember the issue) where Sue Storm died because of Johnny’s carelessness so he traveled back to save her and sacrificed himself to make sure she lived. Richards went in professor mode and talked how it was a shame that he didn’t realize it wouldn’t bring back his own sister in their reality and Johnny corrected him saying Reed was wrong and that he knew exactly what he was doing because that’s what he would have done himself. A very poignant story.
Wouldn’t it be funny if the only order that Victor got to go to the moon was the one that Marcus just gave him?
It would be ironic to have to fight someone only because you told him he’d have to fight you in the past.
I like this!