Hence the observers were arranged so that every photon attempting to pass through the sphere would be intercepted. The photons from the outside world were, of course, blocked out, and the region of space inside the sphere was scrubbed of wayward photons as best as possible. Each observer will send out a high-energy photon—energized many, many orders of magnitude higher than even the limit of what was thought to be theoretically possible in your day—that will pass through the specifically optimized material of the artificial planet and through the pod to reflect off of me, and thence it will go through the pod and the planet again to complete two radii of the imaginary sphere and be collected by other observers; I will therefore be indirectly detectable as an obstruction by the intended observers directly opposite of the emitting observers, and, as mentioned, I will be incidentally detected by other observers as I systematically reflect each photon according to my instantaneous orientation (the observers will be in constant and immediate communication on their own network via applications of quantum entanglement).
Being a spinning point I will have a tangential velocity, v, which, with help from the metric expansion, will be greater than c for an observer whose bombarding photon is collinear to my tangent at the instant of contact. The observer, in this instance, will not detect the reflection—nor will it receive indication that the signal has been picked up by another observer—and it will thus conclude that I have disappeared; this is what would be considered a successful observation. If only a few observers are simultaneously successful, then the other observers will continue to corroborate my existence—there will merely be some disagreement among the observers about an event in the recent past. Suppose, however, that all observers agreed on v>c, and that the symphony of successful observations were to persist long enough to account for the fact that the notion of simultaneity is not very well defined when the effects of relativity are at the forefront. If literally every single photon bouncing off me was redshifted beyond the brink of total darkness, if there was an artificial light horizon around me and all photons proclaiming my existence were simultaneously wiped from the ledger, then all of the observers will be forced to agree that I'm simply not there.
Chapter 59
I had to visit the blue planet before I could go through the time machine. It was totally black now, and there were no more oceans. The oxygen had burned up and the vaporized water had escaped the planet long ago, along with much of the rest of the atmosphere. It was quite like the lunar surface: dead, barren, and covered in craters. There was no living thing on this planet.
And then I woke up and remembered that the blue planet didn't even exist at all anymore, that it had been snuffed out by Sol so long ago. I looked out the window at the trans-humans that were working on the time machine project and I didn't know any of their names or any of their features and I had no home.
Chapter 60
They set me into an incinerator and it burned for a few minutes, and then all of the air and ash was sucked out. Then they took me to the machine.
As I walked my final walk I was thinking about the various potential consequences of time travel, and it was then that I could finally see that I was wrong. I was wrong all along. I was not forged out of the heat of the young, tiny universe; there was indeed no way to create me or annihilate me. I actually owed my existence to my own actions, that is, the act of going through the time machine and creating my own existence in the past. And, of course, my timeline was no line at all—it was a circle. I should say that it was a circle for me since I will carry with me my memories through the time machine, but it was a line segment with two dead ends for some omnipresent observer since he would see me come into existence out of nowhere with memories of things that hadn't happened yet and then later exit existence by way of the time machine. I will go through the dead end of the circle and then I will drift aimlessly through space until I plummet to Earth, an event that would be all but impossible if it hadn't already happened, falling head over heels into the bootstrap paradox—a strange occurrence made possible only because of my immunity to entropy.
And so now I suppose you're anticipating the cliché ending. Perhaps I will step into the machine and everything will turn black for some reason, and then there will be a chill in my heart and a burden of pressure on my eyes like a weeping sensation, and then I'll feel like I was drowning, and I'll reach out with my hands and feel Padempire in front of me.
No. I've spent billions of your human lifetimes out of that vault, and I will never again wake up in the darkness. So much time has passed now that even the thirty million years wasted in between Andromeda and the Milky Way Galaxy could not be thought of as significant. This was all real. It was as real as the instruments of death that I used back in the days when I was a magician, except this time, for the first time ever, the magic trick itself would be real.
Goodbye, Starla. I stepped into the pod, they sealed me in, the acceleration began, and my field of vision shrank into a pinpoint. And then it happened, and I saw a world full of stars again.
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