Chapter 6
------------System ------------
Reset: 3,142,203
Timeline Branch: 0.017512
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Bethy's reply is the only thing keeping me grounded tonight. Not the fact that I'm walking alone in the dead hours. Not the part where I'm impersonating someone who shouldn't exist. And not even the possibility that what he said might actually be true.
Timekeepers don't die.
That's a lie.
Timekeepers do die—but not in the way normal consciousness does. We're separated from the timeline branches, existing and not existing at once, spread thin across every conceivable reality.
Normal consciousness—humans, animals—are bolted onto a singular branch. Every decision they make shifts that branch's course, but they can never break free from the Cantor's pull. No choice, no amount of probability, can escape the causality of the Cantor line.
We timekeepers don't choose where the branches go. We only observe. Many have tried otherwise—and they've all failed.
You can stab us, burn us, shoot us... but so long as we're tethered to the Cantor line, we exist. Paradoxically. We simply reappear in another timeline, intact—yet missing the memories of what came before. So There's an infinite me right now amongst the cantor line, yet I can't perceive every single timeline. Only this one.
I remember a story. A timekeeper fell in love with a mortal woman. He visited her often, mingled with her world. Worse, he initiated the interaction—something we're forbidden to do.
The Timelords warned him. The woman was supposed to meet an abrupt end—an essential event in that worldline. But he couldn't bring himself to let it happen.
Expected time of death, ETD. Stuttgart Germany. An unfortunate case of a drunk driver, a lot of what if's then. Knowing the outcome... knowing the cost... he changed it. The event failed. The worldline collapsed.
For that crime—even if he never truly had a choice—he was sentenced to a fate worse than death: an eternity of existing outside the Cantor's line.
He could still feel. Still see. Still smell. But it meant nothing. No time. No place. No reentry. Just the echo of what once was, stretching endlessly through non-being.
I stare at the broken ceiling light in my tiny New York apartment. The "view" they promised turned out to be a brick wall. I lie there, thinking.
Multiple timekeeper deaths…
[The Time Keeper database has inactive users in the recent cycle…
[Odelia Klein…Last ordered to investigate the ANTItime variant on the CX worldline]
[Foka Nikitin…Last known communication was screams]
[Yaropolk Solovev…Last--]
"Bethy. Stop" I begged
Gerald and I took this mission head-first, ignoring protocols, because this branch was ours. But if what he said is true…
Why were there other timekeepers here?
He knew about Gerald. Knew about our plan. Yet he calls it, his plan not me and Gerald's.
And something just irks me about his way of saying my name. I couldn't catch it properly, maybe I'm just going crazy
I chuckled. Such a well kept masked, know how the system works—too well in fact, that would make him a timekeeper like he said he was.. I think?
But Bethy was unable to find any kind of trace of him from the records so the anomaly?. What are you pale man?
I sat up on the bed grabbing the fissure device on the drawer, scanning the current branch
[Synched to anomaly's branched..]
Whether he's a Keeper gone rogue, or the anomaly in disguise… doesn't matter right now.
He wants to steer me off course.
That's all I need to know.
Bethy's voice cuts in again, quiet and frayed:
[Warning: Identity remains unverifiable. Threat potential remains high.]
[Proceed with mistrust.]
I nod to no one.
Already there.