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2004 week continues. Yeah
---
I Am the Ouroboros [Koo-Koo-Key-Choo]
=====================================
[0]
Gibson settled into his chair, draining his glass and
looking down at his watch. 11:45. Fifteen minutes
before the end. Fifteen minutes before the beginning.
Fifteen minutes before he would have his revenge.
He looked at the snow globe in his hand, feeling its
weight, shaking it and watching the snow inside dance.
Across the base, it read 'Merry Christmas!' and, below
that, '2004'. He smiled. He'd bought the thing a
little while after killing himself, stumbling on it in
a dollar store and instantly knowing that it was the
one. It felt right in his hand, the way that it had
before.
[1]
He remembered now the days leading up to the crime,
the days after his wife had left him and taken their
daughter. After his sister had died, finally fading
away from the cancer that had eaten her from the
breasts out. After that bastard Waid had taken credit
for his work, building on Gibson's accomplishments to,
eventually, win the Nobel Prize. He remembered the
time after everything had seemed hopeless and the
world had sickened and soured into a strange, grey,
hostile sort of place. The year 2004.
He had been drinking that night. He'd been drinking
more and more heavily from the time things had started
to fall apart, his drinking occasionally punctuated by
half-hearted attempts at cleaning himself up. But he
*had* been drinking that night, more so than ever,
trying to obliterate himself, pounding at his own soul
to smithereens with each shot of vodka. It didn't
help. Nothing helped. No matter what he did, he
couldn't make himself go away, couldn't make that sick
loathing lessen even one little bit.
That's why he had broken into the lab and taken one of
the transmitters. To destroy himself. To meet himself
face to face so he could smash his own sickening face
right in. In that drunken fury, the idea had hit him
with an irresistible clarity. There had really been
nothing else he could have done.
Fumbling to attach the remote unit to his arm,
squinting drunkenly as he punched in the temporal
coordinates, he'd managed to finish off the bottle and
hurl it against the wall before the lab crackled and
bent and melted away entirely. He fell through the
fireworks/lava lamp void in which 'time' hung
suspended, trying not to vomit as his vodka-filled
guts felt like they were rising up around his ears.
Then he was there. In the future. The old man had been
sitting next to a fire, reading a book, obviously
startled by the sudden appearance of his younger self.
Gibson held back long enough to see the look of
recognition in his own aged face before drunkenly
lunging, clipping the elder Gibson's head good and
hard before falling to the ground. The old man flew
back, striking the mantle with a crack and pitching
forward, landing on the floor in a heap. Gibson was
not a violent man, but this violence had felt very,
very good.
Barely conscious of anything but the incredible wave
of hate carrying him along, Gibson rose, staggered
over to the fallen figure, kicking it brutally a dozen
times before picking up a heavy object (a snow globe)
from the mantle and bringing it down on the old man's
skull. Three. Fucking. Times. On the third impact,
both the man's skull and the object broke, and the
liquid exploded out of both and over him and he
dropped the shards still in his hand, staggering back,
almost falling.
Then it was over. The intense rush faded fast, and
consciousness ebbed away. He had time to vomit and
press the RETURN button on the remote unit before the
darkness claimed him. He felt nothing at all after
that.
The next morning, he had woken on the lab floor, his
hands cut, blood all over himself, a horrible dead
taste in his own mouth. It had taken him a few moments
for what he had done the previous night to come back
to him. When it did, he sat down on a chair and
covered his own mouth in horror. "Oh, God," Gibson had
said. He could think of nothing else to say.
[2]
For a few hours, there seemed little else to do but go
back and prevent himself from doing what he had done.
It was absolutely against every ethical guideline
imaginable, of course, but so had been drunkenly
killing an older version of himself in the future.
The more Gibson thought about it, however, the less
sure he was that he could or even should alter his own
history. For one thing, killing himself in the future
was not the same as, say, killing himself in the past.
There was no paradox. He hadn't broken the laws of
time so much as he had bent them.
Not only that, but the absolute viciousness of what he
had done began to dawn on him as well. He'd gotten
drunk and beaten an old man to death. To. Death. The
fact that the murder was also a suicide hardly seemed
to change anything; all it had done was to stop an
innocent from being killed. What if the time unit
hadn't worked? What then? Would he have wandered out
into the present and killed the first person he saw?
Would that have been the 'normal' chain of events?
No. What he had done could not be undone. It had been
a crime with its own built-in-punishment, guaranteeing
an instant death penalty for its perpetrator. The
first truly perfect crime.
In fact, there was only one thing missing:
self-defence. In any confrontation with himself, one
iteration of Gibson would die, so punishment would be
assured. But which Gibson should be the one? Gibson
the murderer? Or the future Gibson, the old man who
had been so horribly killed in his own home? What had
that harmless old man ever done to anyone? Should he
pay for the crime of what was, essentially, a totally
different man?
The moment Gibson had returned to the lab, he had
stopped being the young Gibson and started on his
journey to be the old one. The moment he'd come back,
the younger, murderous version had embarked on his own
journey, towards him, with only one goal in mind. The
young Gibson had gotten him once, and now he was
circling back to do it all over again. The next time,
the real Gibson would be ready.
[3]
The only thing from that night which had stayed in his
brain with any sort of clarity had been the date, and
he had spent the last forty years counting down the
days until it would come around again.
Before crossing out the little box on his calendar
which represented yesterday, he had written 'D minus
1,' feeling like a child on the night before some
black and apocalyptic Christmas. Gibson had waited so
very long, preparing himself for the confrontation,
that being this close to the defining event of his
life filled him with an indescribable swirl of
emotions. The weight he'd carried for all the years
had been heavy. It had made him...strange. Unpleasant.
Difficult to be around. It had come to define him to
such an extent that he honestly didn't know what its
resolution would feel like. If, indeed, the laws of
time let him feel anything at all.
Thinking about these things, Gibson had not slept at
all during the night before D-Day. He had just sat in
his favourite chair (THE chair, the one in which he
had been murdered), next to the fire, listening to
clock chime twelve times to ring in 'D zero'. Counting
down the minutes before one of him would die.
When the spacetime event finally happened, he honestly
felt relieved.
[4]
In front of him, where the chair had been the first
time around, the air bent and rippled, and there came
a sound from nowehere like a rusty bicycle chain
clacking. Gibson smiled and stood up, the snow globe
heavy in his hand. He looked at his watch, saw it was
midnight exactly.
"Right on time," he said. Smiling.
He saw the other Gibson appear, the man's young body
rippling oddly for a moment as the suture in spacetime
close up around him. The smell of vodka wafted over,
and he saw the young man totter unsteadily on his
feet. It was all the same as before, except for one
crucial difference. This time, the elder Gibson was
standing. Behind him.
"Fucker!" he barked, bringing the snow globe down on
his younger self's head, shattering the trinket with a
strength surprising for a man his age. Drunk and
unprepared, the intruded grunted and then crumpled,
hitting the ground immediately. "Ha!" said Gibson,
letting the remains of the globe drop beside the body.
"Got you THIS time, sucker!" He gave the man a swift
kick, eliciting a muffled groan.
Absently drying his hands on his shirt, feeling
younger than he had in years, the old man picked up
the fire poker and looked down at the invader from the
past. Blood covered the face, oozing down from the
wound in the hair to the features, across the high
brow and down the Roman nose. Not a bad looking kid,
all things considered. Yet another thing squandered.
Yet more youth, pissed away like it was nothing.
It occurred to him, as it had so many times in the
past, that killing himself like this would invalidate
everything that had happened to in the previous forty
years. It would almost certainly erase him, the aged
Gibson who had waited so long, from spacetime as well.
He would have, in essence, died long ago in the year
2004, and everything else, including what he was doing
now, would simply cease to have been. The thought gave
him pause.
Then he thought of the last time his daughter had
tried to talk to him. He remembered the look on her
face as he had told her to never visit his home again.
He thought of the mess her life was, the
undisciplined, unhappy, directionless excuse for an
existence she suffered through daily. He thought of
the failed relationships, the self-destructive
patterns which his beautiful little girl fell into
again and again and again. He thought of the pain she
obviously felt at being spurned, repeatedly, by her
father, the cold and aloof man who was her only
surviving parent. He remembered the men, his
daughter's lovers, all stern and harsh and
uncompromising, all so much like him.
He looked down at the creature at his feet, and felt
that old hatred, stronger than ever. "Your fault," he
said, raising the poker. "All your fault." He brought
it down, hard, on the prone Gibson's face, smashing
teeth and breaking bone. It felt as good as it had
felt before, all those years ago, and, again as
before, he brought the bludgeon down repeatedly until
the head (his head!) was just a filthy red pulp
smeared across the floor.
He grinned, licking his dry lips and trying to speak
through his wheezing. "Kill me...once, shame on...you.
Kill me...twice...shame on me!" It felt good to say
those words. He'd been waiting a long time to say
them.
Panting, feeling his overtaxed heart racing, he
straightened up and dropped the poker. It landed on
the rug with a thump. Gibson, still breathing heavily
and feeling light-headed, closed his eyes, waiting for
the paradox to come and sweep him away from it all. He
wondered if it would hurt. He wondered if he would
notice himself being erased.
He stayed that way for several moments, eyes screwed
shut, waiting for the end. It didn't come. Gibson
opened his eyes again. The body was still there. The
fire in the fireplace was still burning.
Just as he began to wonder what was wrong, the world
around him cracked, and the strange, sparkling,
glowing molasses-like stuff behind the visible world
began to flow into Gibson's study from beyond.
Everything it touched turned to something like brittle
glass which cracked under its own weight.
"Oh, shit," said Gibson, who was, after all, a
temporal physicist and knew exactly what was
happening. "I didn't mean for THAT to happen." He
looked around, helpless and dismayed. Then he looked
down at the broken corpse of the man he had been. "You
bastard. See what you've gone and made me do?"
A moment later, spacetime ruptured, destroying
everything that had ever been in a rain of cosmic lava
and a cloud of coloured glass.
Gibson did feel something. He felt surprise. Then he
felt nothing at all.
------------------------------------------------------
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sometime this year
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