Journal of Lin Siegen
The Journal of Lin Siegen
1. Introduction.
The events of my life have been extraordinary. It is a life that crosses thousands of worlds and millions of universes. A life that began in a shining utopia and may end in a diseased dystopia. No one else now living remembers what I have seen, so I write this record so that, if I should fail, a guide may be left to someone who comes after to fix the world and put the future back on its proper path.
2. My Early Life
I was born in the CE 955 and grew up on the space habitat High Everett at the L3 point. On my fifth birthday my father took me to Earth, still the heart of the vast galaxy spanning Ultima Utopia Union. I remember standing before the monument to the victims of the Last Revolution, when the much reviled United Nations tried to institute a tyrannical New World Order over humanity, and was resisted by the uprising of all free humanity. As I watched the two billion, fifty seven million, nine hundred and sixty six thousand, one hundred and one unique crystal flakes drift in their luminous substrate, commemorating the counted dead, my father turned to me, noticing my anguish.
“Yes Lin, the Last Revolution was a terrible thing. Many died. But remember that it was also the birth of the Utopia we know today. Remember that Lin. Sometimes the greatest good can come, even from times of greatest evil.”
3. I Gain Entry to the Butterfly Effect Center for Kinetic Exodimensional and Temporal Transit and Continue My Studies
[Here follows a great deal of information on spacio-temporal theory. The only interesting - or comprehensible - bits for anyone not a Physics PhD are some amusing anecdotes about how Siegen and his fellow students abused space and time travel for various college pranks, such as inserting themselves into the most embarrassing moments of their colleague’s lives. . .]
4. I Join The Continuum Watch and am Assigned to Timeline 7
[Graduating top of his class, Lin Siegen is recruited by the Continuum Watch, a sort of Space-Time Police, and assigned to the distant past of Timeline 7, where he sets himself up as a German theoretical physicist working at the Max Planck Physics Institute in Munich. From there he can monitor anomalous technical developments in this timeline, to prevent ‘Felonious Tech Transit,’ a practice of illegally selling future tech in the past for profit.]
[There is brief mention of a local woman, Gloria Holtz who Siegen married as a cover. Surprisingly little is written about her, with an equally brief mention of an unnamed baby son.]
5. The Chrono Cascade Event
[Lin Seigen describes an event triggered by invaders from Timeline 99 that shatters the timestream, then reconstructs in as one melange of a hundred different realities. He describes his one-man attack on a Timeline 99 ‘Chrono-colocation’ facility in Eidelstein, Germany that prevents them achieving total dominance over the timestream at a stroke, however he his too late to fully fix the space-time continuum. He then comes to realize that he alone is left from Timeline Prime. It falls to him to set the world back on track.]
6. Finding CROSSDOWN and the Zols
The realization that all Utopia Uptime was lost to me was a blow. Further probes revealed that the Timestream for several centuries bracketing the Chrono Cascade were also severely disrupted, with all trace of Continuum Watch activities erased.
With only one recourse left I was forced to take drastic measures. Chartering a flight to Antarctica I infiltrated the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Research Station. As I suspected the station had been taken over by 99s for the purposes of constructing a high energy Epochiometer. . .
[There follows a detailed description of this Epochiometer, a device cleverly disguised as a deep core sampler, but really intended to transpose the environmental effects of past geological epochs on the planet, thereby allowing largescale terraforming according to the plans of the 99ers.]
. . .Hijacking the device, I travelled through time. The transit was as rough as I had expected - the 99ers have only the crudest understanding of Time Travel and even with my modifications their devices are dangerous and unreliable - but on opening my eyes I beheld the smoky sun under the heavy prehistoric atmosphere, and heard the cries of a flock of passing Pterodactyls. My calculations had once again be accurate. I had returned to the Late Cretaceous, the era where the fallback crisis control station CROSSDOWN was stored. Of course I sabotaged the device in the process to ensure none could follow after.
[Lin Siegen describes travelling through prehistoric jungles before finding CROSSDOWN submerged in a stasis bubble deep beneath a lake swarming with Plesiosaurs and some unusual aquatic adapted guardians. He also describes meeting the Zols, caretakers of CROSSDOWN. Originally citizens of the Ultima Utopia left as caretakers for the station, they were on the verge of phasing out of existence entirely due to the destruction of their home reality. Lin Siegen stabilized them - though unfortunately in a much reduced mental capacity - and transferred them to robotic host bodies]
7. Tokomandilin
It was in the Cretaceous where I met the raven priest Tokomandilin. He was a resident of timeline 4, a reality in which the Europeans never came into contact with the Americas, or indeed any civilizations beyond European and Mediterranean regions. Tokomandilin worshipped an ancient Corvid deity, and believed many clearly fantastical things, including that we were actually within the bowels of a great Earth Spirit “Gaia,” rather than in the far past. He had come here seeking council from this imaginary “Gaia”, so he said, but I quickly realized that he was just putting a brave face on things, and had in fact been flung into the far past by the Chrono Cascade, an event which had shattered his tiny little mind. Taking him under my wing I promised to bring him back to his own timeline and eventually restore him to his proper timeline.
8. Grace Zirago
The Journey back to the Cascade Contemps time period proved difficult. CROSSDOWN was lacking in power, and without a significant source could not be moved. However I quickly discovered that the Chrono Cascade had left fissures in the timestream that could be used to jump forward in short hops from temporal fragment to fragment until reaching the key Cascade period.
[Lin Siegen proceeds to describe at length the complex procedure by which he did this, which ultimately sounds a bit like a cross between Sliders and Quantum Leap.]
. . .It was in an jump to France circa 1572 in a fragment invested by that we encountered Grace Zirigo. She called herself “Blazilla,” a truly ridiculous nickname, and was clearly quite mad. Of course since she had been hurled into Timeline 13 which is infested with creatures that can only be considered Vampires her madness is understandable. The poor woman has coped perhaps the best that could be expected. Certainly her assistance proved welcome. . .
[There follows a dry account of a harrowing chase through the catacombs of Paris while avoiding swarms of vampires before finding the fissure to the next temporal fragment in the hidden tomb of Jacques de Molay.]
9. Jack Mulder
It seems appropriate that we jumped from one templar to another. We emerged into the war torn cities of Timeline 21. A timeline similar to Timeline 7, but riven by deadly urban conflict due to overpopulation, shortages and social tensions. The fissure deposited the three of us into the middle of a firefight in Cape Town, between a gang of criminals, and a former policeman, in a South Africa torn apart by civil war.
It seems I am making a habit of collecting unbalanced individuals. Jack Mulder, who calls himself ‘The Executor,’ appears to be on a one-man crusade to avenge the death of his wife and child. As a policeman myself (albeit of a universal function rather than human beings) I cannot approve of vigilantism, however my own investigative acumen suggests that the true culprits in the murder of Mr. Mulder’s family are 99ers. His skill with weapons will be a useful addition to my own plans.
10. A Detour to Japan
Due to the antics of both Ms. Zirago and Mr. Mulder I was forced to exit Timeline 21 in an overly hasty manner. The additional load of four people rather than three, as per my initial calculations, did take us to Timeline 7, but lead to us falling back several decades in time, into the mid 19th century, while also displacing geographically to the Japanese archipelago.
Thankfully this time we emerged in relative peace, disturbing only the falling blossoms of a nearby cherry tree, and the musings of a matronly woman who named herself Izanagi Reiko. She seemed unsurprised to encounter us, speaking of destiny and future events in cryptic prose. [There follows several footnotes of the original Japanese, presented as Haikus].
Although Izanagi Reiko appeared not to recognize my Continuum Watch coded greeting my suspicions remain. She knew too much about my past, and spoke unnervingly of my future. Is she really ignorant of the Watch, or is there another power even further uptime of the Utopia which has seeded its own agents throughout time? I am unsure whether to find this fact comforting or disturbing.
Since neither Ms. Zirago or Mr. Mulder are subtle individuals I contrived to have them remain to guard the cherry tree while Tokomandilin (artfully disguised as a contemporaneous female religious practitioner) and myself proceeded out into this primitive land to seek the next fissure. It might perhaps have been best to also contrive a means to leave the raven in a tree somewhere, perhaps, as before we had travelled two villages Tokomandilin had managed to get herself into a duel with a wandering Samurai by the unlikely name of Saicho.
[Lin Siegen decribes the duel’s inconclusive result, whereupon Saicho recruits them to help him track down a corrupt an evil monk who masquerades as a man of good. In the process of this assistance they break into several castles and defeat local leaders possessed by evil forces, many of whom transform into cosmic horrors upon confrontation.]
11. The Null War
This was how I discovered the truth of the so-called demons. Despite local superstitions, the reality is reason for concern enough. They are in fact highly psychoactive parasites from a highly irresponsible bioweapons program, preying on the worst fears and impulses of humanity. There were always rumours in the Continuum Watch of a “Null Timeline” or Timeline 0 where all were forbidden to tread - a dark reflection of our Utopia. To have what I had assumed no more that Watch campfire tales confirmed for me was something of a shock. Accordingly I committed my small alliance to assist Saicho in rooting out this infestation before it could take hold in Timeline 7.
[Lin Siegen describes a cat and mouse game with a hidden master of evil who seems to always be one step ahead, including an encounter where the evil master nearly manages to kill Tokomandilin and Blazilla from ambush using a powerful magickal artifact, before fleeing through a gate to a realm known as Sasayama when the others intervene.]
It became clear to me that we were facing a master of concealment and deception - even in our battle with him he had artfully hidden his appearance. However, I calculated that such a man was also driven by the pursuit of power, and would never abandon so powerful a weapon as the sword he had used, so instead I devised a means to track that unique weapon.
As a mythological artifact, Totsuka-no-Tsurugi, certain temporal eddies had attached themselves to the sword. Correllating those to the spoor of corruption from the psychoactive parasite I conducted several tests using a requisitioned observatory at Norikura. The first provided a location in transtemporal space at [there follows a rather arcane set of co-ordinates] I initially assumed this to be the location of this ‘Sasayama,’ however we were then attacked by a horde of ninjas and forced to defend ourselves.
Once the attack was dealt with I resumed observation. It appeared that my initial figures had been in error, and accounting for Temporal parallax, we located Sasayama at [more arcane co-ordinates]. More importantly, observations also identified a powerful fusion source as well as a latent temporal fissure. According to my calculations, we could use this both to travel back to a time roughly contemporaneous with the Cascade Event, AND bring CROSSDOWN forward in time. A major step toward success was about to be taken.
[To Be Continued]