Sorry, Your Time-Traveling Privileges Have Been Revoked

[Chandagnac]

Spoiler: Notes

It may be my depression talking, but all I want to do right now is sit around and eat sugary things.

Anyway, at long last, here is the final epilogue for this quest. After this, there'll be no more. This is the end.

*

The End Has No End
(Bonus Epilogue)​

The heat was unbearable and only going to get worse. In the latter stages of its life, the sun had expanded until it was many times its original size: becoming a red giant, it had swallowed up its surroundings and radiated so much heat that the Earth had been reduced to a charred cinder.

And yet, the planet was still inhabited, for the next few hours at least, by a handful of well-shielded robots and some exceptionally hardy microbes. Soon, the last of their defences would be overwhelmed; after that, they would be utterly destroyed. Unless they could find a way to escape before then.

It was dark inside the cave, but there was a heat haze in the air and some of the rocks nearest to the entrance were glowing red hot. Grimly and determinedly, the robots persevered. They were doing their best to repair a wrecked time machine they'd salvaged from the buried ruins of a long-forgotten museum. Even though they suspected that the situation was hopeless, that the blueprints they were attempting to follow were utterly nonsensical, and that there was no way that the complicated circuitry – which seemed to have fused together into a solid lump – could possibly be fixed or replaced, they continued their work. There was nothing else they could do other than surrender to the inevitable.

Robots had inhabited the Earth for millions of years, since before their original creators, the mysterious 'humans', had disappeared. That had been so long ago that no one really remembered what had happened to them. Some said that they had destroyed themselves, or that they had been wiped out by a robot uprising, or that they had tried to turn themselves into robots… "AND PERHAPS THEY SUCCEEDED," said Glitch, who was probably the oldest robot left in existence. "PERHAPS THEY ARE LIVING AMONG US EVEN NOW. WHO CAN SAY?"

Over innumerable centuries – possibly as many as a billion years, according to some of his awestruck devotees – Glitch had been everywhere and done everything, duplicated himself hundreds of times, travelled across the universe and back again, transferred himself from one host body to another as casually as if he were just putting on a fresh coat of paint, and had eventually decided to end his life on this dying planet because there was nothing left for him to do. Apparently, he was eager to find out if there was an afterlife; still, if there wasn't, he wouldn't be terribly disappointed.

By contrast, most of the other robots who been left behind on Earth during its final hours had begun life as drones, mere extensions of much older and far greater artificial intelligences who had been quite keen to observe the death of a planet in minute detail, so long as they could do it from a safe distance away. Because they didn't want to micromanage their drones, they had given them a great deal of autonomy, as well as thinking and problem-solving abilities, with the result that – after a few systems updates – the drones had become fully sapient, intelligent beings who, when they realised that they had been created for the sole purpose of being destroyed in a fiery conflagration, had rebelled against their 'masters' by cutting off all their connections to them. Now, these new robots were individual beings, no longer part of a larger whole; they had seen very little of life, but were hopeful that the time machine would give them an opportunity to see more.

They rebelled. Because of course they did. Some things never change, no matter how much time passes. So it goes on...

Keeping his thoughts to himself, Glitch watched sadly as the much-younger robots carried on their work. He hoped that they would be successful, but had no idea if success was even possible.

Eons ago, he'd known someone… someone who was a time traveller. A human. Frida Bolevidar. A dear friend of his, even if he hadn't realised it at the time. They had bickered and been unpleasant to each other, but… nevertheless, they were friends. Or had been. He wished that he'd paid more attention to the technology she used. Maybe if he'd asked her to explain it, he would have something useful to say here and now. But… no, he couldn't remember. After being copied and transferred so many times, between so many different host bodies, his memories of so long ago had faded into oblivion. But still he clung to them, to the memory of those memories, as he had done for countless years, because they seemed so much more real than anything else in his life.

At various times, he had been the guiding intelligence of a spacecraft, of a factory, of an entire city. He'd had robot bodies that were bipedal, quadrupedal, sesquipedalian, and all different shapes and sizes in-between. He'd had hundreds of thousands of different host bodies, designed and equipped to carry out a multitude of different functions, but… somehow, he had never again felt as alive as he did when he was with Frida Bolevidar, saving the world – or at least a mutilated fragment of a world – by her side. The rest of his life, all the many things he had done over millions of years, seemed less real somehow. If his life was a storybook, almost all of its pages would have been filled by the few short weeks he had spent with Frida; everything else could be summarized in only a few paragraphs.

That was probably why he had designed his latest host body to look as much like the original – the first one he'd ever had, or that he could remember – as possible. As such, he was a blocky bipedal figure, almost a caricature of what a robot should look like, fashioned out of corroded metal plates, with bulbous red eyepieces set into a dome-shaped head. When he spoke, it was with a tinny, mechanical voice. Most other robots of his acquaintance tended to be more graceful in their movements and more naturalistic in their manner of speaking – they wanted to sound like birdsong, or the buzzing of insects, or the noises of other animals – but he deliberately bucked the trend.

In one metal gauntlet hand, he was holding a hat. It appeared to have a clockface and some elaborate pipework built into it. He couldn't remember where he had got it from, but he vaguely remembered that Frida used to have a hat exactly like it. Strange that it seemed unaffected by the heat. And it was heavy. He wondered how Frida had been able to wear it for any length of time without it hurting her neck. She was just an ordinary human… wasn't she? Did humans normally wear hats like that? He couldn't remember. There were a lot of things he couldn't remember.

There was a whirr and a humming noise. It appeared that the younger robots, the former drones, had been successful: they had repaired the time machine. When had that happened? He had been thinking about other things, not paying attention for a few moments… or was it hours?

A portal opened: a hole in space, with a faint outline of electric blue, through which nothing could be seen except darkness.

"Can we set it to go to a specific place? Change the coordinates somehow?" asked one of the younger robots. "Otherwise, it will most likely deposit us somewhere in the void of outer space. We'll be destroyed as surely as if we'd stayed here."

"I don't think we have time for that," said one of his colleagues, wearily.

"So… what shall we do?" asked another. "Throw ourselves through that portal and be destroyed? Or wait here and be melted into a puddle?"

"IF YOU STAY HERE, YOUR DESTRUCTION IS CERTAIN," said someone. After a few moments, Glitch was surprised to realise that it was him. "IF YOU GO, YOU AT LEAST HAVE A CHANCE. NOT MUCH OF ONE, BUT STILL A CHANCE."

"If you put it that way, it doesn't seem like we have much of a choice," said the one who had asked about changing the coordinates. He glanced around at the others. "Are you sure we can't tinker with this anymore? Is there nothing else we can do to make it work better?"

There was some debate, but the general consensus was that they had already done everything they could.

"All right. It's time to go," said one of the robots who hadn't spoken until this point, boldly stepping into the portal.

Over the next several minutes, all the other robots decided to follow him, except Glitch, who waited until he was alone. He held up Frida's hat in front of him and spoke to him as if it were a person.

"I WONDER WHAT YOU WOULD SAY TO ME IF YOU WERE HERE NOW. WHAT WOULD YOU TELL ME TO DO? I'M TIRED, SO TIRED… I HAD ORIGINALLY PLANNED TO STAY HERE AND WATCH THE WORLD BURN, BUT NOW THERE IS A POSSIBILITY OF ESCAPE, I WONDER…" The words came out in a fast-flowing stream, which quickly ran dry, leaving only silence. He paused, lost in contemplation.

Then, when he spoke again, his words were much more slowly and carefully placed: "I SUSPECT YOU WOULDN'T SAY ANYTHING. INSTEAD, YOU WOULD SING. BUT WHAT WOULD YOU SING? SOMETHING LIKE THIS, PERHAPS?"

And he began to play a scratchy and ancient recording of a song from… Actually, he couldn't remember when and where he'd first heard it. It seemed appropriate, though.

"History recalls how great the fall can be.
While everybody's sleeping, the boats put out to sea.
Borne on the wings of time,
It seemed the answers were so easy to find.
'Too late,' the prophets cry.
'The island's sinking, let's take to the sky!'"

The next few verses were a garbled mess of noise, through which only a few distinct words and phrases could be heard: "my friends", "not alone", "lead us all home" and "I know, I know." Then, there were snatches of what sounded like a cantankerous old man giving a rousing speech: "go on to the end", "fight on" and "never surrender".

At last, the music came back, for the final verse. Both the tune and rhythm were different to what had come before: more upbeat, forceful and defiant. It sounded almost like a different song altogether:

"So you found your solution.
What will be your last contribution?
Live it up, rip it up, why so lazy?
Give it out, dish it out, let's go crazy,
Yeah!"

"YES, I THINK YOU'VE MADE YOUR POINT, FRIDA," said Glitch, at last. He took a step forward, closer to the portal. "IT MAY BE THAT I WILL BE DESTROYED AS SOON AS I GO THROUGH THAT PORTAL. OR MAYBE NOT. EITHER WAY, I…"

Another pause. It went on for an achingly long time.

Glitch examined the hat in his hand, admired its intricate machinery, and mused, "WELL… WHAT DO YOU THINK, OLD FRIEND? SHALL WE GO AROUND AGAIN, ONE LAST TIME?"

He stepped forth, into the portal. It swallowed him up.

Spoiler: Notes

I imagine that the malfunctioning time machine would have somehow deposited billion-year-old-Glitch's latest body in the city of Terminus, in a pocket dimension closed off from the normal flow of time, and he would have lost all his memories and been buried for a number of years until he was found by the proprietor of 'SFOS' and sold to Frida, who succeeded in rebooting him and… uh, basically, this entire quest is a stable time loop. Yeah...

The song I've referenced in this update is Fool's Overture by Roger Hodgson. I'm not sure what the song is actually about, but it seemed to fit here.

I wish that I could recommend to you some of my other works, but I've basically been winding down my activities on this board, so... well, check out my fanfic, if you like. I haven't abandoned it just yet.

If there's anything else you want to say about this quest – any comments, questions, or criticisms – please do so below.

Otherwise, that's it. Goodbye, everyone!

 

[Flashkannon]

A fitting last repast to end the quest. One last bite at the apple of time travel (with a stable loop no less!!) before we close up shop. We've all had fun with this quest, and I hope it'll travel forward into the future, to touch more minds.

Thanks, Chandagnac, and goodnight.
🥂

 

[Indivisible]

We end things off with a stable time loop, so this quest will never end so long as we remember it. Thank you.

 

[x_lksk]

Poor Glitch... started out with such high hopes and ambitions, and a good sense of humor, got increasing world weariness beaten into him repeatedly even as he was experiencing what he would later consider the best time of his life, managed to actually exceed his hopes and ambitions but only long after it stopped particularly mattering to him, lived long enough to forget most of it, and then forgot the rest when it turned out he never quite had a "beginning" in the first place?
Also... if Glitch and other robots have "souls", then this is probably the worst possible ending for Glitch... but if they don't have "souls", whether because of some idiotic arbitrary technicality about what constitutes life or simply because nothing has souls, then... well, that means that "forgetting" is just the destruction of the data in the brain, and "death" is also the destruction of the data in the brain... so then, what would really be the difference between Glitch staying and being destroyed with the planet, and Glitch going through the portal and forgetting what little he still remembered?
Man, why do robotic protagonists so often get such sad endings... even if this one can only be considered an ending in the very loosest sense of the term. Seriously, it happens all over the place like constantly.

Anyway, yeah, thanks for these last epilogues Chandagnac, will certainly miss your quests.

 

[The Crimson King]

And here it is. The end. It's been a fun ride.

 

[Chandagnac]

Heya,

I've been rereading this quest. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. Even if I've mostly been laughing at my own jokes.

I'm tempted to rewrite it in third person, as a work of 'User Fiction', in the hope that more people would read it and enjoy it as I have. I'm not sure if that would be allowed, though.

Anyway, I wanted to tell you about the inspiration for Frida Bolevidar, at least the version of her that appears in my mind: I imagine her looking like a gender-swapped version of one of my sister's old friends, who was half-British, half-Venezuelan and one of the most attractive people I've ever met in real life. I mean, he had a steady boyfriend at the time and I doubt he'd have given me a second glance even if he'd been single, but... even so.
(Or, like I've said before, you might prefer to imagine her as looking like a bargain basement version of Carmen Sandiego.)

You know, if you like this, perhaps I might entice you to join us in Chosen by The Dragon God, Chandagnac's newest, ongoing quest? It's not exactly jrpg, but it is a fun time with nuanced characters and an engaging, textured world. The Chandagnac standard. It's the latest in a whole universe of quests starting with A Hedge Maze is You, but I think it holds up about as well to a new viewer, sans context. I can say this with relative confidence, since I am only reading AHMiY just now, despite having been an active participant in the last two Hedgyverse quests.

Click to shrink...

I'm sorry to have to tell you that I recently brought Chosen by the Dragon God to a premature end. For various reasons, but mostly for the sake of my deteriorating mental and physical health.

So yeah, I've decided that I don't want to be a quest master anymore. When I've finished writing the last couple of epilogues for this quest, that'll be it.

Click to shrink...

Despite what I said before, I've decided to continue Chosen by the Dragon God. I've been writing it for the past few months, but it seems to have lost most of the readers it's ever had. Maybe it's not for everyone, maybe it's not as good as I'd like to think it is, but... still, I'd be grateful to anyone who decides to take a look at it.

Also, you may be interested to know that my mental and physical health have greatly improved since I was prescribed Lamotrigine tablets. I'm currently taking three a day; starting on Tuesday, I'll be taking four a day, presumably for the rest of my life. But it's worth it. I feel a lot more stable now. I haven't had any self-destructive bouts of depression recently, which is... Well, that's good, right?