Time is not a line. It is not a loop. It isn't a "flat circle" either. It doesn't even consist of a network of branching paths all butterfly-effecting away from each other.

Butterfly effects are overrated anyway. They're actually quite difficult to pull off. They do happen, and you can force one if you try, but it will probably take you many attempts and by the time you accomplish one, someone like Mina will have showed up to take care of you. Not because she needs to "protect the timeline" (there is no timeline) but simply because the people paying her salary don't like competition.

Anyway, it's more accurate to say that time is a fuzzball. A mass of threads all tangled up. Sometimes they run parallel for a while then drift apart only to get yanked back together by something very much like gravity.

You don't notice all this pulling apart and yanking together because your brain just didn't evolve to see in those directions.

If you're very skilled, you can build a machine that teases the threads apart and re-knits them, or cuts one and joins it to another. You can even make a loop, but the fuzzball doesn't like loops. It tends to squash them pretty severely.

But there's no universal before and there's no universal after. There are lots of befores and lots of afters, and sometimes the befores and afters even switch places. This is why explorers who go out journeying into the fuzzball do so only with the most careful, guarded steps. It's so easy to get lost in a way that no one can ever find you.

The Alphas got lost in that way. The Alphas are a legend from a place that's very near us, but our brains can't see in that direction.

According to the legend, time wasn't always a fuzzball. It used to be elegant, ordered, structured. It was sublime and it was eternal and it was full of life that was equally eternal and sublime.

But that life committed errors. Even the legend only guesses at what they were. Perhaps they tried to cut and twist the threads to make themselves even more sublime. Regardless, what happened was that the creche of time shattered and its pieces re-knitted themselves chaotically until all that was left was fuzz.

The Alphas shattered along with it, and they are still among us, scattered across infinite time in incomprehensible and unrecognizable shapes. They must still be with us, says the legend. How can something which comes before all befores be said to end?

Some say that, if you connect the dots in exactly the right way, their residual forms can be discovered, even communicated with. That hearing the voice of an Alpha is like bathing in the irresistible will of a god.

Some also say that their shattering was deliberate, that the still-existing Alphas did it to gain omnipresence and that everything we see and do and are is a holographic imprint of their eternally dreaming minds.

Mina thinks it's all hogwash.

Her sister Theia doesn't. She's one of those people who thinks that the scattered bits can still be correlated, that the maps of becoming can be reconstructed. But she was always the "bright" sibling. Teacher's pet. She sits in a room all day clawing at holoscreens and exo-projecting charts, attempting to solve the equations of the Holy Mystery.

She doesn't even notice how small the room is.

Mina could never confine herself that way. Time is vast—vaster than past, present or future—and she counts herself damned lucky that she's allowed to taste so much of it.

After all, what would be the point of speaking to a god if you didn't have any interesting stories to tell them?

Artwork by kr00bs.