The Last Year (Short Story)

The timeline first malfunctioned on June 6^th, at 7:21 AM GMT*. Technically, the year was 2117, although that designation quickly became irrelevant. It was, for all intents and purposes, The Last Year.

There's no way the original malfunction would have been observable, given its location. Even if it had occurred in a technically observable location, it would most likely not have observed. In fact, it occurred in the Andromeda galaxy, within the supermassive black hole's immediate sphere of influence. On June 6^th, at 7:21 AM, a neutron simply appeared from nowhere. That is not an altogether unheard of event, but under normal circumstances, matter appears with its antimatter counterpart, and both are destroyed in short order. This neutron appeared unaccompanied, and remained.

It remained, anyway, for long enough to be pulled into the supermassive black hole.

Approximately one second later, two protons and two electrons appeared, again unaccompanied. They might, perhaps, have coalesced into a hydrogen atom, had they not also been consumed by the supermassive black hole.

Approximately one second after this, three protons, three electrons, and one neutron appeared, only to suffer the same fate as the anomalous matter that had preceded it. This pattern continued unchecked, and radiated outward.

Approximately twenty-six hours, fifty-four minutes, and thirty-two seconds later, the disappearances began. A single hydrogen atom in the process of being sucked into the supermassive black hole simply disappeared. One second later, three subatomic particles in an otherwise stable oxygen atom suffered the same fate. This new pattern followed the same trend as the appearances.

On July 1^st of 2117, humanity discovered a method for opening a gateway to another timeline. For most of the next three months, this would be regarded as the defining scientific discovery of the year.

On September 4^th of 2117, at 10:26 PM GMT, the appearances reached earth. One proton and one electron in an Ozone molecule disappeared, resulting in unobserved chaos at an atomic scale.

The next day, at about noon, the appearances claimed their first casualty, when a small particle of Boron which appeared in the upper troposphere had its fall to earth interrupted several times. It managed to accrete a massive hailstone around it before finally falling to earth and striking a woman in the head. Her death was noticed; its ultimate cause was not.

Shortly after that, science confirmed the phenomenon of appearances when a small mass of subatomic particles, in a state indescribable beyond “seething” and “searing,” appeared in a classroom in a university in Bolivia. It interrupted a biology lecture.

By the beginning of the next day, the disappearances reached Earth. The appearances, meanwhile, had become alarming.

Scientists, the people who truly understood how the universe worked – or was supposed to work – realized the magnitude of what was happening, understood that if it was not stopped, it would be the end of man, and in a hurry. These people turned to the gateway, believing it would save them. Their first idea was to simply feed matter into it, attempting to counteract, offset, or interrupt the phenomenon.

Up until this time, nothing but electrons had been sent through the gateway, carrying data. Engineers and scientists on both sides had been very careful to balance the data sent and received, so as not to create any unintended consequences. Now, the time for caution had seemingly passed. The scientists first tried to push a small puff if helium gas through the gateway.

They were fortunately not to be killed by the attempt. The gas was instantly destroyed, releasing a massive amount of energy which, luckily, only widened the gateway rather than killing everyone present.

Realizing they could not simply funnel matter through the gateway, the team now looked to exchange matter. This plan did not carry with it any hope of sparing the unaffected timeline, but it might allow the people living there to escape. To test this theory, engineers in the affected timeline would attempt to pass one kilogram of nickel through the gateway, and receive one kilogram of cobalt from the other side.

The results of this experiment were as follows: the walls of the laboratory on the unaffected side became splattered with one kilogram of molten cobalt; the walls of the laboratory on the affected side became splattered with slightly less than one kilogram of molten nickel (the remainder of which disappeared at some time during the course of the experiment); the walls of both laboratories became splattered with the remains of dead scientists and engineers. Subsequent to this experiment, a new team of scientists in the unaffected timeline set to work closing the gateway to the affected timeline.

On the affected side, even the scientific community was upon the point of panic. Everyone else was well beyond that point; life had become essentially unlivable. Everywhere, the roads were clogged with frightened people hoping to escape the inescapable. Slow-moving at first, the traffic everywhere became stopped when random pieces of the road surface, the cars, or the drivers disappeared, causing fatal accidents involving dozens of cars. The hail of falling objects was unending.  Everywhere the eye could see lay the leavings of a decaying landscape: broken things, broken animals, broken people.

Desperate physicists now turned to a pair of farfetched, last-gasp solutions. Some hoped they could find a point of origin for the instability, and perhaps create a black hole that would consume its source. They succeeded in creating a small black hole in low earth orbit without destroying the Earth, but failed to find an appropriate place to deploy a larger one. Despite the futility, these people did remarkable work.

The remaining physicists went for broke, and attempted to discover a means of time travel. The idea was that if they could access the phenomenon in its earliest stages of escalation, they could counteract it, or at least have longer to prepare for it. These scientists came very close to proving the complete impossibility of time travel. The undoubtedly would have completed their work if they had been given more than five days to do it.

They did not even get six. On September 10^th, a ball of heterogeneous matter approximately the size of the moon appeared less than two hundred thousand kilometers from Earth and was immediately affected by Earth's gravity well. It passed wide of an actual collision, and its momentum was just reversing to make a second pass when a chunk of planet Earth approximately half the size of Africa disappeared.

This was the last event observed by humanity.

*This is an extreme oversimplification. Time does not malfunction, because time does not function. It is above function, beyond function. Time is the one thing immutable. In the end, of course, that was precisely the problem.