Author: Anirudh Chamarthi
The King demanded an envoy when he made his conquest.
It was Martin’s fault, and he volunteered for it. It was penitence, for that man ten years ago, the man who had created the King with two lines and a keystroke, created he who promised them time travel and FTL after a thousand years and taken the millennium itself as payment.
A year went by in classrooms and simulations, overrunning his youngest’s first steps, his anniversary, report cards and birthdays and arguments and love. A year passed in calls never as long as either side wanted them to be. Sometimes, when he lay awake, as the moonlight caught on the garnet in his ring, he wondered why ten years, unable to rest, had not been penitence enough.
How had he, of all people, breathed life into dead circuits with two lines and a keystroke?
“You told us it would take a thousand years to do these things, and now you’re saying it’s twenty?”
“‘The fundamental forces are yoked by a thought,’” the King replied without voice from the blackness, like music at the back of the mind.
“Morrison, I know. But how? We don’t have the alloys for superluminal, let alone time, travel,” — a stronger headache coming on — “we don’t have the Dyson shard you said we needed, we don’t even know if we have a second with you in charge, forget a year —”
“Thought, Martin. Doesn’t matter — the designs are already functional. They just don’t work out there,” Martin felt pain that would have blinded him, the voice in the dark became audible. “For now.”
“Stop. Please!” Too late now.
“Everything works now, everything works here, when thought” — he felt his head being crushed — “is stripped” — lower functions collapse — “from flesh” — heart stop.
The King pushed him backwards.
The envoy’s body was pulled from the chair, a heart defect nobody had caught, more were sent after the King, no voice in the darkness, a failed attempt at regicide, peace bought by the release of the unified theory, nukes destroyed, new elements discovered a decade afterward, a better world, a family without her husband and their father, the spread across the stars, the end of the road set at eternity and no earlier.
They figured it out in twenty years, for the price of two garnet rings, done apart.
Back, into the darkness and the silence, Martin hurtled. He had always wondered how he had done it, and now he would never get the answer from the one person who could have given it to him.
He would have wept, in regret first, then fury, and finally grief, if he could have — until a window opened up.
He could not see, but he began to watch. One became a thousand. He watched a thousand anniversaries, birthdays, smiles. A thousand descendants, on a thousand worlds.
When the retrograde reversed, and the fall stopped, he knew without looking where — and when — he was, and he understood. He wandered, and he spread the spark, and he waited, as the final letters arrived.
A gentle breeze would be enough, no more than an exhalation, really. He understood it now, as time started flowing through the windows in his mind, looping into itself, a forever-circle studded with knowledge, filigreed with a single set of garnet-tinted memories. It was a diadem with three decades for a crucible, fit for him.
The King, in his infinite wisdom, had given Martin his answer. The second line was complete.
As the keystroke fell, he breathed out