Micro Fiction Monday: Fragile

I should have known it would end here. I tried so hard to stop it. Knowing the future, it seems, does nothing but turn you into a constant state of denial.

Here’s the thing that no one knew about time travel: the time-space continuum is not a fragile thing. There is no butterfly effect; squashing a bug will never destroy the entire human race. Rather, it’s self repairing. Kill a cricket ten, twenty years ago, and you’ll return to your own, unaltered timeline. It’s like throwing a pebble in the ocean—the ripples only go so far.

There’s an event horizon in the continuum, and once you reach it, there’s no going back. Nothing can be changed, because any attempts at alteration will be smoothed out in the rough current of the time stream. No one knew this—not even me.

So I stood on the brink of it all, rewinding and replaying, twisting and turning the events that had set the greatest tragedy of my life into motion. But with every attempt I made, the laws of the universe followed suit, and nothing brought me any closer to my goal.

I returned to my own time, numb with the pain of having watched death perform a hundred times over.