Ellimist

My name is Azure Level, Seven Spar, Extension Two, Down-Messenger, Forty-one. My chosen name, the name that my friends called me, is Toomin. I say "called" because it has been an exceedingly long time since anyone called me by anything but my game name. That name is Ellimist, and it has been whispered in many corners of the galaxy, sometimes with fear, sometimes with reverence, sometimes with gratitude.

I enjoy the gratitude the most.

For many millennia I wandered the stars, helping sentient races in need and encouraging life on previously barren worlds. In that time I had only ever encountered one being anything like myself. That being called himself Crayak. In many ways, he was like me. We were both the last members of a dead race. We had both expanded our consciousnesses and our bodies to include vast amounts of circuitry and machinery. We were perhaps the two oldest sentient beings in the galaxy.

With all our similarities, we held one crucial difference. While I chose to preserve and support life, Crayak chose to support death and misery. On our first meeting he boasted that he would destroy all life in this galaxy, killing me last of all.

Since then, we had played a vast game, I on the side of life and he on the side of death.

I was losing.

In my desperation, I sought to destroy Crayak. For many years, we fought each other. We chased each other across the galaxy, each endeavoring to outdo each other with new weaponry. Worlds and civilizations were destroyed in our wake. I told myself it was worth it if I could defeat my enemy at last. At last, Crayak was able to lure me into an inescapable trap: a black hole.

The pain was exquisite. Strange, as so much of it could not be called my body in any traditional sense, but those were my sensors, my eyes and ears, those were my limbs that were not just crushed in the black hole, but stretched and twisted, spiraling into its gravity well. I should have been annihilated. I was annihilated, squashed into the space of molecules.

And yet…

As each piece of my manufactured body fell into the vortex, as my enemy gleefully destroyed the parts of my body that had remained outside of the black hole, my consciousness and my senses remained, and not only remained, but grew.

I could see the inside and outside and top and bottom of all things with no regard to their distance from me. Their distance from me? Where could I be said to be, exactly? I was everywhere. I could see energy. I could see space-time as millions of strands of possibilities to be chosen from. And I could not only see all of these things, but manipulate them.

I was overwhelmed. Astounded. I don't how much time I spent trying to unravel my new senses and abilities. It might have been decades. It may have been minutes. Time became meaningless.

In any case, both my old and new senses showed me one thing: my enemy was still out there, enjoying his victory over me, and that meant setting out to destroy the life I had sought to save. I was stronger than him now, but I saw that as soon as I revealed that I still existed, he would replicate the unlikely accident that had caused me to be as I am now. Could I allow that to happen? Could I allow Crayak that kind of power? Did I have any choice?

In my reverie, I examined the curve of space-time. I could see the structure of it. Understand it, perhaps like no being had before.

I could manipulate it.

Wait. I could… manipulate… time? Change it?

I had not felt fear in many millennia, but I felt it now. I could eliminate Crayak, undo the timeline so that he never came to this galaxy, or so that he never existed. Yet… what right did I have to wield that kind of power? What meaning did any action have, what meaning did all of my actions have, if they could simply be undone?

Even as I was filled horror at these thoughts, another possibility overcame them. If I could travel through time, I could save my people. I would no longer be the last Ketran. I had been lonely for so long, with only my sworn enemy for company. What would it feel like, to be wrapped in the wings of my long lost Aguella? To play a game with my old rival Menno, a game without the vast stakes to which I had become accustomed? To fly free without the weight of the galaxy on my wings?

As soon as the idea formulated, I knew I would not be able to resist it. But how to go about it? To what point in time would I go?

I could go back to before the Capasins had decimated my homeworld, but that would be futile. I did not know when the Z-space broadcasts that had attracted them had begun. Even if I was able to stop them once, I could not prevent them from happening forever, not while living as an ordinary Ketran.

I could go back further and give my people weapons that could defeat the Capasins, but that would destroy all that we were. The Ketrans were non-violent by their nature. Community was sacred and killing absolutely prohibited. No matter how much two neighbors hated each other, each depended on the other for lift.

As much as it hurt, I would need to return to a point after the destruction of my home, to the time when I led a group of refugees across the stars, trying and failing to find an ecosystem like that we had come from, a world of vast, floating crystals.

I knew now that there was no such world. I had loved the Equatorial High Crystal. I had loved the Azure level and could not accept that my offspring would never see it. Now I knew better. If the Ketrans were to survive, they would need to change. I was still attached to life, but I was not so attached to wings and pods as I was. Hadn't I loved children with hooves and dangerous scythe-like tails? I would love my New Ketran offspring, whatever environment they needed to adapt to.

I could not live among the Ketrans as I was now, but I could easily replicate my old body. There was also my mind to consider. Early in the process that had made me what I was, I had absorbed the memories of many of my fellow Ketrans. I would not be able take those with me and enjoy their company fully. I would also need to excise most of my own memories, leaving only vague impressions of what had happened to me, what I became in this soon-to-be alternate future, and the mistakes I had made that took me there.

I needed one more thing: as my Ketran self, I would be unable to manipulate the timeline as I could now, but I needed a failsafe, something I could use to return to this timeline if something unforeseeable went wrong, a tool that could be used by a simple being to manipulate time. A failsafe, it would need to remain constant in every possible timeline.

This was how I came to create one of the most subtle and dangerous devices to exist in all the universe: the Time Matrix.

Creating the device was deceptively easy. My thought formed it: a sphere, pure white and exceedingly smooth. I gave it the simplest of interfaces. It would be cued by touch and thought. It would need to be simple if any but myself were to operate it.

I touched it with my mind. I needed to be very careful, to look into my past and find a moment while I was on the Searcher where I was completely isolated, a time shortly before I came in contact with Father and began to become what I am. A time where I could hide the Time Matrix.

That proved difficult, but not impossible. Very little of my life had been lived behind any sort of barrier, but there I was, about to flutter out of one of the Searcher's squadron of fighters. I grasped that moment with my mind, recreating it as best I could while altering it slightly, replacing Toomin, sometimes called Ellimist, leader of the Ketran refugees with what Toomin would become. Myself, The Ellimist, with the Time Matrix resting under my fingertips.