Alpha Attractor Field
Divergence Number 0.337174
AD 2025.02.17 01:12:51:47

I am actively assisting the greatest evil in human history.

At one point I could have claimed innocence. Later, I could have pleaded ignorance or self-defense. More recently, I could rationalize, compartmentalize to cover my crimes. I can clearly remember the moments when I crossed each of these lines, the exact words which drove me over them. I have no doubt that I would cross them again. Attractor field theory is clear: the fact of my sin is set in stone, and my future is as irrevocable as my past.

In both, I work for SERN.

AD 2002.09.12 08:00:21:89

My first year at SERN was relatively uneventful. It followed a particularly intense summer internship, where my team was unable to complete our project. Our director was so impressed with our ambition that he offered us full-time positions to finish the work, and two days before fall term started I dropped out of graduate school to join the world's foremost particle physics research facility.

When we presented our results, the board gave it no more than a courtesy inspection before promptly firing my teammates. Afterwards, they explained that it had been no more than an extensive interview session, and that only I had what it took to stay on board. They offered me a position in the Higgs research group, on-site housing, and nearly double my previous salary. My near-instant acceptance of every physicist's dream was met with a one-line reply.

Welcome to the winning team.

AD 2007.06.24 22:39:03:65

The emails started arriving four years later. Someone from the Neutrino lab had recovered copies of an old project, and sent it to the entire staff. I caught the message just as it arrived, and managed to read the subject line - Z-Program / Jellyman's Reports - before the entire file vanished from my system. In its place was an email I had never seen, five hours old and titled Routine Server Maintenance. It was marked as already read.

Subsequent copies of the Jellyman reports were delivered more covertly, through external message clients or directed at specific departments. Each time, the email lasted less than ten seconds before a "maintenance" message from earlier that day replaced it. By the fourth occurrence, I had my email open and visible at all hours; by the sixth, I had the detail I never wanted to see.

Human is dead. Mismatch.

AD 2010.08.17 03:10:40:48

A year later I was relocated to a group researching micro black holes. SERN had denied their existence less than two months earlier, but with the Jellyman messages still fresh in my mind I kept my mouth shut and my head down. They had stopped after the eighth round, and the Neutrino lab had an opening posted by the next day. For most, it was an opportunity; for me, it was a warning shot. It bought SERN two more years of my perfect obedience.

Then the hostage arrived. Two days prior, they replaced every member of the team but me - in retrospect, I should have taken the hint and fled the country. The morning she was brought in, armed civilians burst into my room and dragged me through the complex. With every one of their steps I feared the end. What I got was worse.

The room I was dumped in was pitch black, save for two searing spotlights: one aimed directly at me, and one at the hostage across the room. An unseen council bemoaned our situation, pointedly referring to the trouble we caused, leaving no doubt that they were aware of my knowledge. They described a document they received some years prior with detailed future staff records, and how the hostage and I were both active for several more years. They explained how attractor-field convergence meant they couldn't kill us now, no matter how desperately they wanted to. So they let us go.

Because if SERN couldn't change the future, we didn't stand a chance.

AD 2021.11.30 20:54:51:19

Over time, we grew accustomed to our place. Never comfortable - every day we were either set up an experiment that aided the enemy, or were forced to watch as our research shredded another innocent life on a molecular level. But we found our ways to cope, to shield ourselves from the psychological torment. Mostly we talked about her friends outside SERN - unlike me, she had been researching time travel before her abduction, and knew the timeline would protect them for a while longer.

They were mounting a resistance, she claimed, for the war no one saw coming. One of them appeared sporadically in what little news we received from the outside; he was using his temporary death immunity to run raids on the lab every couple of months. I think he even met her, once or twice, before realizing convergence kept her in just as it kept him out.

Her other friend was far more noticeable - cracking SERN's servers every other day and corrupting or modifying crucial files. He somehow opened a line of communication with her that SERN couldn't trace - though after a point they simply cut off our internet access entirely. Even now complaints will crop up claiming that wildly inappropriate commentary was inserted into someone's code, and the computer techs will have to hunt every inch of the system for leaks. I'm not entirely convinced it isn't an AI now living in the rafters of our database.

Abuse from the higher-ups began to ramp up in the late 10's. Some weeks they would force two people through the machine, with the second recoiling in terror once they saw the fate of the first. They would send children through, kids who had volunteered for the chance to "explore the past." We hardly ate, then. She would abruptly fall silent, in the middle of one of her stories, and just stare up at where the sky should be, lost in some painful memory.

Nothing we did would stop the killing. I think she realized it first, or else had known from her life on the outside. Even if we finished the time machine, SERN would just find a way to use it for greater atrocities. The date of her friends' deaths was approaching; I could see in her eyes that she believed SERN was the cause. The pressure of a decade's isolation and our total impotence against SERN finally broke something in her, and I quickly discovered how thoroughly outclassed I was.

Within a week, she presented a short-range time machine to the director. To anyone else, it would look like a miracle, but I saw her in action. Only 18 hours were needed for her to build the machine; the rest she spent agonizing over how to restrain its power, to keep from giving SERN too great an advantage. After the meeting, she didn't speak for a month.

After the meeting, SERN conquered the world.

AD 2025.02.17 01:15:32:55

Two years later, SERN's control included all major news services and most of the net. Our task complete, they were convinced by both future intel and her "remarkable discovery" that I was no longer important to their operation, and relocated me to their newly acquired Japanese campus. As a courtesy, they even provided my date of death: April 12th, 2044. I outlive the meekest of rebels, a coward to the bitter end.

I used to wonder if I could have done something to change the worldline, to beat the attractor field and take back the future. Two days ago, as I worked on a riot weapon for SERN's paramilitary force, they gave me my answer.

Hououin Kyouma, leader of "Valkyrie," eliminated in Akihabara.

I'm sorry, Kurisu.