Post by redsycorax on Jun 8, 2021 1:30:18 GMT
The path of evolution is often shaped by contingency and chance throughout the Multiverse. On some Earths, the Chicxulub asteroid impact seventy million years ago destroyed the long era of saurian reptile dominance, leading to the rise of mammals and in time, humanity. Some Earths had other simian or hominid subspecies achieve dominance, while on others, humanity became extinct due to the Toba supervolcano eruption in Indonesia in 70,000 BCE and other species took their place- in some cases, canids or felids. On still others, contingency and chance caused the rise of silicon-based sapient life, usually on worlds that only bore a nominal reference to Earth in terms of diameter and aspects of geology. On Earth-77, however, the course of Terran evolution was affected by a distant rogue planet, which we shall name Shiva for the sake of convenience. Shiva was a superjovian, so its gravitational turbulence within the Oort and Kuiper belts was substantial. Thousands of icy planetoids were thrown into eccentric orbits and of those, hundreds bombarded the inner solar system. One, known to alternate-Earth observers as Minos, impacted on Earth about one hundred and seventy million years before datum present. The impact in question destroyed the fledgeling reptilian dominance that was emerging, as well as most amphibian species- and mammals therefore never evolved. Instead, insectoids came to dominate Earth-77 instead as the battered and bruised planet recovered. Particularly, a hive-building hymenopterid species analogous to bees, wasps, ants and termites achieved overall control of this particular alternate Earth. In time, they developed chemically based science and made discoveries about physics and eventually developed interplanetary and then interstellar travel. However, all of that occurred seven million years ago. The hymenopterids, known as the N'miani, rapidly spread through local planetary systems, until they collided with an older, ruthless interstellar empire of lepidopterids on the superearth we would call Kepler 442b, 1206 light years from Earth's planetary system. The Bienorii may have looked like fragile moths or butterflies, but appearances can be deceptive- particularly if evolved to beguile or deliberately deceive potential predators into their actual existential or ethical state- which tended to be violently xenophobic. The N'miani-Bienorii War lasted several millennia. Although it supposedly ended with the Sack of Bienor, nevertheless there are legends and myths that lost Bienorii starship fleets are still prowling the heavens...
+++
G'SEL INSEKTA, 22,300 MILES ABOVE IERTHE:
K'lil, last survivor of distant Krptn, cleaned his proboscis and looked up to witness D'nr, the slender but deadly Wonder Wasp [English approximation] crawling through the GSLI airlock. The red Krptinian needle fly touched antennae with her in greeting as his translator chimed: "Well met, D'nr. How was your patrol over the Atlik today?"
Wonder Wasp shrugged: "The usual, K'lil. It still looks like the Planetary Senate has not heeded the warnings about updating the iterations of our protective technology. I fear it may take an event like another hurricane on the eastern coasts of North or South Amkea before those hoary elders of ours get around to doing the necessary thing. Apparently, they're having a long, drawn out debate over scarletmoss excise tax, which has the Mrzian Party Senators up in limbs about what they see as protectionism against colonial economic interests."
"I'm beginning to wonder if we're getting too complacent, D'nr. I know it's been over a century since the last recorded sighting of a Bienorii attack ship, but..."
D'nr let out an ululating sigh: "I realise you feel particularly aggrieved at them, K'lil, given that they obliterated Krptn and your wombship was the only one able to get clear in time. What happened there was genocide. But..."
"Rr's." Darkwingant had materialised on the teleport pad:
"How was Grthm tonight, old friend?" D'nr did the ceremonial greeting with him as she had with Superfly
"Eventful. Greenfly got out of Rkhm Asylum and I had to recapture him before he used his emotorspray to derange the city's inhabitants."
Superfly whistled: "Ah. I see our friend Bzzd of Appiato is paying us a visit. How goes it, Green Lantern?"
A whorl of emerald light gradually faded, to herald the arrival of the local sector Green Lantern, an honorary G'Sel member, although his Green Lantern Corps responsibilities meant he could only visit Earth occasionally: "Good to see you here, K'lil, D'nr, Rr's. I've taken the liberty of consulting with my supervisors, the Guardians, over what I must now tell you."
Superfly drew back as an all-too-familiar shape materialised before him:
"That...is Brainiac's saucer?! But how? I thought he was destroyed when the metalliplague swept the galaxy three years ago and destroyed most metal sapiences. Including our team mates Cybant and Redswarm. How..."
Bzzd ululated: "I know, K'lil. Moreover, the saucer now appears to be equipped with extragalactic technologies, beyond the immediate experience or competence of the Green Lantern Corps or even the Guardians. That was why it was felt best to consult with you in this context."
"They're not from any within our local group or even supercluster of galaxies."
"But Brainiac's vessel doesn't have the technology to range beyond our supercluster. It would take him billions of years to traverse the distance."
"Time travel? Or the assistance of a higher level intelligence like Drax?"
"Bzzd, are there any analogues to known Milky Way, local group or supercluster technologies?"
"In some cases, K'lill, yes, we have been able to reverse engineer solutions to what we found. Others are not. We have located what we believe to be a red sun-simulator particle beam onboard that vessel, so either Xax of Xaos or I will acompany G'Sel if he shows any signs of confronting us. But his vessel is on the fringes of our galaxy, in a moribund quarter with white dwarves and dead planet corpses littered around it."
"Could this be a trap?" D'nr asked.
"Brainiac has show no signs of wanting to destroy any adjacent planets or even asteroids in his vicinity. Indeed, Wonder Wasp, he may be lying in wait. You had best assemble the rest of G'Sel."
ELSEWHERE...
"Those miserable creatures usurped this cosmos from me! I will not have this! I will not! I am..."
"Patience, my lord. Their own hubris will lead them into an inexorable maw from which they cannot escape."
"Very well, Coluan. However, this latest scheme of yours had better work."
"It will. Their world contains an ancient secret. And once it is disclosed, they will lose their moral compass and pretensions."
OORT CLOUD: MINOS, BCE 170.000.000
A black starship, opaque to all light and scrutiny from outside, detonated explosive charges on the minor planet that would one day be named Minos. From the inwward reaches of the vessel, a cilia-coated insectile hand touched a panel, evaluating its trajectory and likely point of impact, almost nine billion miles inward. Although the continental array on the blue-green planet was vastly different from what it would become immeasurable years in the future, it was still recognisable as the world that would one day be known as Iorthe...Earth-77.
EARTH-77, BCE 170,000.000
His hair was dirty blonde and his trenchcoat ripped and torn. He was bleeding profusely from several wounds in his side and on his chest and arms. Then the mage saw the black, tubular simulacra of an anthill and realised he was already too late as grotesquely large hymenopterids crowded out of the vessel and bolted toward him. In the seconds of life left to him, John Constantine realised he was praying. Then there was only screaming in the remote Jurassic morning and then, merciful silence.
Far above, in Earth orbit, a holographier unit whirred as it recorded the bloody demise of an erased Earth's last surviving human champion. A green humanoid hand closed over the probe video infeed as Brainiac's plan came to fruition. One part of his ploy had borne fruit. Now others needed to play their part. Silently, unnoticed due to a cloaking field several centuries beyond Earth's new hymenopterid hegemony, his saucer broke orbit and fled into the darkness.
PRESENT DAY:
As Superfly, Wonderwasp, Darkwingant, Velocitee, Bzzd, and Waterskater closed on Brainiac's saucer, they were still enmeshed in conversation:
"What is that green glow around his vessel? It's not his conventional forcescreen."
Superfly frowned: "Chroniton residue. He's been time travelling. Odd. There are no signs of landing, such as residual trace radiation or soil remnants on his vessel."
"What's even stranger is that he's trying to contact me through his power ring and it's not an attempt to seize control of it." Bzzd telepathed to the others.
"All right, Brainiac. Go on. What vainglorious boast do you have to deliver now?"
"Merely this..." The images of the primordial Jurassic temporal visit and its bloody denouement were played back to them.
"What are you trying to pull, Brainiac? Surely that's a fa-" Waterskater angrily responded.
Darkwingant held up a limb: "No, R'tr, wait. That is incontrovertibly Terran vegetation of the Jurassic era. And those are precursor hymenopterids. And that creature... was involved in temporal transit itself."
"How interesting. You're not going to say 'it was defensive and it was threatening the precursors.'?"
Wonder Wasp said sceptically: "No. Although the data says that it was a magic user, it was apparently near exhaustion. It was unable to defend itself from the Precursors when they attacked."
"And it's a continuous feed. And they seem to show no hestitation or fear from their nonverbal or bodily language. As if they knew what this creature was and deliberately intended to dispose of it. Yet we have no fossil records of the creature in question. Why?" Darkwingant queried.
"Aren't you curious about how suddenly precursor hymenopterids appeared in your world's fossil records?"
"We've always assumed it was a sudden benign mutation and that the adaptation in question gave us a quantum benefit in survival when it came to other species..." Superfly said.
"Yes, the Minos asteroid. Look at the surroundings. What else do you see?"
Wonder Wasp realised: "That's impossible. The Precursors evolved just after the Minos asteroid impact. But that landscape is Equatoria, almost precisely the area that was hit several months later."
"Now, look at this..." The scene cut to a deep space image of the Minos asteroid within the Oort cloud, hurtling toward a distant and lethal rendezvous with Iorthe in the distant past.
"That's the Precursor habitat- but that's... after the attack on the pink vertebrate that you've just screened. So... it's a time machine?"
"Ah. You're starting to work it out, are you?"
The image abruptly cut to a familiar figure. Superfly said hesitantly: "The Time Trapper? But that resembles no known era of Iorthean history. We've never resorted to ecocidal options like nuclear weapons. Those aren't..." And then they saw the Time Trapper bend down and fill his sample box with several squirming larval insects... identical to the ones they had just seen in the Jurassic early morning imagery.
"Your conclusion, Superfly?"
"Are you implying...our world is the result of an historical discontinuity?"
"I think I've demonstrated that amply. The Time Trapper wanted an end to the vertebrate metasapients that had frustrated his plans for transtemporal domination repeatedly, so he took the apocalyptic option. He decided to intervene and seed your adopted world, and select others, with positively mutated hymenopterid life, insuring that his nemeses species never evolved because your beloved precursors replaced them. The vertebrate "John Constantine" that you saw was the last survivor of a rearguard action to reverse the change and restore history to its original trajectory."
Wonder Wasp exclaimed: "But that would have obliterated untold trillions of sapients."
"You admirably grasp your moral dilemma, D'nr. The question is, what do you intend to do about it? Ignore it? Go your separate ways and pretend that no such incident happened in the dim past? Or travel back and undo what happened, costing your own species very existence in the process? Those precursors are only trying to defend the integrity of your timeline, after all, through travelling back to defend those innocent larvae, the remote ancestors of your own kind."
Darkwingant remarked: "Have we any choice? If our own species dominance was based on the genocide of a prior sapient species? It is monstrous. It is against everything G'Sel Insekta stands for- to defend the weak, helpless, vulnerable and needy."
Velocitee pointed to her transit vortex: "Sapients, our means of temporal travel lies that way. And if we succeed...well, it's been an honour and privilege serving alongside you all these years."
JURASSIC EARTH-77: BCE 170,000,000
And thus it was that a grisly bluff was called. This time, when John Constantine materialised near the benign mutation hymenopterid hatchery and when the Precursor protectors broke through the clearing, intent on obliterating the threat to their kind's future survival and dominance over this Earth, they found that the vertebrate had some consequential protectors of his own. Wonder Wasp threw her royal chain lasso at the intruders, causing one to jerk back and break its neck. Another was felled by Velocitee, buzzing around it at hyperspeed, excavating a pit that dropped it into water in a subterranean well metres below. A red and yellow blur crashed through the Precursors temporal transit vehicle, shredding its delicate innards and cutting off any protective response. Rescued from his fate, John Constantine wondered at the strangely familiar liveried insects that had abruptly appeared and assisted him. Then he looked down at the larval insects in their natal pits. Had he any right to do this? If these insects were descended somehow from those below him, then didn't the fact that they'd rescue him indicate they were valuable forms of sapient life that deserved to survive?
Waterskater provided telepathic contact with the stranger, informing him of the past atrocities in Hymenopterid history. The Coleopterid Genocide in Equatoria. The enslavement of Lepidoterids in Borea. The extinction of the A'arakhne Confederacy because of deliberate infection with arthropodicidal micro-organisms on Tau Ceti IV. The stranger nodded and sent back images that indicated the vertebrate species that had previously dominated their world was no better morally. And then another Precursor vessel materialised from out of the Jurassic late morning and battle was joined again. And at long last, John Constantine realised he had no real choice. Wishing forgiveness from all he held sacred for what he had to do, his feet stamped down on the larval precursor hymenopterid pits. repeatedly, tears in his eyes, as he unilaterally aborted the timeline that had then proceeded to dominate the next one hundred and seventy million years of galactic history. When it was over, he gazed tearfully at the assembled group of insects. As a halo spread around them, they gradually disappeared, as did the Precursor protector assailants. In deep space, Superfly felt the erosion of his causality begin to eat away at him, but not before he cannoned into Minos, destroying it outright, leaving only a scattered shower of meteoroids. But the impact was enough to deflect other inbound cometoids from their original trajectories, splaying them into hyperbolic orbits and out of Earth-77's solar system.
UPTIME:
The Time Trapper screeched as its own existence was undone and with his erasure from history, there would never be any transposition of mutated hymenopterid larvae to the Jurassic twilight, no untimely proliferation of sapient insects, no Minos asteroid impact and no subsequent Time Trapper seeding of other worlds with analogous precursor sapient insectoids. The timeshift couldn't fix everything- there was still a nuclear war in the late seventies on Earth-77, but without the circumstances that had led to the timeloop that had replaced humanity with the hymenopterids. Numbly, Constantine watched as a group of London Council Pest Disposal Unit workers asphyxiated a patch of writheing larval hymenopterids, a scene duplicated across a world that would never know how close it had come to permanent erasure from existence.
Blinking back tears in his eyes, John Constantine went into his local, the Rose and Crown Pub, for some serious boozing. As he was swallowing his third pint, he noticed a small ant had crawled onto the pub coaster. It reared up, looking at him. Constantine lifted the coaster and let the ant rejoin its counterparts in a new anthill outside the masonry and bustle around him. The ant hesitated again, then hurried back on its way, intent on its duties and routines of the day. After a while, it forgot about the altruistic human. But back in the pub, John Constantine never did.
THE END
TO BE CONTINUED
+++
G'SEL INSEKTA, 22,300 MILES ABOVE IERTHE:
K'lil, last survivor of distant Krptn, cleaned his proboscis and looked up to witness D'nr, the slender but deadly Wonder Wasp [English approximation] crawling through the GSLI airlock. The red Krptinian needle fly touched antennae with her in greeting as his translator chimed: "Well met, D'nr. How was your patrol over the Atlik today?"
Wonder Wasp shrugged: "The usual, K'lil. It still looks like the Planetary Senate has not heeded the warnings about updating the iterations of our protective technology. I fear it may take an event like another hurricane on the eastern coasts of North or South Amkea before those hoary elders of ours get around to doing the necessary thing. Apparently, they're having a long, drawn out debate over scarletmoss excise tax, which has the Mrzian Party Senators up in limbs about what they see as protectionism against colonial economic interests."
"I'm beginning to wonder if we're getting too complacent, D'nr. I know it's been over a century since the last recorded sighting of a Bienorii attack ship, but..."
D'nr let out an ululating sigh: "I realise you feel particularly aggrieved at them, K'lil, given that they obliterated Krptn and your wombship was the only one able to get clear in time. What happened there was genocide. But..."
"Rr's." Darkwingant had materialised on the teleport pad:
"How was Grthm tonight, old friend?" D'nr did the ceremonial greeting with him as she had with Superfly
"Eventful. Greenfly got out of Rkhm Asylum and I had to recapture him before he used his emotorspray to derange the city's inhabitants."
Superfly whistled: "Ah. I see our friend Bzzd of Appiato is paying us a visit. How goes it, Green Lantern?"
A whorl of emerald light gradually faded, to herald the arrival of the local sector Green Lantern, an honorary G'Sel member, although his Green Lantern Corps responsibilities meant he could only visit Earth occasionally: "Good to see you here, K'lil, D'nr, Rr's. I've taken the liberty of consulting with my supervisors, the Guardians, over what I must now tell you."
Superfly drew back as an all-too-familiar shape materialised before him:
"That...is Brainiac's saucer?! But how? I thought he was destroyed when the metalliplague swept the galaxy three years ago and destroyed most metal sapiences. Including our team mates Cybant and Redswarm. How..."
Bzzd ululated: "I know, K'lil. Moreover, the saucer now appears to be equipped with extragalactic technologies, beyond the immediate experience or competence of the Green Lantern Corps or even the Guardians. That was why it was felt best to consult with you in this context."
"They're not from any within our local group or even supercluster of galaxies."
"But Brainiac's vessel doesn't have the technology to range beyond our supercluster. It would take him billions of years to traverse the distance."
"Time travel? Or the assistance of a higher level intelligence like Drax?"
"Bzzd, are there any analogues to known Milky Way, local group or supercluster technologies?"
"In some cases, K'lill, yes, we have been able to reverse engineer solutions to what we found. Others are not. We have located what we believe to be a red sun-simulator particle beam onboard that vessel, so either Xax of Xaos or I will acompany G'Sel if he shows any signs of confronting us. But his vessel is on the fringes of our galaxy, in a moribund quarter with white dwarves and dead planet corpses littered around it."
"Could this be a trap?" D'nr asked.
"Brainiac has show no signs of wanting to destroy any adjacent planets or even asteroids in his vicinity. Indeed, Wonder Wasp, he may be lying in wait. You had best assemble the rest of G'Sel."
ELSEWHERE...
"Those miserable creatures usurped this cosmos from me! I will not have this! I will not! I am..."
"Patience, my lord. Their own hubris will lead them into an inexorable maw from which they cannot escape."
"Very well, Coluan. However, this latest scheme of yours had better work."
"It will. Their world contains an ancient secret. And once it is disclosed, they will lose their moral compass and pretensions."
OORT CLOUD: MINOS, BCE 170.000.000
A black starship, opaque to all light and scrutiny from outside, detonated explosive charges on the minor planet that would one day be named Minos. From the inwward reaches of the vessel, a cilia-coated insectile hand touched a panel, evaluating its trajectory and likely point of impact, almost nine billion miles inward. Although the continental array on the blue-green planet was vastly different from what it would become immeasurable years in the future, it was still recognisable as the world that would one day be known as Iorthe...Earth-77.
EARTH-77, BCE 170,000.000
His hair was dirty blonde and his trenchcoat ripped and torn. He was bleeding profusely from several wounds in his side and on his chest and arms. Then the mage saw the black, tubular simulacra of an anthill and realised he was already too late as grotesquely large hymenopterids crowded out of the vessel and bolted toward him. In the seconds of life left to him, John Constantine realised he was praying. Then there was only screaming in the remote Jurassic morning and then, merciful silence.
Far above, in Earth orbit, a holographier unit whirred as it recorded the bloody demise of an erased Earth's last surviving human champion. A green humanoid hand closed over the probe video infeed as Brainiac's plan came to fruition. One part of his ploy had borne fruit. Now others needed to play their part. Silently, unnoticed due to a cloaking field several centuries beyond Earth's new hymenopterid hegemony, his saucer broke orbit and fled into the darkness.
PRESENT DAY:
As Superfly, Wonderwasp, Darkwingant, Velocitee, Bzzd, and Waterskater closed on Brainiac's saucer, they were still enmeshed in conversation:
"What is that green glow around his vessel? It's not his conventional forcescreen."
Superfly frowned: "Chroniton residue. He's been time travelling. Odd. There are no signs of landing, such as residual trace radiation or soil remnants on his vessel."
"What's even stranger is that he's trying to contact me through his power ring and it's not an attempt to seize control of it." Bzzd telepathed to the others.
"All right, Brainiac. Go on. What vainglorious boast do you have to deliver now?"
"Merely this..." The images of the primordial Jurassic temporal visit and its bloody denouement were played back to them.
"What are you trying to pull, Brainiac? Surely that's a fa-" Waterskater angrily responded.
Darkwingant held up a limb: "No, R'tr, wait. That is incontrovertibly Terran vegetation of the Jurassic era. And those are precursor hymenopterids. And that creature... was involved in temporal transit itself."
"How interesting. You're not going to say 'it was defensive and it was threatening the precursors.'?"
Wonder Wasp said sceptically: "No. Although the data says that it was a magic user, it was apparently near exhaustion. It was unable to defend itself from the Precursors when they attacked."
"And it's a continuous feed. And they seem to show no hestitation or fear from their nonverbal or bodily language. As if they knew what this creature was and deliberately intended to dispose of it. Yet we have no fossil records of the creature in question. Why?" Darkwingant queried.
"Aren't you curious about how suddenly precursor hymenopterids appeared in your world's fossil records?"
"We've always assumed it was a sudden benign mutation and that the adaptation in question gave us a quantum benefit in survival when it came to other species..." Superfly said.
"Yes, the Minos asteroid. Look at the surroundings. What else do you see?"
Wonder Wasp realised: "That's impossible. The Precursors evolved just after the Minos asteroid impact. But that landscape is Equatoria, almost precisely the area that was hit several months later."
"Now, look at this..." The scene cut to a deep space image of the Minos asteroid within the Oort cloud, hurtling toward a distant and lethal rendezvous with Iorthe in the distant past.
"That's the Precursor habitat- but that's... after the attack on the pink vertebrate that you've just screened. So... it's a time machine?"
"Ah. You're starting to work it out, are you?"
The image abruptly cut to a familiar figure. Superfly said hesitantly: "The Time Trapper? But that resembles no known era of Iorthean history. We've never resorted to ecocidal options like nuclear weapons. Those aren't..." And then they saw the Time Trapper bend down and fill his sample box with several squirming larval insects... identical to the ones they had just seen in the Jurassic early morning imagery.
"Your conclusion, Superfly?"
"Are you implying...our world is the result of an historical discontinuity?"
"I think I've demonstrated that amply. The Time Trapper wanted an end to the vertebrate metasapients that had frustrated his plans for transtemporal domination repeatedly, so he took the apocalyptic option. He decided to intervene and seed your adopted world, and select others, with positively mutated hymenopterid life, insuring that his nemeses species never evolved because your beloved precursors replaced them. The vertebrate "John Constantine" that you saw was the last survivor of a rearguard action to reverse the change and restore history to its original trajectory."
Wonder Wasp exclaimed: "But that would have obliterated untold trillions of sapients."
"You admirably grasp your moral dilemma, D'nr. The question is, what do you intend to do about it? Ignore it? Go your separate ways and pretend that no such incident happened in the dim past? Or travel back and undo what happened, costing your own species very existence in the process? Those precursors are only trying to defend the integrity of your timeline, after all, through travelling back to defend those innocent larvae, the remote ancestors of your own kind."
Darkwingant remarked: "Have we any choice? If our own species dominance was based on the genocide of a prior sapient species? It is monstrous. It is against everything G'Sel Insekta stands for- to defend the weak, helpless, vulnerable and needy."
Velocitee pointed to her transit vortex: "Sapients, our means of temporal travel lies that way. And if we succeed...well, it's been an honour and privilege serving alongside you all these years."
JURASSIC EARTH-77: BCE 170,000,000
And thus it was that a grisly bluff was called. This time, when John Constantine materialised near the benign mutation hymenopterid hatchery and when the Precursor protectors broke through the clearing, intent on obliterating the threat to their kind's future survival and dominance over this Earth, they found that the vertebrate had some consequential protectors of his own. Wonder Wasp threw her royal chain lasso at the intruders, causing one to jerk back and break its neck. Another was felled by Velocitee, buzzing around it at hyperspeed, excavating a pit that dropped it into water in a subterranean well metres below. A red and yellow blur crashed through the Precursors temporal transit vehicle, shredding its delicate innards and cutting off any protective response. Rescued from his fate, John Constantine wondered at the strangely familiar liveried insects that had abruptly appeared and assisted him. Then he looked down at the larval insects in their natal pits. Had he any right to do this? If these insects were descended somehow from those below him, then didn't the fact that they'd rescue him indicate they were valuable forms of sapient life that deserved to survive?
Waterskater provided telepathic contact with the stranger, informing him of the past atrocities in Hymenopterid history. The Coleopterid Genocide in Equatoria. The enslavement of Lepidoterids in Borea. The extinction of the A'arakhne Confederacy because of deliberate infection with arthropodicidal micro-organisms on Tau Ceti IV. The stranger nodded and sent back images that indicated the vertebrate species that had previously dominated their world was no better morally. And then another Precursor vessel materialised from out of the Jurassic late morning and battle was joined again. And at long last, John Constantine realised he had no real choice. Wishing forgiveness from all he held sacred for what he had to do, his feet stamped down on the larval precursor hymenopterid pits. repeatedly, tears in his eyes, as he unilaterally aborted the timeline that had then proceeded to dominate the next one hundred and seventy million years of galactic history. When it was over, he gazed tearfully at the assembled group of insects. As a halo spread around them, they gradually disappeared, as did the Precursor protector assailants. In deep space, Superfly felt the erosion of his causality begin to eat away at him, but not before he cannoned into Minos, destroying it outright, leaving only a scattered shower of meteoroids. But the impact was enough to deflect other inbound cometoids from their original trajectories, splaying them into hyperbolic orbits and out of Earth-77's solar system.
UPTIME:
The Time Trapper screeched as its own existence was undone and with his erasure from history, there would never be any transposition of mutated hymenopterid larvae to the Jurassic twilight, no untimely proliferation of sapient insects, no Minos asteroid impact and no subsequent Time Trapper seeding of other worlds with analogous precursor sapient insectoids. The timeshift couldn't fix everything- there was still a nuclear war in the late seventies on Earth-77, but without the circumstances that had led to the timeloop that had replaced humanity with the hymenopterids. Numbly, Constantine watched as a group of London Council Pest Disposal Unit workers asphyxiated a patch of writheing larval hymenopterids, a scene duplicated across a world that would never know how close it had come to permanent erasure from existence.
Blinking back tears in his eyes, John Constantine went into his local, the Rose and Crown Pub, for some serious boozing. As he was swallowing his third pint, he noticed a small ant had crawled onto the pub coaster. It reared up, looking at him. Constantine lifted the coaster and let the ant rejoin its counterparts in a new anthill outside the masonry and bustle around him. The ant hesitated again, then hurried back on its way, intent on its duties and routines of the day. After a while, it forgot about the altruistic human. But back in the pub, John Constantine never did.
THE END
TO BE CONTINUED
