The Commonality

The Commonality

He was late, and Aldus Brax checked his pocket watch just to be sure. The leather binder under his arm was stuffed with papers wound in a leather strap, and he’d occasionally have to circle back when a sheet would fall free. In a huff, he reached Tower of Records, the doors flying open and every eye turning toward him.

“Hmph. You’re late,” Hensley Smith said, the Admin-Superior curling his mustache and checking his own watch. “You should know, Aldus, time waits…”

“…for no one. I know.” He straightened his glasses and fixed his hair.

“Indeed,” agreed Smith.

A dozen Admins had gathered, each charged with monitoring at least a thousand differing timelines. Above them, the topmost levels of their towering archive was lost in a low, dark cloud, which at any other time would be open to the sky and abuzz with activity. Absent were the assistants combing through the countless shelves of a timeless catalog. Now, all was quiet, and the Admins stared skyward with dread at a growing storm.

A lift quietly descended upon its rail from the haze and Mira Dryden stepped off at ground level, high-heels clacking against the polished marble floor. She set a tidy folder down upon the ring-shaped table. “Twenty-one hours,” Mira said.

“Impossible!” one Admin exclaimed. “How did we not see this coming?” another asked.

Smith poured over the folder, turning through the charts and graphs and calculations. He leaned back, pulling his monocle away, dumbfounded. “It’s a planet killer…a timeline commonality. Dear God.”

“What does that mean?” Aldus asked.

“An extinction level event across all realities. Every Earth pulverized instantly, thousands of timelines slamming back together at once. A total reset.”

“Which will extinguish all life on every Earth,” Mira said.

“And destroy the tower,” the Admin-superior clarified.

Mira removed a sheet from the folder and pressed the top corner. One form instantly became twelve, which she passed around the room. As if drawn in pencil with precise tools, an asteroid materialized, tumbling slowly upon the parchment. Next, vectors and coordinates appeared in different colors with a countdown steadily ticking downward in hours, minutes, and seconds.

“Where will it strike?” Aldus wondered.

“Does it matter?” Mira replied.

“So, what can we do?”

A mumbling erupted amongst the Admins when Smith said, “Our priority is noninterference. We’re observers. That’s all.”

“But we have the ability,” Aldus reminded him.

“And we all know how that’s turned out,” Smith replied, shaking his head. “The Permian-Triassic extinction – introducing the sauropods to nuclear fusion. You can still see the crater from space.”

“But if we do nothing,” Aldus rejected, “Earth dies and we lose everything!”

“We cannot interfere!” Smith rejected.

“Absurd!” Aldus declared and bolted for the nearest lift, ascending into the sky.

“Damn fool!” Smith scolded. He and Mira found their own lifts and followed him up.

“You can’t do this, Aldus!” Smith scolded as the other man breached the fog, before entering themselves. Rolling thunder rumbled in the distance. “How far does the storm extend?” he asked Mira.

“I never saw the top.”

“It’s that bad?” The thunder grew and they could see the first hints of flashes from above.

She nodded. “It’s worsening and will increase, until the event.”

Suddenly, a deluge and blistering winds hit them. “Maybe Aldus is right,” he admitted. “I’ve never seen a commonality tempest like this.” Smith shouted against the gale, “Aldus!”

Then unexpectedly, the storm waned, the wind quieting and fog lifting. Twinkling stars in a clear sky reappeared and, two lifts over, Aldus Brax descended from above.

“Aldus, you insolent…” Smith said as he passed.

“He did it,” Mira interrupted.

“Yes, but what did he do?”

Back on the ground, their feet met the polished tile just as the foundations groaned and cracked.

“Is this the end?” Mira wondered, though Smith knew better.

“Hardly,” he grinned. “Rather, new growth.”

The entire tower shuddered and shifted one hundred feet closer to the sky. A new space of empty shelves appeared around them, and upon a lower one, a new volume materialized. Astounded, Smith smiled, glancing to a satisfied Aldus Brax then opening it wide.

On the pages, images shifted and they observed a powerful coronal mass ejection, timed at just the right moment, vaporize the asteroid which had threatened the Earth.

“All this new space,” Mira marveled. “What now?”

“It will fill itself over time, of course,” he said and turned his eyes to the clear sky above. “Nicely done, my boy. Nicely done.”