[Time Warp] Supercape, Supercape, and the Far Future!

[Dr Archeville]

15th April 2011

“Goodness me!”

Supercape had never seen anything quite like it. And he had seen a lot. The cosmos was stuffed full of the most extraordinary anomalies, fluctuations, and oddities, and he spent a lot of his time examining them.

As he flew high above Freedom City, keen to clear his head after a taxing day at the Lab wrestling with the particle smasher, he had run into what he could only describe as a rip in the universe. A jagged, pulsating, and flapping rip. It was perhaps 20 metres wide, and a few metres broad, although he had the unnerving sensation of it possessing more than three dimensions. A lot more.

Clearly, it deserved closer examination.

As he floated towards it, his plethora of superhuman senses all singing praise to the strangeness of the anomaly, the rip wobbled slightly.

Perhaps if he had not been so engrossed in the study of the rip, he could have avoided it. It swelled, twisted, and ate Supercape up whole.

Supercape had only a dim recollection of this. He drifted back into consciousness with the air whistling over his head. Looking around, he saw the rapidly expanding landscape. He was falling. With a burst of adrenaline, he shook off the cobwebs and regained his faculties. Even so, it was a close thing, and he only managed to stop his fall a few metres from the ground.

And what a ground it was. Endless desert and cracked rock as far as his eyes could see. The sun was large, angry, and red. A dusty wind blew around him. The only signs of life where some lichen and other, undefinable plant life that clung to the rocks.

Where am I?

The unrelenting landscape gave no hint. With a moments concentration, the space around him wobbled, and he disappeared.

To reappear floating in orbit over the planet. He vaguely recognised it. Earth, but not as he knew it. The continents had all flowed into one mega continent. The moon still rotated around his home planet. The sun was wrong, and the stars had moved too.

Hold on…this rings a bell... Oh dear.

He couldn’t place the exact time, but this was how Earth would be in a couple of billion years, when the Sun changed and the continents had clashed. A couple…of…billion…years...

Everything had gone. Whilst it was extremely interesting, he felt a gnawing coldness in his gut, not just from the loss, but from the realisation that he was trapped.

He spent the next two days searching the planet, looking for the rip in time, but to no avail. It had gone. Sitting on a mountain peak higher than the Everest of his time, and observing the unfamiliar wreck of Earth, he held his head in his hands, silent in despair.

“Chin up!” came a familiar voice.

Supercape turned around to look straight at himself. Well, not quite himself. The hair was flecked with grey, and the forehead lined, but it was, without question, himself. Maybe how he would be in 10 years time.

“Easy way out of this!” said his older self, with a broad green. “Won’t let you into it right now, got to figure that out yourself” he continued, tapping his nose, “all that quantum entanglement stuff, works in more dimensions than three… pretty sure you know that by now, although I didn’t know how to use it…”

The younger Supercape stood watching his future self, mouth aghast.

“…but suffice to say, you cracked it!” the older man said. “So, here I am, come to rescue you so that you get a chance to crack it. And when you do, don’t forget to come here and rescue yourself like I am doing… have to preserve quantum causality and all that, or heaven knows what would happen…”

The older man lay a hand on the younger, and with a flash, and a smoothness that put the younger man’s teleportation to shame, they reappeared over Freedom City, where the rip had been.

The future Supercape examined his extravagant and high tech watch. “Not bad… a few seconds out…” he muttered before giving his younger self a friendly wave. “Good luck out there” he said “not that you need it, after all, I made it! Although those Spider-zombies were a close one…errr… forget I said that!”

And with another flash, the younger Supercape was all alone, quite flabbergasted.

Temporal Entanglement eh? He thought to himself, the next day, as he started reprogramming the particle smasher in the lab.

Very interesting…