Chain 035: The Fountain

Chain 035: The Fountain
Location: Past, Present, and Future
Age: 19
Identity: Savage / Drop-In [-50]
Drawbacks: [+600] Discordant Incarnations, They Do Not Understand, Unending Age

[Free]      Perfect Time
[100/1550]  Sense of the Now
[200/1550]  All Together Now
[400/1550]  The Departed Speak
[900/1550]  Soothing Presence
[1100/1550] Absolution
[Free]      Biosphere
[1150/1550] Meditation Garden
[1550/1550] Tree of Life Sapling

There are a lot of things I expect to discover, when I open my eyes in a new world. Places I've never been, sometimes places I've never heard of. Things I've never seen before. Fantastic worlds glittering against the backdrop of space, dragons and other such magical creatures flying through the skies.

Things I do not expect to discover, though, include the fact that I'm in my own body, at the turn of the 21st century, working a menial job while trying to get my life together after high school, not yet having found my chosen career.

Nor do I expect to discover that I'm also in a spot five hundred years prior, even if it seems... vague, much of the time... and I turn out to more or less be a farmer in a rural area. Any knowledge of anything outside of the local county was frustratingly vague ... but I seldom really had time to dwell on it, as the life of a farmer is a very busy one. Not to mention the life of a parent. There are some insights I've had about how things were back then, however... things I could have happily lived without.

While I don't expect my perspective to shift between these time frames and it is sometimes jarring, I truly am shocked when I start also seeing things from a much more distant future, at the cusp of the 26th century, and from the perspective of a much older version of myself no less. Of course, there are issues of the pains of old age, but there are ways to mitigate that - but it seems I am one of a remarkably slim minority, as virtually everyone else is unaged past early or mid adulthood.

All of this adds up to a great deal of discord, especially since from everything I can gather after the fact, the past version of myself is decidedly unlike the present and future in that it's a very different gender. While it was a good life, it doesn't exactly click with me, not in a way that I might expect. To be honest the identity crisis was something that bothered me a great deal more than I might have expected, in all time frames, and it took me a great deal of thinking to come to terms with it.

In fact, it took five hundred years of thinking to come to terms. Not only with that, though. With all of the lives I've lived. Certainly, they're spread across very different worlds. Arguably they're vastly different versions of myself - as was the past version of myself. You can't get much different than a formerly aspiring programmer and a subsistence farmer, after all. But... in the end... the realization that they were all a part of me was a notable one. Different experiences, different things I might have done, but all of them me.

Maybe that's what it took to finally reach past the hurdle of only being able to grasp a handful of my abilities at a time. Perhaps I don't learn quite as readily as I might have before, but that's nothing that persistence can't fix.

And certainly, having a soothing presence is a particularly useful thing when it comes to parenthood, even if it turns out that pneumonia in the early sixteenth century is a lot more merciless than it is in the modern era; my children all knew I loved them, but saying goodbye when you know the end is coming is hard.

That was no different in the distant future, either, when the time came for my jump to end.

The present though... that was the worst part of things. Because I had the memories of the future, where all of this happened as it is now. But have you ever considered the ramifications of having your life to do over? Lost friends that you suddenly were thick as thieves with. Lost loves that you hadn't even met yet.

I may not have had memories of jumping in the distant past, but when it came to the present... well, I restrained myself from acting on my knowledge of my future life, for the most part. I did track down one friend, though, and encouraged her to take a different path in her life; moving west rather than east, thereby avoiding years of trauma. Another... well, I gave her options that she didn't have previously. A degree of agency. Yet, no one understood why I did this.

I was abruptly far more reflective than I might have been, where I got a motorcycle from and how I kept the bills paid without a job. I visited distant family that I'd not seen in years. It confused the people I visited with as well. But the universal thing that happened, whenever I told anyone of my nature... they'd almost all either panic or shut down in denial. And while I don't use my abilities as an achron very often to change my personal timeline, I had to do that depressingly often to stop everyone from thinking I was insane and locking me up. Not only that, but if I tried to share the insights I'd collected over my journey, they'd have similar reactions. It was heartbreaking in every possible sense. It hurts to know that, despite the thought that everyone has... that if things were a little different, the broad strokes of life wouldn't really change all that much. That despite what people professed later in life, the thoughts at the time didn't reflect what they said.

Only two people believed me, in truth. I think the only reason that happened was because I cured conditions that would have otherwise killed them, and that they were family already. Lost loves stayed lost. Lost friends were often never met. But at least I could still trust those near me, even though I couldn't dare tell them the truth. Toward the end of my stay, I made sure everyone was taken care of; quietly using magic to deal with certain ailments where I could. Easing their passing where I could not. Leaving myself certain things, as "my" life would continue even if I myself would not be here. And the worst of it was the passing of one of the people who believed me, even if it was a bit later than predicted.

Before I left, I made sure to leave caches in various places across the world. Blueprints. Tools. Workable substitutes for materials that were hard to manufacture or damaging to the environment. Pollution condensers. Fusion labs. Superconducting fiber. The barest details of the longevity vaccine, even though rumors spoke of aging being reversed in lab animals as my time drew to a close.

After all, I'd seen the mark of those technologies in the future - what's wrong with a little bootstrapping if it helps make a better outcome?