Mirai, Mirai is a bite-sized speculative serial drama, posting weekly. This time, Lady Radiance and her friends must fend off the attacks of multiversal megalomaniac Mheksos the Mighty—with the help of their children from alternate futures far worse than their own. Click here to get started.
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⏪ Previously, Mheksos outlined his master plan to erase every version of himself with time-travel powers from the multiverse. He intends to prevent the resulting reality-collapsing paradox by swapping in someone else as Mheksos’ secret identity—and informed Hades that he seems to be the most obvious choice…
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“Me?” Hades tried to swallow, but couldn’t. “No, I…that doesn’t make sense. How would you even ensure that?”
“It should be sufficient to return you to the point in time where the paradox resolves,” Mheksos said. “I vanish, you vanish, and then—Mheksos will always have been you. The record will show that you left your timeline at that point and rampaged throughout the multiverse, attempting to make your name as a villain, before your future self finally returned to your own timeline just a day or two before your past self had left. The overlap between you two explains the paradox here. The damage you inflicted to the other timelines explains the erasures there. No version of Mheksos with the power to edit history remains. And once you live through the paradox again, you’re free to call off the invasion then and there, if you want to.”
[authorly scribbling on a whiteboard over Mheksos’ shoulder]
While the multiverse abhors a grandfather paradox (event has no cause), ontological paradoxes (event causes itself) appear to be perfectly survivable.
To be clear as mud, by the way, items (1) and (2) never happened. —E.B.
“If I want to, ha,” he said beneath his breath. Perhaps that was the question. After he had always been Mheksos, would he still want to? Or would Mheksos’ accumulated memories consume even that little piece of his soul that he had kept to himself? “But—no, look, this is ridiculous. I thought that bringing in a new Mheksos was supposed to settle everything, but The Matrix still knows who you are—were—will have been?—and now we’ve talked, so—look, it’s not that I don’t want to be the Master of the Multiverse. But outside your extended paradox bubble, what becomes the rationale for Mheksos’ existence? Why in the Below would I leave this timeline now and start waging interdimensional war, and why would I purposely come back early enough to influence my own past?”
Mheksos shrugged loosely, picking up a twelfth chipped cup that seemed to have appeared from nowhere. “Once you’ve actually resolved the paradox, one question may end up answering the other. In any case, do recall that you’ve been living in its aftermath, not events as they will have been to start with. With a scar like that on the timeline, it’s possible you may never entirely reconcile the causality; some plausible reason is all it would take. Perhaps you’ll have had some dust-up with your puppetmaster, or a humiliating rejection from your lovely nemesis…see, the longer you think about it, the more sense it makes, doesn’t it?”
It did, so Hades left off that thought and attacked the next. “I can’t even travel between timelines.”
“Can’t you?” Mheksos asked. “Or have you never tried, because you didn’t know what was possible? I know that you understand the physics. If you were to revolt against your master and take some of his power for yourself, enough to keep yourself alive without him, enough to see through the fourth dimension and face that first jump…”
Hades had stopped listening. His master! He hadn’t thought of Archangel at all since being pulled through the rift. He reached mentally for the familiar sense of control, just to be certain, and brushed against a feeling like the empty socket of a missing tooth. Panic surged through him as if he hadn’t found his pulse. “What did you do?” he demanded.
“I’ve done nothing. You still have the power he was letting you borrow, but he doesn’t exist here, so he can’t touch you,” Mheksos said. “You must have noticed that it was the same way for Makaria? Your master couldn’t just take control of her, since she was created by a different version of himself; he’d have needed your help. As Mheksos, marauding abroad through the multiverse, you’ll likewise be entirely free from his influence. You’ll be your own villain. Your own man, even.”
“I…” Hades stared at him, recalculating. “Well…yes, I suppose I would.”
The ironic thought had just occurred that perhaps he was well-suited for the job: his own timeline might very well also be safer without Lord Hades. The good world that he was slowly coming to appreciate, that he’d become reluctant to allow his master, or anyone, to ruin…his daughter smiling at her mother, free of the yoke across his own shoulder…it might all still be possible. But only at a price. He slowly clenched and unclenched a fist as he thought it over. “Everything Mheksos has done would become my work,” he said. “Even killing my Lady Radiance. I know that’s happened many times.”
“Not your Lady,” the other said. “Mheksos hasn’t touched a hair of yours. The others—there was nothing you could do. They got in the way.” He looked darkly amused as he added, “That’s not a bad reason for jumping from timeline to timeline, is it? Trying just one more time to get it right.”
“I didn’t say I would do it,” Hades said, bristling, suddenly overcome by a feeling that he was rarely allowed to experience.
“I wasn’t asking,” Mheksos said.
“I don’t get a choice?”
“No more than I did.”
“Wonderful. Story of my life.” Hades put on a wide, shallow smile. “Will I remember any of this conversation?”
Mheksos’ presence was starting to look a little thin. “It’s possible; there are things I remember from my past lives that have since technically been erased. Then again, possibly not.” He raised a hand, and the room took on a deepening green tint. “If any of it’s important to you, I suggest concentrating very hard.”
Liam’s skin tingled with fear as his surroundings continued to fade. What was important? All that came to mind immediately was Makaria, but she’d only come here in the first place because of Mheksos; to try to remember her at all seemed like a hopeless kind of circular logic. And yet that was all he could think of—Kari, and the happy family she wanted so badly, and her hesitation to believe that she was even allowed to say so. He knew that pain, and yet he was about to inflict it.
“Will they forgive me?” he asked, his voice cracking like thin ice underfoot—as if Mheksos could answer that. But he was already falling again.
💀⌛💀
An approaching thunderclap rolled over the city as Kari stared into the space where the rift had been.
Lady Radiance had stopped running when she saw it close itself from the inside, and now she began to walk slowly toward her daughter again. The bright-white and warm-gold auras, hazy from refraction through the pouring rain, tangled briefly at the edges and then melded as Christa reached her and leaned down. Behind her, Jacob and Titan Beetle hung back by the stairs.
Kari took the proffered hand, but stayed where she was, sitting in the pooling water that had splashed flecks of tar across the hem of her cloak and the skirts of her borrowed pink dress. “Is he coming back?” she asked, with her gaze still fixed on her last sight of Lord Hades.
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⏭️ This episode concludes Part 5 of 7. Next week will be a brief intermission. We’ll return on Monday, May 18th with the opening to Part 6, another trip down memory lane—this one to The Matrix’ universe, Terra-43. You may want to reread #8, his previous flashback episode, in the meantime...
Thanks for reading! For more stories set in this universe, see my superverse directory.
So. Uh. Thank you for explaining. Um. I need you to explain again please.
Oh boy.
...
I'm going to go outside and wait a moment to see if I can hear the scream when Scoot reads this.
Also: WHAT. WHATTTTT. What?