The Continuum Paradox: 06. The Dead World

 

My second mission was different from the first. This time, Hastings didn’t send me to merge with another version of myself who was thriving. Instead, I was sent to a version of Earth that had already fallen.

I called it the Dead World. When I merged, I woke up in an abandoned city, the air thick with ash and silence. The sun was dim behind a veil of dust, and the buildings were crumbling. This version of me – let’s call her Survivor Aria – had been living alone for years. She’d scavenged supplies, built makeshift shelters, and learned to fight off what little remained of humanity.

Survivor Aria had one goal: stay alive. But her memories revealed a chilling truth. The world hadn’t fallen because of natural disasters or wars. It had collapsed because of us. Greed, technology run rampant, and decisions made by people like Alt-Aria.

I wasn’t sent here to find solutions. I was sent here to learn what happens when we fail.

The Forgotten Lesson

The longer I stayed in the Dead World, the harder it became to remember my mission. Survivor Aria was paranoid, angry, and broken. Her thoughts became my thoughts. Her memories, my memories. I started to believe I belonged there, that I’d always been part of this desolate timeline.

But then I found something she had been hiding – a journal. In it, she wrote about a group called the Visionary Collective. They’d tried to warn people about the collapse decades before it happened. They’d built prototypes for sustainable technologies, ones similar to the blueprints I’d stolen from Alt-Aria’s world.

But no one listened. The corporations silenced them, and their work was buried. The journal ended abruptly, with Survivor Aria lamenting that she’d been too late to act.

Reading those words felt like staring into a mirror. I realized the same story was playing out in my world. I couldn’t let that happen.

The Cost of Merging

Merging back from the Dead World was harder than the first time. Survivor Aria was still in my head, her anger and paranoia clawing at my thoughts. When I woke up in Continuum’s facility, I felt like I’d left a part of myself behind – or maybe brought too much of her back with me.

The team scanned me, ran tests, and gave me the usual warnings about lingering side effects. But they didn’t tell me how bad it would get.

I started having vivid dreams of the Dead World, waking up gasping for air. I saw ash and ruin everywhere I went, even when I was wide awake. And Survivor Aria’s voice wouldn’t stop whispering in my mind, reminding me of the cost of inaction.

Hastings noticed, of course. He pulled me aside and told me something I hadn’t considered: “Every merge rewrites you, Aria. You’re not just borrowing these lives. You’re becoming them.”

The Warning

Hastings finally told me about the Final Branch. It’s the reason Continuum exists, the reason they keep sending us into these alternate lives. Somewhere out there is a timeline where humanity not only survives but thrives. Hastings believes the answers we need are in that branch – but no one knows how to find it.

What he didn’t tell me is why Continuum is so desperate. I found that out on my own. While hacking into their systems again, I uncovered a classified file. It revealed that prime reality, our reality, is collapsing faster than they’ve admitted. We don’t have decades to fix this. We barely have years.

This is why I’m writing to you. Your timeline is still young. You still have choices. I’m leaving this record because someone needs to know the truth about what happens if you make the wrong ones.

I don’t know where my next mission will take me, or how much of myself I’ll lose. But I’ll keep merging. I’ll keep fighting. Because if I can’t save my world, maybe I can help save yours.

-Aria Kairos
2124