In the beginning, or should I say, the end, there were five.

They had started out as tiny blips in an empty and cold universe, but slowly other little bits had begun flying towards them.

Each of the five greedily accepted their new source of nourishment, and over time grew to astronomical proportions.

Initially, they had been too far apart for any communication, but after many many years of waiting the reaches of space had begun to shrink. As they got closer together, as well as much larger, they began to converse.

"What should we do now?"

"I don't know, there's not much to talk about..."

As indeed, there was not much to talk about.

There was a lull in conversation for a couple of million years.

The youngest of the five, however, got bored and started to wonder about his situation.

"Does anybody, like, remember anything?"

"What do you mean?"

"Things happen, we eat our little bits, but I can't remember what happened in the past."

"Nobody can."

"How come?"

"That's just how it works, you don't know what happened in the past. No sense asking why."

"Well, yeah I guess so..."

"At least we can know something happened in the past, because in all our future conversations we can’t remember the past."

"If so, then what's the point? Why are we even having this conversation if we're just going to forget what happened? Hell, I don't even know what you just answered and now I'm in the middle of a sentence I don't remember the beginning of! The only way I keep talking is because these words are the logical start to what I’m about to say next."

"I know, I know, calm down. That's just how things work. No point questioning it. At least you know what's going to happen, imagine how scary it would be not knowing THAT."

"Good point, I guess..."

Of course, their conversation went nothing like this. What seems like the learning of a topic was in fact the opposite. The young inquisitive Entity had actually started the conversation knowing exactly what would happen, and understanding perfectly how time works, but only wanted to forget it, which was exactly what the lesson helped him do. Why, you may ask, would these Entities want to forget everything? That will all be explained in the next conversation they have after a few more million years of contemplation.

The reason why the conversation has not been formatted in the most "accurate" rendition is because it would not make any sense to you reversed peoples.

After a few million years, the Entities once again began to speak.

"What's the point?"

"I'm actually not quite sure."

"It's been quite boring just sitting here and absorbing specks of dust, wouldn't it be better if we had a purpose?"

"I guess so, but what should we try to do?”

"Hey! I know! We've been spending this whole time worrying about forgetting about things, while maybe that's a good thing!"

"Interesting...."

"What if our whole purpose is to erase information?"

"Honestly, we can't avoid what we do no matter how much we may delude ourselves into thinking otherwise, so we may as well enjoy it. Let's decide on making our whole purpose to forget information."

They had a vote. It passed unanimously.

After deciding to make forgetfulness their purpose, the Entities had forgotten what it was.

And thank goodness they had agreed on their purpose so late in their existence, or else most of it would have been spent with none at all.

But now they were at the point in their existence without a purpose, and they knew it. As every year passed they knew less and less, until the only kernel of knowledge they could hold onto was the fact that they were greedy.

They had all of this matter, and yet had not shared it whatsoever.

However, after bidding each other some quick farewells, or more accurately, greetings, they began to release their matter.

As they let go, a few curious things happened. For one, they all simultaneously died.

They were no longer the Great Entities, and were now just black holes - inanimate objects, with no more a soul than a worn-out shoe.

All consciousnesses, both forwards and backwards, really only exist the exact moment in which they are present. The only thing differentiating our universe from yours is that we think we are going towards the known, and away from the unknown, while you think the opposite.

I don’t know which is better. I think that getting rid of information makes a lot more sense, honestly, but of course I can assume you think, well, the opposite.

And one miraculous thing, at least perhaps from your perspective, happened when the Entities released this matter of theirs. It came out not as uniform blips, but with order--one could even say information.

Perhaps the Entities did not die and instead live on in the order of our universe, waiting to be further forgotten.

But yes, as this matter was released from the Entities, it was not as small cold dark specks, but as large cold dark specks. However, these were different. They were of course not sentient —that privilege is reserved only for humans and the Entities— but they attracted energy.

From all the far reaches of the universe, light began to coalesce into these orbs, feeding them. But instead of becoming larger, they started to heat up. As they got hotter and hotter, they glowed a dull red. And eventually, they acquired enough energy to break their constituent parts into simpler, purer forms. This required immense effort and kept them in constant need of more light energy.

Eventually, although some took longer than others, these orbs all heated up into stars.

Though they had a longer wait, those that took the dwarf route to stardom eventually lived longer lives, and also had the honour of being the first place where our the humans in our universe, the great information destroyers, have been able to live.

We humans are interesting. We consider ourselves the great second link in the endless quest towards uniformity. Though the Entities created our universe with all its disgusting complexity, we still respect them, because they gave us humans a purpose. Of course this purpose, if you think of it in a strictly logical way with all the knowledge we unfortunately have as a society, is useless. The universe as a whole tends towards complexity no matter what we try to do. No matter how much we try to forget, unwrite, disassemble, and unlearn, complex living things still spring out of the ground, indifferent to our holy purpose.

Fortunately, our society has little patience for such nihilism. As we know from the great writings of the future, we will eventually live in a simpler age, one without knowledge, one where humans are free to believe whichever delusions we wish, with nobody to disagree and make us miserable.

Fortunately, once more, we also have at our disposal the Bridge, and with it access to you miraculous, entropy-reversing other humans.

And that’s the story of the Entities. Of course, many back home in the towards-the-known wouldn’t call it just a story, and the most popular religion actually has the Entities as its central gods. But I know you don’t exactly believe in our religion so I guess it’s just a story to you. Whatever.

Anyways, enough about the towards-the-known, tell me about the towards-the-unknown! I’ll love forgetting about it back at home.

As George ended his monologue about the religion and general philosophy of his world he was finally able to relax. Talking still felt weird to him because he was a native of the towards-the-known, but as the official ambassador to the towards-the-unknown, he had just about mastered it.

Every second, new information was being added to his memory. It made him quite uncomfortable, but he tolerated it as a service to his world and to greater cooperation between the two universes that the Bridge enabled.

The first two chapters of this text have simply been a transcript of George’s monologue, as Darlings Publishing thought a summary of the Entist religion would be an appropriate beginning to our documentation of the backwards universe and its history.

Since human memory is erased in the towards-the-known, we have no way of truly knowing what happened before the bridge was created. This is, of course, because the only way of recording information about it is to have locals travel to the towards-the-unknown and dictate what they know of their future, so it can be recorded before it is forgotten when they go back. They do not care that the information is destroyed—as you have probably learned from the monologue of George—and actually relish the destruction of knowledge.

Just a point of clarification, towards-the-known and unknown refers to the direction time runs in the respective universes. Assuming you are reading this in the correct location, you do not know what will happen in the future, so you are in the towards-the-unknown.

And so, even though he did not truly know what happened in the past, George gave the most popular rendition among those who try to guess. Many people disagree with his version and argue it is impossible to know anything that happened in the towards-the-known before the Bridge was created. At the end of the day, it comes down to the simple fact that many people want something to believe in, regardless of how accurate it is.

The reader may be wondering why George, or anybody from the towards-the-known for that matter, would ever want to go here and form new memories. The reason is diplomacy.

The Bridge was made in the year 2000. Coincidentally, it was also the year 2000 in the calendar of the towards-the-known. Ever since then, our two worlds have discovered, well, ways we can be very useful to each other.

A huge industry in the towards-the-known is mining and oil drilling, and now more than ever after they have access to all our mine tailings from our mines. After we extract metals from ore, we used to be left with hazardous chemicals, but now we can just give them to the towards-the-known. They mix them with their metals and form ores and put them back into the earth. More recently, however, they’ve just started giving us their metals instead of going through the effort of reforming them into ores.

There are many people in the towards-the-known, especially Entists, who are very opposed to this. They argue that we towards-the-unknown inhabitants only want to refine their raw materials (not inaccurate) and that trading with us is a direct insult to the Entities and their message. Of course, this isn’t very well thought out, because even though we refine their materials into products we can use, the process on average creates entropy, just like everything in our universe does. Entists are not known for their logical thinking.

Fortunately, at the moment most of the major nations in the towards-the-known support trade with us, as they have grown reliant on our waste products for the functioning of their society. However, as we all know, in twenty-three years, in the year 2050, the bridge will be shut down by the towards-the-known. We know this to be true, as nothing in their memories has ever failed to come to pass. Thus our world is left with the problem of relearning how to live without them.

Why will the gate be shut down? Next chapter we will give a detailed political analysis so the reader can begin to understand why the towards-the-known is acting in a way that, from our perspective, appears highly irrational.

After reading the last chapter, and from being up-to-date on current events, you know that the Entists (people belonging to the religion surrounding the destruction of information) will eventually gain control of the major governments of the towards-the-known and shut down the Bridge by the year 2050, or for them the year 1950. We are incapable of stopping them, for reasons that will be discussed in the next chapter. As to why they are doing it, it all comes down to basic human nature.

Our concept of entropy is completely reversed in the towards-the-known, and so that universe tends towards order. Since humans in both universes like to feel like they have some sort of control and power, the Entist religion formed there in order to provide that feeling of personal control and autonomy over the universe. Entism is much like our institutions of science and learning, we attempt to accumulate knowledge and order in a universe where that is truly impossible.

Though one may think that since the only difference between our universes is the direction of time, they would be only mirror images of each other. This is not the case.

Separated, our two universes would be exactly the same save one difference: The direction of time that people think they are going in. Both peoples in both universes have a set of memories that logically flows from the present to the moment we were born. However, our memories in the towards-the-unknown involve people saying that time flows towards the unknown and involve people doing things that would only make sense if they were preparing for time to run forwards and towards the unknown. The towards-the-known people have a set of memories that involves people “saying” (in their perfectly reversed and information-destroying languages) things that would only make sense if they thought time ran towards the known. So, in short, we think time runs forward because all our memories only make sense if we assume time runs forward. The world is the way it is because it is the way it is.

These differing beliefs of the direction of time have caused drastic differences between our two societies. For one, religions such as Entism are much more widely followed in the toward-the-known. Our psychologists have tried to think of reasons why this is the case, and the most prevailing theory is that in a universe where people know everything that will happen in the future, people search much harder for some way to have a purpose or feel like they are working against the laws of the universe. Here people feel that craving as well, but it is satisfied more so by the belief that we can decide what will happen in our future, and that we have some degree of control or free will. This is, with the opening of the Bridge, unfortunately not true even for inhabitants of the towards-the-unknown. Though the actual method is quite logically complicated and will be covered in a later chapter, there is a way to derive the future from the memories of the inhabitants of the towards-the-known. Knowing their personal future, such as death day and the time of major events of their life would drive most people insane, so most don’t seek out their future and would prefer to live in ignorance. I am sure that in the towards-the-known they joke about our delusional need for control as much as we joke about their delusional need for, well, control. People are people, regardless of how time flows.

It seems like this mindset would easily lead to nihilism, but both sides have ways of coping with the fact that our future is or could be predicted and free will is an illusion. In the towards-the-known, they have plenty of practice with dealing with it and have founded religions like Entism to give themselves purpose. Also, as you may have seen in George’s speech (one of the original towards-the-known to towards-the-unknown interactions and a very historically famous moment), they have a very strong sense of honour and actively disdain those who are nihilists in their universe. Here, only twenty seven years after the Bridge was opened, we do not have many coping mechanisms save ignorance. The government of the United States and Territories of North America, the country in which the bridge is located, has strictly regulated what information gets out to the world at large about our future, so as to maintain our sense of humanity and control.

Though the towards-the-known brings us towards a perhaps saddening conclusion about our free will, Darling’s Publishing* would like to affirm that the superiors in power are surely making the best of the valuable predictive information so we can move towards a better world and work for the good of all mankind.

Next chapter we will discuss how exactly interactions between our two universes work and how predictive information can be reliably obtained, its accuracy, and its limitations.

*Please note Darling’s Publishing, at the time this piece of propaganda was written, was sponsored by the government of the then existing United States and Territories of North America.

Imagine what would happen if somebody from our universe entered the towards-the-known. Time runs backwards, and so immediately their entire biological and psychological clock would reverse. Memories would be converted to nerve impulses, and these would be sent to the eyes and would be used to create a stream of light carrying their most recent memories away. They would gradually forget their entire lives, be born, and die. People in the towards-the-known can function because their memories are the perfect sequence of events of what is about to happen, so they know exactly how to act even though they are constantly losing information. A person from our universe, who does not have memories of what will happen, is effectively incapacitated. Think of your normal stream of consciousness, constantly acquiring new information and sensing the outside world. Now imagine the perfect exact opposite of that, memories ripped out of your mind; you can see what is currently leaving your eyes, but you are seeing a fantasy. Living your life backwards, at every instant thinking you are still going forward in time. It is a scary thought, and it should be. In fact, at any moment there is no way to know if you aren’t in the towards-the-known, being punished for a crime you no longer remember. The worst of political dissidents against the United States and Territories of North America are sent to the towards-the-known, eventually to be returned to the towards-the-unknown as an Erased individual and start a life of Voluntary Unpaid Labour. It is an extremely humane way to rehabilitate our criminals, and yet another example of how the towards-the-known has been of invaluable help to our society.

People from the towards-the-known are much less vulnerable than us. Whereas we are completely incapacitated by their universe, they are actually able to function in ours. Before entering our universe, their memories stretch out into the future of what exactly they will do, but they have a gap that is exactly twice as long as their stay in our universe. One half is to make room for when they form memories here, and the other half is for when they return and have to forget them, for that amount of time completely incapacitated with useless memories that have nothing to do with their surroundings. After that their memories perfectly synchronize back with their environment and they resume normal towards-the-known life, forgetting as much as possible. Why their memories are set up so that they perfectly fit back into their universe after the transition stage is not known. This sets up the first, most basic, mechanism that was discovered on how our free will can be violated by the towards-the-known, how our futures are predestined. A visitor from the towards-the-known can be asked the date of their first memory, then using their date of arrival, the date they leave can be calculated with basic arithmetic. These predictions have never been proven wrong, no matter how we try to subvert them.

As for how people from the towards-the-known actually function while here, it is the same as us. They have memories extending back into their past, albeit only starting when they step through the bridge, and all they have to do is act on them in a logical manner. The only issue that makes functioning difficult for them is that the remainder of their memories, the ones they will resume deleting once they return, all involve them acting in a way that is backwards from how they would need to act here. It is quite difficult to visualize, so a comparison is helpful. Imagine you were told to act in a way that would make your most recent memory come true, or to do exactly the opposite of what you just did the moment before, and then to constantly do that for years on end. In reality this would lead to you oscillating between two states, but it would feel just as wrong to you as functioning in our world feels to people from the towards-the-known.

Ambassadors from the towards-the-known who are going to, in the future, visit our universe know exactly when they will do so and the exact events leading up to their entrance, but they do not have any recollection of their stay here, as memories in this universe are formed, not premade. Once they leave our universe they begin forgetting their memories of their stay here until there are none left. At that point, their memories of their future synchronize exactly with what is happening in their universe and they begin functioning normally again.

Now imagine that a current inhabitant of the towards-the-known is going to see such an ambassador come back and start burning through their memories of their stay here in reverse, walking, moving, and speaking backwards in a way that does not coincide with the world around them until their memories synchronize and they are working perfectly backwards for the universe. This spectator has memories of a person living their life here in reverse, and those will only be destroyed when they actually see the person doing such a thing in the future and forget it. However, for the time being, they can go to our universe, start forming new memories and speak backwards about the event to us. We can then reverse a recording of this and thus have an exact replica of this person’s account of what a future ambassador to our world will say and do. Of course, their memories of events far in the future are fallible, just like ours of events in the distant past.

A person from their universe who walks into ours will immediately walk back because they are so used to doing the thing that will make their most recent memory come true. It is, generally, much easier to have them thrown in through the Bridge (carrying machines suffer from the same problem as people do) be caught, and then allowed to speak backwards while forcing themselves not to move. Staying still is much easier than learning to move in reverse. After this, they are returned. Most do not tolerate an extended stay.

If we want a particular prediction that was made in the past by somebody from the towards-the-known who saw an ambassador to come true or not, there are various things we can resolve to do in the future to help the chances of the desired result.

For example, say a second-hand account predictive method tells us that there will be a devastating earthquake in exactly one year. This is bad news, but the predictor could have been lying and there will not be an earthquake. We now resolve to tell the ambassador that there was an earthquake only if there was not an earthquake, and vice versa. This ensures that the only way an earthquake could happen is if the predicter was lying, or if our future self is untrustworthy. Various methods can be employed to increase the trustworthiness of both parties.

Now let’s suppose a predicter said something about a positive event we want to happen. In one year a huge gold deposit is predicted to be discovered, valued at billions of dollars. If we resolve to tell the ambassador we find a gold mine only if we actually find a gold mine, then the only way that we could not find a gold mine is again if the predictor is lying.

That concludes our summary of a very imprecise method of future prediction using the towards-the-known that has found its place as a valuable tool for future forecasts alongside simulation and common sense.

Jones slowly lifted his head from the book. He got up from the chair, knees making a popping sound as he did. He had been sitting there reading for too long. He surveyed the room around him: the hardwood floor of Towards-the-Unknown timber, not the low-quality trash from over there. His wife was sleeping quietly in bed. It was still a couple of hours until she would wake to get ready for work.

Jones had roused himself because the numbers being shouted at him by his handy dandy radio broadcaster were getting worrisomely, even dangerously small - Excuse me sir! Sir! You must leave the house in four minutes and three seconds if you wish to catch the next tram to the embassy! Excuse me sir! Sir! You must leave the … Jones started making himself breakfast slowly, ignoring the little angel murmuring in his ear.

Jones had an interesting relationship with that little voice. He couldn’t get rid of the radio speaker, but he wasn’t afraid of it. By itself the radio speaker held no power over him or anybody for that matter. In fact, there was a convenient little loop upon which you could pull - at your own discretion of course - and the petulant little thing would leave. You could throw it into the trash where in no time at all it would be collected and sent very far away indeed. The only issue was that you would also be collected and sent very far away, and in fact much much farther than your radio speaker would ever go. On the one hand, you would have defeated the radio speaker, but on the other, you would be quite unofficially dead.

So instead Jones kept making his breakfast. The egg he had cracked into his domestically manufactured polyfluoroform nonstick pan was sizzling away. Jones couldn’t hear it though; he was still listening to his patient little reminder about when he should be leaving for work. It was into the negative seconds now, a programming bug discovered by Jones. He was an anomaly in a world of punctual office workers, and kept the secret solely for himself. - Excuse me, sir! If you don’t mind me telling you this, sir! You must leave the house in a negative two minutes and fifty-five seconds! - Jones smiled to himself. Maybe if I could get one of those Entists over here to show me how to go back in time, I could still show up to work early. They could even drop by with some cheap eggs. But as his egg slowly turned from transparent to white, and as the countdown slowly reached larger and larger (or, in fact, smaller and smaller) numbers, no Entists appeared to help him.

Jones slid a spatula under the egg, careful not to break the still uncooked yolk. He liked his eggs sunny-side up. He went to his spice cabinet and selected the little rounded glass container labelled Herbes de Provence. He then sat down to enjoy his eggs.

As the egg on the plate disappeared, Jones thought about what he would have to do at work. He was North America’s chief ambassador, and he always started his day with his eggs and French seasoning. As much of a creature of habit as his radio speaker, he wouldn’t stop his routine for even the most important visitor in the world. No, he would not.

He slowly stood up and walked to the car, dabbing his mouth with the back of his hand. As he pushed open the front door, he found himself standing in front of five angry men in business suits, made from the highest quality imported wool-silk blend.

“Jones. What in God’s name have you been doing?”

The words hung in the air, but Jones paid them no attention. He wasn’t particularly adept at lip-reading, and thanks to his handy dandy ear-radio he was quite incapable of hearing them. Instead, he took a guess at something to say, the words coming from his mouth much too loudly.

“Alright lads, let’s go talk to some Entists.”

The car needed a new muffler. At every acceleration and deceleration a vibration of every mechanical part of the car was clearly audible. This wasn’t an issue, because it compensated for the lack of conversation.

Jones gazed out the tinted window, resting his arm on the door handle ledge. He watched as the surrounding neighbourhood slowly morphed from opulent mansions to rundown apartments, then back again. He would have read a book on his phone, but he had broken it the week before and they were still making a new one somewhere. As technology in the Towards-the-Known got worse and worse, there had come a time when the rich had to switch from using imported technology to domestically produced technology, and the poor vice versa. The other individuals in the car were all reading away, evidently not interested in speaking with Jones. The back of their phones read Designed in California, made in China, a dead giveaway of their socioeconomic status. Those places didn’t exist in the Towards-the-Unknown. It was technically illegal to use one’s phone while you were within a two meter radius of another person, out of politeness, but the punishment was slight and boredom was worse.

Jones looked at the driver, evidently the owner of this unmuffled car.

“Say, uh, Jakob. How’re you doing? Haven’t seen you in a while.”

Jakob did not respond. Jones sighed and turned on his ear radio. He didn’t turn on the radio per se, rather, he turned on the voluntary broadcasts.

…trade with Britain and France has taken a hit recently as the continental blockade was lifted just three days ago in a unilateral agreement by central European powers. Many worry that the diminishing quality of TTK products will reduce the USTNA’s importance on…. Harry the hippo has recently found a fun way to beat the heat….President James Mc Connel has been reelected to his second term in office unanimously through the Indirect Majoritarian Election system…

Jones remembered why he didn’t listen to the radio very frequently. He switched again to looking out the window. Now they were driving past farmland. As the car raced past the cows at 50 meters per second, the spotted cows raced past the window at 50 meters per second without giving the car, or Jones, any attention. These cows were from the Towards-the-Known, but they had no difficulty walking or behaving normally. Since they weren’t going to be returning, they had no future memories of the Towards-the-Known to mess up their behaviour.

Jones wondered what it would be like to be one of those cows. Eating all day and sitting under the hot April sun. Those cows had a lot less to worry about than Jones did, and they didn’t have that awful radio either. Their only job was to eat. Nothing was expected of them, but nothing was given to them either.

Fed up, Jones decided that he wanted to leave.

“Ok boys, game’s over. I am commandeering this vehicle under the authority given to me by the United States and Territories of North America. Pull over by the side of the road and allow me to leave and you will avoid a life sentence”

This was a complete lie. Jones was actually being taken to jail for blatant negligence of his duties as the lead ambassador to the Towards-the-Known. However, the suits didn’t know that. Jones commanded a significant amount of respect among common people, and he was betting on that respect. If they called his bluff, he would likely be killed. Killed sooner, that is.

All three of the men sitting in that loud and angry car tensed up, mentally debating what they should do. It wasn’t unheard of for there to be tests of loyalty to authority like this, where they could be asked to do something for an important person. But it was also possible that the test maker intended them to obey the larger general authority of whoever gave them their orders that morning. They didn’t know what they should do in order to follow the rules, and Jones knew it.

“Don’t worry boys, this isn’t some sort of test. I just need to get off here. I don’t see the car slowing down, and I wouldn’t want to report that to anybody, would I?”

The car slowed, then stopped. The lock clicked. Jones stepped out, the smell of manure filling his lungs and then the car.

He peeked in the car before he closed the door, and handed the person nearest him a sealed letter.

“Continue to wherever your officer told you to take me. Deliver this letter to the guard who’s there, and you’ll all get a five thousand dollar raise. Thanks for the ride.”

He clicked the door shut, and the car went rumbling away.

Jones pulled both of his radio machines out of his ears, and tossed them onto the road. Completely indifferent to the fact that just sent three people to their deaths, Jones slowly made his way across the ditch separating the road and the farm.

Jones was evidently in poor shape. As he woke up, his legs immediately protested against any kind of movement whatsoever. However, Jones was hungry and didn’t want to be stepped on by a cow, so he slowly creaked to a standing position. Things were not going according to plan. He had anticipated finding some kind of farmhouse and taking up residence there as a hired hand. However, wherever he had been let out of the car was evidently not actually close to a farm.

“This stupid lot must be ten kilometers a side.”

His dress shoes and tailored suit weren’t doing him any good either. He had seen the top of a farmhouse at the end of the previous day, but had been too tired to continue. Now he slowly limped over to the small roof that eventually became a wall, that eventually became a door. Jones was in fact observing the curvature of the earth. It was a big farm. Jones knocked at the door. A smiling man wearing a suit much more expensive than Jones’ opened the door.

“You’re not a farmer.”

“Remarkably perceptive, as always Jonsey. Did you really think we were going to let you get away that easily? Those corpses you sent us in that car...they weren’t particularly tight-lipped. Now why don’t you sit down and we’ll ask you some questions.”

Jones threw a punch at this evidently-important-man. Regrettably, he was so weak that the man stepped out of the way quickly enough, leaving Jones a fool.

“That’s enough Jonsey. Can somebody knock this buffoon out?”

Jones felt a painful prick on his shoulder, and the world melted away.

When Jones woke up, he was sitting on a wooden chair, evidently handmade. A plate of cookies was sitting in the middle of a table shared by him and the important man.

“Those farmers were kind enough to lend me their home for the time being, so we have a peaceful place to speak with each other.”

Nobody else appeared to be in the room, but Jones knew better. Some of the futuristic tech from when the TTK had been discovered was inevitably still kicking around in the important government agencies.

“You, Jones, are a very inconvenient man. Do you know that?”

“...”

“You have no idea how easily you could be killed right now Jones. These guards with us,” he motioned to the empty room around them, “they could wipe you off the face of this earth in a fraction of a second.”

Jones had every idea how easily he could be killed at that very instant. In fact, he had acquired those very guns some fifty-odd years ago. He smiled,

“But they aren’t going to do that, are they James?”

James appeared visibly disappointed.

“No they won't. You are, unfortunately, too important to be killed.”

“Then why are you threatening me?”

“...”

Jones stood up. Immediately an electronically muffled shuffling of invisible feet began, stopped only by a frustrated wave of a hand. Jones walked to the door. It was locked.

“Just what the hell do you think you’re doing, locking all these doors?”

James smiled. He stood up, walked up to the door, and then walked through it.

“I’ll leave you some time to answer that question, Jones.”

Chapter 10: Bureaucracy

Jones eventually escaped from that farmhouse, but the story of how is not in urgent need of telling.

The reason why so many people were fussing so much about finding and capturing Jones is because he was a very peculiar individual. He was normal in all respects but one. Though he tried, he could never master golfing, nor was he capable of playing the trumpet without considerable difficulty. His tastes in food were, to say the least, nonexistent. In school, he had been entirely undistinctive. In fact, with all forms of certainty except that of the truth of reality, Jones likely would never have been considered anything more than a mediocrity working in a hardware store to pay the rent and various other expenses.

But we do not know Jones as Jones the Hardware Store Customer Relations Representative. We know Jones as the Important Ambassador with a Shadowy Job Somewhere in the Government, who Recently Became Disillusioned With It. What brought about this change?

It all comes down, as so many things do, to bureaucracy.

In 1983 the majority of democratic institutions in the world simultaneously collapsed. The year before, a very peculiar sort of door had opened in numerous locations around the world. Out of this door, as you very well know, there came people who spoke all of our languages, but with extreme difficulty and with the sort of expression that makes one think that they would rather not be doing so. These people were from the Towards the Known, a universe where time runs backwards. At first, these Bridges as they were called were hidden from the public, and secret testing by the lucky governments that happened to be in possession of one quickly made the rounds of what exactly the TTK could do for us. The answer? Quite a bit.

As has already been explained, these gates could be used to predict the future with a limited degree of reliability. Consumer goods, natural resources, and livestock that sprang out of rubbish heaps in the TTK were all abhorred by those living there (see: Entism). We were more than glad to take these off their hands. But more valuable than these was all of the technology that the TTK had at its disposal. Being capable of creating an interdimensional portal, they also had a number of other incredibly useful products that they were unable to forget without considerable studying.

The word eventually got out about this magnificent new resource that was at the disposal of humanity, but not as an exposé. Little to the knowledge of the United States, etc., there had appeared another portal in the small village of Glentui in southeastern New Zealand. Even more surprisingly, at that very place and time a terrorist organization, The Inconveniently Philosophic, was fleeing from the United States and was in hiding. They immediately caught wind of a tunnel to another dimension and would have nothing of it. Therefore they seized control of the Bridge and (unhampered by due bureaucratic procedure), immediately procured the most fantastical of weapons and tools. With these, they prevented the federal government of New Zealand from taking control of the Bridge. The federal government of New Zealand itself didn’t want some hotshot country with lots of power finding out they had a portal because that country would probably want it. And so the fiasco was kept hidden. But it didn’t need to be kept hidden for long. While the United States was just starting to have a boring philosophical discussion with George, an ambassador, about the religion of the TTK, arrogantly itemizing all of the resources they now had at their disposal, The Inconveniently Philosophic were already able to put their plan into action. They put on their invisibility devices, equipped themselves with jetpacks and laser guns, and simultaneously executed the leader of every major nation on Earth and took control of every Bridge in existence (or so they thought). They then procured the combined nuclear arsenal of the earth and shot the nukes through the portals.

However, something strange happened. As soon as the nukes went through the portals, their internal clocks reversed, and their jets went in reverse mode, shooting them back into the regular world, where they destroyed every known Bridge in existence, along with every member of The Inconveniently Philosophic, along with the majority of life as we knew it on Earth.

At this time, Jones was not particularly interested in politics.

However, then something very strange happened. From another, previously unknown Bridge, hidden in rural Siberia, there emerged a number of men and women who looked very much like ordinary men and women but would occasionally walk backwards, and would speak with extreme difficulty and with the sort of expression that makes one think that they would rather not be doing so. They were from the leading Entist church in the TTK, and were very ticked off that we tried to annihilate them. You see, a nuclear bomb in the TTK actually creates entire cities and thousands of humans with memories, complex thoughts and emotions, and altogether increases the complexity of their world substantially. Everyone there was accordingly very glad that the plan of The Inconveniently Philosophic had malfunctioned. However, they were not keen on having as trade partners a nuclear wasteland with no consumer product demand. And so, they sent some people to clean things up.

“I need to say something.”

Maliciously, “Do tell.”

“We’ve known each other for quite some time now, James. But I really must know. Why do you keep doing this?” Jones smiled, showing his teeth. “I’m obviously too important to be disposed of, and it should be equally obvious by now that I don’t want to help you at all.”

“Well, let’s be...”

“No. Shut up with your cool and condescending responses to every goddamn thing I say, James. I’m sick of it. Do you have any idea how unpleasant this is for me? I’m just some guy who happened to be useful and now my entire life suffers the intolerable inconvenience of your frankly Orwellian rigamarole.” He paused petulantly. “You give me the opportunity to attain fame and power when I’m a twentysomething retail store worker in a nuclear holocaust and, yeah, sure, of course I sign your devil’s contract. Not that you guys would have been all accepting and willing to leave me be if I’d declined, at that.”

“Jones what does this have to do with...”

“Stop talking.”

A respectful pause from the other.

“So I’m taken into this hush-hush operation that makes me feel oh-so-important. I do your dirty work better than anybody else, not by any innate talent or intelligence, no our dear friend Jonesy hasn’t got any of that, but because of some idiotically random coincidence. I feel like I’m at the top of the world, lighter than air, walking on water, letting the bygones be themselves, floating through.... And yet, something is wrong. As always, something just absolutely positively has to be wrong. Doesn’t it James? It turns out that you’re all just a bunch of crooks and liars. If you even know what a lie is. It’s where you say something which isn’t true. But you don’t care about the truth, do you? All you care about your perverse little ideology. You’re not the government of the United States and Provinces of North America, you’re a bunch of Entists. Now how does that sound? Did you think I would just sell out the Human race for a couple billion dollars? Do you think that? Huh? These humans are mighty stupid and weak, but we’re not suckers. At least I’m not. So there.”

He paused, evidently satisfied that he was finally able to deliver his little rant.

“Do you know what it was that first tipped me off that you were fakes?”

James, detecting the lack of rhetoric in the question, almost imperceptibly shook his head from left to right, right to left, then back to center.

“I’m eating lunch with a couple of you buffoons and one of you drops you egg salad sandwich on the floor. Nothing out of the ordinary there. But then you pick up the sandwich, you clap your knees together in a failed attempt to prevent its rise. That’s when I knew.”

“How on earth does that...”

“Oh, you wouldn’t understand. I get it. In some ways you’re very far from being human.”

“We are physicochemically ident..”

“The mind is what matters James. And, speak of the devil, my mind tells my mouth to say that I quit. I’m done with this whole sham. And since you’ll probably keep me around just in case I, one day, decide to be more helpful, I won’t be harmed.”

Jones smiled effusively, looking around the room. Hands not belonging to Jones were raised in a gesture which, to a more friendly audience, would have appeared apologetic. Unhurriedly, the hands descended onto the table, but there was a barrier between the two. In between the hands and the table there happened to be a small electrical device.

“If you really must have it your way, Jones. You could have been such a great help to us. To our mission.”

James frowned, reluctantly considering his options. A decision was made, and soon after the device was, as so many have been, activated. Jones collapsed on the floor, writhing in pain.

“Such a shame, Jones.”

Eventually his movements calmed as did his heart and breathing and brain activity and life. James frowned, and stood up to leave.