Chapter 8: The Paradox Engine

The world groaned. It wasn't a sound that entered the ears but one that resonated deep in the bones, a structural complaint from reality itself. The cheerful carousel music bent downwards in pitch, stretching into a demonic, slurring dirge before dying completely. The vibrant lights of the Ferris wheel and game stalls flickered violently, their colours bleeding into one another like wet paint, smearing the world in nauseating streaks.

“Mom, get behind me!” Sara yelled, her voice sounding thin and distant. She shoved her mother, whose face was a blank mask of confusion, behind her, creating a flimsy barrier of her own body against the unfolding insanity.

The past-Milton stared at the metallic pebble in his hand, his expression a chaotic mixture of terror and ecstatic revelation. The object seemed to hum, a low, ominous thrum that vibrated through the warped air. “It’s real,” he whispered, his voice trembling with a terrifying awe. “He told me. He promised me.”

Sara’s mind was a maelstrom of paradox and betrayal. The Milton from her time had orchestrated this entire, hideous loop. He hadn’t just gone back for a nostalgic visit; he had gone back to arm his past self, to set the first domino falling in a sequence that had already, from her perspective, ended in ruin.

“Milton, listen to me!” she pleaded, her voice cracking. “You have to give that back. It’s a curse! It doesn’t give you what you want, it just takes everything else away. It brings a… a thing! An auditor! It will kill you, it will kill everyone!” She instinctively pressed a hand to her stomach, to the three numb lines that were the permanent evidence of his lies. “It leaves scars, Milton. On everything.”

He finally looked up from the pebble, but his eyes didn't see her. They were looking through her, focused on a prize she couldn't comprehend. His pathetic, desperate demeanor was hardening, solidifying into a fanatical, diamond-hard certainty. The fear was still there, but it was being consumed by a monstrous, burning hope.

“Oh, I know all about the auditors, Sara,” he said, a strange, giddy smile beginning to twitch at the corners of his mouth. “He told me. My future self. A most informative, if brief, visit.” He took a staggering step forward, the crowd of theme park-goers now a gallery of frozen, silent statues around them. “He told me about the leash. The cruel, temporal elastic that always yanks you back to your designated time. He explained how the auditors are just reality’s guard dogs, sent to clean up any messes.”

He was parroting the same cold, bureaucratic language her Milton had used in the car park. The horrifying realization dawned that this pathetic, grieving man had, in the space of a few minutes, been given the full, monstrous education that had been fed to her over days of horror.

“You can’t control it,” Sara insisted, her voice dropping to a desperate whisper as she backed away, pulling her mother with her. “It will destroy you.”

“Control it?” Milton let out a short, sharp laugh that was utterly devoid of humor. “My dear girl, I have no intention of controlling it.” His smile widened into a rictus of pure mania. “I’m going to break it.”

His free hand, the one not clutching her boomerang, plunged into the pocket of his own ill-fitting trousers. The motion was slow, deliberate, theatrical.

“One artifact,” he lectured, his voice rising in pitch, a preacher reaching the fever-pitch of his sermon, “is a tourist pass. It lets you visit. A little peek behind the curtain. But you’re always tethered. Always a visitor.”

His fingers closed around something.

“But two…” he whispered, his eyes gleaming with an unholy light. “Two instances of the same, unique, temporal artifact, existing in the same nanosecond of spacetime… that’s not a visit. That’s not a transgression. That is a fundamental, screaming impossibility. It’s a paradox so profound, it can’t be corrected.”

He pulled his hand from his pocket. Nestled in his palm was a second metallic pebble, identical in every way to the one he’d just stolen from her. It was his own boomerang. The one he was always meant to have.

The sight of it broke something in Sara’s mind. The loop was complete. She wasn't a participant in this tragedy; she was the delivery mechanism. A temporal mule, used to carry a weapon back in time to the man who would one day give it to her.

“The leash isn’t a rope you can untie,” Milton declared, his voice now a triumphant roar over the growing sound of tearing static. “You have to shatter the entire chain! This paradox won’t just create a ripple, Sara. It will create a localized Big Bang. A reality rupture that will sever my connection to the prime timeline completely, anchoring me here. In this beautiful, perfect past. In the last year I have with my Liv.”

He was going to detonate reality to win himself a few more months with his dead wife. The sheer, cosmic selfishness of it was breathtaking. He saw the horror on her face and dismissed it with a wave of his hand.

“Don’t look so frightened,” he sneered. “You were just the key. The delivery girl. Your part in the story is over.”

He began to raise his hands, bringing the two boomerangs towards each other.

The world screamed.

The last vestiges of normal sound vanished, replaced by an ear-splitting, high-frequency whine, the sound of reality being torn like paper on a cosmic scale. The air between Milton’s hands began to shimmer, not with heat, but with a profound wrongness. Then, it cracked. A hairline fracture appeared in the space between the two pebbles, a jagged line of absolute blackness.

Through the fissure, Sara saw things that the human eye was not meant to see. Not another place, but a chaotic jumble of every place. A glimpse of a Victorian streetlamp flickered next to the chrome spire of a futuristic city. The eye of a dinosaur blinked beside the terrified face of a gas-masked soldier in a trench. Colours that had no names swirled with impossible geometries, all compressed into a wound in the world no bigger than his hand.

A force, not of wind but of pure temporal displacement, erupted from the crack, throwing Sara and her mother back. They stumbled and fell to the pier’s wooden planks, the splintered wood scraping Sara’s palms. She scrambled to shield her mother’s head as the lights of the theme park exploded in a shower of sparks, plunging the pier into a terrifying twilight lit only by the profane energy bleeding from Milton’s hands.

He stood in the eye of the storm, laughing, his body silhouetted against the growing tear in the universe. He brought his hands closer, the two pebbles now only inches apart.

“For you, Liv,” he screamed into the temporal gale, his voice distorted and warped. “Forever!”

And in the screaming fissure between his hands, as the two artifacts drew nearer, Sara saw the universe begin to come undone.