Chapter 3: The Grandfather Paradox

Branch Seven Adaeze, who asked to be called Seven for clarity, explained the situation with the focused urgency of someone delivering a diagnosis. 'When you created my branch, it inherited a copy of your device. My version of you, which is to say me, continued the experiments. I created additional branches from my timeline, which created branches from those branches, and so on. The tree is now hundreds of branches deep, and the original trunk, your timeline, is bearing the cumulative weight of every branch that descended from it.' 'How long does my timeline have?' Adaeze asked. 'Months. Perhaps less. The degradation is exponential. Physical laws are already showing micro-fluctuations that your instruments can detect if you know where to look.' Adaeze checked. Seven was right. The gravitational constant had shifted by a fraction so small it was almost undetectable, but it was there, and it was growing. 'The solution is straightforward but painful,' Seven continued. 'The branches must be collapsed. Not destroyed. The energy they contain must be returned to the originating timelines. It is like pruning a tree to save the trunk.' 'Collapsing a branch means everyone in that branch ceases to exist.' Seven met her gaze without flinching. 'Yes. Including me. Branch Seven is one of the most energy-intensive because I was foolish enough to create further branches of my own. My collapse alone would stabilize three tiers of the tree.' Adaeze felt the weight of the conversation settle onto her shoulders. She was being asked to erase universes. Not hypothetical scenarios or mathematical abstractions, but worlds where people were eating breakfast, falling in love, watching sunsets that had become slightly wrong in ways they could not articulate. 'You cannot save them by preserving them,' Seven said gently. 'A collapsing timeline does not end cleanly. It degrades. People suffer. Reality becomes incoherent. Collapse is mercy compared to the alternative.'