Present day: New York

An unearthly wine resounded from the immense instrument. A turquoise burst of flame lit deep inside the lens. In this moment of apprehension, Ebinson instantly regretted having ever continued Mission Blink. Had he doled out a death sentence to all of his co-workers by enrolling them in this experiment? If something terrible happened to anyone, he would feel responsible. But who or what had caused the lens to fire prematurely? Something about the light coming from the lens shook his steady mind. All other lights in the chamber had turned off. He glanced down at the controller in his hand and pressed the emergency stop button. In his meticulous planning, he had modified the reactor with a remote control directly linked to the primary circuit just in case something went wrong. But now the reaction seemed to be fueled from another source. Ebinson pressed the button thinking it would stop the reaction, but nothing seemed to happen. But, his quick reaction, he would find, had in one way hindered the full effects of the events to come.

Holding their breath, everyone watched as the phenomenon grew. The light kept swallowing the pitch-black shadows hiding in the corners. Other gadgets and equipment seemed dwarfed in the wake of the turquoise beams. The whine changed to a moan and the moan to a roar. 

Just as it looked like it couldn’t become any brighter or louder, another light spewed from the depths of the lens. It was of no hue or shape. This new light closed around the other and choked out its radiant beams. Realization struck Ebinson, along with two quaking, destructive blasts of nothingness. This must be the light that was written about on the side of the machine, this was the dark energy. The light that devours all things was upon them!

1974: New York

Alcav was not a man to argue with. When he said he would do something, he did it. So, when he proposed to destroy the future, no one stood in his path. Alcav watched the large screens that lined the walls of the underground lab. They had detected a link to a future event that would serve his purpose. Someone was attempting a transport through the space time continuum. This was good, very good.

“Sir, the future coordinates locate the event right here in our lab!”, an assistant exclaimed.

Alcav thought of this for a moment. Yes, this was not out of the question, actually a probable location for a future attempt. “Is the signal strong?”, he asked.

“Yes.”

Adjusting a few knobs and scanning the readout, Alcav found the match he expected. His own clock was nearby on the other end! This explained how people in the future were experimenting way down in his lab.

“Send the transmission!” Alcav replied. “Soon all the energy from the collapse of that future will be at our disposal!” There was a reason for Alcav to destroy the future. He needed energy. The problem was that with the technology of 1974 he could not capture the  vast amount of energy needed to fully unlock the space time continuum without collapsing his own reality. Now, he could only teleport shot distances with his modified clock, but after harnessing the energy of the future, he could do almost anything. Once he sent the signal, the future experiment would be hijacked, destroying that reality but tapping the energy in an unlimited flow of potential for his own machine. 

A screen showed the link had been completed. Energy was beginning to register. The disintegration of the future was beginning. But then something was wrong. A warning light showed something had intervened in the experiment! “Maybe they’ve done something to stop the explosion from completing itself”, Alcav thought. An explosion erupted in the center of the lab, a black light flew in all directions. Shouts of surprise and exclamation filled the lab. At that moment, several things fit together in Alcav’s mind. The attempt to power his experiment had failed. His ambition to be the inventor of teleportation was at risk. His personal safety was only a secondary concern. The explosion was growing and consuming his most essential machines. This would set him back years. Then the last thing fit into place – his clock. 

Activating his future clock would reverse today’s failure, putting him back at the beginning of this Tuesday, a Tuesday in which the explosion would have never happened, rather than next Wednesday as was his normal return. If he teleported to next Wednesday he could never save his experiment. That left only one option. He needed to get to the future. If he was consumed by the black light seeping into the room he would get transferred to a future that was being destroyed. If, in that future, he could find his clock, he could use it to teleport back to his Tuesday, a Tuesday where the future was destroyed but the explosion didn’t happen. Once he restarted this Tuesday, he would do his experiment again, on a different future. Because there were infinite futures he could redo this as many times as he liked (assuming of course they could find a way to prevent a repeat of the transfer explosion from the other futures). It was all very confusing, but if you took the time to study the continuum, as he had, it made perfect sense. The explosion was now shrinking, and Alcav didn’t have much time. With a leap, he jumped into the heart of the black light and disappeared.