The Sentinel

I had no choice
They would have ended the world
Before it even began
Their security net had grown vast
After we started to find the travelers
People whose molecules were older
Than they possibly could be
How can one person be made of molecules
200 years older than the rest of the universe?
Unless they came from some older, future place
The time killers
Sending themselves back for
Politics or profit
Destroying the entire history they backtracked across
By their impossible presence

Eventually we spotted them
I myself helped decipher the scope of their crimes
Helped erect the fences
That were supposed to keep them
From traveling
But it went wrong
When we tried to make all of time secure
With no way to forsee
The absolute loss of own existence
Attacks that could come from distant futures
We had no way of predicting or stopping

The fences were made tighter and tighter
Ring upon ring of them around the present
But knew they were worthless
Could not be patrolled
If there was even one lapse in security
One political stumble
Between now and eternity 
Our whole history would be lost

We decided that it was impossible to defend ourselves
Against a threatening future
That time must be breached on our own terms
To stifle the threat in the past
At its source
An army was prepared
Scientists, soldiers
And the elite
Plans made to jump them all back
Before Temporal Event One -
The farthest any traveler had been known to go
Back to the 23rd century
Preempting all time travel
Controlling it's development
Occupying the past
To make history safe

I knew that's why they were building
The solar ring array
Not for power generation
But to force a nova
Power for their one-shot catapult
Their beachhead landing
Killing our whole civilization
Its existence
Its memory
To remake it all
Under their administration's eternal protection

What would you do
If all of time was doomed
And all that was left
Was to give some hope
To it's abandoned child?
I decided to secretly fight them
The trick to circumvent the fence
To reach back farther
Was not to transport matter
Certainly not one's whole material self
But to find a way
To knock the puzzle pieces of the past
Out of their intended order
To send a message
Information
Reprogram what once was
Out of its own materials

I found a place
And a time
Farther than the farthest traveling
To send back a signal
An improbable shift in probabilities
A small signal
Spread over time
Joining one molecule at a time
Into a messenger
Of my own image
From the clay of the manipulated past


And so, causeless, motherless
I rose
A mere copy of my former self
(I must be honest about that)
From a peat bog in the 17th century
Where my creator-self had compelled
The potent organic molecules
To slowly imitate herself
To slowly revivify from their decay

That once-would-be future is gone now
Dead from the moment
She sent back the signal of me
Just as surely as they would have killed it
She could have done it more simply -
One molecule of the past knocked off course
Would have killed the whole timeline
But she - I - knew that some memory should remain
To wait and watch
To give birth to new copies of myself
Again and again
Lest the washing of centuries on strange shores
Of lives lived with strange, ancient people
Should weaken my memory
My resolve to stand
Against a future history once undone
That must never remake itself