Ending zero (actually three, just to make sure this doesn’t confuse anyone unnecessarily, also the true ending):

Nothing made sense. I had just heard my father speaking, but this wasn’t the first time. And it didn’t feel like it would be the last time. No matter what I said he didn’t answer back. He was dead. He died well before the madness of twenty years ago. And yet I heard him. This couldn’t be happening, so obviously it didn’t. I hadn’t spent the last twenty years going slowly insane to just snap right in the last moment, yet here I was.

Obviously, I was crazy.

But didn’t crazy people not know they were crazy? Wasn’t that one of the requirements? You couldn’t be crazy if you knew you were crazy? I could have swore I remembered that being the case, something about it being a catch. It didn’t matter, though, because I didn’t spend the last twenty years learning just to go crazy so easily.

If insanity wanted me, it was going to have to fight for me.

And fought it did, and so did I. Twelve years of my life wasted in studying the topics I shunned previously. It didn’t come as a surprise to me when I figured out a way to fuse elemental hydrogen at room temperature and sea-level pressure. I was crazy, so obviously I’d think I could do the impossible. Watching the pure glow of a nuclear candle burning through the sky itself, I knew this had to be a delusion.

It didn’t matter though, because it was better than the converse. I’d rather fall fully into this madness than pretend that I was figuring out a way to move space and time than to come to terms with my own inability to change world. At least this way I wouldn’t feel so useless, the same way I felt as I watched my family die.

Sometimes I was grateful that I wasn’t a romantic person, and that I never went beyond a few short relationships. No children of my own to watch die, no more blood on my hands. Or at least, I thought I didn’t have a lover and children, but maybe I did? My memory was already suspect because I could remember every aspect of each of the four space stations I visited. Or was it three? No, four, it was four. I spent more time finding that fourth station, well over a decade more, nearly fifty years since the start of this all. It had to be four.

It didn’t matter at that point.

Nothing mattered.

Everything mattered.

The device I built would have barely worked without the power source, and I’d have never been able to orient it correctly without knowing that both other directions were wrong. I don’t know how I knew they were wrong, but I knew that they were just wrong.

I knew that I had already lost touch with reality, but still something pulled at me. Dragged at me. If only I could just stop for a moment and think, but the moment I tried I was overwhelmed with thoughts that were not my own. No, they were my own, but not me. Countless thoughts, and yet only a few. A dozen, yet trillions.

It didn’t even register to me when I pressed the switch. The sensation was unlike anything I could ever imagine as felt myself changed. Nothing changed outside the small ports of an exotic matter made of some strange array of barely stable quarks that allowed light through but no other force. If I didn’t have an array of graviton emitters, I’d have been thrown around the small cabin. None of this was real anyway, so having some truly absurd technology at least made this a bearable fantasy.

And then my phone rang. But I didn’t have my phone with me. And it all came crashing back to me in that moment.

I answered it, knowing what I had to say, what the timeline demanded of me. Completion.

I hated myself for speaking, but I knew I didn’t have a choice. Acceptance.

None of us have a choice, we’re all players on the stage and not the author. Finality.

“Hello...hello? Oh my God hello!”