The traveler

Tying up loop ends

Keymard was lost.
Not literally lost, as in, he didn't know where he was, but he was mentally lost. He had no idea what he was actually still doing in this world. All he did was fainting, and living three lives at the same time, each for a really short period of time. He really didn't know what to do anymore. He wished he was more like Pierce in this body as well. He had only been awake for an hour, so he still remembered everything crystal clear: his cunning escape plan from that cell, seizing the InstaCaust and hiding it somewhere in the base where nobody would go look for it. That way, when Isaac will go look for it, he will still remember where it is (and hopefully nobody will have taken it away) so they finally have the damned thing. It still didn't help him though. He was still forced to live three lives, for eternity – and he didn't want to think about it. There had to be something he could do. Maybe if they had the InstaCaust, he could – No. He needed to do something now. He had three days to do something about it. In life, that's a short time, but for the moment it's pretty long. He decided to go for it.

"Let me check for a while. 153th floor, section Laba."
"Thanks," Keymard said to the library accountant, and went on his way. He ought to find something in the time travel section for sure, right? He scanned past all the books. Here is a list of books he saw and decided to skip.

· "Time travel for dummies"

· "The glorious engineering of time travel and warp drives"

· "Warp drives for dummies" What was that doing in the time travel section? Someone must've put it wrong.

· "Time travel for the ultimate dummies that didn't understand Time travel for dummies" Keymard could only guess why that book even existed.

· "The Human guide to time travel" That seemed interesting, but upon flipping the book he saw it was actually the same as "Time travel for dummies". What an insult.

· "TIME TRAVEL IS EVIL. PERIOD." It could have contained useful information, but people who write like that mostly don't have anything useful to say.

When he finally arrived at "Misuses of time travel" he decided to give it a go. He pretty easily found a section about a time loop. Best of all, someone has actually been through it already! They have medieval Earth records of a man named- and when Keymard saw the name Pierce over there, he felt quite disappointed. According to this book, it had never happened before, apart from Keymard himself. Still, he decided to give it a go, and he was right to, because after only five minutes he found a more technical description of the problem. It was caused by a self-inducting loop, which meant that the only reason the loop could exist was the fact that it never ended. Thus, if he would make a loop in the self-inducting loop, the problem would be solved. There were several possibilities, but the easiest one according to himself would be to remember how he ended up in the loop in the first place.
So he went back home and thought.
And thought.
And thought some more.
And thought even more.

After about two hours of thinking, he gave up. He could remember everything – how he worked at the Technical Institute of Pasadena, how he helped Tim with that wormhole, how he covered up for Tim's absence when he actually got sucked up in that very wormhole, how Tim eventually came back and – wait. That's where it was. That's where he couldn't remember anything until the moment he woke up as Pierce. It also made sense: Tim would've caused it, and he could do it because the wormhole took him to the future. Now he thought about it, he heard Tim's voice in that odd facility as well. He had to go and look there, and that's exactly what he did. Keymard took what he thought he needed, went to the JOSTT (Joint Organization for Space-Time Travel) and headed straight for Earth, in the year 2017.