The Ouroboros Effect

Prologue

Dated 26/08/2019

Softlabs Metaphysics Organisation

Report Number: 0024601

It has always been a longstanding hypothesis that if a living, sentient organism is somehow propelled back in time to a particular time frame, the original copy will suffer what is known as the Ouroboros Effect. The Principle of Preservation of Chronological Integrity (POPOCI) states that if two organisms were to exist simultaneously in the same time frame, the isolated environment will attempt to destroy the original copy.

Just how so, nobody has ever attempted to find out.

Or possibly ever could. You see, at least with our current understanding of metaphysics' correlation with temporal displacement (or to the commoner, time travel), we simply do not have the capabilities to send anything, much less an organism, forward nor backward in time. To do so would require opening a wormhole, which by the way, its existence being debated upon, in the fabric of space-time.

However - we did it.

More accurately, the future us did it. I reiterate, given our current technology, we could never hope to open a wormhole and send something or someone through it. But that means a future us, with future technology, could do so - and they did.

What we did was simple. We made many time capsules, physical and digital, and just waited. The time capsules were programmed to send reminders at periodic intervals in the future, in which the intervals get shorter and shorter as years, or even decades, rolled by. The message embedded in the time capsules were straightforward: if the reader of said message lives in a time where time travel exists, they are to send a genetically identical living specimen back to a very specific time frame.

The genetically identical living specimen was Specimen #13906-C. It was an albino mouse whose entire genome had been mapped out and meticulously recorded down in our database. We nicknamed him Benny, and Benny had been surviving in our lab for more than six years. The average life span for a mouse was two years. Benny was cloned from his genome every time Benny the predecessor died.

We told them to send Benny back in time to 17/08/2019. If the date arrives and no Benny appears, then we would have to rely on the 'us' from the past to continue on with the experiment.

Today was the day, and when we checked our specially designed living room for Benny, we saw two Bennys.

It was chaos. Time travel exists somewhere, sometime in the future, and the second, exact same replica of Benny was living, breathing proof. We isolated Benny Number One and Number Two, and watched.

The very next day, evidence of the Ouroboros Effect was already apparent in Benny Number One. He began to develop some sort of cognitive dissonance, and was unable to complete simple tasks like solving a maze which he had solved dozens of times before to earn a corn chip. Five days later, he forgot who was Effa, the researcher who had hand-bred Benny, ever since Benny was cloned from a single stem cell. Nine days later, Benny Number One died, having repeatedly running into his cage wall until he collapsed and simply stopped breathing.

Benny Number Two, the Benny that was sent from the future, remained unharmed.

I am writing this report to inform everybody. A warning of sorts. Time travel is real, and should never be experimented with. Maybe the future 'us' wanted us to know. Maybe the reason why they chose to follow our instructions, knowing full well the Ouroboros Effect would happen, and still sent Specimen #13906-C back to us, was for us to witness the alarming effects of time travel with our own eyes. Maybe they were trying to tell us a message.

Maybe they were trying to tell us, we should never have invented time travel in the first place.

Jean Osterhaus