Everything You Know Is Wrong

Prologue - Paradox Loop

Everything you know is wrong
Black is white, up is down and short is long
And everything you thought was just so
Important doesn't matter

-Everything You Know Is Wrong, "Weird" Al Yankovic

Felix stepped through his front door and immediately kicked off his shoes and put down his heavy bags. He had been travelling for the past two days and felt a tremendous relief just being back at his own familiar apartment. The drip, drip, drip of his leaky faucet only served to sooth his frayed nerves. "Welcome home," his faucet was saying.

That was when Felix heard a sound that wasn't quite so familiar: a thumping sound coming from the kitchen. It almost sounded like someone preparing food.

That's impossible, thought Felix, I'm on the 6th floor and my door was locked when I came in. It's probably just creaky pipes or swamp gas or something.

Felix concluded that it would be too embarrassing to leave and look for help. What would his neighbours think when this all turned out to just be a simple case of swamp gas? So Felix decided, contrary to his usual policy of general cowardice, to check and see what was making all the noise.

Felix crept towards the kitchen area with as much stealth as he could muster, which was very little. His clumsy attempts to step lightly just made the floorboards creak louder.

Peering around the corner, Felix caught sight of the source of the noise. There was an intruder in Felix's apartment, and he was drinking milk straight from the carton. It was disgusting; he had his mouth right on it. Felix made a shocked and not particularly masculine noise.

The intruder turned around and Felix came face to face with himself. He was oddly dressed and a little older than he should be, but Felix had seen himself in the mirror enough times to know himself when he saw him. The other Felix was startled, but not nearly as confused as the situation demanded.

"Don't worry," said the man "I'm your long lost brother!" he laughed.

"Ha ha! Not really. I'm actually you from the future."

Felix was in the awkward position of not having a more rational explanation. This would have to be one unusual case of swamp gas.

"Well what are you doing here, then?" he asked. He had no idea why but his brain was on autopilot.

"I was waiting for you," explained Future Felix "There's a bunch of us. I arrived first and got hungry, and then I remembered that I was drinking milk back when I was you and I met me for the first time."

Felix actually understood most of that.

"You said 'a bunch of us', a bunch of who?" asked Felix.

"A bunch of your future selves," said Future Felix "Or possible future selves. I don't really completely understand all the math and everything. Basically I came back to this point in time to try to prevent you from travelling back in time-"

"I'm going to travel back in time?" asked Felix.

"Well, obviously," said Felix "I'm you from the future and I'm here in the past. That's only logical. But this is a separate, additional instance of time travel that you're about to undergo. Originally I came back here to stop you, but then that was going to bring about a dark future of some kind so a different future us came to stop me from doing that, and another version of us said that it was a bad idea, and then another version showed up to stop him I guess? It just kept going on and now there are six of us."

"Six?" asked Felix.

"Yeah, you want to meet them?" asked Future Felix, before yelling "Hey everyone, he knows what's up you can come out now."

Five other Felixes, who had apparently been in the living room, came into the kitchen. Unlike the first Future Felix, many of these Felixes were quite different. One was wearing a leather jacket, an eye-patch, and was lighting up a cigarette. Another was wearing an expensive suit. A few were wearing strange clothes that Felix would never buy, and one was wearing them backwards.

"Hi," said the Felix wearing the backwards clothes. He waved.

"So we've been talking," said Future Felix "And we've decided that you should travel back in time after all. The future of the space/time continuum is more important than the fate of any given timeline. It's all very self-sacrificing; we're being noble as hell."

"Well I hate to disappoint all of you," said Felix "But I don't have any immediate plans to travel back in time. I wouldn't even know how even if I did. So I won't be doing any time travelling."

"I disagree," said Future Felix, and gave Felix a light shove.

Felix stumbled backwards and fell into the tear in the fabric of space/time he failed to notice opening up directly behind him. He felt a tremendous sensation of vertigo and then nothing.