By me, with art by Sam Messerly.
Click here to read from the beginning.
I didn’t really understand what Thinkwilder was saying at first. Myself, I had never really thought about the consequences of mining your world. I just figured, for example, if you had fewer rocks, you had fewer rocks, but that it wouldn’t cause any real problems beyond sparser pebbles on the beach.
“I guess the world has maybe twenty billion tons of rocks instead of twenty point five billion,” I said. “Maybe their gravel roads have a little less gravel.”
Thinkwilder jerked his head this way and that, then scrunched up in the inflatable chair and snorted.
“Sure, but it depends what that gravel is being used for, right?” he said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Furbud was crawling up into my chair, which immediately reformed to accommodate the furry beast. The mammoth was still eyeing Thinkwilder suspiciously.
“We take rocks and minerals to build something out of, yes?” Thinkwilder said. “We take things so we can build. But if those materials we are taking from the past in the living world were meant to be used to build something in the future…”
“In the future?” I asked.
Look, time travel stuff is pretty hard to grasp at first, and I was just not getting it.
“Warbell, we can see the future,” Thinkwilder said. “We can see that the rocks and minerals we are taking away are also used in the timeline of the earth for what they call skyscrapers or walls or parts of their vehicles. We can’t just take rocks from an entire universe and expect it won’t have any effect on that universe, right? Have you ever checked to see if when we take out the metals from the past, if those metals then disappear from the future buildings and machines put together by humankind?”
I shook my head slowly.
“Right!” Thinkwilder said. “You didn’t! Because you didn’t care! But I checked, and removing the rocks removes them from the buildings in the human world of the future as well. That can cause catastrophes. A wall may suddenly lose its cornerstone. Yes, that’s right. And then the wall cannot stand up, you know. And bad things happen.”
“But the humans can’t build the wall without the cornerstone. So they shouldn’t have been able to make the wall in the first place if it disappeared from the past. That doesn’t make any sense!”
Thinkwilder nodded his head.
“Yes, it doesn’t,” he said. “But the future exists with the same matter as the past. Perhaps removing it from one time removes it from all the times in the future as well. Or perhaps there is another factor that makes the rock or metal or organic matter disappear from a specific part of time. I do not know for certain, but possibly reality becomes linked across time periods through the portal in some way.”
“Alright,” I said. “So it’s a chain reaction throughout the history of the earth. But the Kingdom of All Eternity and Protection of Our People isn’t harvesting organic material from the earth. We just take rocks, metals…”
“And children,” Thinkwilder said. “Right? Children made from the organic material of the past. And everything their parents eat over the months or years abroad, yes? All that becomes a part of your body. All that muscle and sinew you build from the food of the world is torn away when you leave. So what kind of effect could that have on the people and the animals of the other side, hmm?”