Engineer Memory Loop had built impossible things before. She'd constructed warp drives from salvaged parts, created shield harmonics that could deflect quantum torpedoes, and once jury-rigged a coffee maker to produce a perfect earl grey tea. But building an escape route from a temporal prison while experiencing every moment of her life simultaneously? That was new.
"The problem," she explained to the assembled crew in what Observer had dubbed 'the stable moment'—a brief window where Solver's anchoring allowed them all to exist coherently, "is that we're trying to escape through space. But we're not trapped in space. We're trapped in time."
They gathered in Engineering, all twelve crew members finally aware and present in a single timeline. The effort of maintaining this coherence was visible on Solver's face, sweat beading his forehead as he held them steady against the entity's digestive processes.
"So we escape through time?" Captain Navigator asked.
"Not through—around." Loop activated a holographic display, showing their situation as she understood it. "The entity exists outside normal time, experiencing past, present, and future simultaneously. We're caught in its digestive tract, being broken down into paradox energy. But what if we could move sideways?"
"Sideways through time?" Causality leaned forward, intrigued. "You mean perpendicular to the normal flow?"
"Exactly. Look—" Loop manipulated the display, showing time as a river. "Normal time flows like this. The entity sits outside the flow, reaching in to trap ships like us. We keep trying to swim upstream or downstream, but we're still in the river. What if we stepped onto the bank?"
"Temporal perpendicularity," Causality breathed. "It's theoretical, but... Loop, that's brilliant. We don't escape when, we escape if."
"English, please," Navigator said.
Loop grinned, the first genuine smile any of them had managed in subjective centuries. "Every moment contains infinite possibilities. We're experiencing one—trapped in the entity's gut. But there are timelines where we never encountered the anomaly, where we took a different route, where The Chronos was never built. Perpendicular time travel means stepping sideways into one of those alternatives."
"But those timelines don't exist," Observer pointed out. "We did encounter the anomaly. We are trapped."
"They don't exist yet," Loop corrected. "But I think I can build a probability engine. Something that can crystallize potential timelines into actual ones. We can't change our past, but we can create a parallel present where the past was different."
The crew exchanged glances. It was insane. It was impossible. It was their only hope.
"What do you need?" Navigator asked.
"Time," Loop said, then laughed at the irony. "Stable time. I need maybe six hours of coherent existence to build this."
"I can give you three," Solver said through gritted teeth. "Maybe four. The entity is fighting back, trying to fragment us again."
"Then we'd better get started."
What followed was the most intense engineering session of Loop's career—and considering she was experiencing all of her engineering sessions simultaneously, that was saying something. She cannibalized the temporal shielding from the probe, repurposed the navigation deflector into a probability discriminator, and turned the entire warp core into what she could only describe as a "maybe engine."
Causality worked alongside her, translating theoretical mathematics into practical applications. Observer monitored the entity's reactions, calling out warnings when it noticed their activities. Navigator coordinated, while the rest of the crew provided whatever assistance they could.
"It's fighting us," Solver announced two hours in. "I can feel it trying to fracture our timelines. It knows we're up to something."
CLEVER LITTLE MORSELS. BUT YOU CANNOT ESCAPE BY BECOMING WHAT YOU'RE NOT. I EXIST IN ALL TIMELINES WHERE YOU EXIST.
"Maybe," Loop muttered, elbow-deep in quantum circuitry. "But do you exist in timelines where you don't exist?"
She felt the entity's confusion like a change in pressure. Good. Let it think about that paradox for a while.
"Connection established," Causality announced. "We're ready for the probability matrix."
Loop initiated the sequence. The maybe engine hummed to life, its sound not quite there, like an echo of something that might happen. Around them, reality began to fuzz at the edges as potential timelines brushed against their own.
"I see them," Observer whispered. "Thousands of alternatives. Millions. In one, we're explorers who discovered a cure for aging. In another, we're pirates who—wait. Something's wrong."
Loop saw it too. Every timeline they could perceive still led to the entity. Different encounters, different traps, but always the same ending. The thing really did exist in all timelines where they existed.
"It's connected to us," Causality realized. "Our observation of the anomaly created a causal link. We can't escape to a timeline where we never encountered it because our encounter with it is what creates our ability to perceive alternate timelines."
"A perfect trap," Navigator said bitterly.
But Loop wasn't giving up. She dove deeper into the probability streams, looking for something, anything they could use. And then she found it—a single timeline so improbable it barely registered. A timeline where...
"Oh," she said. "Oh, that's horrible. But it might work."
"What?" Navigator demanded.
"There's one timeline where we can exist without the entity. One where it never trapped us because..." She paused, struggling with the implications. "Because we trap it first."
Silence greeted this pronouncement.
"We become the predators," she continued. "In this timeline, The Chronos isn't a research vessel—it's a temporal hunter. We're the ones who feed on paradox, who trap entities like this one. It can't digest us there because we're the ones doing the digesting."
"That's monstrous," Navigator said.
"Yes," Loop agreed. "But it's also survival. And here's the thing—we don't have to stay in that timeline. We just have to exist there long enough to break free from this one. Once we're out of the entity's digestive system, we can transition to a better alternative."
"Use one horror to escape another," Solver mused. "It's poetic, in a twisted way."
"Can you do it?" Navigator asked.
Loop checked her calculations. "Maybe. Probably. The transition will be rough. We'll have to temporarily become something antithetical to our nature. And there's a risk..."
"What risk?"
"That we'll like it. That timeline's version of us has been hunting for a long time. We'll inherit their memories, their skills, their... appetites. We might not want to leave."
Navigator looked around at her crew. They were exhausted, fragmented despite Solver's best efforts, slowly being digested by an entity older than their civilization. The alternative was horrible, but was it worse than eternal consumption?
"Do it," she ordered.
Loop initiated the final sequence. The maybe engine screamed—a sound that existed in potentials rather than air. Reality twisted, showing them glimpses of what they were about to become.
The Chronos, but wrong. Its hull black as space, covered in temporal scars from hunting entities across the cosmos. The crew, but changed. Eyes that saw too much, hands that had learned to twist time into weapons, minds that understood paradox not as physics but as flavor.
"Transitioning in ten seconds," Loop announced. "Remember—this isn't who we are. It's who we need to be to survive."
The entity realized what they were doing. NO! YOU CANNOT—YOU WILL NOT—
"Five seconds."
I OFFER BARGAINS! FREEDOM! KNOWLEDGE!
"Three seconds."
PLEASE!
"One."
Reality shattered and reformed. Loop felt herself changing, memories that weren't hers flooding in. Centuries of hunting, of feeding, of being the thing in the dark that temporal predators feared. The Chronos reformed around them, its cheerful research equipment replaced by probability snares and paradox weapons.
And they were free.
The entity writhed before them, suddenly prey instead of predator. Loop's new memories provided context—it was young by the standards of its kind, barely a million years old. It had grown lazy, complacent, feeding on trapped ships instead of hunting properly.
"We have it," Observer said, and her voice was different. Harder. Hungrier. "The snares are holding. We could feed for decades on something this size."
"No," Navigator said, but Loop heard the struggle in her voice. The inherited memories were strong, and part of her—part of all of them—wanted to give in. To feast. To become the monsters this timeline said they were.
"We transition to the next timeline," Navigator continued. "As planned. Loop?"
But Loop was staring at the entity through eyes that had seen too much. She understood now why this timeline was so improbable—temporal predators were rare because the lifestyle was seductive. Once you tasted paradox, once you felt the rush of consuming crystallized time, it was hard to stop.
"Loop!" Navigator's voice cracked with command.
Loop shook herself. Remember who you are. Not who this timeline says you are. She reached for the maybe engine controls, fighting the new instincts that told her to feed, to consume, to hunt.
"Transitioning," she managed. "Finding a peaceful timeline. One where we're just explorers again."
The shift was gentler this time. The predator memories faded like nightmares, leaving only shadows and the taste of possibilities on their tongues. The Chronos became itself again—bright, hopeful, designed for discovery rather than consumption.
They hung in normal space, free of loops, free of traps. The entity was gone, either escaped or erased—Loop wasn't sure which and didn't want to know.
"We made it," Observer said wonderingly. "We actually made it."
"Status report," Navigator ordered, professional calm reasserting itself.
"All systems nominal," Loop reported. "We're approximately twelve light-years from our last recorded position. Chronometer shows... interesting. According to this, we never encountered any anomaly. We've been conducting a standard survey for the past four months."
"A timeline where we were never trapped," Causality mused. "But we remember. That shouldn't be possible."
"Temporal scarring," Loop explained. "We're not quite the versions of ourselves that belong in this timeline. We're echoes, shadows, memories of what happened in another stream of possibility."
"Will it fade?"
"I don't know. Maybe. Or maybe we'll always carry a piece of that experience. A reminder of what's out there, waiting in the spaces between moments."
Navigator nodded slowly. "Log everything. Encrypted, sealed, command access only. The galaxy needs to know these things exist, but..."
"But we also know how to become them," Loop finished. "And that knowledge is dangerous."
They resumed their mission, exploring strange new worlds, seeking out new life and new civilizations. But sometimes, in the quiet moments between stars, Loop remembered the taste of paradox, the thrill of the hunt, the seductive whisper of temporal predation.
She'd built impossible things before. But the most impossible thing she'd ever built was a cage for the monster she could have become.
And sometimes, late at night when the ship hummed with familiar sounds, she checked to make sure that cage was still locked.
Because the horrible truth was this: they had escaped the entity by becoming something worse.
And part of them—a small, dark, hungry part—missed it.