This is the last chapter of the book.  I hope you've enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

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Chapter 37 - Stairway To Heaven

The madness didn’t end until January 20th, the day that the old President left office and the new President was sworn in.  The voices in my head said their goodbyes and even apologized for messing with me.  I started to feel better almost instantly, just like the voices had promised before they left.  It had been the first time those voices told me the truth about anything, and it was the last time I heard them.

I waited a few days to make sure I was really clear-headed again, and then I told my mom that I was feeling better.  She said that she could tell.  I was beginning to feel like my old self again, except for something that I wasn’t able to understand, I could no longer remember Ali’s face, and the panic switch wasn’t working anymore.

How could it be?  Ali was my best friend in the future.  She taught me so much about her world.  How could I have forgotten her face?  In order for the panic switch to work, I needed to visualize Ali and Jesus at a party.  Any kind of party.  Cake and balloons should work.  I tried to picture Jesus in my mind, that was no problem at all.  I tried to picture balloons and chocolate birthday cake in my mind also, too easy.  Then I tried to imagine Ali sitting next to Jesus, possibly enjoying a piece of cake, but for the life of me, I just couldn’t remember what she looked like.  What color was her hair?  How about her eyes?  Nothing came to mind.  I tried going through all the colors I could think of, but none of them seemed to fit.  It was as if her existence had somehow been purged from my memories.

I tried everything I could think of to signal the computers to bring me back to the future.  I tried imagining Jesus with Natalie, or May.  Didn’t work.  I tried thinking of different kinds of parties.  Nothing.  I even tried just plain thinking the words, “Hey future computers, the panic switch is not working, please bring me back.”  But there was no reaction.

It seemed as though I was stuck in the present timeline.  Completely unable to communicate with anyone in the future.  Did that mean the missions worked?  Maybe everybody already immigrated to the new world and left me behind, just sitting in that chair with the thing on my head.  I had no way of knowing what had happened, and I started to get nervous.  What if the people in the new future didn’t like the people in the old future.  They had, after all, grown up almost entirely in the computer worlds, completely separated from things like the real world, consequences, and sometimes even each other.  I imagined how some might react if a hellish ruined world began teleporting genetically polluted people into that pristine Earth's paradise.  Even the dust in their hair, clothes, and luggage would probably contain more radioactive pollution, chemical contamination, and biological super-germs than the new world could handle coming in all at once.

I wondered if I had done something that messed up the future somehow.  But Ender had told me that it would be impossible for anyone between the two eras to unto the knot we had tied in the timelines.  It should have been perfect, the AI’s planned everything and anticipated all of the possibilities.  But no, I was stuck in time once again, and nothing I could think of was able to undo that fact.

Ender had said there were others that they were sending back too.  Maybe one of them knew something about what happened to Heaven and the future people.  I missed Ali, and hoped that she and everyone else was okay.  I still remembered what Ali said to me in parallel New Jersey about never giving up.  I haven’t given up.

The mental partition between myself from the past and myself from the future was beginning to slowly dissolve.  It took a lot of time, but eventually I began to remember things from the future while I was still in the past.  It seemed impossible.  Had I really been possessed by a computer simulation of myself from the future?

The funny thing about dolphin punching is that the mental partition between the dolphin and the puncher is supposed to be there to help both of them.  But when the partition broke down between future me and past me, it actually helped both of us figure things out; two heads really are better than one.

I was able to explain things to my past self, and then my past self started asking me questions that I hadn't thought of.  Things like 'Who could have changed the panic switch?' and 'What was Ender's real reason for sending me back?' and even 'How do you know this past isn't really just another simulation?'  I had to admit that I didn't really know what Ender was up to, or what was really going on.

Eventually we heard the song 'Stairway To Heaven' by Led Zeppelin, and we had to hear it again multiple times before we finally got it.  But somehow that song put it all into context, it was as if another one of Ender's time travelers had written it to help us understand.

Epilogue - "He Has No Idea What We're Really Using Him For"

Ten lifetimes later, somewhere around fifteen minutes had passed for my future self as I was sitting in the chair with that thing on my head.  Now I was experiencing the past as my latest life who was a medical researcher and had just given a lecture in Chicago on the emergence of super-germs...

"It's confirmed.  That's a tenth one." said one of the scientists in the future.  They all looked very pleased with themselves, especially Ender.  And why shouldn't they feel all warm and fuzzy inside?  After all, they had just carved a giant hole in the Universe to create ten new pasts for them to take over and shape the course of human civilization, just like the future Shadow Government had always wanted.  And by the end of the day there would be hundreds of new alternate pasts to conquer!

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Did you enjoy reading today's chapter?  I hope so because it was the end of this book.

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