It's a Time Paradox! ⌛ [Win Exiting Prizes]

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::hourglass:: It’s a Time Paradox!


Dive deep into the fascinating and mind-bending world of time travel. The challenge is to create a unique, creative, and complex time travel paradox—situations where traveling through time leads to contradictory, confusing, or impossible outcomes. The goal is to explore the logical puzzles and dilemmas that arise when the past, present, and future collide. Similar to the paradoxes you might have seen in the Back to the Future movie series.

How to Participate?

1.Title: A catchy or thought-provoking title for the paradox.
2. Description: A detailed explanation of the time travel paradox, including:

  • How Time Travel Works in the Story: How is time travel achieved? Is it a machine, a spell, a wormhole? What are the rules governing it?
  • The Paradox: A clear description of the paradox itself—what happens to create the contradictory or impossible situation? How do the actions in the past affect the future and create the paradoxical loop?
  • Consequences: What are the implications of this paradox on the timeline, the characters involved, or the universe? Is it solvable or does it spiral into more chaos?

Example Paradox:
A scientist invents a time machine and goes back 20 years to leave his younger self a journal filled with scientific breakthroughs, allowing him to become a world-famous physicist earlier in life. The younger self uses the journal to make these discoveries but becomes so successful that he never invents the time machine, and the journal is never written.


The most creative, imaginative, and eccentric answer(s) win!

Deadline: 13th October 2024, 11.59 PM EST.

1 winner,
Prize: $50


  • All contests must be played within the community thread.
  • Do not copy or refer to answers from the internet.
  • Use of AI is prohibited.
  • Do not share any personal information in the community thread.
  • Only one entry per user.
  • Take into consideration the contest deadline.
  • Please mention your Bitcoin address in your post

Edit: Thank you all for participating!
Winner Announced :trophy:: @fortinitus1

Title: To Change A Dead Reality

How Time Travel Works in the story:
In this story, time travel can be achieved through a machine prototype called fhe Chrono-Link created by a neuroscientist. It is a helmet-like machine that allows only a person’s consciousness to travel back in time and inhabite part or an entirety of their younger self or even another person’s mind. During this time, the body is unconscious and the user can only remain there for a short period without mental or physical consequences to their own body. The user must be careful with what they influence in the past, since it can affect the future.

The Paradox: The neuroscientist in charge of this groundbreaking inventioninvention decides to use the Chrono-Link, although it is not yet approved for travel, to journey back to 1985 in hopes to altering an accident that claimed his best friend’s life.
To do this he inhabites his friends body but the emotional toll from the accident causes an error in the machine and his consciousness seperates from his real body, now becoming trapped in his friend’s mind. In the present, the scientist dies after slipping into a week long coma and his family remains unaware of what really happened. Meanwhile the scientist, stuck in the body of his best friend, is forced to live a new life in a different body. His daughter goes on to improve the Chrono-Link and make other significant contributions to science that shapes the future while he is forced to observe the alternate reality he has created without any means to go back to his own body.

Consequences:

• The scientist’s mind now serves as a tether that connects the past to the future and with this abnormal connection strange anomalies start happening that could put the balance of time and space at risk. Seeing such issues, the Chrono-Link may be destroyed as a way to stop the anomalies but this would make things worse as the only way to attempt to reverse the problem is now gone.

• His best friend’s consciousness remains trapped or suppressed with no way to make sense of what’s happening. The scientist’s mental ability wears thinner everyday and he might have to sever his own consciousness, sacrificing himself for the sake of balance.

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Echoes of Time Travel

I have been obsessed with this time machine idea for as long as I could remember. It started off as just a dream. A crazy, impossible thought I did entertain during late coffee nights, binges and endless calculations. But then, one day, I did it. I built the thing. My very own time machine, complete with humming wires, blinking lights, and a control panel straight out of a sci-fi movie. I could hardly believe it worked.

The process of getting the machine to work was surprisingly straightforward. Just set the dial, step into the chamber, and hit the button. When I first tried it, I felt like I was tumbling down a never-ending tunnel, with glimpses of memories and flashes of futures that might be. I was exhilarated. And, yeah, a little scared. I mean, who wouldn’t be? This was completely uncharted territory.

Curiosity got the better of me pretty quickly. I wanted to test out a theory, so I went back to a time before I’d finished building the machine. I wanted to see my past self. Sure enough, there I was, hunched over the same desk, scratching my head over the same stubborn equations. Watching myself from the shadows was surreal—like déjà vu, but cranked up to eleven. I could practically hear my own thoughts.

And then it all went wrong. My past self saw me. He freaked out, and in a panic, I told him the truth; that I was him, from the future. Before I could explain, he did the unthinkable. He ran to the machine and tore it apart. Just like that, reality seemed to hiccup. I felt this horrible jolt, and suddenly, I was standing alone in an empty lab. The machine was gone, the notes were gone, everything was gone. It was like the machine had never existed at all.

Now, I was stuck. I have trapped myself in the past. I needed the machine to go back, yet I have caused my past self to destroy it. So, in this timeline, it never should’ve existed. But it did. But it didn’t. I was caught in this endless loop, haunted by memories of a machine that couldn’t possibly be real.

And that’s where I am now. A man lost in time, with memories of a machine that never was. The past is this impossible riddle, the present feels like a cage, and the future? That’s something I’ll never understand.

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1. Title:
The Infinite Reverberation

2.Description:
In"The Infinite Reverberation," time travel is achieved through a complex device known as the Chrono-symphonizer, a machine that harnesses the energy of sound waves and vibrations to create temporal portals. The machine operates on the principle that every event in the universe emits a unique vibrational frequency, which can be amplified and manipulated. Time travelers must synchronize their mindset with the specific frequency of the time period they wish to visit.

** Rules of Time Travel:**

(i).Resonance Required:
Travelers must emotionally connect with a specific event or era; otherwise, they risk being lost in time.

(ii).Temporal Echoes:
Every action taken in the past creates an echo-an irreversible change that resonates through time, altering the timeline.

(iii).Return Limitation:
Travelers can only return to their original timeline after resolving any changes they’ve made in the past, otherwise they risk fracturing the timeline further.

- The Paradox:
The paradox begins when Tragge, a musician who feels his life has lost its meaning, decides to travel back to the 1970s to witness a legendary concert that inspired his favorite band. Upon arrival, he accidentally bumps into Amanda, his grandmother, who is at the concert with her friends.

Unknowingly, Tragge starts a chain of events: he encourages her to pursue music instead of her conservative career choice. Inspired, Amanda forms a band and becomes a famous musician, drastically changing her life path. As a result, Tragge’s father is born into a world where his mother never meets Tragge’s grandfather. Tragge’s own existence begins to unravel.

The paradox intensifies when Tragge, realizing he may cease to exist, tries to return to fix the timeline but discovers he cannot because his very actions in the past are now part of the current timeline. Instead of reversing the changes, his attempts only create more temporal echoes, leading to new alternate timeline where different versions of Tragge exist, each with a slightly altered reality that distorts the fabric of time itself.

- Consequences:
The implications of this paradox are far-reaching. The timeline becomes a chaotic tapestry of intertwined realities, with each attempt to fix the past creating new loops of contradictions, Tragge meets alternate versions of himself who embody different paths-one is a successful musician, another is a failed artist, while yet another never existed at all. Each Tragge has unique memories and lives shaped by different outcomes stemming from the same event.

The most profound consequence is the psychological toll on Tragge. As he encounters these echoes of himself, he grapples with identity and purpose. His journey spirals into an existential crisis where he must confront the question: if he changes the past, who is he in the present?

Ultimately, the paradox remains unresolved. The more Tragge tries to fix his mistakes, the more he destabilizes the timeline, leading to a Cascading Reverberation, where the past continuously collides with the present, creating a never-ending cycle of chaos. The universe becomes a labyrinth of echoes, challenging the notion of free will and destiny, leaving Tragge trapped in a quest for meaning within a chaotic continuum of his own making.

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Lu’s Fulcrum of The Ancient Inca Staff

How Time Travel Works in the Story:

The paradox is set around an Inca staff. Legend says that the staff belonged to an ancient Inca king’s court magician who had the ability to shape the destiny of members of the royal family and others. Buried for centuries and its magical powers believed to have been lost forever, this golden staff was discovered during an archaeological expedition.

The staff, which was inscribed with intricate carvings, had an ancient script that reads: “With me in your hand, you may shape a new life in any timeline you desire.” The staff’s mysterious power enables its holder to teleport to a different timeline by simply stating their desire for the time and the life they wish to live. This would result in a full transplant into a new reality based on the wishes of the bearer of the staff.

The Paradox:

Lu Chanka, a brilliant archaeologist in his forties, loves ancient mysteries and civilizations and has spent his life in pursuit of these, but has continually felt unfulfilled in his personal life. Despite his love for his family, he found out that they had only disdain for him—not because he isn’t a nice person but because he isn’t rich. His family values material things and Lu’s modest earnings left him, in their assessment, as someone beneath the family class.

It became so bad after the death of Lu’s dad that his mom never consulted him before taking any family decisions even if it would later impact every member of the family. This is simply because, to her and Lu’s siblings, his opinions never mattered - after all, he’s not wealthy. He had resigned to the fate of living the rest of his life knowing that filial love is out of his reach and given up on his previous belief that family is everything.

The Expedition in Peru

During a life-altering expedition in the Peruvian mountains, Lu unearths the Inca Staff of Timelines in an ancient tomb deep in the mountains. After painstaking months-long research, he deciphers its ancient script and realizes that this is not just another ancient artifact, but an opportunity to recreate the life of fulfillment he had always desired.

In his quest to rewrite reality, he held the Inca staff and muttered: “I want to live in a time where I’m loved by my family.” Instantly, his world shifts and he finds himself transported to a new reality. Born into a modest loving family, he is left in no doubt that he is valued as a human soul in this reality. For the first time, Lu felt familial warmth and kindness, simple joys of life such as a home filled with laughter, shared story times and dinner fires are now normal in this life.

However, this peaceful existence quickly shattered one night when Lu’s village was raided by slavers, and Lu was taken prisoner. This was the beginning of a life of suffering and difficulty for Lu. The band of raiders bound Lu and other captives after their village was burned down. What pained him most was that in the melee that followed the attack, he lost contact with the rest of his family.

Bound and beaten, Lu and other captives from his village were moved through the jungle that night. In his numbed mind, Lu wondered what had become of his family and if he would ever see them again. But fate intervenes. As the caravan of raiders and captives passed through a canyon at dawn, they were attacked by a clan of warriors allied to Lu’s tribe.

As the fighting raged, the bound captives tried as much as they could to stay away from the slashing, stabbing and cutting blades of the attackers and the attacked. Lu barely escaped being tramped underfoot by a slaver horseman who suddenly charged in his direction. He had barely evaded him when a second horseman charged through. Lu watched the second horseman pursue the first and slay him. He also saw the victorious horseman come back towards him holding the horse of the slain raider. As he made way for the rider and horses to pass, the horseman suddenly stopped in front of him and said “If we had let them get to the coast, it would have been too late for you all.” Then he raised his sword and slashed, bringing it down towards Lu’s side, and then rode off.

Lu looked down and saw that the rope that tied him to another captive has been cut. With the slavers overpowered, Lu and the captives were overjoyed to be free again, but their joy was short-lived when they learnt that many in their village had been killed during the night raid. Not knowing if his family was dead or alive, Lu was torn in-between relief and despair at being free once again and not knowing if he would ever see his loving family again.

Lu and his kinsmen returns to their village to find just a handful of survivors, but of his family, he found only one, his little sister. The happy life Lu had now seems like a distant memory. Although he found love in this life, the life beyond his village is full of dangers. Driven by frustration and increasing confusion, Lu wished for a different life of peace and security. A life where love, wealth and freedom are intertwined and balanced. Immediately found himself in his recent life as an archeologist.

The Inca staff seems to have given him another chance to decide what ideal life really means to him. But at every timeline, Lu discovers that life comes with contradictions and costs. Here he is, a renowned archeologist but despised by his family. In another, he is dearly loved within but there is war without. He realizes that true satisfaction of the souls should not come from without but within. All he needed was stay true to himself.

Consequences:

The Fulcrum of The Ancient Inca Staff paradox leaves Lu in an endless cycle of wishes and dissatisfaction. As he used the staff to further his quest for the perfect life, he became detached from reality with an increasing awareness similar to clutching at straws. He remains unfulfilled at the realization that happiness must come from within, a puzzle that is missing in his life despite trials in different timelines of life. In the end, Lu understands that all realities come with sacrifices and that trying to create the “perfect” life is akin to the fragmentation of his very soul and existence.

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Title: The Diviner’s Double Shadow

Description:
How Time Travel Works in the Story: In a penstalk village - Manshaku, a young man named Chima stumbles upon an ancient relic while exploring his family’s ancestral land. The relic, a mystical pendant, is imbued with dibia magic. When Chima seeks counsel from the village dibia, the diviner explains that the pendant has the power to travel back in time when it’s worn under a full moon at midnight. However, it comes with a strict rule: the user can only remain in the past for the duration of a shadow’s length at dawn, and each use of the pendant leaves behind a “shadow” of the user that lingers in the timeline as an alternate version of themselves.

The Paradox: Chima is eager to use the pendant to save his beloved sister, Saho, who mysteriously disappeared three years ago. He travels back to the day she vanished and finds her, warning her of the danger ahead. They escape together, and Chima returns to the present, only to find his family doesn’t recognize him, and his sister is still missing.

As he pieces together what happened, Chima realizes that his shadow, a version of himself left behind in the past, never returned. This “shadow Chima” continued living a different life in the past and prevented Saho’s disappearance, but in doing so, disrupted the timeline where Chima originally existed. The paradox arises when Chima tries to reconcile with his shadow self in the past, but the two of them cannot coexist. Each encounter with his shadow creates another version of Chima in the present, and the timeline begins to splinter into infinite branches, each containing different versions of Chima and Saho.

Consequences: The endless splintering creates cascading timelines, each with a unique variation of Chima and Saho’s fate. In one timeline, Saho is safe, but Chima never meets her. In another, Chima sacrifices himself to ensure her survival, only for her to forget him entirely. Some versions of Chima try to travel back further to stop the first time travel event altogether, while others seek out their alternate selves in different timelines, hoping to combine and stabilize their fractured reality.

Eventually, the universe begins to open under the strain of endless paradoxes, and Chima realizes that the only way to bring stability back is for every “shadow” version of himself to cease to exist. He must make the ultimate sacrifice by destroying the pendant, ensuring that none of his selves ever traveled back in time in the first place. But even in destroying the pendant, another shadow Chima appears, suggesting the cycle may never truly end.

Is this dilemma solvable? Or are Chima and Saho forever trapped in an infinite loop of breaking shadows?

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Title: Curse of the Riftstone Prism

How Time Travel works in the story: Here, time travel is achieved by harnessing the powers of an ancient mystical artifact gifted by Cronos, god of time from Greek mythology. It was christened ‘the Riftstone’ for its extraordinary ability to allow the user to split the veil of time by creating portals powered by intense rituals allowing the user the option to visit different past timelines of their choice and stay as long as they wish. Trained extensively on how to use it, each aspiring mage is given a small piece of the stone, since it is very powerful in its whole form. The rules governing time travel in this story are:

• The crystal only allows time travel to the past since according to the tales of old “The present is now and the future is yet to come, thus it can’t be seen only influenced.”

• Once a person steps into a past timeline, that past becomes their new present and their future depends on the choices they make. They therefore, cannot physically exist in that timeline and their original timeline simultaneously.

• Traveling back from a created portal is very difficult and requires great magical energy, perfect timing (example during auspicious days) and sacrifice to the God of Time.

• The longer they stay in that new timeline, the less likely they will have a hitch-free return.

The Paradox:

This occurs when George, an aspiring alchemist, uses the Riftstone to travel from the year 2017 to sometime in the 16th century, hoping to experience life from another perspective and also intrigued by the classical age and Renaissance period. He stays for a year, meeting new people and experiencing new things but when he attempts to return to the present, he makes a serious error in his ritual to Cronos and the Riftstone’s magic fails him, leaving him stranded in the past now his current present. With seemingly no choice left, George settles into his new reality and uses his abilities to contribute to society’s advancement in this timeline, even building a new family there. Meanwhile, his continued presence in this timeline starts to affect other realities, leading to a constant malfunction of time’s veil and obvious anger from the gods made manifest through frequent natural disasters and great famines.

Back in his original timeline, notable mages and time travel experts scramble to resolve the issue by attempting various rituals to appease the gods, creation of alternate portals in attempts to bring George back and spells to restore balance. This is all in vain, however, as different timelines start to collide creating an era of chaos. The world is now reduced to an unorganized system of broken timelines due to the Riftstone’s growing instability and a powerful god saddened by how his gift to humanity had been misused.

Consequences:

• Although the Crystal’s power permits the user endless access in different timelines, there is a time limit for each travel. George prolonged his visit, leading to a ripple effect that destabilized all timelines, leading to a clash of other realities.

• Since magic is tied to time itself, mages and other magic practitioners from every timeline can no longer practice their art freely because of its now unpredictable nature. This greatly damages many economies and businessess due to their dependence on magic as a trade.

• With the Cronos, the god of time enraged at the misuse of his gift of time travel to humans and the frequent disasters metted upon them by the angry gods, mages from George’s current timeline capture him as a sacrifice to appease their anger. As an unwanted connection between timelines, he is forcibly given up as a sacrifice against his own will in hopes that stability in every channel of time would be restored and the split veil repaired.

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Title: The Calabash of Time

How Time Travel works in this story:

Time travel in the story involves an ancient African artifact called Calabash of Orunmila, a holy gourd given forth by Orunmila himself, the Yoruba god of wisdom and divination. Through only one single lineage of blood throughout the generations, the calabash is able to take its user back into times when their ancestors have made some important decisions. It will only work if whatever events are to be shown are connected directly to the user’s blood relation, and it requires the ingesting of a specific concoction of herbs while invoking some complex ritual to the spirits of their ancestors. With this magic of the calabash, however, there’s a warning; time is sacred, and to tamper with the past could result in the ties between ancestors and descendants being torn apart, tearing apart the spiritual fabric that joins them.

The Paradox:

Ade is a young apprentice and village warrior gifted with the Calabash of Orunmila by his dying grandmother who was a powerful shaman. In this way, he gets a chance to know about his ancestors through this medium and acquire knowledge. His grandmother warns him never to interfere with the past, so that he doesn’t tear apart the spiritual thread that links the present to the past. However, upon discovering that his best friend Wale is to die in a battle due to some tribal issue that had happened hundreds of years earlier, Ade uses the calabash to go back in time into the empire of the opposing tribe during the exact crucial moment in that war when Wale’s ancestor, a warrior from another tribe, was killed.

Ade intervenes in time and saves the ancestor of Wale from his sure death in that battle. In that, he had managed to alter that particular point in history thus triggering off a chain of events. The ancestor, who was to die, manages to survive and goes ahead to make other decisions in life, which utterly alters the course of the future. Upon returning to his time, Ade finds that his entire world has moved. His family is not as it used to be, and even the bloodline of his friend Wale has been distorted beyond recognition.

In the new timeline, Ade feels spiritually disconnected from his ancestors. His bonds, once joining him with his past, have been severed; he has been left in metaphysical loneliness. His dreams once roamed with visits from ancestors, and now it is empty. This disconnection brings severe emotional and mental distress upon Ade, who no longer feels protection and guidance from his ancestral spirits. This feeling ensnared him in eternal puzzlement. Taken from African culture, the linkage to his forefathers is the actual core of his being; he loses himself without it.

Ade’s interference also creates an ancestral collapse whereby complete lineages of families have either disappeared or morph into the unrecognizable bunch. The opposing tribe went a completely different way, their ancestors never met, the marriages were never arranged, and the children who once were born no longer existed. This forms a timeline where, instead of saving Wale’s bloodline, Ade distorts it into something alien, weakening the power and influence their people used to have in present times.

Also, the more he travels back in time to change events, the more cycles fragment; that creates a rift in the ancestral veil of time. With every renewal of the cycle, the universe attempts to self-correct the anomaly through yanking Ade’s consciousness into his previous body.
Stuck in this loop, Ade is doomed to continuously relive moments prior to his fateful decision, always knowing that around the corner waits his inevitable pull backward in time to the same single point, never to take back his wrongs. It’s a loop that drives him closer with every new timeline-each one a little more distorted than the previous one-to the brink of madness. That spiritual world, once so known to him, crumbles. In addition, ancient beings like Orunmila grow angry at such desecration of time. Even more so, Ade himself became an anomaly, not quite here and not quite there, living in continuous spiritual limbo. More and more, with each passing cycle of loops, spiritual consequences begin to manifest in the physical world. Off the coast of Africa, strange and inconsistent events begin: where rain is due, droughts persist; floods over the deserts, and suddenly species of animals long regarded as extinct become apparent.

Nature and the spirit world are out of balance.
The elders and shamans speak about strange happenings, ancestors visiting them as though they no longer remember their descendants. Rites that yielded answers from the spirit world yield silence or chaos.
Orunmila appears to Ade in a vision and informs him that the only thing that can be done to repair the timeline is for him to go back in time one more time and let Wale’s ancestor die as he did originally.

But doing this means embracing the death of Wale in this current timeline which is something he cannot come to terms with.

This presents an impossible choice: letting his friend die or allowing the ancestral collapse to further dislocate both spiritual and physical worlds that are soon to engulf him. Ade chooses to right the wrongs and do what’s right. The ancestor dies as he should, and the timeline starts to heal. But when Ade goes back into the present, he finds he has to accept that his friend will surely die in oncoming war.

Consequences:

•. The ancestral balance is forever affected, and there is forever a rift between each lineage and their ancestry, a balance that will take decades to resolve.

•. Ade’s sacrifice once again balances out the forces of the universe, but he is remains scarred mentally and spiritually by what happened. Some people declare him a hero, yet he does not cease being troubled by his guilt and grief over Wale’s death. Many people declare him a threat, and his tribe is looked down upon by the community for years to come.

•. The Calabash of Orunmila is returned to the gods, as it has proven to be a deadly weapon in the hands of humans. This powerful gift will never be seen by any human again.

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