Nobody took it well, and they kept on not taking it well for the next week, as Cam’s peers constructed what they needed and liaised with the Ice Mind. On the Outerward branches, Kay knew, the Cousins were preparing their own engines to support the healing process. There were plenty of Cousin science teams who would end up stranded on this world or that. They accepted it as part of their duty, more sanguine than Kay’s own people at the prospect of giving their all for the greater good.

Nobody was speaking to Kay except Auruthmer and Murther either, and she felt vastly aggrieved that she was the lightning rod for all that disgruntlement. It’s not my fault, she wanted to shout. This is our best chance to save everything! But they couldn’t really understand, and so in the end she found herself on the cusp of preserving the universe, feeling as alone as she ever had.

She watched via Cam’s intricately constructed displays as great engines were thrown into motion, taking hold of the complex fields the Ediacaran was generating. Their constructions had to try and align these fields into a stable configuration, one that would survive the death of the entity generating them. And not a moment too soon, because a huge, morbid cascade was now sweeping this world, this true original Earth. There was a critical threshold of living material to monitor. Below this, by Kay’s calculations, the Ediacaran would be unable to sustain itself and its pet realities. Perhaps it would then continue as a collection of basic life forms. Reduced to an assortment of quilted bags on the sea floor and crusty lichens on land—no longer a singular entity at all.

She watched in real time, through Cam’s mediation, as the fields aligned and shuddered under their ministrations. Murther was at her side as they parsed the data, shoulder to shoulder. Kay felt a swoop of triumph as everything fell into place as their models had predicted, all the straws leaning against one another just so, so that each one balanced the next in a great round. Every timeline was abruptly separate and whole, their metaphorical walls sound and solid, every branch an island.

And then they experienced the bleak depths of despair as their great experiment failed. As it all came apart, cracks proliferating, the complex waveforms of the different timelines collapsing rapidly into oblivion. All those different Earths, all those lives, those minds, those histories…unwritten and unwound until nothing was left and as if none of it had ever been.

She’d given it her very best shot, sacrificed everything, and still the grand plan had disintegrated into shards and splinters.