text: [Themes: Horror, Surreal, Historical, Time Travel, violence, time travel, strong profanity, complicity, American Civil War]
  
  > Describe the surroundings
  A white house with a boarded front door lies to the east. Forest is all around. Little else can be said for certain.
  
  > Go west
  You open the back door and step inside...
  Inside the house
  You are back in the kitchen of the house, as empty and desolate as ever--
  
  Wait. The staircase is intact. How did that happen?
  [Please type a command before pressing Enter.]
  
  > Up
  You climb the stairs...
  
  When you get to Betsy's room, you find her sitting on her bed, crying her eyes out. Whitman is sitting next to her. His belt is undone and he is smeared with blood. "It wasn't me, it wasn't me," he is saying.
  
  "It was him!" He is pointing at you.
  
  You look down. You are also covered in blood.
  
  You are standing in the front room of a white house. You know this because you are staring at yourself from across the room. He doesn't see you, though; he's looking at someone else. And though you can't see that person's face, it seems to be--
  
  "Tycho Green," he says. "You may remember me from such wars as the American Civil War. I'm betting you've been wondering what's been happening to you. The question is, do you really want to know? It takes a while to drop the phat info-b0mbz, and chances are your scattered little nineteenth-century brane couldn't begin to comprehend the tale. But it's your call -- want the story?
  
  "Yes," says the man with your face.
  
  And then he vanishes.
  
  "Frag," Green mutters. Then he turns around and spots you.
  
  "Dammit, stop bi-locating," he says. "All right, here's the scoop. I am from what you would call the 22nd century. We'd call it something more like Window 2101-2200 Sphere 123488.59588 Track ZZ9, but then, reckoning of the date got vastly more complicated once time travel was invented. Little thingawhoozits about the size of a hockey puck -- have they invented hockey yet? is that 19th century or 20th? I always get those confused. Anyway, you key in your temporal coordinates, blip back to wherever you want to go. Only goes backwards, y'skate. Can't go forward because there's branching. Bifurcation? Try bajillionifurcation. At any moment there are something like seven point six times ten to your mom little subatomic blips that could blip some other way. It's like a tree -- you can follow any branch back to the trunk, no decision-making necessary. But finding the right branch from the trunk, well, you have to choose wisely. The hockey puck can't choose because the calculations would take quite literally forever and also it would melt and also it can't just pick at random because most combinations of subatomic blips lead to the universe spontaneously combusting without so much as a 'Bye bye, grandpa loves you.'"
  
  You are standing east of a white house, surrounded by smaller buildings which are collapsing and building themselves back up before your eyes. A carriage wheezes out of the carriage house, then vanishes. Green emerges from the outhouse and taps you on the shoulder.
  
  "So most people don't bother blipping back in time," he continues, "because they can't get back. But me, I met this girlie and I decided that she would be mine. Except that she'd been dead for two hundred years and I didn't want to dig her up because, eww, gross. I'm talking about Ann Whitman here. Not too shabby, hmm? You've got your Homer, your Bill Shakespeare, your Ann Whitman and I guess now your Thu Minh Tran though, just between you and me, I think she's overrated. But Ann, now, her littachur just struck a chord with me. Me and eleven billion other people, key, but still. So I decided I'd review some tapes, learn your dialect, blip back, sweep her off her feet, the whole bit. Key, that means she'd never actually get around to writing her books, but no paradoxes here -- soon as you show up in the past and start changing stuff, you get bifurcated off the tree right away and can't hurt the original branch. Unless..."
  
  The same dolls on the dresser, the same splashes of pink. Betsy is hanging from a noose tied to the crossbeam. She is fourteen forever.
  
  > examine betsy
  Green arrives at the top of the stairs. "Well, I'm getting ahead of myself," he says. "See, the reason Annie was able to crank out these incredible Southern Gothic novels is because she'd lived this incredible Southern Gothic life. Like, her little brother had his head thumped with all sorts of brane damage and got locked in the basement like a monkey -- with another brother assigned to feed him and clean up his shit... that guy blew his head off, gee I wonder why... oh, and her little sister had been raped by her father and then hanged herself." He glances over at Betsy's dangling body and shakes his head. "So the leftover kids got together and offed Daddykins... oh, yeah, and let's not forget Daddykins himself. He wasn't just some random monster -- see, he got tagged by an artillery shell in the war, lived the rest of his life in excruciating pain, and spun off this whole second personality based on some dreadnok thug who actually got fragged by the shell. Bill Blake, big ol' tuff guy. Tuff enuff to stand the pain that Whitman couldn't. So Whitman spent more and more time as 'Blake' -- even brought him into the business, presented himself as Whitman to the people he needed to kiss up to and as Blake to the people he had to browbeat into submission, wrote himself two different paychecks and deposited them at two different banks. But then 'Blake' started showing up at home, and, well, we all know how that turned out..."
  
  "So I blip back in time to when Ann's beginning her literary career," Green says, "but while she's a freakin' sooper-jeenius, she's also completely psycho, I mean mental to the point that you can't conduct a conversation with her without the whole thing ending in tears and maybe some blood. So, no smoochies with Ann while she's like buried under the bell jar, so back some more, this time to get Pops out of the way of the shell so that she can actually live a happy smurfy life with a sane parental unit. Except...
  
  "See, there's one teensy little problem with these hockey pucks -- you break 'em, you've bought it. It's like, take a piece of paper and draw a line on it. Then from the end of that line draw a bunch of branches. Then from the end of each of those branches, draw a bunch more. That's time.
  
  "Now take that tree you've just drawn. Put in on a desk. And empty your inkwell onto it. That's what happens when a time machine blows up.
  
  "When I went back to the war to keep you from getting tagged by the shell, I took a piece of shrapnel right in the ol' hockey puck," Green says. "And when that exploded, this whole timeline got stuck inside the blast zone. The timelines that are enough bifurcations away from us'll be fine, but for us, time is in smithereens and there's no piecing it back together. From here on out it's just fragments, past, future, present, future, past, all jumbled together. No cause and effect, so choice dissolves." He shrugs. "If it's any consolation, I'm stuck here t
  
  You are standing west of a white house with a boarded front door.
  
  You are standing west of a white houseYou are standing westYouhere on out it's just fragmentsYou are standing westtrio of frenzied attack dogsthe same splashes of pinkmumbling milquetoast has been jumping at shadowsman's home is his castleI make the rulesleast there's some wine leftchoice dissolves*** You have died***
  
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