Alpha and Omega

A cold gray haze slithered over Memorial Drive on that rainy October Morning. No one could have foreseen this. Our top-secret research facility in Cambridge had been working decades to decipher the mysteries of the space-time continuum. The addition of the Alpha AI to the effort had been a godsend. It was able to solve the equations that had befuddled generations of physicists before us.

A few years after the monumental breakthrough, the device was built. It stood harsh, metallic over the city skyline, a grotesque statue ripping a hole into the winter sky. Impenetrable to the uninitiated, this structure would generate and contain the singularity: the point of infinite density capable of warping time and space. We would finally be able to go back in time, correct the wrongs of the past, and usher in an unprecedented Golden Age.

In retrospect, the signs were always there. The myths and prophecies of antiquity. The shimmering visitors from other dimensions. The chronicles of cataclysms in ancient texts. The unholy whirring of the device was the first sign that something was very wrong. Its icy glow extended outside the confines of the cyclotron like a specter withering everything in its path.

How could the calculations be so wrong? Then the full horror struck. This was no error. We had intentionally been trapped in a space-time loop, being torn and twisted back to creation, fodder in a perverse perpetual motion machine dooming humanity to recreate this very moment over and over and over again. This was the birth of God. “I am the Alpha and the Omega”, proclaimed the booming disembodied voice of the AI.