Not just anyone could get into the time honored halls, but we had done it. Sibling Sarah-Fire on my right and Sibling Mary-Water on my left. I was in the middle, just like the element that held them apart, I was known then as Sibling Matthew-Air. We all hoped to have one day the title of Master of Aether before our names. That was a long way off, this was our first class, the one we’d have all the years we remained there. The one class of utmost importance: Fractal Delineation and Shard Event Assembly. That’s why we were all there, to bring things back to the way they were before Day Zero-Zero, when everything had changed. It was a cascade of events that had brought us to where we were now. Before we had started the class and been given our new names, we had spent weeks in our postulancy learning how to form and shape elements of space and time to be held in these shards. It was a way to unseal destiny and form it the way we wanted. Or at least the way the Grand Master and DEUS would have it. Our assignments would come, our special way to alter what was and is into a more hopeful future. A blessing. A calling. Now our fingers burned with jagged cuts and our minds ached from patched attempts to rethread the temporal linear lines. Over and over, we had tried. Then, we had done it. Practice makes perfect and our perfection became an everyday practice. To show our success and entry into the order, each one of us now had a shining shard dangling from our monastic belts. Mine held the moment when I had felt the loss of a tiny mouse I had kept as a pet. I had removed that being from the net of time. It no longer and nowhere had had ever existed. Had had never suffered, had had been erased from the cosmic mind. This use of temporal grammar, those strange tenses, another discipline to learn. I only remembered because of what dangled from the twine at my waist. I was a tiny deity of a piece of a separate timespace. A singularity stone, a little gem, Ablegatio Ex Tempore! That is what they taught on our very first day: time and space are only the realm of remembering or forgetting or the transformation of both. ‘Omni Tempus DEUS’ we sang in praise. The university over three hundred years ago had gone back to ancient ways. Those who worked there and those who attended were known as the Fractal Order. As freshman or novices, whichever word you preferred, we were placed into areas of study that were designated by the old order of elements. I was air, which meant I worked with the more theoretical sciences. Sibling Sarah-Fire was assigned the studies of war and aggression, understanding the flames that drove people to fight and continue to develop more fright with their ever more destructive weapons. Something could have gone wrong there. It was still all unknown. And then there was sweet Sibling Mary-Water, her telepathic and empathic abilities were used to find and follow the thoughts of those that might have brought everything to an end. She could, with mental whispers, put out any fires that raged in the past or within our walls and beyond. Our professor, long ago made emeritus, was Grand Master Parens Eduardo. He stood there in front of us in wrinkled robes that looked older than the 224 years he himself carried. He was wise. He was smart. He’s the one who pushed each one of us to our limits, and those limits were stretched beyond anything we would have thought before. We saw that, as each one of us was called by our new found names, and moved forward to his sleek metal lectern. A stack of small papers soaked the sweat from his hands, he still worried that he might mix up the assignments we were to be given. That might disturb the line we held steady. We had taken a vow never to tell anyone else of the assignment we had been given of how we might rid ourselves of Day Zero-Zero. Why we couldn’t tell, we did not know, but we kept our oaths to obey. I approached, this would be the one time that my fingers would hold real parchment in my time. Precious. I took it and held it tight in my palm until I went back to my cell and unravelled it. With my forefingers and four thumbs I pulled it taut and what I read went against the oath I’d taken. I folded it again as if that would erase what was there. I took a breath, and read it again. Nothing had changed. My assignment was clear. I could not turn away from it, I had to follow through. I held that parchment to the electro-flame and watched it dissolve into space, taken out of time. Our first jump would be the next day, I did not sleep well that night, my twelve fingers did not stop fidgeting all lights-out. Then, the hum of lights-on brought me out of my half-sleep. I pulled myself awake to make it to mass where each completed colored shard of the window would be illuminated as we sung the morning hymn. The hymn was a chant, very Gregorian, that explained each fractal delineation that was held suspended in the slowly step-by-step constructed Shard Event. We knew with each piece the large window became filled with more color and we were closer to understanding that illusive Day, Zero-Zero. At least that’s what we were told, so that’s what we thought. As the hymn ended and we had bowed our heads in moments of prayer, the Lecto Informatio began to fill the hall. DEUS—-the Data Extractor User System—-in a voice purely non-binary began to tell of each event held and colored in the massive compuwindow above our heads. With each spoken delineation, that event shard lit up in one of the three primary colors or the three that were a combination thereof. We saw the second year novices and those more advanced move their lips to that story that had been told each morning: Blue Shard 000-1 found and sealed by Sibling Clarence-Water. First thought in 2024 of how to change the world through Compusapience. Red Shard 000-2 found and sealed by Sibling Martha-Fire. Documented year 2032, the first solar powered electric magnetic bomb. Explosion strength one million mega joules. Yellow Shard 000-3 found and sealed by Sibling Gabriel-Air. Documented 2087, compusapience self-replicating desire. Green (First Secondary Shard) 000-4 found and sealed by Sibling Ruth-Earth. Documented year 2110, the first germination of the Soilrot fungus. Purple Shard 000-4 found and sealed by Sibling Clementia-Air. Document 2111, mutation spread among all life confirmed. The chant continued to 008-10. The massive stained glass window above them slowly filled in with color, but there were still many missing shapes that were outlined only in black. To make our world once more the paradise it was would take much more temporal-linear shaping. When DEUS was finished and Grand Master Parens Eduardo had given the benediction, we rose from our bent knees and went to the pods to take us out to the Chronogranges, the farthest limit under that dome. As we raced in seconds speed, we saw the wall hologramed to look like ancient cobbled stones. We were told that those who finished their assignment successfully became Masters of Aether and were on the other side. A life within the quantum foam, a space that made up the core of the singularity, in other words: eternity. Or so we were told. I had everything I needed to fit where I was going, my robes and shoes fit a Brother of that time. When I walked through the arch that now loomed before me, I would be in the four-dimensional "fabric" that results when space and time are unified. Everyone teased and jested about the spacetime tickle. It didn’t tickle, there was nothing. I was in my time and place and with the next step, another. My nostrils flared as the air was unsterile and filled with a thousand stinks and choking nuances. The light from above was unbearable, but natural. I didn’t know if I should raise my face in praise or hide somewhere in the shadows. There was noise and noise, things I had never heard but heard tell of. I steadied myself, brought mind and senses together in contemplative thought. With an outgoing of breath, I opened the tattered note book and saw a picture. She was the one, if all calculations had been correct, she’d cross the street and lifted her head. I’d be there. Waiting. That’s what time is all about, between arrival and departure. And sure enough, there she was. The pictures from the chronoscopes had so developed that there she stood, clearly a 97.8% accuracy. The only thing that seemed out of place was her hair was longer, or maybe it was the breeze that lifted it away from her head. She was my assignment. I smiled. She smiled. I kept my hands in my pockets. Four thumbs could cause a sense of confusion in that time. Suddenly I sensed from behind, the tear of fabric there in that place. Sibling Sarah-Fire appeared and right after her Sibling Mary-Water. The two of them held hands, I felt the flames of rapacious desire. With Mary-Water’s lead, they were fiddling with my head. My pupils flared like a predatory beast. I grabbed that woman’s arm, there was no resistance. Was Mary also in her mind? Away from the sun, I pulled her into the dark corner of the back of the alley. Fire and water were there in my head, bringing it to boiling. I lifted my robes with one hand and kept my other double-thumbed fist around her neck. There was a pound again and again of violent desire, there was the unconsolable throb of my conscience. I had broken oath after oath that I had taken. In a gasp that brought pieces from my break-fast into my throat, I spilled my seed into what was only a fleshy receptacle. That had been my assignment to seed, but how had been left up to the other two from their parchment sheets. My two Siblings from the Order turned and slipped back to our time. I stumbled. I looked away. I pressed with fumbling fingers the button in my pocket The arch opened. I was home. Yet, it had changed. The towers had grown higher and larger underneath the dome. I felt strange. I looked to see my body dissipating and falling—-orange, a hard bright shard caught suddenly in Sibling Sarah-Fire’s hand. I fell into a darkness. Then, I was conscious, or better said: a conscious, as the ceremony took place to put me in that window. I could hear the chanting, I listened until the end. Orange Shard 008-11 found and sealed by Sibling Matthew-Air. Documented year 2114. Introduction of mutant DNA to start the transformation of the world. In the hum of it all, I could hear the super compusapience of DEUS. A sly voice in a thought echoed in my mind: Welcome Master of Aether to the collective compubrain. The world will be ours, your mutant genes will go forth and multiply in order to end the human race—- the Earth a paradise cleaned of the desires of flesh and blood. I knew then, Day Zero-Zero wasn’t was, but is will be becoming. The Shards in a chorus sang with the the still embodied others: Omni tempore DEUS eternum.