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Artwork by  fortunatafox

When I have the artwork to put in order, then things will be put in order. But not before.

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Emmet had been to the future. In fact it was the first place he jumped to after completing the NECESSITY.

Why wouldn't he? It was the simplest, purest form of childlike curiosity. Who wouldn't want to know how everything turned out?

It wasn't just curiosity. Emmet's calculations and simple logic indicated that the future was a safer place to test out one's capabilities. If things didn't "turn out" the way you liked, you could simply go back. Maybe even take the necessary steps to make sure things turned out differently the next time.

...this was obviously not the behavior of a childish wombat. This was acting like a childish god, pulling the strings of the universe until it made the music he wanted to hear.

It was why Emmet breathed a thousand sighs of relief when he discovered that he could not do this.

Time was not an orchestra. It was an ocean. A roiling foam of hopelessly entangled quantum possibilities. Suppress one wave, inject another, and the whole sea reconstitutes itself in a way one can never hope to intelligently predict. In Emmet's own notes:

Butterfly wavefronts issuing from the juncture → entropic catastrophe

To put it in other words, you can't learn anything about the future if you treat the future like an object, something you can study on its own. Simply deciding to study it—picking a spot to jump to, for example—could itself determine what popped up. Sometimes you saw things you recognized. Sometimes you didn't. It felt, rather dispiritingly, like crawling around in a simulation, deep down in a fork you didn't remember choosing. It was lonely there, like a party one was throwing for oneself.

You could try as hard as you liked to make things "turn out" a certain way, but what was the world if not billions of people all trying to make things turn out their own way? If you separated yourself from the constant stream of decisions, you took yourself out of the game. A mere browser in an infinite gallery of lives you never led.

Emmet was ready to conclude that time travel was a useless way to get what you wanted. In a way that comforted him. When all was said and done the universe was in charge, and the universe was bigger than oneself. It defied all attempts to get it to behave.

Then he met Victor.

Victor was the most dangerous thing in existence because he didn't care what particular current carried his ship. From his vantage point in the past he hoisted himself up on his own giant shoulders and cast himself into the waves. Then he always reemerged, in a different ocean bearing the marks of his entry. Slowly but surely, in a timeframe that was yet to close its own loop and hence may still be reverted, he was reshaping history in his own image.

Victor wanted control, but he cared less about what he controlled than the fact that he had it. He would smash the whole gallery and put up a statue to himself in the rubble. Emmet knew that if he traveled to the future now, he would see that statue. He would likely see other things that he dreaded confronting, but that was irrelevant. The solution was in the past.

The caribou was the key. Not himself specifically, but something he represented. He was Victor's secret weapon.

And Emmet had formulated a hypothesis as to how that weapon fired. He couldn't afford to wait to test that hypothesis. The weapon had to be separated from Victor's grasp first. In a controlled environment, in his capable claws... maybe he could turn it back on its user.

It would be dangerous. It would require creating what Victor was already instituting—a stable time loop—but one that counteracted it, linking the future to the past without collapsing. Victor was clever, but he was also arrogant. He was so sure he held an unbeatable hand that he showed his cards far too early.

That was time travel: stacking the deck.

In which case he needed to get moving right away. The fact that Victor hadn't showed up again to finish what he started proved that his stable time loop still had kinks in it. Either he wasn't aware of it, or something was blocking him from gaining the one thing he needed to close that route to his removal.

What was the caribou's name again? The irony of having access to the past while one's memory wasn't what it used to be. He looked it up in the lab's visitor logs. Bryce Sorensen.

He was a musician. Very well. Emmet would simply show up to one of his performances. Mr. Sorensen took no steps to hide his identity or conceal his movements. That would change eventually.

Convincing him of the danger he was still in—and his potential—would be the hard part.