The Mace
Solve the loop to save the world.
Solar Storm Press
The story
The truth is, we don’t know why the Earth blew up. It just kind of did. Our only real insight into the whole fiasco is via the unreliable protagonist, Kevin — not his actual name.
Awakening in a daze aboard the Hypercube, a temporal prison built outside spacetime itself, Kevin — heretofore called The Mace, because in the future everyone is named Kevin and it gets confusing — is handed his mission and a pair of Gravity Gloves: technology that lets him wield dual Planck-scale black holes as he crosses the barrier between infinite worlds, just in time to watch each one get annihilated, over and over, by an arch-nemesis who turns out to be himself.
Back on Earth, again and again, further back each time, only to be outsmarted by himself once more, The Mace is tasked with investigating — and maybe even stopping — the cascading destruction rippling backward through every converging timeline. He just can’t seem to stop blowing things up.
The Hypercube
A future version of The Mace has gamed the system — deceiving his own sponsors inside the Hypercube to skip backwards through time, quietly destroying Earth over and over to stop it from destroying the universe first. He’s not proud of it. He has maybe thirty seconds, every time the device that’s really behind all this fires, to track it before it’s gone again. He doesn’t know who’s driving it. Neither, really, does anyone else — that’s rather the point.
Future Colonel Fillets is helping him track it. Future Mace, on his way out, leaves Regular Mace an implant so he’ll remember everything after the next reset — the one mercy in a story that otherwise resets its hero’s memory every issue on purpose.
“Solve the loop to save the world — or just enjoy watching one guy lose an argument with himself, over and over, at increasingly planetary scale.”
— house pitch, Solar Storm Press
