Epilogue

Author's Note: This may seem at first like it's posted in the wrong place, but this is the correct epilogue for my Life Is Strange story, Not Over Yet. Read on and you'll see in the end!

Brigadier General Jonathan Edwards, September 25th, 2030:

Regardless of whether QUEST works or fails this will be my final entry. There really isn't a point to type it out and put it in the system, but a soldier's habits die hard. Either this works and we'll save ourselves, or this fails and we're all dead. It's funny how in seeing the end of something draw near, your mind always goes back to the beginning to think it through one more time. I guess that's the point. I need to go over it all one last time.

Back in January of 2030 was when those ten foot tall humanoids suddenly started popping up in Siberia of all places. Scientists called them aliens from another world, religions called them demons sent to punish us for our wicked ways, others had their own ideas. When they were seen digging in to entrench themselves it was falsely reported that they were digging for gold, and being that they were on Russian soil people took to calling them the Anunnaki; the late Russian author Zecharia Sitchin's creative interpretation of ancient Sumerian religion's ideas of the sky gods, the Anunnaki. It really doesn't matter what they are or where they're from, I just call them the enemy; invaders that came here to take what's ours.

Our first efforts to contact them were met with hostility. Once we realized any humans that approached them were killed we knew we had a war on our hands. So, we've fought them for the last nine months, threw everything we had at them. The problem is it didn't work. Their technology is just too advanced for us to deal with. They have some kind of magnetic shielding that makes our bullets and missiles curve away and miss their targets, and laser weapons that overheat and melt all our planes and tanks. We may as well have been attacking them with spears and arrows. Nothing worked, and we just kept losing country after country as they advanced southward and westward to command all of Asia. Europe and Africa were next, and finally the Americas.

Now I'm in Hawaii, the last bastion of the human race. There may be survivors on other islands out there, or in caves, but they'll be found and killed eventually. I was just a Captain when this conflict began, the title Brigadier General hardly seeming earned or fitting for me to wear. It doesn't matter anyway; people have stopped looking to higher command for a military solution. We're totally encircled, our last naval ships barely having any oil left to run on, and no munitions that even work on the enemy anyway. They'll overrun the islands by tomorrow's end and kill us all.

But, we have QUEST, our one final hope. Before the mainland fell the best scientists in the world got together in California and worked out the impossible. The science nerds named it the Quantum Ultra Engine to Surrogate Time, but it sounds to me like they just really wanted to name it QUEST. How it works is impossible for me to explain, but I know what it does. Put a person in the machine and the supercomputer reads trillions of outcomes based on its function, that being to give the person the ability to manipulate time for approximately nine days. They tried to explain to me why it was nine days with a whiteboard full of calculus but I had to make them stop and move on. At any point in the subject's life they could have nine days of the ability to rewind time, up to a few minutes to redo mistakes, or even jump into past photographs to redo previous events.

We thought when we tested and proved it worked that the machine was a godsend. But we could only grant someone time powers at any point in their past; we couldn't give anyone instructions or information, no knowledge of what happens to the human race in 2030. We tried generals, politicians, doctors, scientists, all of our best people and minds. All our subjects gave trillions of negative results, that no matter when in their lives they received their nine days of powers it wouldn't result in saving the human race.

All our hopes had been raised for nothing and the invaders, the Anunnaki if I must call them that, started tearing through America. So, they packed up the machine, promoted me and sent us across the ocean to Hawaii. Everyone who had already been tested by QUEST stayed behind except for my unit that was tasked to keep the device safe at all costs. We were lucky we made it to Hawaii. Other convoys were hit and suffered more than 90% loss rates. But, we arrived and set up QUEST in the most secure military bunker in Hawaii and started trucking every citizen on the islands down there to get them tested. Everyone gave negative results. It was the most disheartening mission I've ever had.

As the days passed and everyone failed to produce positive results our team began to realize the futility of it all and accepted our doom, though like rats in a maze we continued to search for the cheese as if on autopilot. When the west coast of the USA fell and we knew we were all that was left it was a terrible feeling, like the world was counting on us to save them and we failed. A few ships arrived from California with survivors that all tested negative, and one small ship came from Seattle, Washington. Of the millions of people there only about a hundred made it to us alive, and since a soldier's habits die hard we had them tested. We couldn't believe it when we had a positive result, so we ran the test four times, positive every time. Of all the people on Earth, our salvation lies within some unassuming little 35 year old photographer named Maxine Caulfield.

When Maxine, or Max as she prefers, was barely eighteen years old she witnessed her childhood best friend Chloe Price gunned down by a mental case named Nathan Prescott, who then turned and shot her in the arm. I've seen the scar on her arm, but when talking about the event, even though it was from so long ago, I saw the scar in her eyes as well. Something about that event changed her, took something out of her that she needed, and it had nothing to do with the bullet that passed through her arm. I may be a soldier but I have a deep understanding of love, and Max loved Chloe like no other. The tragedy is that she procrastinated too much and missed her chance to tell Chloe how she felt. Because of that, Max never married, never had children, and never really had much of a life. She just stayed behind the viewfinder of her camera and lived vicariously through her photographs.

Giving Max her power right before that event is what QUEST says will save the world, but the chain reaction is a lot to wrap your head around. This is what the machine said: Max will spend the first five days of her time desperately trying to save Chloe, then give in and accept her fate. She'll attend Chloe's funeral on day six and mourn throughout days seven and eight, and only on her final day will she set into motion the chain reaction that saves us all. She decides on that final day that she'll travel through a seven month old photo to leave her younger self a message on how to save Chloe Price, but also to save another girl by the name of Rachel Amber.

Rachel Amber was sadly the victim of the same mental case who murdered Chloe, her death officially marked as April 23rd, 2013. But, Max will change all that by saving the life of a girl she never knew just to be able to have Chloe back. When Rachel is saved she moves to L.A. to pursue a modeling career and much more. Max tells her what her fate would have been, and the knowledge that she was meant to die in April as the victim of an awful crime fills Rachel with such a deep and profound drive to prevent such things from happening to other young people. That drive pairs with her incredible ambition and her knowledge of international law, and she changes the world.

In July of 2015 for Rachel's 21st birthday she convinces her modeling agency to launch a new program that they call CLAIM, Children Liberated from Abjection, Injustice and Misfortune. With Rachel already having succeeded as a beautiful and popular model being the face of the program it draws the attention of the vain and wealthy all over America. The sales pitch is to claim a child and raise him or her to be a model citizen, and with a model like Rachel pitching it the idea soars. The sales pitch works so well on the narcissistic, drawing people into competing with one another to see who can raise the best model citizen. All the people out there buying yachts and sports cars, mansions and beauty queen wives to show their superiority through their wallets are fooled. Their flaws are turned into virtues as the new big thing is to adopt and raise a child as best as can be, tricking all the self-absorbed jerks into becoming amazing parents and adopting children in need from all around the world. After a few years it trickles down the vine to all of the middle class as well. The program becomes so successful that it leads to over a million youths a year being saved from poverty, abuse and neglect.

In March of 2018 a wealthy family adopts a Syrian boy named Zain Nassir. His parents were killed by our military industrial complex and its endless war on "terror", 2018 being a particularly bad year to live in Syria. Zain was only 10 years old then, but he'll be 22 by the time the Anunnaki show up. Unfortunately nobody cared in my reality and he died somewhere in Syria, but with Rachel still alive he'll be able to grow to adulthood with a proper education. Apparently he's going to be some kind of magnetic genius, and he'll come up with a solution to the shielding the invaders use only a month into the conflict. With our munitions being able to actually hit them we turn a seven billion person loss into a ten million person loss, our numbers and firepower far outweighing theirs with their magnetic shielding no longer working against us. With Zain's technology we'll win the war by June.

It's funny, when QUEST spit out the data one of the technicians started weeping and fell to the floor to begin praying in Arabic. It seems Zain Nassir translates to "beautiful savior" or "graceful victory" depending on context. I prefer the graceful victory context as a soldier, but either is fitting. These kinds of coincidences are what make you step back and think about what's really going on here, what's really true and not true. I don't make any claims to know more than a person could know, but it definitely feels like the hand of God reaching down and saving us from certain doom. Saving the human race at least, but not us here and now in Hawaii; we're going to erase this timeline and make a better one.

I asked the technicians what the machine said about the rest of us, but it doesn't work that way. We could only look at the time between October of 2013 and September of 2030 in the one timeline that had a positive result, and only from Max's perspective. She never meets me, which is a shame since I actually grew up in the Seattle area until I was stationed in California in 2024. To think, in this new timeline I'll live nearby Max and Chloe from 2013 to 2024, and then live nearby Rachel from 2024 to 2030, but never meet any of them. Oh well. At least I was able to meet the Max of this timeline and give her the chance to save us all, and also to end her loneliness in this world at last.

It's actually a very sweet story. After saving Rachel and Chloe and losing her power, when all her memory syncs back up into one mind, Max stays with Chloe from then until now. After Max graduates from high school the two girls move into an apartment to be independent, Max working as a photographer and Chloe as a tattoo and piercing artist. It takes some time for their careers to take off, but soon they start making money and saving up for a house one day. In early March of 2016 they fly down to Arcadia Bay to spend Chloe's birthday with her mother Joyce and her third husband. It's there that Chloe takes Max to the lighthouse during sunset and declares her undying love for the girl, proposing marriage, and Max says yes.

Max's friendship with a wealthy, famous model pays off as Rachel sends her a lot of juicy photography gigs. Chloe's talent for art leads to growing recognition and her revenue stream increases as well, and by 2019 the married couple moves into a house together. Max returns the favor to Rachel for the photography gigs by adopting a couple of little girls through the CLAIM program. For the next eleven years Max and Chloe get to live their own version of happily ever after, doing jobs they enjoy, having each other, and raising a couple girls to be model citizens.

I didn't look too deeply into the rest of the data because it felt like an invasion of privacy, and it was making me jealous, but those girls all seemed so happy, Rachel included. From what Max knows about her it looks like Rachel's dreams came true as well, and who deserves it more? It's a shame we can't leave any kind of message behind. We're about to send Max through time to save the world and nobody will ever know about it. Everyone will celebrate Zain Nassir for his invention, and maybe it will come to light that it was Rachel Amber's program that led to his life being saved, but nobody will recognize the true savior of humanity. That should be fine, though. Max seems pretty shy, and she'll probably be happier keeping her part in saving the world private for only her, Chloe and Rachel to know about. All she ever wanted was Chloe anyway, and I'm glad I was able to give her that much at least. I guess what they say is true, that love really is the most powerful force in the universe. All of humanity will be saved because Max Caulfield loves Chloe Price so deeply she's willing to bend all of space and time just to find a way to be with her. Bless your beautiful heart, Max, and may you live happily ever after with the woman you love. You've earned it.

Author's Note: I didn't want to write a run-of-the-mill epilogue that blandly tells you the future of this character and that character, and I wanted to answer the last two unanswered questions: Why was saving Rachel so important, and why did Max have time powers in the first place? So, I hope you enjoyed the end result! And now my story is finally complete. Thank you for reading. Blessings and good health upon all of you.