On the thirtieth day, an organization calling themselves "The Time Observers" reached out to the United Nations voluntarily.
They weren't a government agency or a research institution—rather, they were a secret society that had existed for centuries. According to their claims, timeline divergence and fusion weren't natural phenomena—they were... man-made.
The representative of the Time Observers was an elderly man with snow-white hair, who appeared to be at least ninety years old on the video call. He introduced himself as Dr. Owen.
"Timeline divergence has always existed," Dr. Owen explained. "Every major choice creates a new branch. But under normal circumstances, these branches collapse quickly, with only one version becoming 'reality'."
"What determines which branch becomes reality?" Dr. Zhou asked.
"The observers. Or rather, collective consciousness. When a sufficient number of people 'believe' in a certain version of events, that version gains the weight of reality. This is known as the 'consensus reality' theory."
Dr. Owen pulled up historical documents: Medieval manuscripts describing the phenomenon of "ghost towns", Renaissance paintings depicting buildings that shouldn't have existed, reports from WWII pilots of seeing "another Europe" in the sky...
"Timeline fusion isn't happening for the first time," Dr. Owen said. "There have been at least three large-scale fusion events throughout history. The last one occurred in 1945, following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which caused severe space-time disturbances. We observed at least seventeen timelines merging together at that time."
"Why didn't you stop it?" someone demanded.
"Because fusion is necessary," Dr. Owen replied calmly. "Just like forests need periodic wildfires to regenerate their ecosystems, timelines require periodic fusion to... prune the excess possibilities. Otherwise, possibilities would multiply infinitely, eventually causing the structure of reality itself to collapse."
"What about the current fusion event..."
"This is the largest one yet. In the internet age, every major event is observed simultaneously by billions of people around the world. This has created an astronomical number of parallel branches. Now, all of these branches are merging together at once. This isn't a crisis—it's a... great renewal."
"A renewal into what?"
Dr. Owen smiled. "We don't know. Perhaps it will become a richer reality, one that allows multiple possibilities to exist simultaneously. Perhaps it will descend into complete chaos, with all timelines overlapping in a state of utter disorder. That's why we need your help—to guide this fusion process, to steer it toward order rather than chaos."