A Lesson in Sacrifice
Disclaimer: Some dialogue taken from the Roswell episode #2-5 "The End of the World", written by Jason Katims.
Part 5
Sam was sitting on Max's bed. He hadn't found his voice yet. His mind was going a hundred miles an hour. Aliens? Wow.
It explained a lot.
It also complicated things.
Just a bit.
Ziggy beeped again. Al looked at the handlink.
"She's suggesting that I check on Liz," Al reported.
"Something wrong?"
"She won't say. I'll be right back. Gooshie! Center me on Liz Parker."
And with that, Al vanished.
******
Al found himself standing on a balcony, outside a window. He heard voices coming from inside the room.
"What?"
"I don't know, I just saw a flash of light outside. Didn't you?" It was a man's voice. Al couldn't see him clearly. He was sitting on the bed. Liz was standing near the door of her bedroom.
"No, I didn't. You were saying?"
"Right. Liz, what's about to happen over the next few days is critical to the history of this planet." The man got up and walked closer to Liz. "Things between us are about to change, grow deeper. We become inseparable and nothing comes between us ever again until..."
"The end of the world?" Liz answered.
What the hell were they talking about? Al floated through the window.
"That's right," the man replied. He looked older than Liz. His hair was long and he had a beard. There was something vaguely familiar about him.
"What happened?"
"The closer that you and I grew, the worse it got with Tess. And eventually she left Roswell."
There was that Tess again. The one Sam believed to be the fourth alien. Ha!
"Because of me?"
"Because of me. And how I treated her. As it turned out, Tess was critical to our survival. The four of us, Michael, Isabel, Tess and I, we made a complete unit. We all had different gifts. With one of us missing we weren't as strong. Everything fell apart."
The four of us? Michael, Isabel, Tess and...
"Ziggy!!" Al yelled "Who is this?" He didn't wait for an answer. He came closer to the man and took a really good look at him.
"So um.. you want me to help you and Tess get together," Liz said, just a hint of incredulity in her voice.
"Yes," Max answered.
For it was Max. No doubt about it. "Ziggy, how the hell is that possible?!"
"Why don't you just go to Tess?" Liz went on, the same scepticism in her voice.
Max was resolute. "It's you I trust. It's you I have faith in. And because it's not just about getting me close to Tess." He paused. Liz looked at him expectantly. Al found himself doing the same.
"I need you to help me... fall out of love with you," he finished, looking Liz in the eyes.
They were both silent for a moment.
"What do you mean, a Future Max? How can that be?" Al's attention was turned away from the handlink when Liz spoke again. The pain in her voice was obvious.
"Is that... even possible?" she asked Max, afraid of the answer.
The older man smiled sadly.
"I don't think so. But we have to try."
Al couldn't make sense of what was going on. "Ziggy, you better have a good explanation for this!" he said. "Gooshie, take me back to Sam!"
With one last look at the couple, Al disappeared.
Max took his eyes away from Liz for just a split second.
"What is it?" she asked.
"I don't know... I keep seeing these flashes of light." He smiled at her, that same half-smile that melted her heart every time it came from her Max. "Must be a side-effect of time-travelling."
She smiled back. She liked being with Max. Any version of him. Even if he had just asked her to do the impossible.
*****
Al had only stopped by Max's room to tell Sam that something serious had come up and that he would be back as soon as he had made some sense of it. He rushed out of the Imaging Chamber and without sparing a glance at Gooshie and the other technicians, he yelled:
"Ziggy! My office! NOW!"
Minutes later, he was pacing around the small stern room.
"How can there be two Maxes?"
"Well, technically Admiral, since one of them has been replaced by Dr. Beckett, there is currently only one Max Evans in Roswell."
"Don't play games with me, dammit!"
"I don't know," the computer was forced to admit after a moment.
Al felt the weight of the world on his shoulder. If Ziggy, the planet's smartest computer, had no idea, how was he supposed to know?
"I have been researching Liz Parker," the computer continued. "She died in a car accident 5 years ago, just a couple of days shy of her twenty-first birthday."
"Is Sam there to prevent something that is not going to happen for another 4 years?" was Al's tense comment.
"I only give that a 2% probability. Mending the relationship with Michael is now at 86%. And stopping Future Max's plan is at 94%."
"The plan to get Max and Tess together?"
"Mostly the part where they try to make present-day Max fall out of love with Liz. According to my extrapolation, this single event leads to a whole lot of problems. It would seem Future Max didn't have a hybrid computer telling him that it would open a whole new can of worms."
Al tried to ignore Ziggy's self-congratulatory pat on the back and focused on the useful information. "What single event?"
"I'm getting to it, Admiral. It would seem Ms. Parker kept a diary for most of her life. It used to be on paper, but after a mishap where it went missing for a little while, she decided that the computer was a safer way to go. She had it encrypted and everything. I managed to access it. The computer she used was connected to the Internet a few moments ago."
Al was about to tell the computer to get to the goddamn point when Ziggy said something that caught his attention.
"Among other things, it says that Future Max came to her in an attempt to save the world from an alien invasion."
So there were aliens. With the revelation of a second time- traveller, Al had forgotten. "We get invaded by aliens?"
"According to Max Evans's future self, we do. In 5 years. Everything is destroyed."
Al needed to sit down. He didn't know which problem to panic over first. "Can you please try starting from the beginning so I can make some sense of this?" He remembered that Ziggy still hadn't answered his earlier question. "What single event?"
"In an attempt to make Max turn away from her, Liz pretended to sleep with her ex-boyfriend, Kyle Valenti. She said the look on Max's face was the most soul-shattering thing she ever had to see." The computer paused, sadness in its voice.
"This in turn led to the break up of their group of friends, of which Max and Liz were the core. It directly resulted in Liz's death, even though it happened a few years later. It's also a direct cause of their friend Alex Whitman's death, which will occur next spring. The rift between Max and Michael grew deeper. Tess stayed, but Michael eventually left. By then, Liz was already dead and she couldn't tell the others what she knew."
"Okay," Al thought out loud. "What does Sam have to do?"
"Whatever it is, it must not interfere too much with what Future Max is doing. Future Max has to succeed to some degree, or he will never disappear, therefore creating a rip in the time-space continuum that could lead to the destruction of the universe a lot faster than the alien invasion would."
"Finally some good news," Al commented sarcastically.
"The timeline which Future Max comes from has to be altered enough so that he ceases to exist. There was one defining moment in Max and Liz's relationship that led to where he is now. That moment must be stopped from happening."
"Oh yeah, and that's very simple to figure out. It could be something as random as Liz running out of orange juice one morning!" Al was losing patience, quickly.
"Actually, we do know what got them to where they are."
Al looked up sharply and narrowed his eyes.
"We do?" he said, clearly sceptical.
"It would seem that all we have to do is prevent Max and Liz to, as Liz states in her diary, "cement" their relationship. An event that would normally take place this Friday."
"That's it?" Al couldn't believe it. It seemed too easy to be true. "All we have to do is keep Sam away from Liz Parker Friday night, and he'll leap?"
"There's a 65% chance that he would leap, yes. But the end of the world will still happen."
"Damn!"
"There's no need for that kind of language, Admiral."
"I'll use whatever goddamn language I want, Ziggy!" Al tried to look at the problem from a different perspective. "What do four kids from Roswell have to do with the destruction of a planet?" he wondered out loud.
"Max is the King of the planet Antar," Ziggy said matter-of-factly.
"What?!"
"There was a rebellion on Antar. Someone named Khivar took Max's throne, but Max's followers had the Royal Family cloned and sent to Earth in the hopes that they would someday come back. Khivar didn't want that to happen, so he sent an army--"
"You know what, don't tell me," Al said. He had enough to deal with on this planet as it was, he didn't think he needed an Antarian history lesson.
He got up and started to pace again. He was trying to come up with something concrete. All these theories and explanation were good, but he needed to know that he was actually DOING something about the problem.
"I have to go back to Sam. What do I tell him to do?"
"The best course of action for now is to do exactly the same thing Max did until History is changed enough so that Future Max disappears. Sam will have to try and fix whatever Future Max screwed up after."
Al stopped and looked at the ceiling.
"Great plan. How the hell are we supposed to know what Max did? We can't ask him, he hasn't done it yet!"
"We can't ask Max, but we can ask Liz."
Realization dawned on Al. He could have kicked himself for not thinking of it on his own.
"What does Liz's diary say Max did tonight?"
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