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description: "It started six months ago when a Sequential Heretic and an Eternal Presentist fell in love—or more accurately, tried to. Their attempts to synchronize their temporal experiences created what physicists now call a \"causal feedback loop.\" She would remember their first kiss while he was experiencing it for all time. He would plan their future while she insisted it was already happening."
article_type: full
taxonomyContext: Catastrophes, conflicts, purges, and disasters that have shaped both cultures - where philosophy turns violent and reality itself breaks down
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# The Spreading Paradox
## The Breaking Point
It started six months ago when a Sequential Heretic and an Eternal Presentist fell in love—or more accurately, tried to. Their attempts to synchronize their temporal experiences created what physicists now call a "causal feedback loop." She would remember their first kiss while he was experiencing it for all time. He would plan their future while she insisted it was already happening.
Their wedding ceremony broke reality. As they attempted to exchange vows "till death do us part" (linear) and "in this eternal moment" (non-linear), the conflicting temporal commitments created a paradox that began spreading like infection from the altar.
## The Horror Itself
The Paradox manifests as areas where causality simply fails. Effects precede causes. Children age backwards into their parents' memories. Words unsay themselves. Death leads to birth which leads to death in endless loops that trap consciousness in recursive agony.
Worst are the Paradox Zones' borders, where linear and non-linear time grind against each other like tectonic plates. People caught at the edges exist in temporal shear—their past selves meeting future selves meeting present selves, all occupying the same space, all screaming. The lucky ones die. The unlucky ones continue.
The Stone has made it worse. Where the Paradox touches the Immutable Stone's influence, time doesn't just tangle—it fossilizes mid-tangle. Frozen moments of temporal catastrophe, preserved forever: a child's birthday party where the candles burn backward while the cake rots and unrots simultaneously, the children's laughter echoing from mouths that haven't opened yet.
Both cultures' remedies failed catastrophically. Entropic acceleration just speeds up the paradox. Moment-Dweller "presentification" creates new tangles. The Permanence Weavers tried to lock a Paradox Zone in stasis and created an expanding sphere where nothing can change, including the ability to leave.
## Death Toll & Damage
The Paradox now covers seventeen city blocks and growing. Population within: unknown and unknowable—people exist in multiple states, making counting impossible. Some are born and die thousands of times per day. Others stretched across decades in a single moment.
Emergency protocols failed when responders became infected with paradox. Firefighters arrived before fires started, causing the fires they came to prevent. Medics healed wounds into existence. Police arrested criminals who hadn't committed crimes yet, ensuring they would.
The economic impact spreads beyond the zones. How do you pay someone who hasn't done work yet but already has? How do you sell products that customers have always owned but never bought? The Cross-Cultural Commerce Guide's appendix on "Paradox Transactions" is twelve pages of increasingly hysterical warnings.
## Lasting Scars
The Paradox Zones are expanding at one block per month (or have always been this size, or will shrink yesterday). Both cultures maintain observation posts exactly one block away, watching for signs of acceleration. The posts are staffed by volunteers who accept they might cease to exist sequentially.
Children born near Paradox Zones show temporal mutations—aging at variable rates, remembering things that haven't happened, forgetting things as they occur. Special schools teach "Paradox Navigation," though the curriculum changes retroactively.
The lovers who started it remain at the center, locked in their wedding moment. Observers report they're still exchanging vows, have been married for decades, are meeting for the first time. Their families hold simultaneous funerals and birthday parties, grieving and celebrating in the same breath.
Scientists from both cultures work desperately on solutions, hampered by papers that unwrite themselves and theories that become false retroactively. The only agreement: the Paradox is spreading toward the Stone. When they meet, existence itself might undergo revision.
The city adapts. New buildings include "temporal architecture"—structures designed to function regardless of causality. Cafés serve "whenever coffee"—always fresh, already drunk, eternally brewing. Life continues, because it must, has, will.
But at night, when the mist rolls in, you can hear the Paradox Zones singing—weddings and funerals and births and deaths, all happening at once, forever.
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*Entry in Major Events taxonomy*
