Listen to the audiobook of this chapter:

  Despite my curiosity about Aaron’s theories on the Bruchette bombing, I hadn’t actually talked to him since the weekend we went to the amusement park. I tended to isolate myself when I was in a bad mental space, which I definitely was since my fight with Mikael.

  Aaron knew something was wrong, though, because he called me the second Saturday after the fight and invited me over.

  “I don’t really feel like going out today,” I moped.

  “That’s why you need to come over. Bring your headset, too.”

  “Aaron, I really don’t…”

  “You need to get out of the house. Stop brooding. So get your stuff and come over.”

  I grumbled something about pushy friends but eventually agreed, knowing it would be good for me to talk to an actual person who wasn’t related to work or school.

  I arrived thirty-five minutes later after what seemed like an eternal wait for the bus to arrive. I’d asked him to pick me up but he said he had some school work to finish before I got there. Couldn’t he pick me up after that? Yes, but it would probably be faster for me to show up and make him stop working.

  “Hey,” I called, walking through the door. “I’m here.”

  “Come on in,” Aaron called from his room. “I’m almost done.”

  I entered his room to see him sitting at his desk, all his time travel papers piled to one side, a book open on the other, and him scribbling away at something. I put my bag with my VR gear on the floor and walked over to him, placing my hand on the back of his chair and leaning forward.

  “Do I even want to know what level math that is?” I asked, staring at what looked to me like strange runes inscribed on the pages of the book.

  He laughed. “Probably not.”

  I backed off and sat down on his bed, sighing heavily.

  Aaron finished his work and looked over at me. "So, how are you doing?"

  I attempted a smile. "I'm ok."

  "You sure?" He swiveled his chair to look at me. "You always call on Saturdays, but you missed it last week and this morning."

  I glanced away and sighed. It’s not like I was attempting to hide how I felt, and he'd known me long enough to tell I wasn't actually "ok" even if I tried. "I got in a fight with someone."

  Aaron watched me for a moment. "It was him, wasn't it?" He didn’t have to say the name, and I didn’t pretend ignorance, we both knew who "he" was.

  "Yeah..."

  "What happened this time?" He asked gently.

  I sighed again. "The usual." I didn't really want to relive it, and Aaron, of course, didn't need details.

  "He's not good for you, you know that."

  "He's not bad for me," I countered, not as defensive as I thought I should be. "He's a good person. He's just... not in a good place."

  "I know," Aaron stood and reached out to me, and when I didn't pull away, he laid a hand on my shoulder. "But I don’t like to see anyone upset you like this." It was his turn to sigh.

  I just stared at my hands in my lap. "We talked about it, you know? Early on. We knew it was going to be hard. But we wanted to give it a try.”

  "And I respect that decision. Just don't let it take over your life, especially when you have fights. They bring you down so fast."

  “I just thought… what were the chances of us meeting in the first place? There had to be a purpose for it beyond just a one-time grouping.” He didn’t reply, and I finally looked up at his concerned face, and gave him a half smile. "Thanks for caring."

  Silence fell between us, not so much uncomfortable as awkward. I knew he didn’t want to push the topic any further, and he knew I didn’t want to talk about it, but neither of us knew what to say next.

  “So...” I said slowly, trying to think of a neutral topic. “What do you think about the Bruchette bombing?”

  “It’s terrible that it happened.” Aaron sat down in his desk chair again, frowning silently. I could tell he was considering whether he should say what he was thinking. Coming to a decision, he shrugged. “But from a scientific point of view, it’s quite the something. Nobody has been able to come to any conclusions about what kind of bomb it was, or whatever was used. The scientific community is abuzz with speculation and is labeling it ‘twilight magi-tech’.”

  “Because it was set off at sunset,” I said, remembering what the news reports had been saying.

  “Kind of. More because they think it’s the same kind of tech I was telling you my time machine is.”

  “Ah. And do they have any ideas about what it actually is that the news hasn’t reported on?”

  “Nothing that I’ve heard,” Aaron replied. “There’s all sorts of theories out there, from some kind of device that breaks the atomic bonds of everything in range and turns it into free-floating atoms, to a large-scale teleport, to some kind of implosion bomb that took all the material and turned it into an ultra-dense microscopic mass that we can’t see.”

  I looked at Aaron skeptically and he shrugged. “I know, right? But something had to have happened to the building and the people inside. The problem is, very few of the ideas out there can explain the heat wave that went with it. There’s always going to be some residual heat with that kind of destruction, but not something that can be felt from five miles away.”

  I nodded and looked around his room as silence settled in again. I would have liked to talk about his theories some more, but I just couldn’t think clearly enough through the weight in my chest to know the right questions to ask.

  My eyes scanned the billboard above his desk and all the mathematical equations pinned to it. “Distract me some more. Tell me about time travel.”

  Something to talk about that didn’t require me to say much and would keep him talking forever.

  He looked at me curiously. “What do you want to know about it?”

  “Um... How do you solve all the paradoxes? You know, ‘kill your grandpa, do you still exist?’ That kind of thing.”

  “Hmm.” He frowned in concentration and I could tell he was trying to figure out how to explain it in terms someone as non-techy as I could understand. “Let’s start with this. What do you think are the possible outcomes for yourself when you return to the present after changing something?”

  “You don’t exist?” I said automatically.

  Aaron shook his head. “No, I mean, other than killing your grandpa. Say you just went back and changed something that didn’t alter your genetic timeline.”

  “Things would be different, of course. And I probably wouldn’t know what that was.”

  “Right. That’s one option. And?”

  “That I come back and there’s two of me?”

  “And the third?”

  “Umm,” I searched my brain for any other options and came up blank. “I don’t know.”

  “You gain a second set of memories of all the changes that occurred.”

  “Ah, ok.” I raised my eyebrows inquiringly. “But that’s not paradoxes.”

  “Gotta start with the basics,” he said, smiling. “So, as for changing the past, there’s several different things you can do. Change history. Kill Hitler before World War II or something. You could change your own life, like throwing away a college acceptance letter so you wouldn’t attend. Or change your family’s lineage.”

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  “Kill grandpa.”

  “Right. So with these any of three actions, all three of the possibilities we first listed are actually still possible.”

  “Paradoxes,” I warned musically.

  Aaron grinned. “Ok, so you killed your grandpa. But maybe your grandma remarried someone else, and the rest of her life went mostly like the original. Your mom was born. You were born. The only difference is that your genetics are slightly altered. Either you personally, or a second version of yourself that lived the new life.”

  “Really?” I said dryly. “You think that’s possible?”

  “Anything is possible in quantum mechanics,” Aaron wiggled his eyebrows. “Though some things are less likely than others.” After a pause where I didn’t say anything, he continued. “And yes, instantly disappearing or dying might happen. Or maybe you just disappear into the void between times when you try to return.”

  “Pleasant thought,” I muttered.

  “But here’s the fun part. There are other things besides changing the past that might happen if you go back.”

  “Like not changing it at all?”

  “Like not being able to affect anything. As if you’re some invisible ghost to the rest of the world.”

  “And that’s fun?”

  Aaron shook his head. “Ok, the most interesting. At least to philosophers and scientists. But they’re more… complicated to explain.”

  I nodded. “Ok, hit me.”

  “This is called the Free Will theory. Assuming people really do have free will, you could possibly take a trip to the past, look around, go ‘cool, it worked’, return home, and everything could be different. You didn’t have to actually do anything, but you ended up in another timeline. How? Free will.

  “Maybe someone ran across the street instead of waiting for the light, and was killed by a car. That person would have been the next president. Since that won’t happen now, a different person is elected instead. Major events changed just because you took a five second joyride through time.”

  I blinked slowly a few times. “That’s deep,” I eventually said.

  “Mmm hmm. And then there’s the last one based on quantum theory. It says that, since your body is physically connected to this timeline at a quantum level, it will always return to this timeline. You can go to the past and make any changes you want, but you will always return to your original timeline. The new world you created, if any, will travel off on its own parallel course, but you will never be able to see the results. Multiverse theory and all that. It also means that if you want to live in the new timeline, you can’t leave again. Go ahead and kill Hitler before World War II, but now you have to live in the past if you want to see how the world turns out.”

  I grimaced at the idea. I much preferred modern conveniences to pre-computer era. “Anything else?”

  Aaron shrugged, giving me a half grin. “There’s always the possibility that you could come back from a trip and not remember anything about your original life, but it is such a remote chance that most magiphysicists don’t worry about it.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked.

  “Well, to transport someone through time, you have to synchronize their MEM and PEM fields, which retains all the intrinsic conditions of the person’s identity and…”

  He trailed off as I stared blankly at him, obviously lost. “Basically, you can’t lose any of who you are in transport, and memories are part of you. Also, there’s no way to know if time travel works if nobody ever remembers using it or what the results are.”

  “Ah,” I said. “I suppose that makes sense.”

  Aaron casually flopped onto his back. “Then there’s one where you go to a timeline where there’s another ‘you’, but that version has also time traveled away, so it seems like there’s only one of you. Or maybe you meet another time traveling ‘you’ in a timeline where there’s a third version already alive. Again, these are such small probabilities that they don’t affect the outcome of calculations, so they’re usually ignored.”

  I dropped back onto the bed and rolled to my side to face Aaron. “And how are you calculating the probabilities? …Wait, do I really want to know this?”

  Aaron chuckled. “I’m working with the theory that you will be more likely to return to a timeline that is most similar to your original one. There’s a few other theories out there, but that’s the most logical. To me, at least.”

  “Doesn’t that mean you would always return to an unchanged world? Your original timeline?”

  “Maybe?” He shrugged, awkward as it was while lying down. “Or maybe you will always return to a future where there’s a second you already running around. We don’t really know.”

  “How likely is that?”

  “I don’t know the answer to that one actually. Not sure how you’d calculate it.” One thing Aaron never seemed to have a problem doing was admitting when he didn’t know the answer to something. It just gave him more motivation to find the solution.

  “I also don’t know if there’s a limit to how close in the past you can travel. Maybe there’s some kind of built-in universal time-travel clock that says you can’t make anything travel back in time less than ten years, or less than your own lifetime. And if not, then there’s the philosophical question of cause-and-effect.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Say I wake up tomorrow to find a note from myself in my machine saying, ‘if you get this, time travel works’. Which means some me in the future wrote a note and sent it to me in the past. Ok. Now, what happens when I get to that future point in time? I want to send the note, but now I wonder, do I send it because I ‘need’ to in order to keep my current timeline the way it is, or do I send it because I choose to? If you get a note from the future, does that mean it already happened, or is happening concurrently? If you know the future, does that mean it’s already determined?”

  “Precogs know the future and can change it, right?” Or could they? My own abilities had radically altered my life in the past. Or so I thought. But what if the outcome would have been the same whether or not I had seen a glimpse of the future first?

  “That’s the theory. But we’ll never actually know what the future would have been like if the Precog hadn’t see it and made a change. Or if nobody had Precog abilities and people never made decisions based on knowledge of the future.”

  “I see,” I murmured.

  “Of course, this is assuming the answer to the riddle of time travel is not quantum locking. If that’s the rule of time, then maybe I’ve already sent myself dozens of messages but haven’t gotten them because they’re in a different timeline now.” He chuckled, then frowned. “Though, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t, because I’m not foolish enough to possibly mess up my own life by creating paradoxes like that.”

  He went silent and I rolled onto my back, the two of us staring at the ceiling in silence for a while, each contemplating our own deep thoughts about time and change. I had to say, it worked to keep my thoughts off my personal life, at least until I started wondering if it was possible to change what happened between Mikael and me, and what the outcome would be if I tried.

  “What about traveling to the future?” I asked to distract myself from my thoughts.

  “What about it?”

  I waved a hand in circles over my body. “You know. Does that work differently? Is it even possible?”

  “Theoretically it is. Forwards and backwards in time are treated the same at the quantum scale.”

  “What? How?”

  “It’s… complicated,” he sighed. “For now, just know there’s some properties of the universe that don’t distinguish between forwards and backwards in time.”

  “So how would you choose which direction you go?”

  “Quantum entanglement,” he said simply.

  "What’s that?" I felt like I should know more about this stuff after knowing Aaron for so long.

  "Quantum entanglement is when you link two particles together in such a way that whatever you do to one, it has an opposite effect on the other, no matter how far apart they are. Quanticum entanglement is linking magicles the same way. It's a strange situation where time and cause-and-effect don’t play by the same rules that we know, so past and future don’t, either. It's the whole basis of time travel. And teleports, which is why you need special education to operate them."

  "The quantum world is weird."

  He laughed. "You have no idea."

  "And how do you get the data for your equations? I'm pretty sure you don't have a quantum lab set up here." I looked around as if expecting to see one all of a sudden.

  He huffed. "I wish. No, I just follow the lead scientists and publications, and gather the data I need from there."

  "Ah," I said in sudden understanding. "You let the other people do all the hard work!"

  He laughed loudly and I couldn't help but join in. "Sure, we'll go with that," he finally managed. "Right now, we're pretty sure the Multiverse Theory is at least partly correct, but we're not sure how it relates to time travel."

  "We? How many of ‘you’ are there?" I teased.

  " ‘We’ as in the scientific community," he snorted. "As for how many of me there are, that depends on how many universes exist." He eyed me sideways.

  I laughed. "You got me there. So why do all of ‘you’ think there are parallel universes at all?" I was pretty sure I already knew the answer, but I wanted to let him keep talking. He always wanted to share his theories and experiments with me, but I rarely had the time or interest to listen.

  "Precogs like you. They can see things that are about to happen just before they do, but only when there's a chain of events that's guaranteed to happen.”

  “I thought we just agreed that we don’t know what would happen if Precogs didn’t exist. Or if it even has any effect on the timeline in the first place.”

  “We don’t. But the fact that you do exist and you can change what you see has both physicists and magicists alike believing this is proof that that time branches off into multiple timelines, depending on how people react to what they see."

  “So am I living in a universe created by someone else because of how they reacted when they had a Precognition?”

  “Or am I living in a universe you created because you are a Precog?” Aaron countered, smiling.

  I pretended to think for a moment. “That’s definitely it. You are living in my personal world. The entire universe revolves around me.”

  Aaron laughed. “Jokes, good! Does that mean you’re feeling better?”

  I sighed heavily. “You’re successfully distracting me from my problems, anyway.”

  “I’ll take that. Now, if we’re done with the heavy stuff, how about you hook your headset up to my VR system and we play some Point of Contact together.”

  I grinned and sat up. “Sounds like fun.”

  Aaron was my original gaming buddy. He and I used to play Shakara together all the time, back before he got obsessed with his time travel machine idea. Not obsessed in a bad way, just that most of his free time was spent tinkering in his room on the project, probably because he was now planning on using it for his graduating thesis.

  I wasn’t sure how much longer he had until then, since he was dual-enrolled in the Hawaiian Institute of Technology and the magicus universities. It was considered dual-enrollment and not triple-enrollment since everyone enrolled in the magicus universities would spend close to half a year at each location during the respective hemisphere’s winter, when the school would be shrouded in darkness for five months.

  He had, in fact, just returned from Magiskolen at the end of February. But because of whatever degrees Aaron was studying, he wasn’t required to go to Aotearoa University in Antarctica. Instead, he spent those months taking courses from HIT via virtual reality classrooms. Apparently, one of the bonuses of attending the world’s premier tech schools was not necessarily having to go to the physical location.

  I connected my headset’s wireless receiver into Aaron’s console, powered on the system, and loaded up the game. Point of Contact was a space exploration role playing game for either one or two people. The name referred to the aliens the players were supposed to locate and either befriend or annihilate.

  About two hours after we started playing, Aaron’s doorbell rang unexpectedly. Well, unexpectedly for me. Aaron had ordered us pizza before I arrived and told them when to deliver it later that afternoon.

  I hung out with Aaron until after dark, playing the game while we devoured two entire pizzas over six hours. I almost asked if I could just crash at his place for the night, but knew I had to get home to take care of my cats. So instead, I just asked for a ride home, which I got without hesitation.