"Topanga!"
The woman's full lips twisted into a smile - the kind of look that grown women didn't give twelve year old boys. "Hello, Stuart. My, it's been a long time since anyone called me that. "
Stuart locked eyes with her, feeling a potent blend of excitement and fear. She was short, for an adult, with a pale face and a full figure. A long, flowing blue dress hugged her curves, swishing as she walked. Her presence signaled a realm of possibilities but also a few potent dangers. He cringed inwardly as her eyes twinkled; it felt like she knew what he was thinking.
Ned, Darren, and Hillary stared at her with unconcealed shock. Only the original Topanga seemed comfortable with the situation. "They don't call you by your name?" Darren forced out at last.
Surprisingly, it was the younger Topanga answered the question. "When she… or I was freed from this prison… we chose a new name for… ourselves."
The uptime Topanga nodded in agreement. "I'll tell you that travelling in time is challenging, but talking about it is far worse. The verb tenses are perfect torture."
Ned, who had been frozen in place until that moment, suddenly jumped to life like a wind-up toy. He pointed at the woman with a quivering finger. "You… are you?" he asked, turning to face the younger Topanga.
"Obviously, Ned!" Hillary snapped. "So what's your name now?"
"My parents called me Topanga Lawrence, but in my heart, I've always known who I am underneath – the name on my soul is Moon Child," the woman declared with a wistful smile.
"Moon Child," Hillary echoed dubiously. "As in, first-name-Moon, last-name-Child?"
"If you wish. You'll have to forgive me for all of the theatricality," Moon went on, gesturing to the dark classroom and the flickering candlelight. "It's been so long since I've been to a good séance."
Ned chuckled. It was a familiar sound to anyone who knew him – the typically brash persona, acting as if he were on top of everything. "Well, I'll give you this much – you know how to make an entrance. I like your style, Moon Child."
Stuart couldn't believe his ears. Ned was actually flirting with the time traveler.
"Well, thank you very much, Ned. It's truly great to see you again," Moon cooed, stepping closer to the boy. She extended her right hand to squeeze his bicep. "I'd forgotten what a handsome young man you were."
"Okay, that's enough of that!" Stuart exclaimed.
All eyes in the room turned on him. "What's your deal, man?" Ned asked, looking genuinely affronted.
"He doesn't trust me," Moon explained.
"No, I don't," Stuart confirmed, hardening his face.
"Why not?" Topanga interjected. "She's just an older version of me. I mean, she's me! If you don't trust her, you don't trust me."
"Of course I trust you, Topanga, it's just…" Stuart floundered. He didn't know how to explain it. His faith in Topanga was absolute, but this woman made him unaccountably nervous.
"Oh, don't take offense, darling. I don't," Moon said silkily, stepping next to her younger self and throwing an arm around her shoulder. Remarkably, the two were pretty close in height. "I have the benefit of knowing the older Stuart Minkus - we are close friends to this day. He once told me how he felt on this occasion, when he first came across the older Topanga Lawrence."
Stuart could hardly hold in his curiosity. Behind his back, he squeezed his sweaty hands into fists. "Oh?"
"He said he felt like he had just met the villain of his story."
Well, that settled it. Either Moon Child could read his mind, or she really was his friend in the future. For some reason, both options made him a little uncomfortable.
"Why isn't he here?" Darren spoke up.
"Who isn't here?" Ned asked peevishly.
"Stuart. Older Stuart, I mean, and older me and older you… where are the rest of our older selves?" Darren clarified.
Moon nodded. "We talked about it, those of us that are still in touch, and we agreed that only one of us should come back to bootstrap our younger selves through the process."
There were a few things in that sentence that Stuart wanted explained. Hillary beat him to the punch. "What do you mean? Why aren't we all still in touch?"
The woman gave in an indulgent smile. "Hillary, I'm afraid that happens even to people who lead normal, linear lives. For most people, the friends you have at age twelve simply aren't the same one you have later in life."
"How old are you?" Ned asked abruptly and then reddened immediately.
"Don't worry, Ned, I think we're well outside of the normal realm of manners," she assured him. "As for my age, I really don't know. The question only makes sense for people who lead their lives along a linear timeline on a single world. To someone with my background, the question is meaningless. I can tell you that I think of myself as twenty something."
"What do you mean `other worlds'? Are you saying you've been to other planets?" Darren asked.
Moon Child smiled. "Of course I have."
"So, you're a traveler in both space and time?" Darren asked.
Moon shrugged. "Naturally. As far as the math goes, travelling through space and through time are essentially the same thing."
Some things were beginning to click into place for Stuart. When Topanga had said they needed to master time travel, she had really meant that they needed to master wormholes. "You told Topanga how to fix my equations!" he declared, pointing an accusing finger at the time traveler.
"Fix? Hardly," Moon snorted, patting Topanga on her shoulder. Standing next to each other, they looked like sisters. "But yes, I gave her a suggestion that would move you down a more profitable avenue. It worked even better than you realize. Stuart Minkus, do you know that you made the first interdimensional jump in human history this afternoon?"
Stuart opened his mouth to respond, but stopped abruptly as new memories assailed him – an empty bedroom and a pair of teenagers on a couch. Without planning on it ahead of time, he sank back into his desk. He balled his hands into fists to contain their shaking. "How does this happen to me?" He realized only after he spoke that he had addressed the question to Moon.
She stepped closer to him and lay a warm hand on his shoulder. For a moment, she ceased to be the enigmatic, shadowy time traveler and instead he sensed genuine compassion in her. "This has happened to you before?"
He nodded. "That Tuesday… when this whole mess got started…"
"I remember it," Moon prompted him. "I was there, too. It was just a long time ago, for me."
"It was only when I thought back over my behavior towards Cory Matthews that I could remember some of the things I had done… How is that possible?"
Moon shook her head. "We don't know, but it happens to all of us. We agreed, you and I, I mean – future you and I, agreed that it's just one of those things that goes with being a character in someone else's story. It's just one more reason it's so urgent that you all get out of here."
"It can be done?" Darren put in. "We can escape?"
"Yes, it can be done – that's why I'm here. I've come to train the five of you in how to travel through space and time. It will require a great deal of effort on your part, but if you are willing to put in that effort, the rewards might literally be incalculable. You must understand that, from where I am standing, this question is a mere formality, but I will ask it anyway: Do you all consent to my instruction in the art of Jumping?"
"I consent," Topanga announced immediately, surprising no one.
"I'm in," Ned said quietly. The look on his face said he was struggling with something, but he kept his quiet for the time being.
"Me too," Darren agreed.
Hillary gave Stuart a significant glance. He mulled over the question internally, but it was a foregone conclusion. He wasn't sure he trusted Moon, and he wasn't impressed by how quickly the others seemed to be falling in line. Still, the opportunity to reinvent the field of theoretical physics could not be denied, but the possibility of escaping from Cory's World compelled him even more strongly. "Yeah, why not?"
"Okay then. I'll go along with it for now," Hillary said, scowling at Moon.
"I should warn you that this will take a great deal of time to complete – far more than the scant hours before dawn. Fortunately, from this day forward, time will be on your side. With my help, we can do this before you ever have to go home again."
"It's not that I don't appreciate the encouragement," Ned spoke up suddenly. "But… I mean, am I the only one who sees how crazy this is? How can this woman help us learn time travel, when her presence here is predicated on us already learning how to do it?"
"I did say it was a paradox," Moon offered unapologetically.
"So what?" Ned was practically shouting. "Maybe that works for Robert Heinlein and Captain Picard, but that just doesn't fly in the real world!"
And then Stuart started laughing. He'd laughed at jokes and funny movies before. He'd faked his way through a few chuckles when taunting his academic rivals or flaunting his own brilliance. He'd even had a few bitter laughs that weren't mirthful in the least. For the first time in his life, he accessed a new realm of humor – he laughed at the universe. "Don't you get it, Ned? You're so right but so wrong!" he choked out between laughs. "This would never fly in the real world – but that's not a problem because we don't live there."
They started that very night. Once everyone calmed down and accepted the presence of the chrononaut, they took seats in the darkened classroom and the lesson began. "Einstein's equations make it clear that space time can twisted into any geometric shape – including loops," Moon stated. "These loops are popularly known as wormholes – a sort of tunnel connecting two otherwise distinct spots in the multiverse."
"What is the multiverse, exactly?" Darren cut in, self-consciously halfway raising his hand.
Moon frowned at him. "It is not necessary to raise your hand to ask questions, since we're not in a classroom. However, if you have to ask what a multiverse is, there may not be anything I can teach you."
"I object to that," Hillary announced, rushing to her friend's defense. "We are, as I understand it, beginning a scientific and mathematical exploration of the universe-"
"Multiverse," Ned corrected.
"Right, multiverse," Hillary went on. "I'm sure that while Darren is conceptually familiar with the term, he understands that we should begin with a rigorous definition of all terms involved."
Moon laughed. "Very good, Hillary. Stick together. Simply enough, we may define the multiverse as the set of all possible realities. The important word there is 'possible'. One interpretation of quantum physics is that new realities are spawned at every probabilistic event. Strongly stated, the set of existent realities is the same as the set of possible realities. Any world that can exist does exist - the challenge is in how to access them.
"Fortunately, these parallel realities exist literally as dimension. The three physical dimensions of height, width, and length are readily understood, and time is generally accepted as the fourth dimension, as we'll see when we discuss Minkowski Spacetime. It is the higher dimensions (roughly fifth through twelth for our purposes) that allow us access to parallel realities. To properly navigate the multiverse, we need multivariable mathematics at a level you'd have never dreamed possible."
"How do we make the worm holes?" Darren asked, not raising his hand in the least.
"Good question. Perhaps you have been wondering why I am came to you at this specific time. The answer is that I came as soon as you as a group were ready – right after Stuart created the first worm hole this afternoon."
"Wait a minute! Didn't you all say that Topanga told Stuart how to adjust his equations? Weren't you already helping him when he made his breakthrough this afternoon?" Hillary objected.
"Clearly, we're going to have to rethink all our ideas about causality," Ned put in.
"Quite correct. My very presence in this classroom indicates that the cause of an event need not precede the event itself," Moon pointed out.
"All I did was write some equations on a chalkboard!" Stuart protested.
"Which is all it takes, obviously enough," Moon replied. "You can create wormholes by having the appropriate equations correctly formulated in your mind."
It didn't take long for the ramifications of that statement to sink in. "That's asinine," Ned declared. Judging by the faces of Darren and Hillary, they agreed.
Stuart, for his part, had to take Moon's assertion more seriously. His doubts had been left very far away on a stranger's couch. He had, only half a day before, done something seemingly impossible, and Moon's explanation, as improbable as it was on the face, fit the facts.
The chrononaut shrugged. "It's also asinine to think that sixth graders could do upper level math and theoretical physics at this level. It should be impossible and would be impossible except that we occupy such a serendipitous location in the multiverse."
Ned scoffed. "You mean because we don't live in the real world?"
Moon fielded that caustic jab thoughtfully. "I have travelled to many dimensions or realities or whatever you wish to call them… for the sake of accuracy, we'll just say that I've visited many places in space and time, and all of them were just as `real' as you could want. No, what I meant about the good fortune of our position is that, for whatever reason, the barriers between dimensions in our neighborhood of the multiverse are thinner, somehow. One of the properties of our native universe is that wormholes leading to other universes are relatively easy to form. The two worlds that Stuart inadvertently Slipped into border ours, on a particular axis, and are as such the easiest for us to access."
"But, have you been to the real world?" Stuart asked.
"I have never left it," Moon responded levelly.
Stuart couldn't help but roll his eyes. "Okay, your point is taken. Maybe we need to reexamine our ideas about what the world `real' means. Even so, the world we live in is the subject of a television show watched in another world, right?"
"Not exactly."
"What?" Stuart wasn't the only one to blurt this question.
"The world we're presently occupying is the setting of a television show watched in at least one other world. We have all been on that show, and consequently there are certain inevitable behavioral ramifications-"
"Like the complete loss of our own self-control," Stuart growled.
"Perhaps… but perhaps not," Moon qualified. "It's true that your liberty is arrested to a degree while you are `on camera'. The rest of the time, your life is your own. There are plenty of things going on in this reality that will never be seen on anyone's screen."
"If you're suggesting that I settle for a life-" Stuart began.
"I'm merely suggesting that your search for the `real world', as you insist on calling it, is a fool's errand. Let's try this another way. You figured out that Cory Matthew's life was a television show mainly by observing his behavior and the behaviors of those around him and comparing that to the formulaic nature of television shows you watch yourself. Is that right?"
"More or less," Ned put in.
"Have you never wondered what life is like inside those television shows?" Moon asked them. "What is the world for those characters?"
"Are you saying that Saved by the Bell exists in an actual, physical world like ours?" Hillary asked incredulously.
Moon nodded. "I've spent a lot of time there, in fact. Screech is an old, dear friend – although he isn't much like his on screen persona. I'll also tell you that there are places where they watch Screech and all of you on television, and other places where those viewers are in turn the stars of other shows."
"Surely there is some place where no one is secretly being watched!" Ned exclaimed.
Moon considered it. "I suppose it's possible… so it must exist somewhere. I couldn't guess how you'd go about finding it."
"Turtles all the way down," Stuart breathed.