Where... ?
Ah.
There he is. You frown. He could have at least texted you saying "yo hey I'm over here" or something.
You sit down heavily in one of the plastic chairs set into the wall. The hinges groan at your weight.
In his left hand Damien is clutching an empty pack of cigarettes, working it open and closed with a thumb. In his left hand. You raise an eyebrow.
Damien, you know very well, is ambidextrous. It's simply that he uses his right hand for just about every conceivable thing. His left hand is reserved for sliding one finger around a trigger or two into a woman. Why? Well... even he can't tell you.
See, now Damien has this... thing. Buys a pack of cigarettes, gives away all ten to people who look like they're having a shitty day (usually homeless people), then keeps the empty pack. He says he first did it when he was fourteen and stole a pack from some asshole. First it was an act of spite, then he realized that giving people stuff was a nice feeling. So he kept up the ritual, up until the point when he could buy his own cigarettes and realized how expensive they were. So now, this bizarre nicotine-charity thing was a rare occurrence.
But he did it today. So that's not good.
"You're late."
"Sorry." But he isn't.
"We couldn't meet anywhere else, huh?"
He shakes his head, his eyes roving slowly over the crowd. "No... it had to be here." He leans back, stretches, loosely slings an arm arm around your shoulder and gestures to the trains with the empty pack. "People coming, people going. It's good. Helps you think."
That's debatable. "Enough pedagogy for one day. What did you want to talk about?"
Damien looks over at you. "About time, of course."
You look at the trains. "Of course."
"Don't mute me. Not yet." He pauses, his voice more tentative. "Don't turn it back, either. Stay with me, okay? Stay and listen."
That's the closest Damien, in his entire life, has ever come to begging. You sigh, rubbing the heel of your palm against your eye. "Here I stay. And here I listen."
"Good. Okay." He takes a deep breath. He seems to pull life itself from the subway—the blaring voices over the speakers, the scrolling red text, the moving bodies, the rumbling of trains near and far.
"We had three theories," he says, and says it with a new sureness. "But I've got a fourth."
0-0-0-0-0-0
The three of you sit around the table. Kurt brought the Modafinil and Ritalin and caffeine, Damien brought the books and a few nice cigars ("This is a special occasion!"), and you brought the flame. Well, a candle. But that counts.
Out of the speakers you hear the murmur of Archive and Faunts and Amon Tobin and Portishead.
With open laptops and stacks of books on quantum physics and superstring theory and black holes, you spend eight hours researching, theorizing, debating, arguing. You scour over YouTube videos and Wikipedia articles and theses too crazy to be peer-reviewed. And argue more, naturally.
First you sit in the chairs, then on the floor, then on the table, then you're pacing around the room, gesturing into dimensions and geometry you can hardly comprehend. Then everyone's up, pacing, pointing, waving, trying to convey the impossible with the finite.
It's hot as Hell in here. Now you're all shirtless and sweating and the fan's on and that's not much help but the background noise is nice you suppose. Damien lights another cigar with your candle.
After eight hours, you're all sprawled on the floor, burnt out, reduced to a pile of higher-thinking limbs.
"Fuck this," you grunt, and REGRESS.
It's eight hours earlier, and you open your mouth and enlighten Kurt and Damien with what you've already discovered.
And they are amazed.
Yet another eight hours pass, and now you're pacing back and forth with your hands behind your back, cigar clamped in your teeth, looking for patterns in between the seconds as Kurt scribbles down equations that make your eyes blur.
And once again, you all collapse into a sweaty amalgamation of Mammalia.
"You going to turn back?" Damien slurs, turning a glazed eye towards you.
You just give him a toothy, hazy smile, and REGRESS.
This time, you're ready, and tell them to write down everything you say for the next hour.
They do. They then argue for the next four hours as you lay your head on the table and listen to your heart palpitations. And then you lift your head and join the fray.
Finally. Shot number three. You're all laying on the floor, staring at the ceiling, listening to the quiet crackle of the candle's wick.
You've got something. You've got three theories.
1. Linearity: there is only one instance of time, and you are moving backwards in it when you REGRESS. Whatever is rewound is essentially deleted from existence.
2. Divergence: there is just one instance of time, and every time you REGRESS you are creating a new timeline. The previous timeline continues, presumably indefinitely.
3. Preordination: all instances of time are occurring on a track, and every time you REGRESS you simply insert yourself into a different timeline which coincidentally matches your desired outcome.
Too bad they're barely theories at all.
0-0-0-0-0-0
"So, I thought... what if... maybe if it's not you who's moving through timelines, or rewinding a single timeline."
He lets that thought float in the air between you. You watch it, puzzled, before snatching it in your teeth. "What the Hell does that even mean?"
"I mean—" Damien holds his hands out, begins to gesture in that way he does— "I mean it's not your consciousness."
"What?"
"That was one of our postulations, right? By the Divergence model, the 'you' existing in that timeline you rewound out of— that 'you' loses the timebreak?"
"Sure."
"But that raised the whole question of your consciousness, and where it was going, and how it was being affected, and if you became braindead in those abandoned timelines or something." He takes another breath. "So I thought... what if... what if an outside source is moving through the timelines, not you?"
You stare at him, then down at your hands.
"I can't think of a good word—"
"Like... a parasite?" You swallow, work your throat. "Like I'm possessed?"
"Fuck, not like that. I mean—" He crosses his arms, pulls inwards. "I mean, like how we're always thinking about who else can timebreak like you. And I thought, well, what if anyone could do it? What if it's something anyone can do? People talk about hallucinations or deja vu or whatever, but— what if it's some kind of... entity... that uses humans as a vessel, and then these people can turn back time?"
You want to REGRESS out of this conversation and tell Damien no, sorry, can't make it, got shit to do. But REGRESSING suddenly feels a lot less like home. "So this thing..."
"Moves through time, but always comes back to you. It could choose anyone, but chose you."
You both sit there. A train pulls up. People get in. People get out. The train pulls away.
"You think it wants me to do something," you say.
Damien shrugs. "I'm not a biologist. Or a theologian. Maybe it wants you to do something for reasons we can't comprehend. Maybe it's an extra-dimensional organism that eats time. Maybe it's not even sentient, and it's just like a fungus or whatever."
"All of those options sound fucking terrible."
"Yeah," Damien says, crushing the cigarette pack in his hand and lobbing it into a trashcan. "Which is why I didn't want to tell you. But you'd want me to tell you. And it's not like you're seeing shit or hearing voices, so... I think the Linearity theory is our best shot, still."
You nod. You nod very carefully. "Yeah."
0-0-0-0-0-0
"Hey, let me see your hand."
You look suspiciously at Kurt. He's holding something behind his back.
"C'mon. Let me see it."
You warily extend your hand, and—
In a swift motion, Kurt locks something black around your wrist.
You look at it. It's a watch. Swiss and angular and seemingly knapped from obsidian.
"You, of all people, need it most," he says. "Think of this as making up for your thirteenth birthday."
You chuckle. "Now what petty grudge am I going to hold against you?"
"Eh, you'll find something."
0-0-0-0-0-0
What thoughts, then, rushed out of the hole in his head?
You hoped they were good ones.