I don't know how long we've spent on that lawn. It's long enough that the seat of my jeans is soaked through from the dampness of the soil.
The horizon is a golden blur to my unfocused eyes. The sun is a black hole in the sky, a gaping maw that threatens to swallow me whole if I stare for too long. I screw my eyes shut, but the white-hot crescent of the eclipse is seared on my retinas, stubbornly resisting my attempts to rub it away.
An impossible eclipse, like yesterday's impossible snowfall. Like the impossible storm coming to obliterate Arcadia Bay in three days.
I don't notice I'm shivering until the hand on my shoulder gives it a gentle squeeze.
"You alright, Max?"
I blink my eyes open, try to put on something like a smile.
"Just cold, I guess."
Warren's frown deepens. My gaze drifts until it settles on the purple blotch under his eye. The sight sends a cold stab of guilt through my gut, and for an instant I want to tell him everything, right then and there.
I draw my knees closer to my chest, hugging my legs in a weak attempt to conserve body heat.
"What a week, huh?" Warren ventures with a shaky laugh. "And it's only Tuesday."
He's shifted closer, his other hand lightly gripping my arm again. I can feel how tense he is, like I'm a statue made of paper mâché that will crumple if he doesn't hold me just right. I deflate a little.
We really can't keep going on like this.
"Hey Warren… sorry I blew you off earlier." Nice going, Caulfield. I wince. Couldn't have picked a worse choice of words if you tried. "I just… This has been the most insane, bizarro week, and on top of everything else I just really don't want to-" lead you on, but he's already talking over me before the words make it out.
"Don't stress, it's all good, Max! We can just ape out some other time once things are less crazy, yeah?"
I shoot him an exasperated look, but he's gazing back towards the horizon again. I think about finishing my sentence anyway, but when I open my mouth the only thing that comes out is a sigh.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. It takes a few tries to fish it out of my pocket with my numb fingers.
Chloe: Sorry about Kate. I hope you're ok.
My fingers hover, curl, hesitate.
Kate.
I see her tear-stained face, soaked clothes clinging to her frail frame like tissue paper. I see her silhouette falling through the air like a marionette with cut strings, once, twice, three times, down, down, down until the crowd of gawkers morphs into the swaying tips of red cedars.
Help me, Max!
I hear the rumble of thousands of tons of steel and momentum bearing down like a force of nature, the terrible screeching of metal on metal as brakes are pulled in vain. A spike of pain bores through my temple. I don't realize my teeth are clenched until I feel the friction through my jaw.
She's alive. They're alive. They're both alive.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
Another buzz.
Chloe: This eclipse freaks me out…
Warren's looking over my shoulder now, his breath on my cheek. I shrug him off, decisively cupping my phone in both hands as I begin to type.
Max: Let's find out what's going on !
My thumb is jamming the enter key before I can think to fix the typo.
Max: Together!
I add for good measure. Whether for my benefit or Warren's, I'm not really sure.
"Who's that?" There's hesitation in his voice, like he's afraid of the answer.
"A friend," I reply, shrugging all the way out of his arms.
My knees groan in protest as I push myself to my feet, the backs of my jeans sticking to my legs and seeping dirt-water onto my skin, where it joins the heavy dampness from the rest of my soaked clothes. A slow wave of exhaustion washes over me, and I contemplate curling up right there on the lawn.
"Are… are we still on for tonight?"
"Tonight?" I ask blankly. Warren's still sitting on the grass, looking up at me with puppy-dog eyes.
"Doctor Graham's convoluted crash course on chronology? You got my email, right?"
Right. The email, from this morning. A lifetime ago.
The temptation of just crawling into bed and letting the oblivion of sleep carry me away for the night is so, so strong. But no. If there's anything that today's proved, it's that I need to get a handle on these powers, and fast. I clench my hands into fists.
Knowledge is power.
"We are so on for tonight," I say with as much forced enthusiasm as I can muster. Then, glancing down at my phone, "Mind if I bring a friend?"
The sky is almost completely dark by the time Warren and I find ourselves sitting cross-legged across from each other on my dorm room floor. My hair is still wet from the shower, and I can feel it dripping slowly down the back of my zip-up hoodie. The floor lamp is on, casting blurry impressions of Lisa's wilting leaves across the walls.
Normally, I'd be in my shorts and PJ's at this point, but hanging out with Warren Graham in my own bedroom with only two articles of clothing on sounds like a really bad idea after everything else that's happened with him today.
"Did you watch any of the movies I sent?" Warren watches me from over the lip of his laptop screen.
"Dude, this is serious." I fight the urge to roll my eyes. "You know I've seen like, half of them already anyway. Besides, do you really think we can figure out how time travel works by watching Pulp Fiction?"
"Why are you so interested in all this time travel stuff all of a sudden, anyway?" Warren huffs. "Wait, don't tell me—you committed time-crimes and now the Time Enforcement Commission is out to get you?"
I give him a halfhearted laugh. Should I just come clean, get it over with? Warren might be the only person who'd believe me right away if I tell him I've somehow turned into a human time machine, and I could really use his science-brain to help me figure this out without all these silly pretenses…
I glance at his bruise again. No. Not today. I've already gotten him into enough trouble.
"Something like that," I mutter noncommittally. "Look, it's for a… project, okay? An important one." Great job Max, that doesn't sound incredibly suspicious at all.
"Oookay Agent Caulfield, I get it. Top secret, for your eyes only." Warren laughs, but there's a hint of annoyance there now.
"I'll promise I'll explain everything, Warren. I will. Just not tonight."
Warren holds my gaze for a moment longer before throwing his hands up his hands in defeat.
"Yeah, yeah, okay. Don't sweat it. Just don't go making a time machine without me, okay?"
That gets a genuine laugh from me.
"So, can I have that crash course on quantum physics now?"
I push my own laptop closed. The Wikipedia article was only making my headache worse. Instead, I reach into the bottom drawer of my desk and fish around for my notepad, careful not to let any of the hastily crumpled post-its of incriminating time-powers-related notes escape their temporary confinement.
For my eyes only. For now.
"Right. Sure." Warren coughs. "Um, just so you know, when I said I had quantum physics homework, I was mostly joking. I mean, I do have some chemistry homework, and quantum physics is like, the basis of a lot of chemistry, but like-"
"Warren!" I'm laughing again.
"I'm just saying, I'm not really what you would call an expert. But I definitely know enough to give you the basic rundown!"
He takes the notepad from my hands, giving the pen in his other hand a twirl before biting off the cap.
"So, quantum physics," he mumbles around the object in his mouth, before finally letting it drop. Gross. "It's all about waves, really."
He draws a straight line with two small gaps down the center of the page, then a solid line to the right of it.
"Everything is a wave, actually, even things that you don't usually think of being made of waves. Even you and me! But the smaller things are, the more wavy they become."
He draws a heavy dot on the left of the page, then an arrow pointing to between the gaps in the first line.
"Imagine this is a particle. It's moving right, across the page. What do you think will happen next?"
"It'll hit the wall?" I point to the spot between the two gaps.
"Sorry, wrong answer," Warren answers giddily. He draws arcs radiating out from the dot toward the gaps in the first line. "For you see, my dear protégée, you've just been bamboozled by wave-particle duality!"
His pen picks up to a frenzied pace, adding overlapping arcs until the space between the two lines is a mess of scribbles..
"See?"
"Warren, you're worse than the Wikipedia article." I dig the heels of my palms into my eyes.
A buzz from my phone interrupts whatever retort he had prepared. I turn to grab it from on top of my desk, wincing as my back pops in three separate places.
Chloe: What numbers your room again
Max: 219. Need me to come get you? _
Chloe: Nah just keep your window open
Chloe: And NO EMOJI
I barely have time to register the deeper implications of the message before the sound of something large scrambling through the hedge outside carries through the gap of my half-open window. The sharp rap of knuckles on glass follows soon after.
"Price Airlines to air traffic control. Do I have permission to land?"
"Jeebus, Chloe, you're ridiculous!" I yelp. I'm at the window in an instant, yanking it up to reveal a navy beanie and a flash of electric blue hair. "How did you even get up here?"
"I flew, dumbass," Chloe pants out between heavy breaths. "Think you're the only one with superpowers? Now… ack! Help me up before my step-shit busts me for unlawful entry."
A quick tug and she's tumbling over the windowsill onto my desk, landing on the floor in a tangle of limbs in front of a bewildered Warren. I poke my head out of the window, frantically checking up and down the street, but if anyone noticed Chloe's urban bouldering performance, they mercifully haven't raised the alarm. I shove the window closed with a bit more force than I mean to.
I turn back to find Chloe surveying the room from her spot on the floor. I follow her eyes over the photo-mosaic on the wall, the fairy lights on the ceiling, the mirror still smeared with Victoria's lipstick, the guitar in the corner, Lisa's drooping fronds. A sudden sense of self-consciousness rises to the surface, creeping up my spine like ice water.
The last time we were together in my bedroom feels like a million years ago. What does she think of this one?
What about me? Have I also turned into something unfamiliar, something she can no longer recognize?
"Hey, you're the girl from the parking lot."
Warren's voice is tiny. He's frozen in place, staring at Chloe as if she were some kind of high-explosive device that could be set off by the slightest movement.
"Yep, guilty as charged." Chloe collects her legs underneath her and rocks back onto her hands. "And you're our knight in shining armour who got Fuckface Prescott off our asses. Thanks for that, by the way." She blows a tuft of hair from her eyes.
I plop myself down beside Chloe.
"Sorry I didn't get the chance to introduce you earlier, Warren. This is Chloe. We've been friends since we were little. Chloe, Warren."
"So you're the boyfriend Max won't shut up about!" Chloe enthuses. I wince so hard I see Warren wince in response.
"Chloe," I hiss. "Not funny."
She chortles, throwing an arm lazily over my shoulder before suddenly pulling me off balance and into her side.
"Nice digs, by the way."
Warren's gaze darts rapidly between us. She holds me there for a moment, gripping my arm almost possessively. I feel a flush creeping up my cheeks. She lets go just as abruptly, leaning forward and grabbing the notepad off the floor instead.
"So." Chloe regards the page at arm's length, turning it this way and that. "What's in the lesson plan, doc?"
"Ahem." Warren clears his throat, puffs out his chest a little. "Quantum mechanics. Ever heard of the double-slit experiment?"
"Who fuckin' hasn't." I can practically hear the eye roll in Chloe's words.
Wait, what?
She plucks the pen straight from Warren's fingers, drops the notepad into her lap, and starts to draw.
"Particles act like waves, so this little guy goes through both slits at the same time and makes fun shapes on the wall, right?"
She passes the pad back to Warren, eyebrow arched in challenge. The page now has dotted lines all over and some wavy squiggles near the solid line to the right. Catch me if you can! the particle says.
Warren blinks once, twice, three times.
"Uh, yeah… yeah, kinda. But the particle doesn't-"
"Each particle can only hit the wall in one place, yeah, yeah, I was getting there. It takes a bunch of repeat experiments to make the interference pattern." Chloe glances back at me, gesturing to the page as if it's the most obvious thing in the world. "Kinda hard to draw all that on the same piece of paper, though, even with my mad art skills."
I make a sort of choked sputtering noise before I find my voice again.
"Chloe, what the fuck? Where did you learn all this?"
"Youtube videos, duh." Thump, thump, thump. Chloe hops in place until she's fully facing me. "Oh, shut it, hippie. I'm a dropout, remember? Had to take my education into my own hands."
Now it's my turn to sit there blinking in shock.
"Chloe Price, you enormous nerd!" I finally manage.
"And don't you forget it," she smirks, tossing the notepad back at Warren like a frisbee. "So, Super Max, now that I'm all caught up, I know exactly what you're thinking." She drums her knees, pausing for dramatic effect. "What does any of this have to do with my time powers?"
"Time powers? Max, what's she talking about?"
Warren's are wide with shock—and probably from more than just narrowly avoiding a spinning notepad to the forehead. My hand is twitching upward before I even consciously register the action, ready to reach into the stream of time and pull-
"We're playing a tabletop game," Chloe cuts in without skipping a beat. "D . You might have heard of it. Maximus Prime over here is playing some super high effort homebrew bullshit time sorcerer, because of course she is, and it's giving the DM—yours truly—one hell of a time, so we're trying to figure out a better ruleset. Y'know, for game balance."
"Max…" Warren's eyes are even wider now.
My shoulders tense. My arm creeps upward a few more degrees.
"… you started a D campaign without me?!"
"I… yes?" I squeak.
Warren visibly deflates, and for a moment I consider rewinding anyway.
"Whisht, shut it, Waldo. Trying to stay on topic here."
Chloe shoots me a wink, and I finally let out the breath I've been holding in. I let my hand fall back to my side.
"Anyways," she continues, "point is, particles act like waves until something forces them to act like particles. Running into a wall, for example."
"Wave-function collapse," Warren interjects. "When you measure the particle's location, it sort of becomes stuck there and all the waviness goes away."
"Wait, back up." I hold up my other hand. "So the particle just… goes through one of the slits and hits the wall? What's so quantum about any of that?"
"No, you're not getting it," Warren sighs.
Chloe shoots him a glare.
"I got this one, Doc Brown."
The notepad is back on the floor between us, a finger tipped with bright blue nail polish pressed between the two lines on the page.
"The key is that the particle is going through both slits at the same time. It's weird, I know, bear with me. For all intents and purposes, the particle is a wave while it's moving, so it can do shit like go through two holes at once. But there's a catch. You don't ever get to see it in its full wavy glory. If you do anything to actually look at it, or somehow find out where it is—literally anything—it becomes a normal, classical particle again. No more quantum weirdness. What you see is what you get."
"Look here." Warren points his finger along the squiggle Chloe drew on the right of the page. "The particle actually has a chance of hitting the wall anywhere, including places that should be impossible to reach if it was acting like, say, a bullet going straight through one of the slits. That's because it moves like a wave and can sort of ripple around. But some spots have a bigger chance of being hit than others. That's what these wiggles represent, it's a probability distribution. If you put enough particles through the experiment, one by one, eventually they'll draw out this pattern on the wall. That's called an interference pattern."
I crinkle my nose.
"So, you're saying if we run the experiment in literally exactly the same way twice in a row, the particle still won't always hit the wall at the same spot?"
Click click, Chloe snaps her fingers with both hands. "Bingo."
"Actually, the likelihood that it hits the same spot is zero!" Warren laughs. "Pretty weird, huh?"
"What if I go back in time and redo the same experiment?" The question is out before I can decide if it's a good idea.
"Right, that too. The result is random every time." Warren's face scrunches into a quizzical expression. "Well, actually, hold on. Maybe not, cuz it's not like anybody's been able to test that one. For all we know, the result could be predetermined."
I square that particular tidbit away in a corner of my brain. Something to test, maybe—if I ever find myself in a university physics lab.
"Oookay," I say slowly. "I maybe kinda sorta get the gist? Particles are waves until you mess with them enough to make them act like particles? Still don't see what this has to do with me, though. I mean, it's not like I can walk through walls or anything—because that would be too annoying for game balance, I mean."
"Yeah, no fucking way I'm letting you walk through walls, Caulfield," Chloe snorts. "Besides, this shit doesn't happen to people-sized objects, you goof. We're talking like, atoms and electrons here. Otherwise we'd all be walking through walls in real life."
"What's the point of telling me all this, then?"
"Chaos theory, baby!" Warren raises his arms over his head in a big ta-daa gesture. "This is the good part, I swear-"
"Is that Warren Graham? In Maxine Caulfield's fucking dorm room?!"
"Oh, you've got to be shitting me." Chloe's already on her feet glancing between the door and the window, hands balled into fists at her sides. "Another one of your admirers, Graham?"
For his part, Warren stays rooted to the spot, mouth agape.
"I got this, Chloe." I grab her arm. "Just… be chill."
Then my hand is on the door handle, and for what must be at least the twelfth time since I moved in, I silently grumble to myself about the lack of a peephole in these stupid dorm room doors. I slowly push it open to reveal Brooke Scott in the doorway, arms crossed in a Geordi La Forge T-shirt and baggy sweatpants.
"Hi, Brooke!" I say hesitantly. "Sorry, were we being too loud?" Great, that makes it sound like we were having sex.
Instead of responding, Brooke just pushes right past me. I take the chance to close the door as quietly as possible.
Back in the room, Warren's arms are still hanging in the air like he forgot where to put them. Chloe is leaning by the desk now, arms crossed and glowering out from under her beanie.
"Holy shit, Chloe Price?" Brooke asks incredulously. "Aren't you like, expelled or something?"
"Missed you too, Brooke," she replies lazily. "A girl can't visit her old stomping grounds for nostalgia's sake?"
"Uh, no, actually. You do know what expulsion means, right?"
"Eat my ass. What are you gonna do, call the police?"
"Ugh, guys, enough already!"
I wince a little at how loudly the words come out, but I lean into it and force my face into what hopefully passes for an intimidating expression. Miraculously, everyone shuts up.
"Just… Brooke, we were talking about some nerd shit to try to get our minds off the day, okay?" Then, more tentatively, "Wanna join us? We could use your input."
Chloe performs perhaps the most dramatic eye-roll in history, which Brooke pointedly ignores. Brooke's gaze finally settles on Warren, and she raises an eyebrow.
"Nerd shit, huh? Enlighten me."
"Yeah—yeah, sure." Warren finally drops his arms, rubbing the back of his head sheepishly. "Well, we were about to start on chaos theory."
"Mad Max here needed a crash course on time travel, so we started with some quantum physics and now we're moving onto the main course, apparently."
Chloe is now focused on flipping a dime between her knuckles. A smile tugs at the corner of my lips.
Captain Bluebeard lives on. Or is it Professor Price for good now?
"Quantum physics?" Brooke uncrosses her arms, stares at Chloe for another moment. She rolls her eyes. "C'mon guys, you don't need quantum physics for chaos theory."
The words are exasperated, but the sternness in her expression has turned to something more like amusement. Whew.
"Um, guys? Will someone please tell me what 'chaos theory' even means?" I make little air quotes for emphasis.
"Oh, that." Brooke bulldozes ahead immediately, leaving Warren with his mouth halfway open. "It's a fancy-sounding name for a simple concept. It's just the idea that some systems are super sensitive to initial conditions. Tiny differences at the beginning end up causing huge differences later. The weather, for example. Ever heard of the butterfly effect?"
"Something about butterflies causing-" tornadoes "hurricanes?"
"Yeah, eh, sort of—yo, Warren, can I borrow that laptop?" Brooke doesn't actually wait for a response before seating herself beside him, close enough to rub shoulders. "Scoot, I wanna find a video to show Max."
"Quantum physics is kind of chaos theory on crack though, right?" Chloe finally moves away from the desk and sits back down, coin still pinched between her fingers. "Like with classical chaos theory, at least you can set up the initial conditions to exactly what you want in principle. With quantum mechanics in the mix, you're shit just outta luck."
"That's like, the complete opposite of the point, but go off I guess," Brooke mutters.
Chloe turns to meet my eyes, then starts flipping her coin. Ping.
"Ever heard of Schrödinger's cat?" Ping.
"Um… a mean old scientist put a cat in a box?"
"Nobody actually did it," Warren mumbles, clearly a little off-balance from Brooke's sudden closeness. "It's a… what's that German word for it? Gedanken-experiment."
"Schrödinger didn't even want people to take it seriously," Brooke chimes in, her eyes fixed on the laptop screen. "It was supposed to seem absurd, actually. Like that was the whole point he came up with it."
"Yeah, well, absurd or not, it's pretty fuckin' wild to think about." Ping. Chloe's eyes are still on mine.
"The idea," she continues, "is you have this cat in a box with some Rube-Goldberg contraption that will make it super not-alive if some particle in the box ends up in a specific quantum state."
"Quantum what?"
"Er… imagine there's a double slit experiment inside the box with the cat. If the particle hits the top half of the wall, nothing happens, but if it hits the bottom half there's a detector wired to a stick of dynamite that will immediately turn the cat into extra-creamy cat-ketchup."
"Ew, Chloe!" I can feel a flush creeping back up my cheeks. This eye contact is getting kinda intense. "Poor kitty."
Chloe smirks, flips the coin again. Ping.
"What can I say? Physics is a cruel mistress." Ping. "Anyway, point is, if you did somehow manage to set up this crazy experiment without getting your eyes clawed out, the fate of the cat would be completely tied to the quantum weirdness of the particle. Boom, you just made a quantum cat, both dead and alive until you open the box to check. Heads or tails?"
"What?"
"Pick one. Heads, or tails?"
"Uh… tails?"
Ping. The coin shoots up, nearly grazing the ceiling. Chloe catches it out of mid air, cups it to the back of her hand, revealing it with a flourish.
"Tails." Chloe winks. "Lucky kitty."
I suddenly have a stupid idea. I raise my hand, focusing on the space in front of my fingertips until something gives.
Twist. Pull. Rewind. The coin flips backwards through the air and perches back on top of Chloe's knuckle. I let go.
Ping. "Tails. Lucky kitty."
Twist. Pull. Rewind.
Ping. "Tails. Lucky-"
Rewind.
Ping. "Tails-"
Rewind.
But this time Chloe hesitates, her brow furrowing for a split second as she holds my gaze.
Ping. Coin goes up, coin comes down-
"Heads."
I suck in a sharp breath through my teeth. Chloe lowers her voice to a conspiratorial tone.
"You open the lid of the box to find the remains of Whiskers painted over every wall in blood and ash. Roll a constitution save to stop yourself from puking up your lunch." She pauses and tilts her head to one side. "You uh, okay there Max? I didn't think you were that squeamish, jeez."
I open my mouth, then close it hard enough for my teeth to clack.
"D huh? Of course that's what this is about," Brooke groans, letting out a loud sigh. "Well, if you two are done with that silly gedankenexperiment, can we get on with what chaos theory is actually about?"
She turns Warren's laptop around so the screen is facing in my direction. It's playing an animation of a two-segmented contraption swinging left and right. The browser tab reads "3-double-pendulums."
"This is a double pendulum. Obviously." Brooke sounds bored. "It's the classic example of a chaotic system. If you set a few of them going at the same time with the same initial position and wait long enough, they'll each end up all doing their own thing eventually. No quantum physics needed."
On the screen, what initially seemed like just one double pendulum is now clearly three attached to the same pivot, each flipping around in its own spastic way. They remind me of those tube mascots flopping around outside car dealerships.
"Or, like I said before, the weather," Brooke continues. "It's why the forecast is crap past like, three days out. The atmosphere is about as chaotic of a system as it gets. The flap of a butterfly's wing can be the difference between clear skies and a hurricane if you wait long enough. Butterfly effect."
I see the butterfly from the bathroom again, iridescent wings catching the sun as it flaps lazily out the window. Would it have flapped its wings differently if I hadn't been there?
"Time is a chaotic system," I murmur to myself.
"Not the most precise statement, but yeah, you could say that, too." Brooke turns the laptop back towards her and Warren. "That's not really the point, though. Chaos theory isn't just about the chaos, it's about finding order in the chaos."
"Strange attractors," Chloe mutters under her breath. Brooke pauses for a second to stare at her like she's sprouted a second head.
"Right, strange attractors are part of it," Brooke says eventually. "Attractors are… I guess you can think of them as patterns that keep showing up in your system. Behaviours that the system gravitates toward over time, even if the initial conditions are very different. Think of dust falling into a black hole. Doesn't matter where the dust starts out, it always ends up in the same place eventually."
"So what's so strange about these attractors?" I ask cheekily. That earns me an eye roll.
"Strange attractors are just what we call attractors in a chaotic system." Brooke turns the laptop towards me a second time. My eyes widen when I see what's on the screen.
"This is the Lorentz attractor. Kind of the poster child for strange attractors, though the dynamical system it's a part of is pretty simple as these things go. Definitely not an actual weather model or anything."
Golden threads swirl over a black background, twisting back and forth in a messy figure-eight pattern. Two tornadoes, forming the wings of a butterfly. I push the laptop back towards Brooke, unable to stop a grimace from flashing across my face.
"Brooke, do you think these strange attractors could explain… visions? Like, from the future? Uh—you know, cuz that's something my character can do," I add hastily.
"Hitting all the clichés, are we?" Brooke deadpans. "Hm. Well, this could be interesting, actually. How does time travel work in your game? Spaceship? Time machine?"
"High fantasy setting, it's sorcerer magic," Chloe answers immediately.
"So it's literal magic, but you're looking for a scientific explanation?" Brooke snorts.
"Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic, right?" I pipe. "Arthur C. Clarke."
Brooke regards me for a moment.
"Alright, I see you, Caulfield. So this character of yours, she can travel back in time." She taps her chin. "According to Einstein's general relativity, time and space are both aspects of a four-dimensional surface called space-time. Usually, everything is forced to move forward in the time dimension, and that's what keeps the universe sane, but if you can go backwards in time then things can get really weird. Breaking causality, time loops, killing your own grandfather, all those classic sci-fi plot devices.
"As for visions from the future, there's two possibilities there. Either you're already trapped in a time loop and you're sort of looking up your own ass through the stream of time, or future events are somehow sending signals back in time that only you can perceive. Tachyons or some shit. But if that's the case, these can't be any ordinary events—or else you'd be losing your mind with constant visions of what you're having for breakfast tomorrow."
Suddenly, Brooke's eyes light up.
"Holy shit, I got it! What if the signal intensity of future events is somehow related to like, the number of timelines currently moving towards that event?"
She's fully gesturing with her hands now. I don't think I've ever seen her so animated.
"So stuff that would only affect you—like tomorrow's bowl of breakfast cereal—would have a super weak signal. Negligible. But if there was some sort of unavoidable catastrophe in the future, something that many, many timelines converge toward… the signal from something like that would be huge. A strange attractor in the flow of time! A prophecy, destined to happen no matter how hard you try to avoid it. I'm a fucking genius."
A wave of nausea roils in my stomach. I can feel the blood slowly draining from my face.
Brooke looks around the room triumphantly. Both Chloe and Warren are staring at her with their mouths hanging open.
"You better be writing all this shit down, Price, I'm practically DM'ing your game for you at this point," Brooke finally mutters, breaking the heavy silence. I catch her looking at me with a curious expression.
Please change the topic, please change the topic.
"Hey, what about the quantum multiverse?" Warren chimes. "That could fit into this too, right?"
Everyone slowly turns to face him.
"Did you make that up just now?" Chloe cocks an eyebrow.
"No, it's a real theory!" Warren turns to Brooke pleadingly. "Look up 'quantum many-worlds interpretation,' I swear it's legit."
"I know what it is," Brooke huffs. "I also know it's pop-science bullshit with no actual scientific merit—and so should you."
Chloe and I share a confused glance.
"Uh, guys?" I venture. Brooke just shakes her head.
"The quantum multiverse is Murphy's Law, Extreme Edition," Warren explains reverently. "According to the many-worlds interpretation, not only does everything that can go wrong happen, literally everything that can happen actually happens. Each time something can have multiple outcomes, reality splits into multiple universes, one for each outcome. Infinite timelines, infinite universes!"
"... of which we can only experience one." Brooke finishes. "Which makes it literally indistinguishable from the probabilistic interpretation. So how is this a useful theory, exactly?"
"It solves the Grandfather Paradox?" Warren replies meekly. "We're talking about time travel, remember?"
In that instant, I'm frozen by the prospect of the countless Max Caulfields I may have abandoned to increasingly terrible fates with each rewind. The nausea gets a bit harder to ignore.
"Infinite fucking universes?" Chloe groans. "Pfft, yeah, no way I'm DM'ing that shit."
She meets my eyes again briefly. I'm not sure just how much panic I'm projecting through them, but she changes the subject abruptly.
"Alright, enough with the chaos theory. Let's talk about how the actual going-back-in-time part works, yeah?"
"Finally." Brooke pushes her glasses up the bridge of her nose. She passes Warren's laptop back to him, but makes no move to give him back his personal space. "Can't have Max derailing the campaign with busted-ass spells, right?" She turns back to me, clasping her hands in front of her like she's giving a job interview. "Max, what's your character actually doing to travel back in time?"
"I… don't know?" The headline from one of the websites from last night's study session surfaces in my memory. "Maybe a wormhole?"
"That works, if you're willing to stretch the science a bit. Though a wormhole would take immense amounts of energy to create—like, several stars' worth. Probably super deadly. If you want to hand-wave that part, there's also the problem that a wormhole is just a portal between two places in space-time, so in theory you could bring other people with you. Might be a bit OP if your time travel spell also doubles as Dimension Door?"
"Wait, you can take other people back with you?" Chloe hisses excitedly. "Uh… in D , I mean."
"Don't think so, can barely manage a crowbar," I mutter, half to myself. I turn back to Brooke. "Got any other scientific explanations?"
Brooke glances between Chloe and me a few times before continuing.
"Well… if you're willing to stretch the science even more, there's this idea in particle physics that antimatter is kinda sorta the same thing as regular matter moving backwards in time. More of a mathematical quirk than anything, but hey, it's there." Brooke taps her chin again. "So you could explain the actual time-travelling part as the spell turning you into an antimatter version of yourself for the duration of the journey. Of course, that would break several fundamental conservation laws—but whatever, hand-waving."
"Wait, isn't the whole schtick with antimatter that it hella explodes?" Chloe asks, a little too loudly.
"Upon contact with regular matter, yes. E equals M C squared. But wait, this could work for game-balance purposes! You could say that the spell protects you from interacting with the world while you're in your antimatter form, but that also means you can't affect the world around you while you're time-travelling in the wrong direction. If you want to get really creative, you could even mix a little multiverse action in there."
"What do you mean?" I ask hesitantly.
"Okay, so imagine this. Every time you jump-"
"Rewind."
"Rewind, whatever. Every time you rewind, you actually do split the timeline. One of you goes back in time to however far back you want to travel for, creating a new timeline from that point. The other version stays behind for a split second before your antimatter body annihilates with all the regular matter around you and instantaneously releases enough energy to vaporize the entire half of the planet you were standing on. So, Warren gets his multiverse, but one of the timelines always gets deleted immediately in spectacular fashion."
Brooke looks uncharacteristically giddy at the idea.
"Okay, nope, not doing that," Chloe states, popping the P off her lips for emphasis. "Gonna stick with the one timeline, thank you very much. We'll just, uh, hand-wave it, like you said. For game balance. In D ."
She shoots me a pointed look. I swallow, trying to smooth out my facial muscles back into a configuration that isn't adjacent to "abject terror."
Another five seconds pass in silence.
"You know what, I think it's getting late," I finally say. "Thanks so much, guys. You've really… given me a lot to think about!"
Brooke and Warren stare at me for a few more seconds. Then Chloe pushes herself to her feet with a huff and starts waving towards the door with both arms.
"Alright, you heard the girl, go on, scram."
Warren makes a small noise of disappointment. In response, Brooke pushes his laptop closed with a snap, shoving it to his chest before hopping to her feet and dusting off the back of her sweatpants.
"Don't overstay your welcome, Price," she calls back as she opens the door.
"Wouldn't dream of it, Scott," Chloe deadpans.
Brooke pauses when she's halfway through the doorway, turning back to face me again.
"This was… kinda fun," she says, like she's surprised by the words coming out of her own mouth. "Thanks."
Then she's yanking Warren out of the room with a yelp, laptop in tow. I push the door closed behind them with all my body weight.
Slam. Breathe in. Breathe out.
"You know, if what she said about the antimatter thing is true, at least you get to glass Arcadia Bay over and over again." Chloe chuckles darkly. "Living my dream, Super Max."
"That is so not funny right now."
I turn back around and slump to the floor with my back to the door, staring up at the ceiling. I look back at Chloe to find her twirling her lighter in front of the window.
"How are you so… chill about all this?"
"Years of practice in not giving a shit." She absently sticks a cigarette between her lips. "You should try it sometime."
I narrow my eyes.
"Chloe Elizabeth Price, if you light that cigarette in my room I swear I will time-warp you straight out of existence."
Chloe raises an eyebrow in challenge, flips the lighter in the air a few times. I raise my hand, and she finally stuffs the cigarette back in her pocket, raising her hands theatrically.
"Alright, Mother Maxine, yeesh. Don't go wasting your superpowers on little old me."
I nod firmly, then promptly drag myself over to the bed and fall backwards onto the covers. Wumph.
The ceiling still looks like ceiling.
"Chloe?"
"Yeah, Max?"
"Why me?"
It's quiet for a while.
Wumph. A low sigh.
"I dunno."
I feel her weight shift through the mattress. I turn to find Chloe's sky-blue eyes inches from mine, glinting with something fierce and unreadable.
"But I do know this. You saved my fucking life. More than once. And you saved Kate Marsh up on that roof today."
Her fingers curl around my wrist, gentle but firm.
"You're a goddamn, bona-fide, real-life superhero, Max."
Butterfly. Snowfall. Eclipse. Tornado.
A strange attractor in the flow of time. A prophecy.
"I don't feel like a superhero." My voice is barely above a whisper now. I have to fight the urge to curl up into a ball. "Chloe… none of this even makes sense. This is beyond science. This is so fucked."
Kate stares at me through a curtain of rain. I feel a tear slowly escape the corner of my eye, rolling down until it's absorbed by the sheets.
"I never asked for any of this."
I feel Chloe's fingers thread slowly through mine.
"Guess we'll just have to play this by ear, then." She gives my hand a small squeeze. "Listen. This power, it wasn't just some cosmic mistake. You were given these powers for a reason. We'll get to the bottom of this, I know it."
It's hard to breathe. I close my eyes, focusing on the sensation of Chloe's thumb tracing slow lines up and down the back of my hand.
We stay like that for a while.
"Chloe?" I open my eyes again. My throat tightens. The words catch, but I force them out anyway. "I'm sorry."
I'm sorry about William. I'm sorry I wasn't there for you. I'm sorry I never wrote. I'm sorry I'm like this. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry…
Something shifts almost imperceptibly in Chloe's gaze. Then she's letting go of my hand, rising to her feet in one smooth motion.
"I should ditch before I actually get busted," she states flatly, striding across the room and pulling open the window.
"Chloe, wait." My voice hitches. I reach out instinctively, catching nothing but air.
"Keep that phone close, Detective Caulfield." Her tone is too cold for the words. "The night is young, and we still have a mystery to solve."
"But I'm so tired," I whine.
I roll onto my stomach, make a big show of it, flopping over and sprawling out my arms. Something to distract myself, to drown out the pit of guilt gnawing through my innards. It doesn't work.
"No rest for the wicked."
By the time I glance back up, Chloe's somehow already hanging out of the windowsill by her armpits. She shoots me a final wink, a hint of mischief back in her tone.
"That includes you, Long Max Silver."
I scramble off the bed, but she's already gone. I lean out of the window, listening to the soft sounds of boot-soles scraping down brick wall, watching a Chloe-shaped shadow disappear over the hedge below.
All at once, it's much too quiet.
The face of the alarm clock blinks out of the corner of my eye. 10:27 PM.
I slump into my desk with a sigh. I find the familiar cover of my journal and flip it open to the first new page, searching for comfort in the well-practiced motion. No words come. Unthinking, my hand moves on its own, tracing and circling until swirling black butterfly wings stare back from the page.
In that moment, it's the most hideous thing in the entire world.
Author notes:
This game seriously dropped both quantum physics and strange attractors in dialogue and proceeded to never fucking actually do anything with or even mention either of them ever again? Consider this my fix-it fic!
I tried my best to make this fit neatly between Episode 2 and 3, sans some extra text messages and an email that don't exist in the actual game for obvious reasons.
DISCLAIMER: this isn't me writing about quantum mechanics and chaos theory, this is me writing know-it-all teenagers having a late-night conversation about their idea of quantum mechanics and chaos theory, so any inaccuracies are entirely intentional and for the plot. Yep.
Ironically, the actual Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is one of the things I couldn't squeeze into the conversation. Still a fun title though. Oh, and about that thing Warren says about the result of the double-slit experiment potentially being predetermined: I tried really hard to shoehorn in a discussion about the EPR paradox and hidden-variable theories but yeah that wasn't happening. Shucks darn.