Extra Life (18 page)

Footsteps pounded in the hall. I got my bearings enough to sit upright before my surprise visitor arrived. It turned out to be Dad, out of breath, gripping both sides of my doorframe. He was home and safe and sound, not locked away in a city holding tank for breaking and entering. He was still wearing his morning bathrobe over the sweats.

I laughed aloud to see him here, pardoned of his crime because he never actually committed it. His presence in my doorway had to mean the whole day was reset, back to seven a.m.

Bobby Keene-Parker would soon be cruising around in his pristine Rapide.

Paige Davis would be
alive
.

Everything could be fixed or rigged never to happen in the first place.

“Um…” Dad said, and averted his eyes.

Because, you know, I was naked. I made a fast sleeping bag out of my comforter and then waved my hands at him, insisting, “no, no, no, I wasn’t…”

“No, no,” Dad parroted, urgently agreeing with whatever it was I was going to say. He pulled the door almost shut to give me privacy, then spoke through the crack. “Don’t be embarrassed, son. I was a teenage boy once—”

“Dad—no! It wasn’t that. Come in here.”

He eased back into the room, but it took him a couple tries to actually look at me. By then I’d pulled on a pair of shamefully old
Despicable Me
boxer shorts. All this awkwardness was Dad’s fault, actually. He was the one who invented a time-space transport that rejected all carry-on items, including clothes.

“I heard you screaming,” he explained. “Are you home sick today?”

“Sick? No. Maybe? But something is definitely wrong.”

“What happened to your eye?” Dad asked.

Before I could answer, the barrage of meaningless script on my Mac smash-cut to a video feed, even though I didn’t touch the computer. The speakers filled will the hissing white noise of an open mic, demanding our attention.

Once again, the talking head news anchor for today’s webcast was your host, Horace Vale. There he was on my monitor, without my distinctive black eye.

Video Russ leaned in and said, “Dad—Russ? God, I hope you get this recording. We tried to time it for right after your leap.” Static interference crackled through his voice. The video feed digitized and wobbled like a roving weather update from the worst stretch of a hurricane.

Dad crouched into the desk chair and slipped on his reading glasses.

“Hello?” he said to the screen.

“It’s not a Skype session, Dad,” I said. “It’s pre-recorded.”

“I can barely see it. Is that you on there?” Dad said.

Video Russ went on, “We’re transmitting this back, but we can only do it once, so—” Most of what he said next was garbled by ear-splitting static, laced with snippets of random music beats accidentally borrowed from some other frequency:

“…warning… pay attention… no matter what…” Not a great time for bad reception. I slapped the screen as if violence would solve something, but of course it didn’t. This was a transmission through time, not a jammed jukebox.

“Is this a school project of yours?” Dad asked.

I shushed him. This recording wasn’t the same Video Russ who spammed me the original pitch for the Pastime Project. At least, it didn’t seem to be the same video shoot. The first one used a steady camera and professional framing. This one was slapped together stat, totally amateurish. This Video Russ used the jittery selfie-cam method, the final victim’s desperate plea for rescue in a found footage horror flick.

“…someone else… not just you…” Video Russ went on. The image flipped to negative, went to black, stabilized, pixelated, froze. The static inhaled and exhaled. I couldn’t make any sense of it, except when Video Russ said, “
You have to stop the leaps.
” I caught that message with sky-blue clarity.

“Stop the leaps?” Dad asked.

“
Shhhh
!”

“…every time you leap… messing with the space-time fabric…
holes
… through the wormholes… glitches… someone else besides you…”

At that, the video cut off for good. Just a blinking cursor on a black screen, and then the random characters tumbling merrily along again. Dad leaned back in the chair, took off his glasses, scratched his scruffy cheek with an earpiece. He stared at the screen like he could actually read that gibberish—and who knows? Maybe he could.

“Did you catch much of that?” I asked him.

“Space-time fabric?” he asked. “Wormholes?”

“Exactly,” I said, squeezing between him and the computer to grab his full attention. His eyes drifted up to mine. “To be clear, you never told me about the time travel program you developed for Rush Fiberoptics, right? You never said squat about mini-black holes and algorithms and tiny tilt-a-whirls fueled by cosmic energy—”

“Negative energy,” Dad said. Even flabbergasted, he had to correct me.

“Whatever. The point is, as far as you know, you never breathed a word about your top-secret experiments to me because this shit was way too dangerous to leak into the world, right? Stuff you couldn’t even trust your teenage son with. Am I right?”

“But—then—how?” he asked.

“Because
we’ve had this conversation already
, Dad.”

His face went slack with the weight of understanding.

“Or we will, later today,” I said. “Listen, your theoretical time-travel device has been developed, and I used it. Twice. Just now. That’s why I showed up naked out of thin air, and why we just watched a video of me from the future.”

“Russ, hold on a second—”

“No time, Dad. I already had to waste time convincing you once before—or actually
later
—and we ran the clock down. So now you have to just listen. We’ve got twelve hours to figure this thing out. You heard the guy: I can’t use the program again. I’m screwing with reality here and making it worse every time.”

“Twelve hours?” Dad said.

“Half a day, seven a.m. to seven p.m.—that’s the span of the leap.”

“But, no, this can’t… there were so many insurmountable technical problems and inconsistencies at the prototype stage. Not just negative energy, but radioactive decay, safety concerns. I never really got this thing out of the brainstorming stage.”

“Here and now you didn’t. But something changes, eventually.”

“Yes…
yes
, I see,” he said. But then his face soured. “No.”

“What’s the matter?”

“A time machine couldn’t be used to change the past. The slightest change creates a paradox, because now the world is no longer the world in which the time machine was invented. Do you see? Paradoxes can’t happen. Schrödinger’s cat can’t be both dead and alive in the box, unless…”

I planted my hands on both sides of his face and brought our eyes just a few inches apart. “I don’t know about a cat, Dad, but
I’m here,
in my own past. This is the
third time
I’ve lived through this morning.”

“My God, Hugh Everett was right all along.”

“Who’s Hugh Everett?”

“That band you like, the Eels? They did the songs for that ogre thing—”

“
Shrek
soundtrack, and it’s
you
who likes the Eels, but what’s your point?”

“The main guy,” Dad said, “Mark Everett, well, his
father
was Hugh Everett the Third, a quantum physicist with honestly almost zero clout in the field because he developed the Many-Worlds Interpretation to solve the Schrödinger problem, and everyone thought he was a fool.

“Everett said the only way to avoid paradoxes is parallel universes, discrete from one another. Nearly infinite multiple realities branching off like grape clusters, each just slightly different from the other. What happens in one doesn’t affect the others. If it were possible to jump between them…”

Parallel worlds
. So that was it. I wasn’t warping back into my own time line after all.
That
was a logical impossibility. Instead, those patented Pastime Project wormholes were sucking me into the near past of
another universe
, one almost identical to mine, but still different.

There I was, proof of a concept that physicists would only take seriously in mathematical theory. Consider our known universe, Dad explained. You know, the one that’s still in mid-explosion after the Big Bang fourteen billion years ago? The one with three dimensions and particles of matter floating inside a vast shell of empty space? Well,
this
universe is only one of an infinite series of them, trillions upon trillions born and dying at every millisecond.

There is a new universe for every possible thing that could happen, an endlessly branching tree of options. So let’s say you erase a word you wrote down in your TV script:
boom
, a new universe where you
didn’t
erase the word. A guy in Moscow decides not to pick his nose:
boom
, a new, nose-picker universe. An alien protozoa-type-thing on Alpha Beta 516 decides to wriggle its cilia backward instead of forward—
boom
, new universe.

Consider a reality where Hitler won World War Two or the Cuban Missile Crisis ended in Nuclear Winter. Heck, in a zillion other variations, life on earth never even started, or, if it did, the dinos never died out.

All these possibilities were
absolute reality
somewhere.

Everything possible, happened, and was happening still.

In the reality I came from, a boy named Horace Vale went out for a walk downtown and disappeared forever. There would be search parties, milk carton photos. His parents would deplete their bank accounts looking for him, but they’d never get any closure, because
that
Horace Vale simply slipped through the cracks…

…and found himself deposited into a new universe not his own. Russ 2.0 wasn’t
me
me, but an alternate me, a living entity completely separate from me, the same as me, but not exactly…

“I’m an inter-dimensional alien invader,” I realized aloud. And another insight, another glitch, suddenly became glaringly obvious. I was sent back to my own bedroom at seven a.m., a point in time when my
original
self should’ve been fast asleep on his pillow. I should’ve materialized right on top of him, but he wasn’t here. Just me and my father.

“Where’s the other me?” I wondered aloud.

“Other you?” Dad knotted his eyebrows. Smart guy, but I was asking him to jump into a scenario that was already moving at approximately light speed. Confusing to anyone, even the guy who would set this crazy stuff in motion.

“When I go back in time,” I told him, “there are two of me. The me I
was
and the me I
am
. So where is the Was-Me me?”

Dad nodded, checked his watch. “I guess he’s at school,” he said.

“What’s he doing there this early?”

He shook his wrist, put the watch face against his ear. “Ticker on the fritz,” he said, “but in my office, just before I heard you scream, the clock on my computer said it was exactly one in the afternoon.”

The shock of misplaced time. It wasn’t seven a.m. It was one p.m. A six-hour leap instead of twelve. My time sliced clean in half.

And almost half an hour had already passed since I came through the wormhole. At this moment, Paige was out by the high school track being bullied by Asshat. Soon she’d be headed home, headed toward a death I refused to believe was self-inflicted. And here I was, wasting time across town, debating physics with my father.

T
HE LOSS
of six hours stumped my father. A few hasty recalculations gave him a fresh hypothesis involving half-life atomic energy decay. It seemed the device might only be able to recapture half its energy after every use. Twelve hours becomes six becomes three and so on. If I did it again, I’d leap to four o’clock, then five-thirty, or so he figured.

But I’d received my own stern warning (from myself)
not
to do it again.