The next morning, I woke up to find another message in my diary.
GRADUATE, STUPID!
Is this how my future self was going to communicate from now on? Sure, it was kind of nice to get some warning, but it seemed a little crude. At least it worked, and I guess it was a lot less of a shock than meeting my future self in person.
The more i thought about it, the more it made sense though. The watch and everything I could do with it occupied my thoughts almost all the time now, the same way a new video game could take over my life when I was 13. I could go anywhere, any time. Unlimited opportunities. It would be easy to just blow off the rest of school and go do whatever I wanted. I would never need money. Sure, I had only won $500 so far, but more would be easy to get.
But deep down I knew I would regret not taking this last week of high school seriously. Mom would kill me if I skipped graduation, and it was probably the last time I might see some of my friends. I was really looking forward to Penn State this fall, too. I had managed to get a partial athletic scholarship for track, as a fairly decent distance and cross country runner, and I wanted to experience the track team and all that went with it. Not that we needed the money, dad had made sure we had enough saved for college since as long as I could remember.
So my future self must know something about this, and was warning me to be careful. Did that mean this was changing my timeline? Did the future me make a big mistake, and this was a way to fix it? What would happen if I went back and tried to change my past now, would I still remember how things happened before?
I needed an expert, someone who knew a lot about time travel. I didn't have Neil Degrass Tyson's phone number, but I did have access to someone who might know a lot.
I texted my buddy Scott: Is your sister still a big Doctor Who fan? Scott and I had been friends since grade school, and were on the track team together. Most days we drove to school together too.
He replied almost immediately. Still waiting to marry David Tennant. Whats up?
That got a laugh from me. Scott's sister was two grades below us. We never talked much, but I remembered her obsessing about the show when I visited there.
Got her number?
Only if you promise you're not asking her out.
I sent back an eye roll emoji. He sent back her number. She agreed to meet me at lunch.
-----
We met in the cafeteria. I'd have preferred to meet somewhere outside of school, but she wouldn't be able to do that until she was a Junior, next year. Still, we were able to find a table away from most of the lunch noise.
"Whats up, Andy?" she asked. She looked a lot like Scott's mom, although much younger. Short, with a small frame, and should length blonde hair that she liked to dye odd colors. This week it was blueish green, which actually looked quite nice on her, accenting the light freckles across her nose.
"How much do you know about time travel?" I asked her, taking the seat opposite hers.
"A bit. What do you need to know? Are you becoming a fan?" her eyes lit up at the possibility.
"No, just doing some research for a project over the summer. Something for college." I hadn't told anyone about the watch yet, not even mom, and I thought it best not to reveal anything.
"They make you do homework before you're even there? Yuck." she said.
"Not really, its just a head start on some writing classes. I need to know how time travel works. Not the mechanics of it, but like what happens if you change history, or meet yourself in the past."
"Ohhhh...." her voice trailed off and I could see the thoughts forming, her finger twirling a blue-green strand of hair.
"Well, according to the Doctor... 'time isn't a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a nonlinear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey... stuff.'" She looked proud of herself, but I could barely follow that.
"I'm not sure what that means..." I interrupted.
She continued on as if she hadn't heard me. "Time isn't just one single set course, where everything has to happen one thing after another. The time stream continually adjusts and repairs itself, and we only see the part we are in now. If you change the past, its effects ripple through the time space continuum and get absorbed and reconnected."
"What happens if you meet an older or younger version of yourself?"
"Its bad. The Doctor bumps into older versions of himself all the time, but he's a special exception, and even then he never meets the same regeneration. But for everyone else, it should be avoided. You can mess up your own timeline, and change your history, even cause massive explosions. Ever hear of the grandfather paradox?"
"No."
"Its an old time travel problem. Lets say you travel back and kill your own grandfather before he met your grandmother. You would never be born. But if you were never born, you couldn't go back and kill him."
"Whoa. That sounds crazy. What would happen?"
"There's one theory that you would still exist, but the timeline would just absorb the changes. You'd be in a world where the family you remembered growing up with was erased, and no one would know you. And you can screw it up even more if you went back and tried to stop yourself from killing him, or convince your earlier self not to do it."
That all sounded way too confusing. "How about leaving messages for yourself, like sending your past self notes in the mail or something? Is that dangerous?"
She shook her head. "Nah, I don't think so. I mean, no more dangerous than any other way to change your own timeline. So do I get to read your paper?"
"Sure. I'll probably need more advice from you on it too." I said. "One more question... If you could go back in time and see anything, where would you go?"
"I don't know. I'd probably go back and see the great artists as they worked. Like Van Gogh and Monet."
"Oh, nice. I hadn't thought about that." I knew she was a pretty talented artist, but I didn't know she was that serious about it.
For the remainder of the lunch hour, she enlightened me as to her theories of where the show would go next season. I'll admit most of it was over my head, but she was so enthusiastic that it was fun to listen.
Where did this leave me? Sure, this was just speculation based on a TV show, but it helped me get an idea of how time might work. There was probably a lot more to it than I could ever think of. Meddling with the past sounded really dangerous, but my future self thought it was important enough to leave the message I found this morning. But when did my future self write that? And if I heeded the warning, would that particular future not happen, so my future self wouldn't need to write the message?
I decided to take the diary warning seriously, and promised myself I wouldn't use the watch too much until graduation was done. I had the whole summer coming up, I'd have plenty of time to explore then.
YOU ARE READING
Prime Mover
Science Fiction(Open Novella Contest Entry) On his 18th birthday, Andy gets a gift from his father, who he hasn't seen or heard from in years. It leads him on a journey to find his father, his future, and himself. "The point of the journey is not to arrive." - N...
