August 25
“All right, then,” Lisa says. “Let’s get this over with.”
We step out through the back door, which Katie opens for us, shivering. Lou hands me the empty coffee can as we go out, and the chilly air strikes me, I reach for the lighter in my pocket. “We won’t be long,” I say. Katie nods, and I smile.
“Well, where is it?” Lisa asks. I pull the notebook out of my satchel and show it to her. “Wait,” she says. “Let me check.”
“It’s the real deal,” I say, frowning. “I’m not like you. I keep my word.”
Lisa flips through the notebook, reading entries and glancing at the notes stuck in between the pages. She lifts the two black notes out of it and peers at them. “The ink is illegible on these,” she says.
“Yeah, that’s my fault,” I say, shrugging. “I put them in when the ink wasn’t quite dry. Maybe you could use a different kind of pen.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” she says, handing me the notebook. “Well, all right. Let’s get this done so I can get out of here.”
“You never asked me what I wanted,” I say.
“I thought you’d tell me first,” she says, frowning. “So, what do you want?”
August 24
“I’m not following,” Lisa says.
“You ever wonder why satellites don’t get retrieved once their effective life is over?” I say. “I got to thinking about that, too. If you stuck a manual or two in a satellite as it was being launched, once it was space junk, it would float in a decaying orbit for hundreds of years until it eventually came crashing down. Doesn’t have to be anything digital. In fact it’s best if it was handwritten. Paper, in a vacuum, doesn’t degrade or decay. Stick that in a heatproof, airless capsule in a few communications satellites, and you’ve got yourself a pretty future-proof bookshelf. That way, even if there was, say, a war or a few dozen natural disasters, human science– including time travel– could continue.”
“You’re speculating,” Lisa says.
“And you’re lying,” I reply. “There’s no way to overcome the forward-progress rule. There’s no way to set up a non-decaying time loop. And, most importantly, there’s absolutely no reason for me to destroy the notebook.”
“But you said…”
“I know what I said,” I say, “and I am going to burn it in front of your eyes. I promise. Wanna know why?”
“I’m dying to find out,” Lisa says.
“It’s to prove to you that it won’t solve anything,” I say. “I’m always going to be an Interloper, and I’m always going to do the right thing, no matter how many times I have to do this.”
August 23
“We all leverage our knowledge to our advantages,” Lisa says. “You’re the Interloper. You do the same thing.”
“Except,” I say, “I don’t have foreknowledge. All I know is what’s happened in the past.”
“Same with me,” she says.
“Except you have a hell of a lot more past than I do, or anyone else here,” I say. “And your ‘past’ is our future. How much of that future isn’t clear, but it doesn’t matter. Because, I know you’re lying.”
“What?” Lisa says, feigning shock. It’s so obvious it’s pathetic. “I’ve told you nothing but the truth, Frannie.”
“That’s right,” I say, “you’ve told me nothing. You say you’re from beyond Peter’s time, and that his theory of time travel is wrong. Except that, from a logical standpoint, if there’s already a way to travel through time, why would anyone bother researching it further? It’s like the wheel. Once it’s invented, there’s no reason to waste effort improving it. Time travel’s a scientific dead end. Once you can do it, the interesting bit becomes what using it does, not other ways to do it.”
“An interesting hypothesis,” Lisa says, “but what if there was a catastrophe that precluded the use of Peter’s method?”
“There isn’t,” I say. “When you can time travel, you can squirrel away knowledge in places that no catastrophe could ever reach. For example, say, a satellite.”
August 22
“Sure do,” he says. “Lookin’ to do some crafts?”
“Something like that,” I say, grinning. “When you get a moment.” He nods and walks towards the back of the cafe, as I sit down across from Lisa. My back’s to the door, inverting my usual position.
“You’re right on time,” Lisa says. “I hope I wasn’t too presumptuous in ordering for you.”
“No, no,” I say. “I really need this now. Didn’t sleep too well last night.”
“I hope it wasn’t on my account.”
“It was, actually,” I say, “but that’s the past. I think I’ve come to a decision.”
“Oh?” Lisa says, leaning forward. “Do tell.”
“I’ll burn the notebook,” I say. “I brought it, and I’ve asked Lou for a can to do it in. We can do this in the alley out back if you’d like.”
“That’d be just fine,” she says, starting to stand.
“Not so fast,” I say. “This doesn’t come without a price. You need to do something for me.”
“Oh?” she asks. “And why should I? Getting us out of the time loop should benefit us both. We can’t afford to be playing games with this, Fran.”
“It’s funny you mention games,” I say. “This all goes back to games. You’re a con artist, a scammer. You prey on people who can’t fight back, who don’t have the knowledge you do.”
August 21
“You’d think, and I thought that way for the longest time. But it doesn’t, ’cause you can’t undo something that’s already been done. You have the better armor, and you’re probably wearing it at that point, so preventing it from being there doesn’t matter, because you already have it,” she says. “I guess they just thought programming something like that would be too much trouble. But, in the end, it works out.”
“Kyle, that is the silliest hand-wave I have ever heard,” I say, half-believing it. Maybe this will work out after all. Whatever’s guiding us both just earned a little bit more respect in my book. “I can see why you’d think I’d hate that game.”
Wednesday, January 31, 2001
Lisa’s waiting for me at my table when I enter the Beanery, just around noon. Lou nods and hands me a cup of my usual as I pass by. “That woman there’s been expecting you,” he says. “Paid your tab, too. Enjoy it.”
“I will,” I say. “How long has she been there?”
“All morning,” he says. “She said you’d be coming in around now. I didn’t believe her, but hey, everyone gets lucky sooner or later, right?”
“Sometimes we have to make our own luck,” I say. “Oh, one last thing, you got an empty coffee can I can use? Metal?”
August 20
The thing is, though, as much as I want to think that something is guiding Kyle to help me, with or without her knowledge, I’m more inclined to believe that this is Kyle’s own doing. That nothing’s guiding her, and she just wants to help. She doesn’t know that she’s helping me, but she is. It’s weird. Maybe whatever’s guiding her is guiding me, too. Something working to make us both think in tandem, giving me focus and clarity. If that’s the case, would you ease up on the whole lovey-dovey thing? I’m not that kind of girl, and now isn’t the time.
“Wait,” I say, interrupting her. “Go back a second. What was that?”
“What, the Red Plate?” she says. “It’s pretty weird, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, go over that again,” I ask. “I kinda spaced for a second.”
“It’s confusing until you think about it,” Kyle says. “Okay, so matter can’t be created or destroyed, right? So when you go into the future and open the box, you get a better piece of armor. But then, you can go into the past and open that same box for the lesser piece of armor that would eventually become the better one.”
“That makes no sense,” I say. “I mean, you lose the better one, don’t you?”
August 19
“I don’t remember that game,” I say. “What was it about?”
“Oh, you’d hate it,” Kyle says. “I mean, it’s slow, single-player…”
“Come on, humor me,” I say, nudging her. “I liked that firework one.”
“Well, it’s about time travel,” she says. “It’s the one that came before that one I got last summer. This kid named…”
I zone out for a moment as she starts rattling off a plot that, to anyone else, would sound cliché. To me, however, it sounds like an answer. It sounds like the most wonderful thing in the world. Even if Kyle thought I’d hate it, and I probably would hate playing it, just listening to her talk about it, and how she gets so into it, I could listen forever. I don’t want her to go.
Part of me wonders why so many things keep coming together like this, just so perfectly. I get to thinking about what Lisa said, about how causality is broken, and how something seems to be guiding it now. It’s possible, even likely, that something could have spurred Kyle to mention that particular game, that particular plot, at this moment in time, in order to get me thinking about a solution. But if that’s the case, then what influenced her? I have no idea, and thinking about it is liable to give me a splitting headache.