August 18
“I know,” I say. “It’s… well, it’s weird. Ever since you told me about the New York thing I’ve had this feeling of deja vu. Like we’ve talked about it hundreds of times before, and it’s…”
“I don’t know what’s come over you,” she says. “You don’t think it’s like, some weird past-life thing, do you?”
“It could be,” I shrug. At this point I’ll take any explanation. “But maybe… I don’t know. You think maybe you’ve gone to New York before?”
“Nope,” Kyle says immediately. “I never went there. Wanted to, but didn’t get to go for that school trip.”
“You never told me that before,” I said.
“Sophomore year, I was asked to come along with the glee club to a regional finals thing in New York City,” she says. “I was supposed to go and help with the lighting and sound board. It was kinda lame, but hey, free trip, right?”
“So what happened?”
“I caught the chicken pox,” she says. “Naturally, it had to happen two days before the trip, when I was in church. I passed out. First and only time in my life.”
“Most girls call it fainting,” I say. She grins. “So you didn’t get to go?”
“I was out of school for three weeks,” she says. “Worst possible time for it, too, except that it had happened just after the first of the year, and I had plenty of time to go through some games. Finished Chrono Trigger, like, seven times that month.” That’s Kyle for you. She found a way to make the best of a bad situation.
August 17
“One last thing,” I say. “Lisa’s not your real name, is it? Who are you, really?”
“A lady has to keep some secrets, Fran Minervudottir,” Lisa says. “Even among friends, some things are best left unsaid. See you tomorrow, kiddo.”
It’s evening when Kyle comes into the apartment to find me hugging my knees on the couch. “You’re that cold?” she asks, dropping her backpack. “I mean, you can turn up the thermostat if…”
“I’m not cold,” I say, lying. “Just… have a lot to think about.”
“This is that thing you couldn’t tell me before,” she says. Damn, but that girl knows how to read minds, or something. “Can you tell me now?”
I look her in the eye. She’s serious. She really wants to know. And if I tell her it could come out worse than if I did nothing. I don’t know why, but a huge wave of deja vu comes over me. “We’ve done this before,” I say.
“Yeah, when you were going out with Stephen–”
“No, no,” I say. “This conversation. We’ve had it before, I know we have,” I say.
Kyle opens her mouth to speak, but pauses. “You’re right,” she says, thoughtfully. “Though I don’t know what it was about. Damn. This is weird.”
August 16
Even though, I wonder what would happen if the notebook was destroyed. Everything I did would be undone. Hundreds of people stuck in time; things going wrong when they should have gone right; things going right when they should have failed horribly or fatally… in short, it feels like I’m the only thing standing between the world and abject chaos. And what Peter said about the coming year bringing something big weighs on my mind, too. Even if he’s not coming from as omniscient a point as I thought, or as he thought, he’s got no reason to lie to me about that.
Of course, for all I know, this could be the big thing.
“How long do I have to decide?” I ask. “I mean, when does the loop reset?”
“You have a few months yet,” Lisa says, off-handedly. “Though if I had my preference, I’d like to be out of here before spring. I hate spring. Too muddy and messy.”
“I’ll sleep on it. Come back tomorrow at lunch,” I say. “And you’re paying this time.”
“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” she says. “It’s only fair. If you can give me my life back… well, let’s just say that I know you’ll make the right decision this time, Frannie.”
August 15
“And I suppose after that, you’ll be out of the time loop, and I’ll be stuck in it,” I say.
“No no,” she says, putting her hands up. “Once I’m out of the loop, it’ll collapse, and you’ll be free to go. I may have some other offers for you later on in life, but you’ll be free to take those or leave them as you see fit. The loop is the only one where we’re stuck with each other.”
“So what do you want?” I ask.
“It’s very simple, and it’s very minor,” Lisa says. “Almost trivial, really. It’s just… it’s going to take a lot of faith on your part.”
“What do you mean?”
“I want you to burn the notebook you’re using to communicate with the Order,” Lisa says. “Destroy it and the loop collapses. We’ll both be let go, and everything will flow as it should.”
She has got to be kidding. The notebook is the only thing keeping me from being helpless as an Interloper. Without the ability to make notes to the future, to set things right, I’m just an ordinary girl.
But would it really be so bad? I mean, I could get on with my life. I could probably go find a guy, maybe get married, have kids– I could screw the destiny that says I die alone and childless. I could leave a legacy on the universe, a real one. I could stop ditching class, I could get caught up on my reading… Lisa is giving me the choice that Peter never did. There’s literally no reason for me to not take this.
August 14
“That’s ridiculous,” I say. “How would the universe know to–”
“Causality is broken, kiddo,” she interrupts. “Things happen before they need to happen, because they need to happen after they happen. Where God had set the universe in motion and let it flow, we humans stepped in and said, ‘Nope, you can’t be hands-off’.”
I swallow hard. “You’re saying that you’ve proven God exists?”
“Not necessarily,” Lisa shrugs. “But something has to be guiding the way causality is being broken now that the natural law of cause and effect no longer applies. It could be God, it could be some time-travelers far beyond my future, it could be nothing more than some other natural laws we don’t yet understand. All I can say is that, for my part, I believe it’s God.”
“And why would you think that?” I say. “You don’t seem the religious type.”
“Well, where I was born, you had two choices: believe in God or be burned as a witch,” Lisa says, grimacing. “We’re getting off-topic. The point is, you can’t trust anything that Peter says, and that puts you in quite the fix.”
“And I can trust you implicitly?” I scoff.
“Absolutely not,” Lisa says, “but I can at least give you a better deal than the Order can. All you need to do is one little thing for me.”
August 13
Peter told me that this was due to the anthingy paradigm causing havoc with the time machines’ alignment systems. I have no idea why– it’s a machine, it shouldn’t care about what its user thinks. “The forward-progress rule is absolute,” I say. “You can’t have time travel without it.”
“Peter can’t have time travel without it,” Lisa says. “His era’s time travel theory relies on the anthrotemporal paradigm principle. Where I’m from– well, where I time travelled from, at any rate– there’s no such restriction. We have time machines that can travel through absolute time.”
“I don’t get it,” I say. “There’s different kinds of time travel?”
“Yes,” Lisa says. “The Order’s theory of time travel is dependent on nanomachines guiding the device, and as a result the machine can only travel backwards along the traveller’s frame of reference. However, a few thousand years after the Order is dead and gone, a new, non-anthropomorphized theory of travel is developed, and history becomes as malleable as clay.”
“Wait a minute,” I say. “Isn’t that fantastically dangerous? I mean, what if you erase your theory of time travel from existence? Or accidentally kill off mankind before it reaches the point when your theory is developed?”
“Been there, done that,” Lisa says, off-handedly. “Point of fact, that’s why Interlopers exist. You’re an immune system for the timestream. A white blood cell.”
August 12
“So uncomplex it for me,” I say.
“I’ll try,” she replies evenly. “What we’re stuck in is an omniuniversal rewind action. Basically, time has been reset to a point where things could possibly go differently, only they aren’t for some reason.”
“Wait, time has been ‘reset’?” I ask. “That sounds like a tremendous load of bullshit. Time can’t be reset. It only flows, if what Peter told me is right.”
“Well, think about that statement,” she says, smirking. “What if Peter’s wrong?”
“He can’t be,” I say, starting to wonder if that’s strictly true. “I mean, he’s from the far future. They’ve studied time that far forward. They know how travel works and how it can go wrong. They have to know.”
“The thing is, Peter? He’s not from as far forward as he thinks he is,” Lisa says, now outright grinning. “Remember the forward-progress rule?”
I shudder. If that rule is wrong, it means that there’s a lot wrong with Peter’s theory of time travel. Most of the theory that the Order of Elegius runs on relies on the fact that time travel forward can only take someone as far as they were able to go naturally. For example, I couldn’t go past this exact moment in time, because that’s the furthest point I’ve reached unassisted. All other attempts to go beyond it would dump me back right here, where “here” is the moment I left.