—The Unexpected—

2031 AD

A decorative hardened-clay magnolia blossom, with the number 82 artfully worked into it, surrounded the door bell. Jessica pressed the yellow button and waited.

The exterior of the house was painted in an obnoxiously happy pink hue. The small garden surrounding the path from the fence to the door lay in a desolate state of disregard. Jessica checked the small piece of paper in her hand once more and then, shrugging her shoulders, crumpled it and replaced it into the hip pocket of her jeans.

“Who is it?” demanded a voice with a thick Russian accent through the door.

“Sergei Vasiliyevich Avdeyev?”

“Dat is highly unlikely.”

“No, I mean, are you Sergei Vasiliyevich Avdeyev?”

After a moment's silence, the door was opened in an unsteady movement. It gave way to a most peculiar sight: a man in his late seventies, his white hair a riot of tangles. His eyes were covered by ancient welding goggles, his forearms by yellow rubber gloves. The rubber gloves, in turn, were covered by fluids the nature of which Jessica dared not guess.

“How didchoo fine dis address?”

“I…”

Jessica stared at the heavy leather apron the man was wearing.

“Did I catch you in the middle of something?”

“Hyus.”

“Something dangerous?”

“Hyus. I'm cookeeng. Kome in.”

Jessica stepped inside. The interior decoration was the equivalent in style of the colour the house was painted in. There was a coat-hang shaped like Pinocchio, a mirror framed by a parade of twenty-three of the hundred and one dalmatians, and a wooden sign over the frame of the door leading from the small entrance room to the living room read:

“An' Ye Harm None, Do What Ye Will.”

“Furrgive de… de bullshit”, said the old Russian man, gesticulating wildly at the sickeningly cute interior decoration of the room around them. “I hhaven't hat de time to redecyorate.”

The old man looked around uncomfortably for a moment and then said, “See down. I need to mine de expeeriment.”

Jessica sat down on a couch still covered by the transparent plastic shroud of furniture.

“Professor Avdeyev, I need your help”, she finally said loudly to the man who had returned to the kitchen.

“Hhelp? From me? I ken't even mayk my own fries, hhow ken I hhelp you?” Something heavy fell and broke in the kitchen. “Blya!”

“Professor, I know of your temporal loop, and I need to use it.”

The sounds from the kitchen stopped completely. After a moment that seemed a lot longer than a moment, the old man stepped into the living room again.

“I don't know who told you vhat, girl, but if you think I hayv a time-machine in my kellar…”

“No you don't. Not yet. You're waiting for it to come back. I'm pretty sure you've figured out by now exactly when it will reopen, and for how long.”

“Who told you dat?” he said, very quietly now.

“Your wife.”

“My vife died 10 years ago.” No visible reaction on the Professor's face.

“I know. She said to make you get a new haircut.”

* * *

2005 AD

“Christie. Her name was Christie. God, why do you care? She’s in the past.”

Two women sitting around a table in a dimly-lit Irish pub. Deep, comfortable armchairs, distant vaguely Irish music. Two beers on the table.

“Because the past never stays in the past, Amber. I’ve seen it before, so many times…”

She had not. The woman who had said that last line had short, black hair, gelled and styled carefully to look unstyled and rebellious; she smelled of an antiperspirant if you got close enough. No-one ever got close enough. She had calmly decided that a perfume would be too womanly. Her name was Brooke, and Brooke had run away from home at 18.

Her parents were absolutely intolerable. They had raised her in an anti-authoritarian manner, allowing her everything; they even supported her rebellion. She decided to rebel ultimately by becoming a failure. She wanted to end up on the street, doing god-knows-what for money, having the wrong friends, maybe contract a disease with a cool name.

Six months later, she lived in a cosy two room apartment with her own kitchen and bathroom, the rent paid in part by the company where she now worked as a trainee. She had failed at failing.

For two years, she continued in her new-found extremely normal life, until the old rebellion reared its head inside of her. Coldly calculating, she decided to become a lesbian. She was certain, she told her friends, that her mother would tear her hair out, would she ever find out. Matter of fact, she made sure her mother would never find out, because she knew very well that her mother would be 'proud' and compliment her on her 'courage'.

She had met Amber in this pub a few weeks ago. Amber was sweet, sensitive, malleable. Amber had only had one relationship before; Brooke decided she needed a larger portfolio to justify her domination in what should be her first relationship; a dominating lesbian was more offensive than a submissive one. Thus she told Amber at length about all the other women she had been with. Now Amber had made the mistake of doing so herself.

Amber raised her beer to her lips, trying to sigh and drink at the same time, and finally settled for drinking only.

“Just don't bring her up again”, Brooke finished the discussion.

And one should think that it would be simple for Amber not to bring Christie up anymore. Only that it was a pity, after she had made up every detail of the relationship carefully.

Three weeks later, Amber and Brooke were about to have sex for the first time. Amber had been obsessing about the fact that this was her first relationship, and with such an experienced girl too! She was certain Brooke would suddenly realize how little experience Amber had when they would be in bed together; she would call Amber's lie about Christie. She decided to mistakenly call Brooke by Christie's name, to lend additional strength to the lie. That had not been a good decision: Brooke decided that a dominating lesbian would have to be very pissed off by such a slip of the tongue, and twenty minutes later, they stood in the middle of the street and the pouring rain, discussing passionately whether or not their relationship had a future.

“Brooke, please! There never was…”

A car suddenly appeared and only barely managed to avoid them.

“Jesus!” said Jacob.

“Yeah, that was close”, Paul agreed.

Jacob was visibly shaken; he had lost his train of thought. Something highly unlikely happened in the decision-taking process in his brain.

“Well?” asked Paul.

Every answer had been possible. Every answer is always possible. But the chance of Jacob giving this answer...

“Yeah”, said Jacob.

The chance of this answer had been too small to even call it improbable. Paul, too, should have been surprised to hear the answer he had been hoping for, but he had other things on his mind.

Paul took another drag from his cigarette. “Yeah”, he said.

They drove past an office building. The car's headlights illuminated the whole front of the building, including a potted plant behind a fifth floor window, but the leaves were almost impossible to be seen from inside of the car.

“I'll drop you off; call me and tell me how it went.”

* * *

“There is a good chance your child might be born healthy.”

“Doctor, I work in HIV related research. I know that chance. And I could recite you the list of the ten most frequent ways in which a child is infected by his parents. You know, that isn't even the tough bit. Here's the punchline: how do you bring a child into this world knowing its mother is most probably not going to see its 10th birthday?” This was what Miriam's mouth said, but her face said 'Convince me to have it! Change my mind!'

Paul said nothing. He looked at his hands in his lap.

“Very well then. In this case, I think an abortion is fully justified. I am… I am very sorry.”

“No greeting cards for unborn children.” Paul's lips silently formed these words as he kept staring at his hands.

“Sorry, did you say something?”

“I said I'm sorry too.”

* * *

Two plastic dispensers, one for soap, one for disinfectant. A doctor washes his hands, two nurses prepare something that looks like a sterile vacuum cleaner. Doors open as the doctor's elbow presses a button in the wall. Miriam sits in an uncomfortable metal chair, crying. Her body is numb from the neck down. At home, Jacob changes the entry 'Paul and Miriam Arlington' into two separate entries: “Paul Arlington” and “Miriam Smith”.

* * *

2006 AD

The face of Miriam. Wrinkles sketched a mask of determination on the canvas of a controlled expression.

“If I stood in front of any other crowd, I would feel the need to justify myself.”

The rows and seats in the lecture hall filled by researchers, doctors, professors, friends and colleagues, Miriam’s family.

“There’s only been one person who questioned my judgement: myself.”

Someone raised a fist in front of their mouth and coughed.

“It was not easy. You all know that. The reason why I have asked you here, though, is not to discuss that decision. Those who have worked with me for a while know that I have always considered this not a profession, but a calling. It has always been a matter of passion for me to fight the enemy we are fighting. Now it’s personal.

“People say that when you know your days are numbered, every moment becomes more precious, more valuable. People say that you can only really value life when you know that yours might be over very soon. Well, I can’t agree with that. All that I have felt is panic, silent, suffocating, overpowering panic. I don’t stop to smell the flowers.”

Miriam hesitated; then she turned around and walked out of the silent lecture hall.

* * *

2009 AD

“Hey, young lady, you shouldn't play in there. It's freshly painted.”

“I'm not playing.”

“Well, whatever it is you're doing, you shouldn't do it around the hut for the next couple of days.”

“I like the smell.”

“Yeah, but you see, the smell is dangerous for you. It can hurt you.”

“Okay. I still like it.”

* * *

2015 AD

Benny was fat. That was the way the rest of his family put it. He himself claimed that he was just a little overweight, and really, who in his family was not? Still, they singled him out. He raised his eyes and looked through the fence.

“No, I'm still holding.”

A member of that strange species that both fed him and came to stare at him stood beyond the fence at that moment. Strangely this specimen was neither feeding him nor staring at him. Her whole attention was taken up by a strange little thing she pressed to her head. Another member of the species, a male probably, stood next to the distracted female, and at least this male was staring at Benny. Benny could handle human staring, because that was what that species was called. Benny looked to his side and saw his half-brother Sid. Sid sided with him when Benny's obesity was discussed among the other elephants.

“To me, all elephants look the same”, the human male now said to no-one in particular.

Suddenly the female starting speaking, her eyes still fixed on the badly paved floor in front of her. Benny knew that the floor was badly paved because the human who would bring him food would complain about it every day.

“No, mice won't do, Jesus! We're not testing cosmetics here. Get us some monkeys! We must have monkeys.”

So apparently the thing in her hand was called Jesus. Benny did not like her talking about mice; Benny was terribly afraid of mice. Sid told him, sometimes, in jest, not to be such a stereotype. Benny said it was not his fault. That was when Benny started drinking. It turned out this was not such a clever idea either: seeing mice in delirium tremens is twice as bad when you are an elephant terrified of mice.

“Monkeys, Jack!” The female lowered the plastic thing. She stood next to the male and looked at Benny.

“Beautiful, aren't they?” she asked.

“I dunno, they look fat”, answered the male.

“Alright, you didn't ask me here to discuss elephants. What's up?”

“It's been ten years. Don't you think you could…”

“You're wondering if I could forgive you? Maybe. Probably. If I tried. But one thing, Paul, I will never be able to do again: I won't ever trust you again.”

“What's the point of this?”

“What do you mean? Why are we here, where do we go, ketchup or mayonnaise, that kind of philosophical question?”

“No, I mean, this.” Paul pointed at Benny. “Why do they keep them here? It's not like they do tricks, like the monkeys; they're not cute either. They're just slow and fat. Why are we supposed to look at them and feel entertained or educated?”

Benny felt a surge of depression approaching.

“You wanted to meet with me to discuss elephants?”

“No, of course not. I want you back. I want to get back into your life. I know you don't want me back, so I'll make this easy on you; let's pretend we've had twenty minutes worth of heated discussion, scaring away the most useless inhabitants of this zoo with our raised voices. Let's also pretend we parted and went our separate ways again, like every year.”


“Alright. Let's.” With this, the female walked away. Benny stepped on an imaginary white mouse.

* * *

2020 AD

Miguel Cartier, last survivor of a family that emigrated from Casablanca twenty-two years prior, sat on a cheap plastic chair, holding a worn-out copy of the Torah. On the wall facing him hung a painting, depicting an angel announcing to the Virgin Mary that she shall bear God's child. Miguel thought that Mary looked rather unimpressed considering the magnitude of the message. Maybe, he thought, she already suspected the rip-off. That Jesus would just be another prophet. Giving birth to the son of God—something like that does not happen to you, Miguel continued in his thoughts, it was too good to be true. He noticed the little plaque saying 'On loan from the Uffizi Firenze' had fallen down and went to pick it up. Next to the plaque, on the floor, lay a pine cone. He wondered for a moment how it would have gotten there, then picked it up and walked back to his chair. Instead of throwing the cone into the trash bin next to his chair, he studied it. The pattern seemed to reach out to him, as if it was trying to tell him something. He raised his eyes and looked at the painting again. Back at the cone.

Finally, he shrugged and threw the cone away.

* * *

2021 AD

Paul shuffled the papers around in his hands. He straightened up in his chair and cleared his throat. Next to the camera pointed at him stood a young trainee. The trainee said:

“Five, four, three…”

2, 1…

Paul read the news. It had become a reflex to him; he hardly saw the words. He knew he had to concentrate: there were always too many things on his mind, and most of them wore Miriam's face; he could not allow them to infiltrate the texts he was reading.

“… around Professor Miriam Smith claims that in nine out of ten infected monkeys…”

For an instant, sweat beads spread on Paul's forehead. He read on. His eyes jumped back to the offending line for a second to make sure that, indeed, it was her name there.

He finished reading the news, urging himself not to hurry.

“… for the weather, and stay tuned for the drawing of this week's lottery numbers.” The red light next to the camera went out and Paul got up. He hastened across the room, to his jacket, and produced a cellphone. He called the number of his doctor, but found it occupied.  

In the course of the next months, Paul would find out that his ex-wife had indeed helped bring about a cure. Instead of making his outlook on life lighter, the absence of the disease, the hole in Paul's mental sky where once had hung the sword of an impending doom, made everything harder: Paul felt like the child who had spilt red wine on the carpet and who had then watched his mother clean the carpet in painstaking work. When she was done, the carpet was cleaner than before, but that only served to make the child feel worse.

In August 2030, Paul closed his eyes momentarily while crossing a busy intersection. A sudden panic-attack prompted him to open them again; and sweating, panting, trembling, he found that nothing had happened at all.

* * *

Probably 2030 AD

The world where we dream is only loosely connected to that which we inhabit when we are not asleep. Some people claim that dreams can show us a glimpse of the future; others say they met people long dead while asleep in bed, and that those told them things the dreamer could never have known.

Dreams neither show us glimpses of the future nor do they open a window into the past. They are simply not quite certain where in time we are supposed to be.

Jessica Simmons dreamed of her high school. She was back, she knew it, because she was not doing well enough where she had been before. She was asking one of her former classmates what her next class was. They were going to a different class, and they laughed at her for not knowing that. Then she was looking for a bathroom, because she had noticed she could not spit anymore, and she desperately needed her spit for something.

She entered the bathroom.

That was when she met Patrick Arlington.

He simply sat on a white wash basin and looked at her.

“Hello Jessica”, he said.

“This is a dream”, said Jessica, suddenly realizing that it was.

“Yes, it is. I'm your dream-boy, if you want”, said Patrick, smiling his most handsome smile.

“Wow. This feels awesome. I can do anything. I'm in my own dream. I have never felt this before!” Jessica touched the tips of her fingers against the palm of her other hand.

“It's called lucid dreaming. Normally it only happens to people who have prepared their mind for it through meditation and waking-world thought experiments.”

“I can fly and make small mushrooms grow on the mirrors”, Jessica observed.

“Yes you can, but you should—”

Jessica woke up to the feeling of her hand impacting on the bedside alarm.

10:13am.

Jessica disliked setting the alarm for round times.

She got up and walked into the bathroom. She looked at her face in the mirror, hair messed up by a tumultuous night, eyes still in bedroom mode, when suddenly she remembered her dream.

“Wow, mushrooms on the mirror”, she mumbled to herself. Half an hour later, she had forgotten the dream again.

Later that day, Jessica was sitting on the bench of a bus stop. Behind her, the semitransparent plastic wall displayed a newspaper article about a dog who had crossed four hundred kilometres to follow its family into their holidays. The dog's name was Juan.

Jessica made a pencil drawing of the cemetery gates into her notebook. The gate was half-opened, and she enjoyed drawing it like that. It made it a little bit more special. Also, if ever she was to become famous, she thought, she could surely make up a lot of symbolism and metaphors around that half-opened gate. She smiled.

Then her smile died.

Something was not right, something was missing. She looked at the gate, then at her drawing again. Frustrated, she flipped over the page and started a new drawing. She allowed herself to draw automatically, not thinking about what she was doing. Her pencil produced a boy in a peculiar pose, his hands holding a single flower. She flipped back to the previous page and frowned. Her pencil touched a corner of the paper, causing a context menu to pop up on the digital paper. She selected the canvas options in the background menu and reduced the opacity to 30%.

The drawings aligned perfectly, and the strange pose turned out to be the boy holding the gate as he passed through.

She felt a soft shiver run down her arms.

That night she had another dream. She was sitting in a Japanese tea house, and her high-school friends were discussing their plans for summer, when suddenly they asked her what she was planning to do in the light of her boyfriend's going home to Japan for summer holidays. And at that point, there was no one in the tea house anymore, and the tea house was suddenly a bedroom, still somehow Japanese, and he was sitting on the bed. He was her Japanese boyfriend, and he looked nothing like Patrick, but he was also Patrick.

“Hi Jessica”, he said.

“Why did you sneak into my drawing, yesterday?”

“Because I was supposed to be there.”

“In the drawing?”

“No, at the cemetery. At the bus stop. We should have met.”

“Why couldn't you make it?”

“Traffic accident.”

She laughed. She knew, instinctively, the way you know things in dreams, that he had made a joke.

“Am I really aware of my dream, can I really do what I want to do, or am I only dreaming that this is the case?” asked Jessica.

“What difference would it make if I told you how it was?”

“I don't know. None, probably. You're right.”

“Let me tell you a little bit about myself, Jessica. Jessica. I like that name.”

* * *

2031 AD

Jessica walked through the first snow of January. A frown sat on her forehead. She walked past an ice cream parlour. For a moment she considered getting herself an ice cream, but then thought of last evening, when she had stood in her underwear in front of her bedroom's mirror.

She stepped into the psychologist's practice.

A few minutes later, she was sitting in a comfortable armchair.

“No, they haven't stopped. Every night.”

“And it's always the same dream?”

“No, I've told you, every dream is different; but in every dream, I'm lucid… and there's him, in every dream.”

“Didn't you say it's a different boy every night?”

“Yes, and no.”

Jessica sighed. She wondered, briefly, if there was any therapeutic value in her doctor asking her the same questions again and again. Then she continued to give the same explanation she had given a dozen times before.

“He looks different every time; sometimes, in those dreams where I can actually hear things, he has a voice; that voice is different every time as well. But I always know it's him. I always know it's the same boy.”

“And is he still telling you the same thing?”

“The story changes, too. Every time he tells me a different story. But just like with his looks, and his voice, I know it's just different words; at the core, it's still the same story. It's a story about how happy we were, how good things were, once. Only that it's not really once, it's not really another time at all. It's now, and here, and we are happy, somehow, and at the same time it's not happening. I don't know how to explain this—it all makes sense in my dream.”

“I'm certain it does. Does he ever look like… like someone real? Like someone you once knew?”

“No… no, I can't say he ever does.”

“Are you happy, Jessica?”

“What kind of a question is that? Do you think if I was happy, I'd be sitting here? What do you think, that I'm making these dreams up, that I'm only asking for attention?”

“Are you?”

“Oh goddamnit, screw this.”

Jessica left.

* * *

“Jessica, we were cheated out of our love.”

That night, he was an apple she had found, fallen from a tree. She was going somewhere, hiding from someone or something, when she came past that tree. It was a beautiful tree, tall, wide, strong. Part of her mind rebelled, told her that this was not what an apple tree looked like at all; they were small, and thin, but the larger part of her mind knew that this was not important. She had learnt that if she disagreed with her own dream too much, she would wake up, and not dream lucidly again that night. She picked the apple up and decided to fly. That was when the apple started talking to her, and she knew it was him, somehow.

“Who did it?” she asked.

“No one. Everyone. I don't know. I don't think we can blame this on one single person, but there is a single person who could change everything. But it is not his fault, really not.”

At this point, the apple changed into a little boy, whose mother had made Jessica watch him while they were at the open air swimming pool, but she also needed to find the industrial elevator in the haunted house, because otherwise other people might ride it before her. The little boy pulled her this way and that way as they kept talking.

“Who is that person?” asked Jessica.

“He is a nobody now; an ageing newscaster. It's the person he once was that we'd need to remove.”

“Remove?”

“Yes, it's harsh, especially since it's not really his fault.”

“I would do anything to be with you. Outside of…” - Jessica gesticulated at the wintry road in front of them, with her mother sitting on a bench, holding a car-jack - “… this place.”

To this, the little boy said nothing.


* * *

Jessica was walking through her city. She was talking to Sara.

“I have had that feeling all my life, Sara. That I am not just here to idle away my time. That there is something I'm supposed to do, you know… someone I am supposed to be with.”

“You must try to tell the difference between that which you desire and that which you believe is likely to happen.”

“Who said that?”

“Me! Just now. Aren't you listening?”

“No, I thought it was, like, a quote or something.”

Sara gave no reply for a while. Jessica was lost in thoughts, almost walking into other people.

“Have you… have you ever felt that you completely and absolutely belonged somewhere, with someone?” Jessica finally asked. A man who was walking in the opposite direction and probably caught a bit of her question frowned and looked at her for a moment.

“Mm-mm”, Sara negated.

“Well, I always figured girls who said stuff like that were too stupid to know any better. But every night I feel it, and it's just not like my dreams to be so… so consistent, you know.”

“If they were inconsistent all the time, that would be a kind of consistency on its own, no?”

Jessica paused and thought for a moment.

“I am not crazy, Sara, I know what I am feeling. And I know that Patrick is meant for me. And that I need to make this happen. I am not crazy!”

“For the record, you are talking to an imaginary friend”, answered the empty air.

“Yes, yes, but that's just eccentricity.”

She had arrived at the cinema.

“No, look it’s neither in the Potter nor in the Star Wars universe…”

The fat boy in glasses looked up at Jessica, phone still stuck between his shoulder and his ear.

“Hold a moment”, he said into the phone. Jessica could hear the incessant rambling on the other end. “Yeah?”

“One ticket for Titanic 2 please.”

The ticket seller looked at her with a sour facial expression. It seemed to say ‘yes we do sell pineapple scented heavy duty lubricant here, but could you please keep your voice down?’ He gave her the ticket and took her money, then turned his attention back to the computer screen and the phone still by his ear.

“The trailer is awesome, dude! 'These are not the wands you're looking for.'” A pause. “No, no, listen. It’s set in the Star Trek universe, neutral ground, you know. ”

Jessica took her seat in an almost empty theatre. There was a couple sitting in the dark of the back rows, and an old man sleeping in the front row. He looked as if he had been sitting there  for a long time. Jessica started talking silently to no one at all.

“No, I don’t really know why I am here”, she said as the intro credits started to play.

“I just somehow felt compelled to go and watch a romantic film. This isn’t me. I’m not romantic. I left romantic behind when I turned 16.”

“Romance never dies”, declared the screen.

“Hah! Never, eh? Everything dies, we all die, some earlier, some later. Romance is at least mortally ill, and the disease has turned her into a bitter cynic. When did anyone last care about true romance?”

“A long time ago”, the screen answered, beginning to retell the plot of the first film. There were ballroom scenes, beautiful exterior shots of the huge ship, and finally an ensemble of musicians playing their song amidst the panic of the sinking ship.

“That, indeed, is romance”, said Jessica to the musicians on the screen. “A chamber music orchestra on a sinking ship that no one cares for, apathetically waiting to die.” The musicians paid her no heed.

“But some things weren't meant to die”, the screen replied, showing a lonely Leonardo DiCaprio, clinging to a piece of driftwood, slowly freezing to death. A few fast forward shots showed him frozen into a block ice, irrationally washed up to the Arctic.

“Some things weren't meant to die”, Jessica repeated, slowly, still staring through the screen.

* * *

Raindrops played a nocturnal march as they fell against the tilted window. A distant thunder rolled into the room. Jessica opened her eyes and got up, mechanically. She closed the window and looked at the sheet lightning advertising the distant thunderstorm in dampened whites and yellows.

“I will kill him”, Jessica said to the window.

“Somehow, I will kill him, and I will allow things to go the way they were meant to go.”

When she went back to bed, Patrick was waiting for her in the form of a stray dog. He told her many things she needed to know.

A little later, Jessica sat up in bed, eyes firmly closed. As she was slowly waking up, she noticed she was scribbling things onto a piece of paper. At first, she expected diagrams, formulas, incantations, anything. When she had fully woken up and turned on the lights, she could see only one line of writing. A simple address.

82… .

* * *

“It doesn't really matter how we describe time. Not for the scope of this course, that is. There is no way to describe time that could be called accurate. There are different models, and they each serve to illustrate a different observation.”

“This is boring”, remarked Sara.

“Shut up, I need to listen to this”, Jessica replied. Someone in the row in front of her turned around.

“When we venture to the borders of our knowledge, to extreme speeds or to extremely small particles, time starts behaving in odd ways”, the professor continued.

“What, you think he's going to give you a recipe for a time machine? 'Take one fresh flux capacitor…'”

“Will you just be quiet?”

“I'm just saying this won't help you get your boy”, Sara muttered in the back of Jessica's head.

“No”, Jessica answered to no one in particular, “but this will.” In her left hand she held a piece of paper with an address. She placed it into her hip pocket.

“Maybe the sanest way to think of time travel, if you must, is that every possible universe exists, all next to each other.”

Jessica looked at the blackboard in front of her. Numbers danced and letters melted. She realized there was no need to go to that address, to find out who lived there, and to see how they could help her travel through time and fix things. It had already happened, or maybe it was happening, or maybe…