“Are you sure you’re alright?” Petra asked her father, poking the ugly wound at his side.
“Ow!” Jake complained. “I’ll be fine, if you stop doing that. Just put the bandages on. Timebenders heal faster than regular people, you know that.”
Petra giggled, pressing the gauze to his skin and holding it there while he wrapped a tension bandage around his waist to hold it. “Sorry, Daddy.” She glanced over her shoulder as he took over on the bandage. From Pyotr’s bathroom, where she was tending to Jake’s apparently non-serious bullet wound, she could see her alternate self sitting in a chair and staring into a coffee mug. “It just seems like such a shame, are you sure we can’t really fix things for her?”
“Even if we did, it would just create two timelines,” he replied, shaking his head slowly. “Really, we shouldn’t have even done it here. I think Pyotr’s stunt kept the timeline straight, but any big event usually causes a second universe.”
“What if we took her with us?” Petra asked. “Take care of her, help her get better. Besides, last night, what the three of us did together… I wouldn’t mind doing more of that.”
Jake chuckled. “No to that, too,” he said. “She has something important to do here.”
“What’s that?” Petra asked, cocking her head. “She’s done enough, hasn’t she?”
Time stopped itself. The sensation, the sudden silence and stillness, was beyond familiar to Petra. So was the voice that came from outside the bathroom.
“If you take her away from here,” Carol said, stepping into view from another room, “then I’ll stop existing again. You should know that by now, mom.”
Carol was older than Petra, and was still weird to hear the word “mom” coming from her, but Petra smiled regardless. “Of course,” she replied. “No Carol, no remote… and none of this can happen.”
“Right on the nose,” Carol said, flashing a smile. “Don’t worry. She’ll have a rough time recovering, but Aunty Anna and Uncle Pyotr will help her along. She’ll move in here in a few days, when she realizes I’m on the way. I grew up surrounded by friends and family. It was a good life, and I only came back with the remote because I knew I needed to… and to meet my father.”
Petra stood and embraced her alternate-future-daughter. “Alright then. Take good care of her for me?”
“You got it, mom,” Carol said, smiling.
Jake took Petra’s hand, standing up with a grimace. “Ready to go home, Pet?”
Petra nodded. “You?”
Jake pulled the remote out of his pocket. “Up one channel, here we go. Or… was it down?”
“Daddy! You-”
Jake laughed and pressed a button, cutting her off and taking them away.
-*-*-
Pyotr sat on the chair across from Petra. There was a soft whump of air in the bathroom; from the sound of it, Jake and the other Petra had just snuck out without long goodbyes. “Are you okay?” Pyotr asked.
Petra looked down at her hand. She was holding a bag of frozen peas, but the wires had burned her badly and would probably leave a scar. “I will be,” she said quietly. “I just have to remember how to be me again.”
“Well, you aren’t alone,” Pyotr replied, sliding a fresh bag over to her. “”You’ll always be-”
“Um, hey,” Anna interrupted, stepping in from the back door, “sorry to interrupt, but I just checked in the garage. I got in through the window and unlocked it.”
The only window in that garage was too high for someone to easily get to, and Pyotr made a note to ask about it later. Right now he was more concerned with the bundled rag that Anna was carrying.
“This was in the machine. I think it stayed behind when Jeremy… left.” She set the bundle on the dining table and unfolded it. “It’s hot.”
In the middle of the stained old rag, a black plastic rectangle sat heavily on the table. Pyotr used a corner of the rag to flip it over on its front, then slid it toward Petra with a smile.
“I believe,” he said, leaning back and nodding at the strangely normal-looking remote control, “that this belongs to you.”
Epilogue
Jeremy grunted, shooting his cum over the face of a young blonde. He’d already been to see her enough times that he’d lost count, and her face was barely visible under the sticky mask he’d created. She was one of several who he’d lined up on the sidewalk for convenience, and the display of kneeling women was starting to lose its charm.
He zipped his pants and glanced up at the sky, then immediately regretted it. The cracks were still there, although they didn’t seem to be widening. It was almost too bad; if they were moving, at least there’d be some sort of way to measure time’s passing. As it was, he was the only thing in the world that wasn’t frozen, and he no longer had any way to change that.
As far as he could tell, the time machine had worked perfectly. The calendars all said he’d arrived exactly on-target. He was just stuck in the moment where he’d arrived. And the cracks in the sky, opening on… it wasn’t even blackness. It was Nothing. It was so wrong that looking at them made his mind reel, screaming the impossibility at him. The sky opened onto Nothing.
He’d gone back too far to save himself with Jake’s remote, too. As near as he could tell, the old man didn’t have it yet. Never would, either, since Jeremy had taken the opportunity to take out his frustrations on him. What was left of him wouldn’t be using any remote controls anytime soon.
Anytime soon. It was weird, Jeremy thought, how much time worked into how people think and talk and act. There wasn’t anytime soon anymore for him, because there wasn’t any time and soon would never come. There was only now.
Jeremy stuck his hands in his pockets and walked away from the blonde, humming to himself. He would never age, and never die. Meanwhile, libraries were full of books about things. Things like theoretical physics.
He’d be back. If he could stay sane for long enough to learn, he’d be back. It was only a matter of time. Read more »