Listen to the audiobook of this chapter:

  I woke up smiling as sunlight peeked through my curtains, bathing my room in early morning light. I didn’t always remember my dreams, and sometimes when I did, I wish I hadn’t. I still woke up crying when I dreamed of my past. But this time, I was glad I remembered. Fanciful dreams like that were always fun and I tended to remember them for a long time. And this one was even more vivid than usual.

  That morning, after an hour of unsuccessfully trying begin my lit history paper once again, I called up Aaron. Unlike most people, Aaron was easiest to get hold of by calling rather than texting, since he tended to be wrapped up in his project and didn’t often check his phone for messages.

  “Hey,” he answered after the third ring.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “Just working on my project. You?”

  “Nothing much. Just wondering if you wanted to hang out for a while.”

  “Sure,” he said, then hesitated. “Do you mind getting yourself here this time? I’m in the middle of something, but I promise I’ll be done as soon as you get here.”

  I chuckled – he always seemed to be “in the middle of something” – and checked the clock. “No problem. I’ll be there in half an hour?”

  “Sounds great! See you then!”

  I grabbed a sweater and shoved my wallet and phone in one of the pockets.

  “See you guys later,” I called to my cats as they watched me leave. Their stares begged me not to go. “Don’t be like that, I’ll be back in a few hours!”

  Once on the bus, I took out my phone and logged into Chatterbox. I’d forced myself to keep the app off while I’d been trying to do my homework, so I hadn’t talked to Mikael yet that morning.

  His message came instantly.

  Sup?

  Going over to see Aaron. You?

  Shows. Rewatching Adam Jones for the fourth time.

  Lol, I said, smiling and shaking my head a little. Why not pick a new one for once?

  I don’t want to watch a bad one, and I don’t like the disappointment of a good one ending. I’d rather just stick with this. Besides, it’s one of my favorites!

  Laaaame, I teased him.

  Nah. So what are you going to do with your friend?

  Not sure. Just going to hang out.

  I see... Well, have fun!

  My heart wrenched a little. I couldn’t tell if he was jealous or sad that I was going to spend time with someone else, or if he didn’t really care. I felt a little guilty, but told myself I was allowed to have a real life outside whatever Mikael and I did or didn’t have. It’s not like we were dating or anything. And Aaron and I had an unofficial standing get-together every Saturday that he was home from his overseas studies.

  I sighed heavily. Thanks, you too. I’ll write when I can.

  When I reached Aaron’s one-bedroom duplex, I knocked on the door for formality’s sake before letting myself in.

  “Hello!” I called.

  “Hey Zee!” I heard the distant shout from further inside the house. “I’m in the bedroom.”

  I walked through the living area and stopped just outside his bedroom door. His bed, nightstand, and a TV were on one side of the room, the other half full of both technological and magical equipment, all neatly in its place. Jazz music played softly in the background from his television.

  “I invented a time machine!” Aaron exclaimed as he turned toward me, smiling and gesturing at a large contraption nearby. The only disorganized area in his entire house was here, with cords and bolts and tools scattered all over the table next to a box large enough for a person to stand in.

  I looked at him, attempting to hide my smile and half-failing. I’d heard a similar proclamation about a year earlier. “Again?” I asked.

  He glared at me. “You’re mocking me, aren’t you?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe a little.”

  He continued to glare for a moment before we both laughed. I walked over and gave him a hug.

  “How you doing?”

  He smiled at me. “I really think I may have figured something out this time! I messed around with the connections between the particle-quantum-entanglement capacitors and the magicle-temporal-entanglement buffers and….”

  “And you know I don’t understand a thing about how those work,” I said ruefully.

  His smile turned into a huge grin. “Maybe you should learn. After all, who else is going to run maintenance on this while I’m out changing history?”

  “Nobody should need to. If it really is a time machine, you should be able to return seconds after you left, even if you’re gone for three years in the past, right?”

  He pursed his lips, obviously frustrated. “I’m not sure that’s how it works. Right now, my theory is that whatever time I spend in another place, that same amount of time will pass in the present, and I will return that same length of time later. Quanticum entanglement can only manipulate time so much. You can go forwards or backwards, but you need a base time to start from and nothing can be held in stasis eternally. Granted, this is all theory at this point….” He trailed off in thought.

  “Well, I’m sure you, oh Great and Powerful Magiphysicist, will figure it all out before your first trip.”

  He beamed at me exaggeratedly. “Of course I will!”

  “Just one question… if the machine stays here, how will you get back?”

  “Wifi!”

  “What? How?” I stared at him blankly.

  He laughed. “I’m going to set up a temporal-spatial wifi between my… er… communicator… I have yet to develop... and the machine.”

  “ ‘Have yet to develop’?”

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  “Gotta go one step at a time!” He continued grinning at me.

  I considered these implications for a bit before asking, “Ok, another question. What happens if the machine is destroyed while you’re away? If your time in the past and my time in the present happen at the same time, what would you do if, say, the house burned down? You couldn’t come back to the immediate past before it was destroyed.”

  “I’m still working on that part, too,” he chuckled. “Probably some sort of emergency recall.”

  “Uh huh,” I said noncommittally and strolled over to his desk as he turned back to his machine.

  A large bulletin hung above the desk, covered in papers full of technical mumbo-jumbo. I glanced at one paper that seemed to have a particular place of importance in the chaos and vaguely recognized the formulas at the top as expanded versions of the energy-mass equations of physical and magicus systems.

  Magicus, the technical term for magic. Personally, I always thought they were both outdated terms and should go by some cooler name, like psychokinetics. But way back in Stone Age times, people didn’t understand how the world worked. They could do these crazy things that they had no explanation for and called it “magic”, and it just stuck on down through the ages. Once it became a scientifically-studied phenomenon, scientists thought it should be differentiated, and renamed it magicus. It was still called “magic” in everyday use, though.

  I glanced further down the page.

  “Funny-shaped-A-P over funny-shaped-A-T equals upside-down triangle dot J.”

  “D. Nabla,” Aaron’s voice sounded dully from across the room.

  “What?” I looked in his direction. His head and arms were lost behind the back of his machine.

  “That’s a D, not an A. It means ‘partial derivative’. And the triangle is an upside-down Greek delta, called a nabla.”

  “Uh huh…. I really need to take that Greek class,” I mumbled to myself as I looked back to the paper.

  Following those equations were about a dozen more variations of each of the three formulas. I recognized very few of the symbols and absolutely none of what it meant. I flipped to the page underneath to see even more equations with symbols I recognized as magicus formulas, but again, I didn’t understand any of it. Neither magicus nor physics had really been my thing.

  On the desk, a pile of papers full of various equations from both the physics and magicus lists were apparently attempting to be equated and failing disastrously, given all the scratching out and scribbled expletives written over them.

  “Sooooo…..” I drawled slowly, “What’s going on over here?”

  “Just trying to solve the Theory of Everything,” Aaron said casually.

  “You know they still haven’t even figured out how to fit quantum mechanics and general relativity into a Universal Theory of Physics, right? How do you expect to combine two incomplete theories into one Ultra-Universal Theory of Everything?”

  He poked his head out and looked at me, eyes shining with excitement. “I dunno. But it doesn’t hurt to try. How else am I supposed to get my time machine working?”

  He climbed inside the machine and continued, his voice resonating metallically. “I think they’ve been going about it the wrong way. Most people have been trying to get one Universal Law of Physics, and one Universal Law of Magicus, then combine the two. What I’m trying to do is combine the quantum equations of each half and the macro equations of each half, then figure out how to make those new larger two halves fit together.”

  “And nobody has tried that before?”

  “Of course they have. But since nobody has figured it out yet from either method, I might as well have a go at it. I mean, somebody has to be the next Feynman, right?”

  “Who?”

  “The Einstein of quantum field theory.”

  “Ah.” I smiled to myself as his words echoed my earlier thoughts and walked over to his bed. “So, you going to be at that long?” I asked, plopping down on the bed.

  “Almost done, just want to finish up this part. Reconnecting things and stuff. Can’t test it until sunset, though.”

  “Why’s that?” I picked up a magazine from his nightstand, Magitech Today, and scanned the contents page. Theories about deep space magic, new discoveries about the relationship between sunspots and EMMR, an in-depth interview with a transport operator about magicle entanglement, the latest solar energy developments from Madrid, and an article on the solar eclipse that was going to pass over Europe near the end of the year.

  “Well, this isn’t exactly like the magi-tech we already have,” he explained as he worked. “The stuff we have now has converters and other systems that keep our stuff working as the PEM fields stop and the MEM fields start up, or vice-versa.”

  “Particle electromagnetic fields and magicle electromagnetic fields,” I said, remembering the physics class I took back in high school.

  “Right,” he confirmed, exiting his machine long enough to grab a different tool and some wires. “So when someone says ‘magi-tech’, that’s what they’re referring to. Technology that transitions seamlessly between sun-up and sun-down. This is a little different. It only works during the time the sun is on the horizon because it has both tech and magicus components that need to work at the same time. Otherwise, it doesn’t do much except light up. It’s kind of like fusion reactors. They have to be underground so both the classical and magicus tech parts can function simultaneously.”

  “I see,” I said. I flipped the magazine open to the article on the eclipse. Astronomy was my one science interest exception. At least, all the non-technical parts. The vastness of the universe intrigued me, but the numbers behind it went right over my head.

  The article had a picture showing the path of the eclipse. It was going to pass just south of the UK, straight through France, north of Italy, and dead over Istanbul and the Persian Gulf. All tech in the 70 mile wide path of totality was expected to go down for about an hour as the eclipse passed overhead. I fantasized about being able to save up enough money to travel to Europe for a couple weeks, meet Mikael, and have us travel to the totality zone to watch the eclipse.

  “Ok, I’m done.” Aaron’s voice broke me out of my daydream. I blinked a couple times and looked over to see him putting his tools away. “What did you have in mind to do?”

  I put the magazine back on his nightstand and stood up. “How about we start with breakfast?”

  “Agreed,” Aaron said, nodding. “What sounds good?”

  We chose a small family diner we both enjoyed. He ordered a monster of a pancake pile that I wondered where he put away in his slim frame, and I got a Belgian waffle covered in strawberries and cream.

  “I’m taking Val to the amusement park tomorrow,” he told me as we ate. “Do you want to come?”

  “I’d love to,” I said between mouthfuls.

  Valorie was Aaron’s little sister, some fifteen years younger than him. She was from his mom’s second marriage and Aaron adored her. Both of his parents were dead now, though, one in a car accident and the other from cancer. Val lived with her dad – Aaron’s step-dad – and Aaron went to their family holiday gatherings, but he didn’t really know anyone there, which is why he dragged me along any chance he got.

  So I’d met Val a few times, but I’d never spent time with her outside of those events. Having known Aaron for five years, you’d think I’d have seen her more, but life has a way of getting in the way. Fortunately, with my work and school schedules finally sorted out, I had weekends off for at least the next two months.

  After breakfast, we hit up The Arena – a game center with an arcade, miniature golf course, go-cart racing track, and three-story laser tag maze. Aaron and I had met there and had an on-going competition to see who could score highest in a twenty-person laser tag match. In the years we’d been playing, we’d made it onto the ‘top ten best scores of the week’ regularly, though not as often as we used to. Whenever that happened, the loser had to buy the ice cream sundaes on the way home.

  We played two matches of laser tag, with me receiving the higher score both times, but neither high enough to make it on the top-ten list. Aaron beat me at go-cart racing after that, and we both made fools of ourselves at the dance-off arcade game.

  Lunch was from a nearby fast-food joint, and we grabbed our mandatory ice cream treats on the way home – Aaron, as usual, offering to pay, even though I hadn’t made the top list. He parked in the lot outside my apartment, and we ate our desserts on the trunk of Aaron’s car while talking about work, school, and life in general. The sun was half way down the sky when we said goodbye, hugging and agreeing that he would pick me around nine o’clock the next morning for our trip to the amusement park.

  When I got on my VR computer a short time later, Mikael called me almost immediately.

  “Shark!” I laughed.

  “I really, really like you.”

  “Uh…. Thanks. I really, really like you too!”

  I was a little thrown off by being greeted that way first thing. Mikael wasn’t usually a very… emotionally expressive person.

  “I wish I could fuck you.”

  Oooook, now I knew something was up. “Did you have something to drink today?”

  “Two bottles of champagne and one wine!”

  “Oh god….” I mumbled. “Did you drink it all already?”

  “Nah. Just the wine. And it’s been over a couple hours. Don’t worry so much! Let’s have some fun! Do you have anything to drink?”

  I was always torn when he got like this. It didn’t happen very often, but when he decided to get something to drink, it wasn’t unusual to be what I’d consider overboard. I think he used it to self-medicate. On the flip side, he was more open and light-hearted when he was drunk.

  “I think I’ve got something in my fridge,” I decided.

  I checked and found some spiced ales in the back. I didn’t drink much, so they’d probably been back there a couple months. Oh well, good enough.

  I grabbed three and sat back down, replacing my VR headset. The screen on the headset was transparent when it was turned off, and by pressing your thumb and pinky together on either hand, the monitor could be disabled so that a person could see the room around them. Or, in my case, the bottles on the table next to me.

  My buzz had worn off by the time midnight rolled around, though Mikael was still good and tipsy. I half hoped he’d tell me he loved me that night when we said goodbye, but I only got the usual “I like you too”.