Across a wide time
present day
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I led Lee and Hazel away from the moonlit park and through the fog-swept streets above the city.
“That cop probably woke up the whole neighborhood,” Lee said. “Mom and Dad are totally gonna bust us.” He hopped onto a low garden wall, balancing easily as he walked along above us.
“Oh. Wait, Kiki, we have to go back,” Hazel said, her voice rising. She hugged herself, imagining the fear on her parents’ faces, dreading the lies she’d have to tell.
I flickered, going wide for a split second. “Don’t worry. They’re probably asleep by now. And the police officer usually hangs around for a bit, enjoying the view and keeping an eye out for scofflaw teens. We’re here, anyway.”
We climbed a steep concrete staircase to a modern house of glass and steel accented with weathered hardwood. It was tucked in the back of a deep lot bordered by towering eucalyptus whose fragrant branches thrashed in the wind.
“Welcome,” I said, opening the door. Lights glowed to life as we stepped inside. The lower floor was a single, continuous room, stretching from the living room’s window wall overlooking the city lights to the brightly lit kitchen.
“Not bad,” Lee said. “Got any food?”
I kicked off my shoes, savoring the cozy, heated concrete floor after the chilly night air, then headed to the kitchen. “Nothing you’d actually eat.”
“Figures,” he muttered. He followed, yanking open the fridge to find it empty save a single container of plain yogurt. He closed it with a snort then leaned against the counter, scrolling through his phone.
I propped myself on a stool at the kitchen’s stone island. Hazel still stood by the front door, listening.
“Kiki, are your parents home, or your nanny?” she whispered.
I shook my head, gently waving her to the kitchen.
She walked tentatively, nearly tiptoeing, until she faced me and pressed her hands to the countertop as if steadying herself at sea.
“Do you even have parents? Or a nanny?”
Lee’s head jerked up. “Are you an alien?”
For a second, my fourteen-year-old face softened into the incongruous loving smile of a two-hundred-thousand-year-old grandmother, putting them at ease. Then I giggled and threw Lee a shaka.
“Oh, I’m human. Do you think an alien would bother putting up with you?”
Ignoring Lee’s glare, I turned back to Hazel.
“I do have parents, but they died a long, long time ago. It’s okay. As for my nanny, well…” I placed two phones on the table, mine in its sparkling protector, the other plain black. I picked up the plain phone and typed a quick message. Mine buzzed. I held up both phones, each showing the same message. Nanny: Kiki, time home come.
“Dude,” Lee breathed, his mouth open in shock.
Hazel gazed at me for what seemed like a full minute, then took a deep breath and picked up our impossible conversation where we’d left off.
“So we’ve known each other for a long time?”
I smiled at her pluck, following her lead. “Well, a lot longer than two years. Way, way longer. We’ve been best friends for a very wide time, billions of us. Some of us are clever teenagers like we are now, others are cute little old ladies, and everything in between.”
Hazel blinked, trying to imagine the immensity of so many interwoven friendships, layered beyond comprehension. Unconsciously, she reached wide as if to embrace us all, then dropped her hands to her lap, her eyes sharpening with questions.
“What do you mean by ‘wide,’ like in ‘wide time’ and ‘wide enough’?” Another thought struck her, and she pushed herself upright. “Wait. How old are you?”
I twirled on a stool at the stone kitchen island. “I’m fourteen, silly.” I stopped mid-twirl, earrings glinting blue-green. “Or thirty trillion. Or ninety-three. Depends how you count.” I shrugged and went back to twirling. “But this me? Fourteen.”
I stopped again and turned to Lee, lifting my chin with a superior air, leaning hard into my big sister shtick. “On my way to fifteen,” I reminded, my voice dropping a register. “Technically, I’m older than you in every universe. Not that it matters. But keep it in mind.”
Neck reddening, he pretended to ignore me by staring at his phone. I waved him over to join us, waiting until he relented.
“As for wide time,” I continued, turning back to Hazel, “well, time works differently for me. Your body can move in three dimensions, but only forward in time. And your mind is tied to your body, so time’s a one-way street for you. More or less.”
I shrugged again. “I mean, you can learn about the past and guess what might happen in the future. But that’s not exactly time travel.”
“It’s different for me. My mind isn’t connected to just one body anymore. With a flicker, I can be anywhere, at any time. And my bodies can be any age, though this one’s pretty great,” I said, arching my back in a limber stretch. “Of course, old-fashioned time travel tricks, like going back and changing what happened in this timeline, are still impossible, even for me.”
“Right, the time travel paradox,” Lee interjected.
I raised an eyebrow. “You got some mansplainin’ to do?” I leaned across the island, chin on fist, briefly aging my body up to an imperious seventeen, head cocked in challenge.
Lee frowned as he let himself get pulled into the conversation. “You know, it’s like, I go back in time to meet my great-grandpa in Chicago and buy him a spoiled hot dog. Then he dies of food poisoning before he ever meets my great-grandmother. So I, uh, cease to exist.”
He paused, puzzling it out. I waved him on.
“So if I don’t exist, then…uh…I can’t go back and give my grandpa the bad hot dog, which means…uh…”
I cut in to close out the paradox. “No death dog, grandpa lives, he and grandma get busy, and voila, here you are.” I tapped him lightly on the nose and smiled.
“Every time you go back and poison him, you’re erased. So you can’t buy him a botulism brat. He lives. You’re born. And so on. The loop keeps spinning. That’s why old-fashioned time travel is impossible.” I nodded. “Not bad, big guy.”
He gazed back, vaguely proud of himself. I let his shoulders square up a little.
“But time surfing is definitely real.” I leaned across the island and gave him a wicked little peck on his cheek. “In case you were wondering, that’s what it’s like to get kissed by ninety million pretty girls at once.”
Lee lurched away, flushing uncomfortably. I’ve always had a knack for taking teenage boys down a peg.
I turned back to Hazel, opening my hands in apology until she nodded, then picking up the thread again. “So if I can flicker around in time, but I can’t go back and change anything… then what am I doing?”
Hazel knitted her brows, trying to imagine the unimaginable. She was drawn back to her earlier vision on the cliff ledge. In her mind’s eye, she saw them again, the vast, multicolored tapestries with billions of people bound tight in woven ribbons of separate universes. The image swirled, dizzying and intricate, and then something clicked.
“Ohhhh,” she breathed, eyes widening with new understanding. “You’re not sewn into the tapestry. You can skip across the ribbons. You move across time, to parallel universes. Right next to ours, but different.”
“Not sure about the ribbons, but otherwise, bingo.” I looked at her quizzically. Had she seen things I hadn’t?
I made a note to myself and continued. “And so, if I brought Lee back with me to buy your great-grandpa a botulism bratwurst…”
Hazel followed the thread. “Well, this branch we’re on now stays the way it is. But you’d be on a different branch, one where Lee actually meets my grandpa. Then the hot dog vendor picks a hot dog, and if he picks the wrong one, he creates a branch where my grandfather dies of botulism, and our whole family never exists… except for Lee, I guess?”
I nodded at her growing understanding, ignoring her question about Lee for now. “Yep, that’s pretty much it. I’ve seen that hot dog guy spawn his greasy deathverses far too many times. Universes are much better with you around.”
I gave her a gentle smile. “Anyway, you asked about ‘wide’ time. Like I said before, ninety million of me are having this conversation with ninety million of you in ninety million slightly different universes. That’s wide time.
“Long time’s easy, just the past flowing into the future like a river. That’s how your life works. But wide time is about the nearly infinite parallel paths the multiverse takes, like the branching, well, ribbons of a vast river delta, streams spreading out as they make their way to the sea. Connecting across all those varied perspectives lets me cut through the randomness and see the patterns in the muck, where the channels run deeper.”
I studied her face, letting the moment settle. “And after watching you across a long, wide time, I don’t think you’re just lucky. I think you’re more than that. Special, like I said.”
Hazel turned away, feeling exposed again, as if her secret had been laid bare. Meanwhile, Lee scanned the kitchen uneasily, half-expecting an army of wild-haired copies of me to materialize around him.
“Don’t worry, Lee, multiple mes can’t be connected to the same universe at once,” I said, spreading my hands to show I had nothing to hide. “I’m scattered across universes. Right now, many of me are here in parallel kitchens with you. Some mes are getting yelled at by your parents after they caught us sneaking back into your house. Other mes are at a diner downtown eating fries alone because your parents heard you in the garage and you never made it out of the house. There are even a few mes trying to spring Lee from juvenile hall after he accidentally tackled the huge lady cop at the park and ended up with her taser.”
I paused, then flickered for a moment.
Hazel balked at my sudden stuttering, the eerie half-absence. Lee stepped beside her, instantly alert.
Then I popped back, wagging my finger in his surly face. “That was not your best move, my man. Luckily, you look sympathetic on her body cam footage when you tase yourself in the foot. I shouldn’t have bothered trying to break you out. You usually get off scot-free with a judge’s warning to ‘be less klutzy.’”
Lee opened his mouth to protest, then clamped it shut, not wanting to honor my teasing with a response.
Hazel walked over and poked my shoulder, eyes narrowing. “You were blinking in and out, like you were here and not here. What was happening?”
“It takes a lot of power when a lot of mes jump universes all at once, so I flicker for a second to conserve energy. A few million mes just went wide and long on Lee’s juvie escapade to see how it turned out.”
Hazel drew a deep breath, following my story wherever it led. “So you created more yous and sent them off to spy on Lee?”
“Most of the time I don’t create more mes. There are already a lot of mes out there, and we’re all constantly multiplying as new universes pop into being. So, I usually go wide by just shifting my attention to when and where I already am. That’s easy. On the other hand, when I move to new times and places, I really use a lot of energy. And breaking Lee out of juvie took some clever timing and placement.”
I hesitated. I’d burned enough energy to power the Earth for a day just to tease Lee. I felt a twinge of shame, then shook it off.
“What about the yous you leave behind?” Hazel asked. “Did a hundred thousand Kikis just vanish after that, uh, jailbreak?”
I hedged. “Usually not. It’s easiest for me to leave myselves there, doing whatever I do. I can leave a universe entirely and come back, like I did at the Penthouse. But actually moving in and out of universes burns through energy like a collapsing star, so I keep it to a minimum.”
Lee’s phone buzzed, pulling his attention away. Hazel looked unsettled, ribbons of possibility swirling through her mind as she tried to grasp the cosmic scale of my power.
Before she could untangle her thoughts, a soft chime rang from the front of the house. I flickered, smiling.
Next Chapter: Die a billion times
present day
“What’s that?” Hazel asked, her voice trailing off as if the chime had rung from another world.
“It’s Peter at the door,” Lee said, flashing us the texts on his screen.
I skipped over to let our friend in. Peter unfolded into the room like a baby giraffe, hunching head and shoulders over me. He briefly filled the doorway, his long limbs awkwardly graceful. He held out two bulging fast-food bags. “I come bearing grease.”
I sized him up. “How can you eat so much and still weigh a couple of quarter-pounders less than me?”
“I’m tall,” he shrugged.
“That’s all you got? Why do tall people credit everything to height? It’s so one-dimensional.” I crossed my arms, miffed.
“It’s just what we do.” He looked down at me benevolently.
I jumped up and snatched the ratty turquoise beret off his head. “Nice lid,” I said, plopping it on before hip-checking him toward the kitchen. “Thrift score?”
“Nah, found it on the sidewalk just now.”
“Ewww!” I squeaked, tossing the hat back at him and wrinkling my nose in mock disgust…
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