‘Exactly.’ Sophia grinned.
Twenty-Six
Hailey clutched her practice exam booklet as she headed back home after a long day at college. She was upset with herself. She had scored a ‘B’ on her practice paper for Business. Even though this wasn’t bad she knew it wasn’t good enough. Her father wouldn’t be pleased with a ‘B’ grade, he was expecting A’s. She was frustrated with studying business – she didn’t want to run a business, she wanted to write. She ground her teeth and her shoulders stiffened within the confines of her suit jacket. Suits! she thought. Who the hell thought wearing suits was such a great idea? They were itchy, uncomfortable, restricting, and in the summer, God, they were hell.
‘I’ll show them,’ she said to herself as she marched home. She knew there would be costs involved with writing if she couldn’t get a publishing deal, so if she wanted to be a memorable author then she would need to do it herself. Whatever it took, if she had to employ a proof-reader and a copy editor, go on writing courses, find the funds for marketing. I’ll get a job, I’ll apply for jobs and save up, then we’ll see who’s right. She went straight up to her bedroom, changed out of her suit and picked up a pile of papers from her desk. She had completed and typed out a CV, now all she needed to do was distribute them. She picked up her bag and went straight back out.
Hailey made her way up the main street in Elbridge; she stopped at every clothing store, café, and even the science museum. She gave her CV over to many friendly and sometimes scowling faces, even if they hadn’t advertised positions in their windows. She had almost run out of copies when she got to the courtyard with the wishing well. This was her favourite spot in the city centre and she found her feet heading straight for the book shop. A bell sounded as she opened the door and the familiar smell of paper and ink surrounded her. Miss Wells was behind the counter, she had run the bookshop for her mother for the last couple of years.
‘Hello Hailey,’ she said as she lifted her nose from a book.
‘Hi.’
‘It’s still a bit cold out there isn’t it?’ Miss Wells removed her reading glasses.
‘Yes the winter was bad.’ Hailey hesitated. ‘Can I give you my CV? I know you’re not advertising positions but…’
‘Sure.’ Miss Wells smiled. Hailey handed over the last copy of her CV. ‘I’ll see what I can do,’
Hailey left the shop and let out a deep breath as she stood outside; she had applied everywhere in the city, she would just have to wait. She gazed at the wishing well and smiled; she found a penny amongst the loose change in her pocket. She thought of Alice and wondered how Kyle was doing. She liked having him around and missed him when he was at university. She flicked the coin into the well. ‘For luck,’ she said and it landed with a satisfying plop. ‘For Alice,’ she whispered.
Twenty-Seven
Kyle stood outside the examination hall with Cameron and his other friends. They were all in grey suits and this was Kyle’s last A-level exam – physics. He could see the invigilators walking along the desks inside the hall and setting down papers as the students waited. He was nervous, but his thoughts could never stay on his exam for long. Alice was still in hospital and he worried about her every day. The doctors were optimistic about her recovery, but she was so skinny and pale, and she could hardly eat a thing.
‘You’re worrying about Alice again, aren’t you?’ Cameron said.
‘Yeah. It’s hard not to’
‘Don’t, she’ll be OK. She’s tough and she’s made it this far. Besides, she wants you to do well in this exam so you can study together at university. You’re doing it as much for her as you are for yourself.’
‘Yeah you’re right, I know.’ Kyle let his shoulders slump. The idle conversations paused around them and the boys looked up to see their headmaster, Mr Black, marching down the corridor towards them.
‘Kyle!’ Mr Black said. ‘Come with me, quickly.’
‘What’s wrong?’ Kyle asked. His thoughts immediately flashed to Alice and he felt as though a hole had been punctured through his chest.
‘You need to come with me.’ Mr Black gripped him by the shoulders. ‘It’s all right all of you, carry on with your exams.’ His cheerful tones rang false and hollow as he guided Kyle away.
‘What’s happened?’ Kyle asked. ‘What’s wrong? Is Alice OK?’ Mr Black shook his head and wouldn’t say a word until they were in his office. Kyle saw that Hailey was in the office too, her expression blank.
‘You two need to wait here, your parents are here,’ Mr Black told them and then he left the room.
‘What’s going on?’ Kyle asked, turning to Hailey.
‘I don’t know, no one is telling me anything,’ Hailey said. She stood up, her voice trembling. ‘It’s bad, something bad has happened.’ The door opened again and their parents entered the room. Their mother’s eyes were red, she had been crying, and their father was impossibly pale. He looked as though he had grown old overnight.
‘Is Alice OK?’ Kyle asked immediately. ‘Tell me, is she alright?’ His father gripped his shoulders and looked him straight in the eye.
‘Kyle I’m sorry… she’s…’ He hesitated, lowering his eyes and pulling Kyle to him. ‘She’s gone Kyle, I’m sorry son.’
‘No,’ he said softly. ‘No, you’re lying.’
‘She passed away this morning, Kyle. She had a heart attack. It was quick.’
‘No,’ Kyle said. He shrugged out of his father’s grasp. He felt sick. There was no way Alice could be gone, he had just seen her earlier that morning. She had been fine.
‘Kyle…’ his mother said, tears streaming down her cheeks.
‘No!’ He ran from the room. His feet pounded down a long corridor which suddenly bleached out. The smell of strong disinfectant stung his airways and removed the hairs from his nostrils as his feet clacked against the polished floors. He pumped his legs and arms harder and willed the muscles in his body to move him faster. Alice wasn’t dead, she couldn’t be dead.
The school turned into the hospital, and he skidded around a sharp corner, almost colliding with a nurse. He was on her corridor now, with large windows on his left looking out at the world outside and down on the pitiful city of Elbridge. He knew this floor well, he had walked these corridors so many times, he had spent long hours between these walls. He ran and he saw her room at the very end, the door was slightly ajar, beckoning to him tauntingly. He could see her through the window, a faint smile on her lips as she saw him. Tubes were wired up through her nose and into her arms, she was painfully thin and she had no hair, but her fragile smile was the most beautiful thing in the world.
A clock appeared above the window and he saw the seconds of her life counting down. He put on another burst of speed; he could make it, he just had to reach her, he just had to be there. He felt panic firing through him and then the hallway stretched impossibly like some twisted infinity. He cried out and ran harder, sweat sticking to his sides and dripping down his forehead. Eerie red light streamed in through the windows and his head turned unwillingly to gaze upon a ruined and broken world. The charcoal remnants of a blackened Earth stood against a blood red sky. He turned back to Alice and he saw her smile drop as her eyes rolled into the back of her head; her torso jolted upwards as though it were trying to wrench itself free from her limbs and then her body went still. Doctors and nurses appeared out of nowhere and crowded around her bed. One of them began chest compressions and another was shouting orders.
‘No!’ Kyle screamed as he ran faster. He felt his body stumble through some invisible barrier and suddenly he was gaining ground again. He saw her father, appear on his side of her window, his back to Kyle as he gazed on at the chaos surrounding his daughter. Alice’s body was not responding to the emergency CPR and a box-like machine displayed the flat line of her heart. ‘Alice, don’t leave me!’ Kyle cried, his voice hoars
e as he sped down the hallway. He was almost at her door; he was almost in her room. His eyes flickered to the right as he passed her father; he had the face of a destroyed man, a nightmarish image that Kyle’s mind could only create. Kyle’s outstretched hand crossed the threshold; he could just see into the room and he saw the blank looks on the faces of the medical staff. They shook their heads, their eyes dull. He saw Alice’s lifeless form. ‘Alice!’ he screamed and then the floor gave out from underneath him and he fell.
Kyle sat bolt upright with his heart hammering in his chest and sweat coating his back. He gasped in the cool night air by the lungful and almost choked as it rushed down his airways. He glanced around the dim room, his eyes adjusting slowly. He was in his bed, he was at university, his head snapped from left to right and his gaze caught the red digital display of his clock. It was gone five in the morning. He dropped back down onto his bed, his skin burning and trembling from the overdose of adrenaline. It had been a dream, a nightmare, no, the nightmare. He remembered it all now, he remembered it clearly. The nightmares that had been plaguing him for months were all to do with Alice’s last moments. In reality he had never made it to the hospital. He remembered the headmaster collecting him and sitting him down in the office. Shortly after his parents had arrived and he had learnt the devastating news – the rest of the day had been a blur, the rest of his life had been a blur. He hadn’t taken that last exam, so the examination board had taken an aggregate result from his previous exams and he had still been accepted at university for a physics degree. A degree he had decided against, a degree he didn’t feel he deserved. He felt tears slide down his cheeks and drip into his ears and hair. Why did it have to be her? Why did it have to be that day? Guilt twisted up his insides until his guts felt as though they were ripping under the strain.
‘I didn’t know,’ he whispered, ‘I didn’t know, I didn’t know, I’m so sorry Alice, I’m sorry.’ His voice cracked as he fought to contain the mournful sob that surfaced at the back of his throat. He should have been there in her last moments, he should have stayed. He gulped but nothing would alleviate the rawness in his throat or the numbness that resided deep in his bones. His heart still hammered against his chest, as though it was knocking on the door to his ribcage, demanding to be let out or to be heard, he wasn’t quite sure which. He threw off his duvet and filled a glass of water from the sink and then knocked back the cool liquid. His shoulders shook violently as he put the glass down and held onto the sides of the sink. No one was prepared for death, no one.
Twenty-Eight
Kyle spent many hours talking with Sophia in the chapel, far more than he had originally intended, but he found it impossible to keep away. There was something satisfying about letting his imagination go and rethinking the way of the world. They even spoke about her other theories which involved metals with biological properties and Kyle’s personal favourite, the idea and likelihood of a hover-board. Sophia had some crazy ideas but she seemed to be able to point out all sides of an argument effortlessly. It was as though she could detach herself from her own mind and put herself into the literal minds and bodies of all sides of her ideas, and then she would deduce the most likely thoughts and arguments. He would frequently come up with a solution and she would frequently point out his flaws and he found himself having to rethink his ideas, and even accept ideas from others that he wouldn’t have before. Every time he set foot in the chapel with new solutions, he came back out with more questions and a slight headache. However none of this fazed him, he found that he was actually enjoying himself and their conversations. He felt as if there was a bounce in his step now, and he had more energy, despite the nightmares which festered in his sub-conscious.
It was mid-February when Kyle found himself heading away from the chapel and back up the slope. He had just spent an hour laughing and talking with Sophia about time travel and teleportation going wrong. She believed that time travel into the past would be impossible on the two timelines they had come up with, due to the idea that when each moment passed and the loop moved on, the previous loops of time would collapse, no longer being possibilities. They called the spiralling, vortex line the ‘now timeline’ and the straight, regular, arrow of time, the ‘human timeline’. Kyle wasn’t sure if the past would collapse but he had to admit that it did make logical sense. If someone had been able to go back in time, it would have happened already. He felt a little sad for all the time travelling fans out there, but Sophia surprised him when she said travelling into the future could be possible.
His thoughts were so distracted by ideas that he barely registered the short trip back to his block. As soon as he got into his bedroom he was pulling out notepads and rifling through draws for some white tack. He hastily drew some new diagrams and jotted down some notes and then he turned to his bedroom walls. He had already begun the process of copying Sophia’s journal pages and sticking them to his walls. Diagrams of circles with shaded stars and vortices with lines running through their centres were tacked to the wall above his bed. He added his new additions to this wall too – graphs with jagged lines like the edges of tall mountains, and another circle diagram with a dot at its centre, and a long, curving line protruding from this dot, crossing over and looping back on itself until it finally reached a random point on the outer edge of the circle. He took a step back and gazed at the diagrams, his eyes roaming and calculating the various details.
He realised that they had spoken about the two timelines at great lengths but they hadn’t fully discussed the energy and forces involved. Here he could see a potential problem with their hypothesis. If everything in the universe was made up of the fundamental particles, essentially tiny vibrating pockets of energy, then one could deduce that the timelines, particularly their now timeline which held all the possibilities, could hold some form or energy. One could also go further than that and suggest that even thoughts and emotions were made up of the fundamental particles too. The problem was defining what sort of energy that may or may not involve. Kyle frowned as his brain ticked over. Another problem was the fact that each loop of the now timeline grew with every moment. Sophia had said entropy increased because information increased. That meant that somehow energy was increasing with every passing moment and every new loop. However, Kyle knew that Newton’s second law of thermodynamics stated that energy could not be created or destroyed. This posed a problem for their now timeline; if the loops got bigger, what was the energy responsible for it and where was it coming from? It would have to be an energy that had always been there, and it would have to be virtually limitless, but what was it exactly? He was deep in thought as he stared at the pages tacked on his wall, hoping the answer would suddenly jump out at him. A knock at his door drew him out of his intense focus.
‘Hello?’ he called. Dani appeared.
‘Hey Kyle I…’ She halted on the spot, the door handle in her hand as she gazed into his room with wide eyes.
‘Are you alright?’ he asked slowly as he followed the line of her sight to the wall above his bed.
‘Wow,’ she said. ‘When did you start decorating your room?’
‘It’s not really decorating.’ Kyle laughed and her eyes widened even more until he thought they might pop out of her head. ‘What?’ he said slowly, his face faltering. Dani blinked.
‘No, no, don’t screw up your face like that!’ she said quickly. ‘It’s just…’ She hesitated. ‘You don’t really laugh that much.’ Kyle paused; he didn’t really know what to say to that so he shrugged half-heartedly. Dani let the door swing shut as she drew nearer to his bed. ‘What are you doing?’ she asked.
‘Thinking about a physics theory me and a friend came up with,’ Kyle replied, his eyes going back to the pages tacked on his wall.
‘These are pretty diagrams,’ she said, pointing to the circles with the many pointed stars. ‘I have no idea what they mean, but they’re pretty.’
‘They’re diagr
ams to explain a moment in time and all the decisions and possibilities open to that person at that particular moment.’
‘What, like whether you’re going to walk or run?’ Dani asked. Kyle laughed.
‘Yes, that would be a tiny fraction of the possibilities,’ he said. ‘I mean everything though, what clothes a person will wear, who they may call, what TV channel they might watch, what they might eat or drink, whether they’ll get in a car, train, plane or boat… everything.’
‘Ohhhh I think I see,’ Dani said as she scrutinised the diagram. ‘It’s like those sliding door moment thingies.’
‘Yes, sort of.’ Kyle nodded.
‘Wait, why have you put imaginary possibilities on your diagram?’
‘Those are all the possible thoughts your brain can have in that moment,’ Kyle replied. ‘They’re not necessarily physical possibilities.’
‘But that could be an infinite amount.’
‘Yeah.’ Kyle shrugged.
‘Mind blowing,’ Dani said. ‘What about the ones on the edge of the star thing?’
‘Oh, those are the possibilities that can be both imaginary and physical. Also, the longer the arms, the less likely they are to happen.’
‘Oh right, like becoming famous overnight?’ Dani asked, her face brightening.
‘Or winning the lottery,’ Kyle said.
‘Fascinating.’ Dani grinned.
‘Well, I think it is. We’ve been trying to think of how physics and time relates to all of this.’
‘Who is we?’ Dani asked casually, a small smirk tugging up the corner of her lips.
‘Oh, just me and Sophia.’
‘Sophia eh?’ Dani said. ‘Is this the same Sophia Cameron was talking about?’
‘It’s not like that.’ Kyle’s face flushed crimson.
‘Sure it isn’t,’ Dani said as she winked suggestively at him.
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