by JB Dutton
* * * * *
I knocked on the door of the Temple of Truth apartment. This was the first time I’d gone right up to it in plain sight. No sneaking through tunnels and creeping around anymore.
I folded my arms and tapped my foot impatiently. Then I heard Noon’s voice in my head.
“Go home, Kari. I’ll meet you there in five minutes.”
That totally weirded me out. I stood there for another minute, wondering if I should do what his voice had told me. I reasoned that it wasn’t really much different than getting a text from him, and did as he had asked.
When I opened my door to him a few minutes later, he smiled slightly and I melted inside. He was right – he had been with me my whole life. I knew why his presence was so calming. Because it felt like home. But now, since last night, there was another factor – the excitement of making out with him had awakened a whole bunch of other feelings, both physical and emotional.
I pulled him into the apartment and kissed him. He seemed surprised, but soon responded, and we continued, right there in the doorway, for I don’t know how long.
Eventually he stopped and caught his breath. I wondered – was his Embodied form used to... intimacy? To being touched the way that I touched him?
“Kari,” he said, “They won’t let me see you.”
My heart sank. “What do you mean?”
“The Temple of Truth project is bigger than me or you. It’s bigger than...”
I completed his sentence for him: “Than our love? Isn’t love the biggest thing in the world? In the universe? That’s what I grew up believing.”
“There won’t even be a universe if we keep seeing each other.”
“Why?!! What’s this all about?”
He walked past me, deep in thought. Then he turned back as though he’d had some brilliant insight.
“Have you ever heard of the observer effect in physics?” he asked.
“Nope.”
“It means that the observer of certain experiments will affect their outcome merely by observing.”
“Okaaay...”
“Did you ever see your mom check the pressure in her car tires?”
Where the eff was he going with this?
“Yes, with one of those gauges that looks a bit like a silver pen.”
“Right, so when you push that gauge into the tire valve to check the pressure, you always let out some air, and that changes what the pressure was before you measured it.”
“Noon, get to the point!”
“The point is that us falling in love is affecting the project.”
I shook my head. “I think you’re just scared. I don’t think you’ve ever felt emotions like this before.”
He bit his lip. “You’re right – I am scared.”
This admission took me by surprise.
“But that’s not what’s stopping me,” he continued. “There’s so much more at stake here.”
“I really don’t get it, but I know you’re not going to tell me.”
“I can’t.”
We stood there in silence for a few seconds. Then I remembered why I’d wanted to see him in the first place.
“So if you’ve been visiting Earth for thousands of years... I need to know... um, I need to ask you something. It would mean the world to me and I’d be grateful to you for the rest of my life.”
The tension drained from his face. He really did care about me. It was totally obvious.
“Okay. Whatever I can do.”
“So, my dad died when I was four. A freak car accident.”
His eyes suddenly looked pained and although it was subtle, his perfect features... tightened somehow. He even lowered his gaze for a millisecond. He never did that. His voice cracked and faltered as he answered. “I... I know.”
He knew. I guess if he really had been with me my whole life, he would know.
“Okay, well, here’s the thing,” I said. “Can you go back in time? Can you go back and save him – change whatever it was that made him crash? Like, if a deer running across the road made him swerve, scare it away a few seconds earlier? Or put sand on the road if he skidded on black ice?”
“I’m sorry, but I can’t.”
I could feel my throat constricting and my voice getting higher. “Look, I’ve seen science fiction movies. I know if you do that you’ll be changing the timeline or whatever for the entire future and maybe you and I will never meet, or one day Mom and him would have a big fight about her leaving for New York and get a divorce, but I don’t care because I just want to have known him, for him to be there in my life somewhere – not just a shadowy memory and a bunch of old photos.”
Noon put his hands on my shoulders and stared deep into my eyes. Calmness had returned to his face. My breathing rate slowed down. I gulped, blinking back the tears.
“I can’t because it’s simply impossible, Kari. The Embodied aren’t able to travel through time.”
Was he lying?
“The Dark Universe is in the same time stream as the Light Universe,” he continued. “In fact they’re both part of the same universe. Time flows forward for me the exact same way that it does for you. No one, nothing, can swim against that current, whether they are in the Dark or Light Universe. It simply cannot happen.”
“But you and Aranara were there thousands of years ago in ancient Greece!”
“Yes.”
“So...?”
“So, we have different life spans than human beings. We aren’t organic like you. In fact, in the Dark Universe we aren’t even life forms the same way that creatures in your world are.”
“But you live and die?” I asked.
“We just... kind of... persist. The best analogy would be self-replicating computer code.”
I didn’t give a rat’s ass about what kind of analogy was best – my brain was desperately searching for a solution. I guess I’d gotten my hopes up too much and couldn’t face the reality that there was no more chance of restoring my father’s life today than there had been yesterday.
Noon stroked my hair. “I’m really sorry.”
I shuffled into the kitchen. “I’m so thirsty.”
Noon followed me. “You heard from your mother?”
I filled a glass, wondering how he could know. Right – he had a direct link to my brain – of course he knew.
“Yeah. I got this email.”
I held up my phone for him to read it.
“I don’t think it’s really from her though.”
“I’ll accompany you to the airport,” he said. “Even if it isn’t your real mom, it’s still the only way we have of finding her.”
I chugged the glass of water and wiped a drip from my chin.
“Okay.”
“Good – I’ll come get you around 2. But I have to go now. I really can’t spend time with you.”
“Fine – so go,” I said, and turned away.
A few seconds later I heard the apartment door close. And he was gone.
