by Sean McMahon
‘How so?’ said Kara, looking for Fearne and accepting she wasn’t going to restart along with the rest of them.
Not this time.
‘Well, I know for us this is like our billionth restart, but technically we’re just reliving our 165th, right?’
‘Oh,’ said Kara, seeing where he was going. ‘So, you think there’s a past version of us already putting our plan in action?’
‘Exactly,’ said Hal, shivering for a moment and taking a step backwards, as if he was somehow treading on the toes of an out-of-phase version of his past-self.
‘So, all we need to do,’ surprised that she wasn’t on the verge of getting a headache from all the time travel theory, ‘is make sure nothing gets in the way of our past-selves carrying out their Time Heist?’
They stood there for several minutes, mentally twiddling their thumbs and wondering what they should do next, as a shrill popping noise signalled the arrival of Future Malcolm.
‘Man,’ said Hal. ‘Wouldn't it be awesome if we could just generate a montage and skip to the end when all this grafting is done?’
‘That would be pretty great, yeah.’
Malcolm smiled at them, a look of mischievousness in his eyes.
‘Urgh, please don’t smile. There’s nothing creepier than when you’re in a good mood,’ added Kara.
‘I was just contemplating your idea on skipping to the end,’ said Malcolm.
‘Oh, don’t you dare leave all this for us to deal with you–’ began Kara.
‘See you tomorrow evening. You know when to find me,’ said Malcolm, dematerialising into their respective future.
‘Such a twat,’ remarked Hal with prolific incredulity.
‘Let him go,’ said Kara with a flimsy wave of her hand. ‘We work better without him anyway.’
Hal nodded in agreement. ‘Okay, so where do we start?’
Hal checked his non-existent watch, trying to remember exactly where they were at this point in what their past-selves had assumed would be their final restart.
‘Friday. Twelvish. I guess we just stay out of each other’s way,’ said Hal pulling out his phone from his pocket. ‘Can I steal a charge?’
‘Only if I can choose the music?’
Kara smiled at the impending payment for his services as Hal shrugged at her terms, and they held hands causing the phone to spring to life.
‘Woah, it doesn’t usually charge that quick,’ noted Kara, taking the phone from him and turning her back on him. ‘What’s your passcode?’
‘No,’ said Hal, a look of concern on his face that went entirely unnoticed by Kara. ‘No, it doesn’t…’
‘Hal. If you want me to drop the needle, I’m going to need your passcode,’ she repeated.
‘Huh?’ he responded, pulled away from his worry over Kara’s increasingly innate ability to bend the rules he was still very much shackled by. ‘Oh. Sorry. One, six, five, zero. Please don’t pick anything rubbish for the soundtrack to our last restart.’
‘No pressure then,’ said Kara, shooting him a wink. ‘You know, you’re an identity thief’s dream,’ remembering he had used that code for his gun’s lockbox as well, and that he probably used that code for everything. Temporal lucidity, it seemed, was nothing if not repetitive.
She spun around having settled on a song, aiming the phone at him like a Starfleet-issue ray-gun before pressing play, as Good Charlotte’s “The Chronicles of Life and Death” began blaring from the speakers.
‘Emo much?’
‘Hey, it’s your music library,’ she countered.
‘Touché.’
*
The afternoon breezed by, as they relived a very familiar Friday, until 3:33pm, when Hal started to get antsy. They were standing at the end of the rear garden, watching the events unfold.
‘Where did you go?’ said Hal, plonking himself down on the grass. ‘When you and Evil Malcolm went all Hayden Christensen and teleported, I mean.’
‘The White Lodge,’ she said simply.
‘Yeah, that’s what Malcolm suspected. But that shouldn’t be possible should it? Going there without Future Malcolm?’
‘Maybe it’s because I was attached to Malcolm? Dark Restarter Malcolm I mean?’ she offered.
Hal wasn’t convinced. ‘He said he didn’t score that gift until after his stay at the hospital, though.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean he wasn’t able to access The White Lodge until after his battle with you…’
They watched idly as their alive-selves blasted a weathered shuttlecock between them, the sounds of laughter meeting their ears amidst the energetic thwacks of the rackets.
‘How did you get out?’ asked Hal eventually, assuming the answer may have rested somewhere within the question.
‘You saved me. And Rachel. I was done.’
She recounted how Malcolm’s past-self had her on the ropes, had cut her badly. How the edges of the nexus had been burnt away to nothingness. And how they had been swarmed by the Time Vampires that stalked the eerie dimension of folded space-time. How Hal himself had led her to a breach of sorts; a gateway back to her Hal and Future Malcolm.
‘At first I thought it was really you. But…we were wrong about the creatures Hal. They weren’t what we thought they were.’
‘How do you mean?’ said Hal, brow furrowed.
‘I think…I think they were us.’
Hal stared in disbelief. That was a huge claim to process.
Kara attempted to elaborate, trying to piece together the limited facts she had at her disposal.
‘I think…every time we restart, a version of ourselves gets transported to that White Lodge Nexus place.’
Hal shivered.
Up until now they had simply assumed that once a restart was done, they were transported to the next one. But if Kara was right, it meant they were not only disintegrated at a molecular level, but duplicated, just as Future Malcolm had claimed.
The implications of that made him sick to his stomach.
If he and Kara, right here and right now, were copies of their original selves, were they even the real Hal and Kara at all?
‘That could explain the static fog,’ said Hal, referring to the seemingly sentient mist that swirled around them and hindered their minds during prolonged exposure to multiple restart cycles. ‘As the fog gets thicker, what if that’s as close to Restarter death as you can get.’
‘You mean if you were to stay here too long? In a restart loop?’
‘Yeah. Stay too long and eventually you end up there?’ Hal theorised, referring to The White Lodge.
‘I think that’s why they wanted to draw power from us,’ said Kara sadly. ‘So they could be whole again. If just for a little while. So they could communicate.’
‘Wait, you said you saw Rachel there?’
‘I did. Though I don’t know how she could have been there. Not unless–’
‘Everyone who has Restarted has been duplicated…’ said Hal, finishing her sentence. ‘Were there lots of Malcolms there too?’
‘Nope. Just a bunch of “us’s”. Well, and a handful of Peters and Fearnes, with some Rachels and Alexs for good measure as far as I could tell. It was weird.’ She couldn’t be certain, but she was sure she even saw a couple of Santas.
‘I’ll bet.
‘No, I mean, they tried to speak to me. But their words were garbled. They were speaking in reverse.’
‘Sounds creepy,’ said Hal thoughtfully, and Kara nodded in agreement as she recollected the experience.
‘Kinda makes you think, right?’’ said Hal, sitting upright.
‘About what?’
‘Well, if there are hundreds of “us’s” running around in that nexus...’
‘Oh...’
‘Yeah. Where were the Restarted Malcolms?’
Kara mused over that bombshell for a moment. Where were the Restarter Malcolms?
‘Heads up,’ said Hal. ‘We’ve got company.’
>
She put the disturbing question aside as Jerry appeared to her left, peeking out through the hedge like a ninja, before sprinting towards the badminton quartet. Hal chuckled as they heard Kara’s past-self crying out about a dog attack.
‘Oh, bloody hell, the hell hounds at The White Lodge! They must’ve been–’
‘Restarted Jerrys!’ said Hal, slapping his forehead. It was so obvious to him now. All those Restarts Jerry had spent with Peter and Fearne, each time recreating an echo of the four-legged honorary Restarter.
Hal was about to dive into the ramifications of that, when the hairs on his arms rose.
‘Something’s wrong. I feel like we’ve forgotten something…’
‘How so?’ replied Kara.
‘It’s gotta be exact, right?’
‘Yeah, what are you thinking?’
‘Well, right now, Jerry should be running to check out that flowerpot, shouldn’t he?’
‘Oh yeah, Jerry came over to see us.’ It was the first time they realised Jerry could seem them in their Restarter form.
‘No, Jerry came over to see us on our first ever restart,’ corrected Hal. ‘There’s no reason for him to leave the group right now. Because there’s nothing to attract him. But he definitely ran off somewhere when we were alive, remember?’
‘Oh,’ said Kara. ‘Oh! Shit!’
He watched, as his Kara set off at a sprint towards the flowerpot, charging after her upon realising she got what he was getting at.
‘Here boy!’ Jerry seeming to sense her Restarter-self rushing past him, his ears twitching as they caught a sound only he could hear.
He moved away from the badminton game he had interrupted, shaking from head to tail, and shot off after the Restarter to see what all the fuss was about, sniffing at her ankles as she stood by the potted plant.
After a reasonable amount of time, and the timeline seemingly back on track, Kara started to panic. Jerry hadn’t stayed in this spot for this long, had he? He had run off around the side.
She heard someone calling Jerry’s name and was relieved to see it was her Hal, who had taken the long way around the lodge, trying to get the dog’s attention, though Hal needn’t have bothered.
In fact, neither of them had needed to intervene at all.
Jerry was already sauntering over to another patch of grass, and began rolling on his back, interacting with what Kara knew to be a version of herself invisible to her own eyes; one occupying one of her latter repeats of their 165th Restart.
And so it was that Jerry’s timeline for Friday had come full circle, with Kara and Hal marvelling over how Jerry could sense them from across multiple phases of existence, countless restarts apart.
‘Because time travel,’ said Kara, releasing a short puff of air and aiming her sarcasm at the plant pot which remained entirely inanimate and forever unhelpful.
*
At 11:04am the following morning, Kara and Hal watched in silence as the box of screws slid across the floor towards a worktop, smiling as a screwdriver fell into the box from the counter, then made its way once more of its own volition and into the storage room that would later become Kevin’s prison.
‘Man, that would be super creepy if you walked in on that, right?’ noted Hal. ‘Like, coming down here and seeing a box moving on its own like that?
‘Time Heist? Check!’ said Kara. ‘What’s next? Pretty much just the balloons, champagne glasses and cork–’
‘Oh my,’
‘–left to go, right?’ said Kara, ignoring his Wizard of Oz joke.
‘Oh my crap,’ said Hal, suddenly worried. ‘Will Peter and Fearne still be glitching tonight if their Restarter-selves aren’t there to, ya know,’ Hal shook his hands and made a noise that was meant to sound like lightning.
‘I guess we’ll just have to be ready if that plays out differently.’
‘But there are only two of us, and they’re at opposite ends of the lodge,’ said Hal, showing signs of stress. ‘It’ll take both of us to keep one of them occupied, let alone both.’
‘Will you calm down,’ said Kara. ‘You’re starting to make me panic, Hal.’
But he had a point.
*
Luck was for once on their side, as the past crimes of their Restarted counterparts played out as normal, with Peter being held in place in the physical world by his past-self and the assistance of what was confusingly a past incarnation of a future Malcolm.
Both Kara and Hal refused to dwell on that too much, deciding to circumvent paradoxical insanity by taking comfort in the realisation Peter and Fearne’s actions across time had cemented themselves as a temporal constant.
Fearne’s alive-self spun around, knocking into some champagne flutes, but instead of letting them fall, Hal instinctively reacted and reached out to prevent them from toppling, his out-of-phase molecules reverberating with solidity given how close he was to his alive-self.
‘What the hell did you do that for?’ said Kara.
‘I’m sorry, I just reacted!’
‘Well, I guess now we know when the champagne flutes stopped falling,’ said Kara sourly.
‘Yeah, my bad. Who knew? Righty oh,’ said Hal. ‘Next stop, Kevin’s. I’ll run ahead and make sure that’s playing out as it should be.’
‘I guess I’ll stay here and watch the shop, then.’
Hal saluted, and Kara reciprocated, finding herself in the utterly bizarre reality of knowing there was the echo of herself moving pool balls around, none the wiser that, less than three feet away, a version of herself from the future was chaperoning her actions to make sure she didn’t bodge it all up on the last stretch.
Kara watched as her alive-self departed with a still-living version of Hal, then recoiled in horror as they closed the door behind them. She glanced back to the pool table, then at the double entrance doors.
They needed to be open. She remembered them being open.
She was about to panic, until an unprecedented truth dawned on her.
Kara walked towards the entrance doors, her alive-self having just departed and therefore close enough for her to draw a modest charge. Not that she needed it any more. Unlike Hal, she seemed to be able to draw a charge whenever she pleased.
She reached out for the handle, feeling a sense of relief as it yielded under her touch. She let go of it and pressed her palm gently against the glass, pushing outwards.
Kara thought back, to when her time-travelling-self had been leaning on that pool table; how she had forgotten her own name, entirely freaking out over her lack of memories as they had drained away from her.
She looked back over her shoulder, her past-Restarter-self still presumably leaning against the exact same pool table, albeit out of phase, noting the black 8-Ball was still in play. This meant her Restarter-self was yet to pot it accidentally by brushing against it.
“I wonder,” thought Kara, wandering closer and reaching out into the space above the table, twisting her hand in the empty air, a brief spark erupting from her hand and disappearing into nothingness. Or, perhaps, giving her past Restarting-self the nudge she needed to snap out of it.
Kara looked down, the 8-Ball moving of its own accord and falling into the centre pocket.
She smiled, realising that she had been supporting herself all along, and she hadn’t even known it.
‘Run Kara…’ she murmured. ‘Run.’
*
‘Something’s wrong,’ said Hal, who had been greeted at Kevin’s by Future Malcolm. ‘That plate isn’t budging’
They peered at it together, as if searching for a divine intervention that had apparently got held up, perhaps nursing a nasty hangover.
‘Maybe I should knock it off?’ said Hal. ‘Our Restarter selves are doing their thing, but everything needs to be like it was before…’
‘Do not touch it. It will fall when it is meant to fall.’
‘It’s not going to fall, Malc,’ said Hal impatiently.
‘If you knock it now and
it’s too early, it could ruin everything!’
Hal moved closer to the circular anomaly, causing Malcolm to push him away, until eventually they were both heatedly slapping at each other, both of them looking utterly ridiculous and neither displaying the finely-honed skills of combat Malcolm not only possessed, but had also imparted onto Hal.
Eventually, Hal won the scuffle, reaching around Malcolm and flicking the plate with his finger, causing a muted ding to fill the room, which in turn made Malcolm’s alive past-self stop in his tracks, until finally the plate tipped over the edge of the drainer and collided with the floor, the ceramic shattering violently.
Alive-Malcolm groaned, and turned his back on the basement, proceeding to clear it up.
‘Was that it?’ said Hal, feeling let down that the ripple they were sending back through time served no other purpose than to temporarily delay Malcolm from his inevitable path. ‘Lame.’
Future Malcolm sighed, wondering what he had done to deserve being trapped here with such people.
‘I don’t know, maybe killing all those other people?’ said Hal.
Malcolm’s expression was one of a man having been caught in the socially awkward act of belittling someone in their presence. He was about to ask how Hal knew what he had been thinking when he realised he was still holding Hal’s arm.
He released his grip on the Restarter and snapped his arm away from him.
‘Stay out of my head, Harold.’
‘Don’t look at me. It’s not my fault our abilities have gone Super Saiyan. Maybe you’re drawing on your alive-self more than you realise. And past-me is only up the road.’
‘Hmmmmmm….’
Kara burst through the open front door of Kevin’s lodge causing Hal to squeal in shock. An act he tried to cover up by clearing his throat.
‘I thought you were–’
‘–The other Kara. Yeah, yeah,’ she said rolling her eyes. ‘I’m not even wearing the right clothes! You scare way too easily.’
