“Write down everything you remember from the future. We’ll find out why your day’s repeating, how your mind traveled back in time, and why you didn’t loop again yesterday.”
“I think I figured that last part out.”
Jeremy shook his head. “And why’s that?”
“Before I time-looped the first time, I was thinking about what happened that day, just because everything went so wrong. I did the same thing before I slept each night. I dreamt the night before about meeting Cameron, so I was already thinking about this point in my life.
“The night before I came here, I thought about why I was stuck in a time-loop. Instead of thinking about August 7th, 2021, I thought about yesterday, August 15th, 1999, the day my parents bought me the new bike. I think that’s why I ended up back here yesterday.”
“Why didn’t you just ask my future self?”
Quinn changed the subject, hoping Jeremy didn’t notice.
“I don’t think you’re hearing me,” Quinn replied.
“I heard you. You said you thought about yesterday.”
“Exactly. I thought about yesterday. And before I looped in time, I thought about the same day. Don’t you get it? All I have to do is think about what day I want to wake up in, and I do.”
“That would be frikkin’ awesome,” Jeremy said.
“Let’s say I’m right. It still doesn’t explain why,” Quinn replied.
“I was thinking about that, too. Who knows if or when I can get back or if time will suddenly stop looping. But when I’m ready, I’m hoping I can just think about 2021 right before I fall asleep and wake up there the next day, no problem. And I need to go back soon, just to make sure my last day in 2021 is the same,” Quinn added.
“What if you can’t?”
“I don’t want to think about it. I’m not sure if I would want to relive my whole life again. But if I’m stuck here, I’m sure I could use what I know about the future. Maybe make things better the second time around.”
“Now we’re talking. What kind of things?”
Quinn stroked his chin. With no superpowers, except for time travel, he needed money. It would give him the clout he needed to make changes and convince other people to help him. It was like oxygen, necessary for survival.
Quinn also knew Jeremy’s complicated relationship with finance, one forged by Jeremy’s poverty-stricken youth, and his later rise above it as a successful entrepreneur. Some people saw Jeremy’s persistent money-talk as greed or insecurity. Still, Jeremy quashed those notions by building the small business community in his neighborhood as an adult.
Quinn thought the money discussion would draw him in, even if he didn’t fully buy the time travel storyline.
“The stock market drops early next year. The NASDAQ crashes like 80% or something. I know YAHOO’s stock tanks in the first quarter. If I could buy some out-of-the-money put options, I could make like... a thousand times my money.”
“What’s an outside-the-money thig-a-ma-jig?”
“Something people buy when they think a stock is going to go down. If it does, they make money. There’s always ways to make money in the market regardless of whether it’s going up or down. You just have to know where to look.”
“I hope you’re right, but there’s a problem. You’re fourteen. Don’t you have to be like eighteen to open an account?”
“Not if I can get my dad to do it for me. I can give him the allowance money I saved up. If I remember right, I have a few hundred bucks. He’ll just think I’m being responsible. He always understood the value of investing and compound interest. He had more of a healthy understanding of personal finance than most people. If I do it right, I can make ten times my money. But I can probably make an investment like that only once or twice because I don’t remember that many stock market crashes. I mostly just remember a few long-term trends.”
“You kinda sound like you are from the future.”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
“Your idea’s good, but we can do better. That’s just chump change if what you’re saying is true.”
“What do you think I should do, then?”
Jeremy smiled, “Finally, you see the value of the Jeremy Meister.”
Quinn rolled his eyes, “Don’t let it go to your head.”
“It’s obvious. Isn’t it? If you can loop in time, you don’t have to remember everything from the future. Just repeat the day over a few times to find the things you can use for cash or influence, like sports matches, stock prices, and other stuff. That’s how we can make a killing, get hot girls to love us, and invent cool stuff from the future.”
“If I can still loop time. I think I should be able to get back to the future, anyway, but what if this was just a one-way trip and I can’t?” Quinn asked.
“That’s where your future info comes in, the bigger and more recent stuff the better. Even if we change the timeline, most big things won’t change, at least if they’re close enough to the present. It won’t be as good as time-looping, but it’s still huge.”
“Things always get screwed up in the movies, though. Time travelers usually find a way to draw too much attention to themselves. They end up getting in trouble with the cops or criminals or something, or they break time, or time finds a way to reverse everything,” Quinn said.
August 7th, 2021.
Day 1.
7:32 AM.
Vladimir and two large men lifted the odd-shaped hefty box. The three of them kept an eye out for onlookers as they carted the heavy container for transport.
Vladimir had olive skin and rough eyes. “This should do it,” he said in a thick, Russian accent.
He wore an Italian suit that clearly one wouldn’t wear to move such an object. The police report would have read: two muscular men in black helped a nicely dressed majordomo move a suspicious object. Still, the Russian knew this beforehand, and he was cocksure enough not to care.
The youngest henchman grinned. “Serves them right,” he added in Russian.
“Keep your mouth shut,” Vladimir replied.
Inside the box, a chrome sphere with numerous pistons and levers twisted and spun like an old mechanical clock.
August 16th, 1999.
Day 1.
“I honestly think the only thing that’s going to happen is I’m going to get to keep the five bucks. But if it’s true, maybe you were right about what you said the last time we watched Back to the Future,” Jeremy said.
“You mean about making a new timeline in a brand-new parallel universe, a fork in the multiverse?”
“Exactly. If your multiverse idea is true, then there wouldn’t be a paradox because a new timeline would be created, and you would just be surfing the timeline in a brand-spanking-new parallel world. People always talk about not being able to travel back in time and change things because of paradoxes. This takes care of that.”
“The ‘I killed my grandfather in the past, so how could I be alive to go back and kill my grandfather if I was never born?’ problem.”
“Exactly. The old timeline would still be there, unchanged. You just took a side street. Problem solved, and you can still change things and benefit from your knowledge of the future,” Jeremy said.