Chapter 20: The Space Between, Part 2

"Should I make you a cup of tea or something?" Bill asked.

"No." Now I was slightly embarrassed about my outburst. But I did come to a conclusion. "You know, telling people about the future is not a good idea. You don't really want to know this stuff."

"I agree with you," he said while sitting on the arm of his reclining chair. "But that goes with the rest of the story. Sly, James, and Ethel."

"Oh, right. What happened to them?"

"James had a hard time. He felt that he needed to convince everyone. No one believed him. Honestly, when it came to history, none of us remembered much about historical facts. I mean, we could tell you that there are going to be computers in every home, we could tell you when two planes were going to crash into the World Trade Center, but none of us knew anything that we could use to convince people right here and now.

"James didn't know how to keep a low profile and well…he got arrested for disorderly conduct and then committed. He's like that crazy conspiracy theorist." Bill ran his hand through his long hair. "If I was a super hero I'd just bust in there and break him out, but despite the supernatural things happening to me, I don't have an extraordinary powers. We just have to wait until he figures it out—that we have to keep a low profile in order to survive this, or else they will break him down and convince him that he really is delusional.

"Sly got released from the psych ward, and he's accepted his fate and is enjoying reliving this part of his life with his wife—while he still has time with her." Bill frowned. "He doesn't want to go back to the future and doesn't want to be reminded of it. And he's made it pretty clear that he doesn't want me or James around as a constant reminder."

I sensed how painful that was to Bill.

He looked at me and shrugged. "Sly thinks that this is a blessing from God. This is God's way of giving him a second chance."

I nodded. I liked that thought.

"But why start me back at eight years old? Why screw with me like that?" Bill stood and stormed into the kitchen, returning with two bottles of Perrier. He handed one to me and seemed a bit calmer.

"I wish I knew why we were both sent back," I said while accepting the sparkling water gratefully. "But I partially agree with Sly. I think that God wants me to do something important, to fix something that's broken. Maybe that's what Sly is doing now. Maybe it's what you're supposed to do—before your mom passes away."

Bill gnawed on his lip. "I don't think this is an act of God."

"If not God, then how else did we get here?"

He raised a hand. "Hear me out. "You've heard of wormholes, right?"

"Yeah…those things that have the power to crush anything that enters it." Yeah, I had watched a few sci-fi movies.

"No. It is the singularity within a black hole that crushes you."

I gave him a blank look.

"The singularity is a point within the black hole where gravity and density, which is so huge, is squeezed into a small space. Entering it, yes, would destroy you. But there is this mathematician by the name of Kerr who has a theory that the centrifugal force of dying stars collapsed into a rotating ring of neutron stars would create a rotating black hole, which could allow a traveler to completely avoid the singularity, because it would be on the outside, not the inside. It's called a Kerr Black Hole or a Kerr ring." He was speaking excitedly, but I was already lost.

"Are you a physicist?"

"No." He gestured to a bookshelf over-flowing with books. "But I've been studying this stuff. Einstein describes time as being connected to space, okay? So picture it like a strip of paper or a ribbon. If the ribbon is folded, then the space between can form a wormhole. But in 1955 this guy named John Wheeler said that this space in between is like foam with bubbles and imperfections. Well tiny wormholes are constantly blinking in and out of existence, and if these were Kerr holes, then you can enter the black hole and come out on the other end as a white hole, which is like the exhaust of the black hole."

I tried to follow, I really did, but I shrugged. "How would this explain the appearance of the letters?"

Bill smiled. "Well I'm happy you asked. The Kerr hole has not been proven. We are years away from something like that. Years. But what if in the future time can be controlled? What if we are able to return to the past to relive our lives?"

I was frowning. "Are you saying that we sent ourselves to the past?"

Bill pointed at me. "Yes!"

"But if people arbitrarily had the ability to return to the past, then it would cause mass chaos. Everybody would be changing the history of the world."

"Okay, no," Bill said excitedly. "Okay, listen to this. So you came from early November, 2016. Your version of the world has stopped but not the total version of the world. The world continued, events happened following true destiny, and then when it got to February 2017, I left. Each person has something like a bubble of time. Your bubble stopped when you left, and now there is a tiny trail leading off course as the main timeline continues pushing forward. If the day before I left I went into your office, I would see you still existing in February 2017 as if you had never left. That is why when we returned here, we didn't run into another version of ourselves! Don't you see? We only changed our bubbles."

"If your theory is true, then why the letters with their single message? Why wouldn't we explain what was going to happen and what we needed to do?"

Bill watched me silently before he spoke in a much calmer voice. "This part of my theory is a guess, but I think that once you do it, travel back in time, you can't be told too much. You can't know for sure. For instance, if someone told you that you would live to be a hundred and would be wealthy and beautiful, then doesn't that give you the freedom to do anything? You would become fearless, doing things that might kill others, but knowing that you are destined to fulfill this…this prophecy. I think that we have…do-overs until we get it right. So in James' case, he is probably going to have a do-over. Maybe it's been determined that this 'anonymous' method is the best method because we've done it before."

"Okay," I said, still not believing his theory. "So we don't allow ourselves to know what's really going on. So what's the point? I can guarantee you that there is nothing in my life that has ever made me want to relive my teen years. Nothing!"

"But it's about getting to the end and becoming the best person that we can be—better than what we ended up being had we not come. And we're not changing the world's future just our own future."

I didn't say anything for a long time. "You're the common denominator in all of this. You find me, James finds you, and we learn about Sly and Ethel. Why?"

Bill shook his head. "I don't know the answer to that. Maybe we're supposed to know each other. Maybe we know each other in the future."

Hmm. If Sly was supposedly from a future where all of this wormhole shenanigans would come to fruition, then he would be pretty damn old. Or, it was going to happen relatively soon because he was already in his fifties in the eighties.

"I suppose what you are saying could be right, but I feel that my theory about God sending us back in time to fix our lives is just as feasible."

"God. Us. What's the difference?" Bill shrugged.