The Watch – Part 118:

‘No, sorry, I can’t wait. I need to know the answer,’ Amy said straightening up. I looked at her with a confused expression, questioning her on what she meant, ‘about how many timelines we created,’ she said with that tone that meant it was an obvious answer.

‘Oh, yes,’ I said, sitting upright myself and putting all my concentration into this conversation.

‘So, Tom came here to tell us that his parents were caught in an unexpected explosion at their workplace.’ She started to explain and then continued by saying what she wanted as bullet points. ‘We went back to stop that explosion from ever happening. There were a few complications regarding the receptionist, but we overcame them and eventually met up with his parents. We found the bomb, then went back in time again to destroy it that way, his parents won’t know anything about you and your secret. That’s new timeline one.’

‘OK,’ I nodded.

‘Due to us creating that new timeline, when we returned to the present, Tom had disappeared from the sofa because he was never there in the first place, because his parents are still alive. New timeline, new parallel universe, and because of that we suddenly found ourselves in the middle of a paradox when our…?’ she wasn’t sure where to go from here.

‘Parallel-counterparts walked in through the front door,’ I said.

‘Yes, they did,’ she said before continuing. ‘And then you explained that this paradox is what is different in that universe and the one we had just come from… does that make sense.’

‘Does to me,’ I said.

‘I think that’s OK,’ she smiled teasingly. ‘Anyway,’ she dismissed that small breakaway with a wave of her hand, ‘our parallel counterparts gave us a piece of paper and told us to take it into the past where we must give them that piece of paper, and then they can then take it to us in the future – but they will be our past-selves. That means…’ I could tell that she was struggling to straighten out events in her head by the way her eyes were darting about. I wasn’t doing much better either. ‘Our past-selves will be in the future, and we – their future-selves – will be in the past. We would have switched.’ She was pleased that she understood that and carried on. ‘However, when we arrived in the past, we discovered that your past-self didn’t have the watch.’ She quickened up her talking speed for the next part. ‘We later discovered that the watch has built in safety mechanisms which prevents from being more than one watch per universe – because we were our present-selves, we still have the watch, but because they aren’t, they don’t have the watch; plus, they are technically our parallel-selves as well as we were in a new universe, but they didn’t know that… anyway.’ She breathed in deeply to regain all that lost oxygen in one go and carried on.

‘So, we took our parallel counterparts into the future where they would continue on the paradox and complete it. No new timeline has been created up to this point, but the moment we arrived back into the future, and the watch’s safety guards automatically kicked in therefore taking the watch from our past-selves as well, that was when a new timeline was created, because that never happened before and they had no way of travelling through time. That’s new timeline two.’ She checked to make sure she was still following this properly before asking me, to which I nodded.

‘After much discussing and finding our answers and all that jazz, we eventually solved the problem by taking our parallel counterparts into the future, and our past-selves back into the past. Taking our parallel counterparts into the future doesn’t create a new timeline; we only travelled along the one we had just created instead, but the moment we took our past-selves back into the past, we created a new timeline… because they would obviously be doing things differently to what their counterparts in the future. So that’s new timeline three.

‘And when we arrived back in the present,’ her energy picked up for the finale, ‘we created yet another timeline because we would obviously be doing things differently to our other-selves – and because we have the watch. That’s new timeline four.’ As soon as she was finished, she deflated and fell against the back of the sofa, breathing heavily as she needed to regain all that lost oxygen for speaking so much for long periods of time.

‘Four new timelines,’ Amy said, sitting back upright again. ‘From the simple act of travelling through time and changing events, we created four new timelines, and that means four new complete universes. That’s totally mind-blowing. You do know that means that there are four new universes out there, that we created. We created four new universes. Or did we? We did, didn’t we?’

‘I believe that’s what happened,’ I smiled.

‘And I thought my mind couldn’t be any more blown,’ she said falling back for the third time. ‘As much as I am tired, I know I won’t be able to sleep after that revelation.’

‘Yeah, me neither,’ I said simply, still grinning.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.

‘Nothing. I’m just pleased that you’re happy, that’s all.’

‘And the moment has just switched being corny,’ Amy said, laughing to filter out all those incomprehensible thoughts.

‘Sorry,’ I said catching her contagious laugh.

‘But that is sweet, though,’ she said after calming down and placing her head on my shoulder. I rested my head gently on hers and we fell silent. We sat there for a few minutes, just embracing each other’s company before Amy broke the silence by saying. ‘You know what I really fancy right now, but also you do owe one after that corny comment’ Amy said stretching.

‘What’s that?’

‘Pizza.’

‘I’ll grab the phone.’

TO BE CONTINUED…

Thanks for reading

Antony Hudson

(TonyHadNouns)