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Yang finds that life is not so different after time begins again, at least compared to his original timeline. He mostly wanders around counting his steps and trying to remember. He’s always trying to remember.
One thing they don’t tell you about time travel is how hard it is on the human body and psyche. Yang remembers reading about a man who held the universal record for time jumps. By the time he retired, his body was riddled with all sorts of cancers, some common and treatable, others yet undiscovered by science, the cancerous cells having mutated into something vicious and nearly sentient over countless jumps. He died shortly after retirement, quietly and in agony.
So far, Yang hasn’t had any physical complications. But he’d started suspecting something was wrong with his memory starting from his fiftieth-something jump. He’s on his 107th jump now, and there’s definitely something wrong with his head. At first it was little things, like misplacing the jump remote. Forgetting exact dates, if he’d taken his sanity pills that day, stuff like that. Then he started taking longer to remember the combination to the safe, and that’s when it began to scare him. He resorted to writing the combination down on pieces of sticky strips and slapping them to the walls of his lab and stuffing them into the pockets of his clothes.
His memory’s so fuzzy now that Yang finds it hard to remember whether he ever had any friends in his old timeline. It’s something he thinks about a lot now that most life on Earth has been eliminated, save for a bunch of single-celled organisms. He can’t see them, though he’s probably killing millions of them with every step.
He wonders if, to something else, he’s also the equivalent of a prokaryote. Something mindless and small, the puny, unlikely beginnings of life, and whether one of these days he’ll be the one squished underneath a giant shoe.
He likes this timeline, but it’s a little too quiet for him. He keeps counting all the way back to the lab. 5,338,211 steps. That’s got to be a new record.
∞
Turning his lab into a time machine took him close to sixty years, but that wasn’t the hard part. The hard part was deciding what he’d take with him and what he’d leave behind.
Theoretically, you could make anything into a time machine (you just follow the same steps and protocols – a little like studying for a standardized test – and then apply them to a different set of parameters), but the general rule of thumb was: the smaller the time machine, the better the interdimensional signals would travel, and the less likely you’d get torn to indiscriminate, infinitesimal pieces in the goopy void of space between time realms.
Yang’s lab was already cramped even with just the essentials, comparable in size to a roomy walk-in closet. It took the last of his savings to build and then some, the rest of which he borrowed from whatever banks he could convince to loan to him. He’s probably long since defaulted on those. The good news is currency has become obsolete in most timelines he’s been to.
So, Yang had to be discerning in what he brought with him. He’d already replaced his desk with boxes of photo albums and postcards, souvenirs from past road trips piled up in precarious skyscrapers everywhere. Memories in physical form, unable to be altered.
He spent two entire months debating between bringing a lamp or a flowerpot because Yang knew that once he left his original timeline, it’d be a one in eight trillion chance of him ever getting back. Once he left, he’d be leaving for good.
He decided on the flowerpot in the end. If nothing else, it could double as a container.
∞
Jump #252. There’s no sign of Him here either. Just cows upon cows upon, you guessed it, cows. These cows aren’t like the ones Yang knew in his timeline. For one thing, they’re orange. Bright orange, like cheap Halloween glowsticks. Most have a ridiculous number of eyes (the most Yang counted on one cow was forty-two) and they all levitate a teeny bit off the ground. And instead of udders, they have tiny fangs on their stomachs that shoot out boiling milk when provoked.
He would’ve gotten a kick out of seeing this. He always did say that cows as a species could benefit from some sort of evolutionary armor, slow and defenseless as they were. Yang would point out that cows were in fact quite large and strong and could probably trample a man to death, and then they’d debate the survival chops of a cow during the apocalypse before one of them would get sleepy or horny or hungry and they’d leave to fulfill whatever human need needed to be met.
But He is not here, so Yang moves on to the next timeline, but not before grabbing a couple pints of milk for the journey ahead.
∞
Yang feels old today. More so than usual. Physically, he is thirty-three, but his mind knows his true age, similar to the rings on a tree stump. He left his original timeline an old, old man, and now his recycled youth feels worn and ill-fitting on him like an overstretched sweater.
Jumping through time must have rearranged Yang’s molecules in some impossible accident, aging him backwards to roughly the age he was when he started his research on time travel. It provides him with a sort of messed-up, existential comfort, like a mental balm for the mentally wacky. If Yang’s thirty-three, then it means it’s only been a year since he last saw Him. Yang’s memory is getting worse, but there are some things the brain just doesn’t forget. Another inane comfort.
The air in this timeline smells like roast beef. Yang wonders what happened to the cows in that other timeline. A young woman with long, hairy fingers for breasts approaches him and asks him if he’s lost. She’s almost completely nude, save for a pair of thigh-high snakeskin boots. Yang shakes his head no, but she slips him a $20 bill anyway.
A timeline with currency. He’ll be damned.
Yang takes the money and buys a sandwich with it. He’s feeling a bit peckish, seeing as he hasn’t eaten anything since jump #389. As he’s paying, he realizes that Andrew Jackson looks a little different in this timeline. A little female. And Asian. Yang shrugs; he’s seen weirder. The sandwich guy – who is actually a girl – drops Yang’s change in his hand, the weight of which nearly sends Yang tumbling to the ground. With some effort, Yang gathers the coins and hands them back to the guy-girl. He-she shrugs and turns to help the next customer.
Yang takes a seat on a bench a little further down and bites into his sandwich. It crumbles to pixels in his mouth.
∞
Is Yang lonely? That depends.
What, you think you’re better than him? You with your normal timeline and normal sandwiches? Fuck you. Shut the fuck up.
∞
To qualify for a time travel license, you must go through a series of rigorous steps. There are weekly fitness evaluations, knowledge exams, genetic testing, background checks… and that’s just round one. There’s a million and one hoops to jump through, all to ensure that only the best of the best receive access to this dangerous tool. In the right hands, time travel can be something close to a panacea, capable of undoing genocides and ensuring minimal loss of life in natural disasters. But in the wrong hands, it can be cataclysmic. World-ending potential.
Yang did apply to The Chronos Academy for Multiversal Quantum Jumpers – the leading institution for training time travelers – but failed to pass the interview stage. When he inquired about the reason for his rejection, the brief response merely said he was “not the type of candidate they were looking for”. Yang suspects it was because of his age. At thirty-seven, he was already a great deal older than the majority of the Academy’s students, who average about eleven years old when they start training. Time travel is easier on the bones if those bones haven’t fully become bones yet, just squishy suggestions of them.
According to the aggressive floating billboards dotting Interstate 3339, the Academy claims to be “an equal-opportunity resource for people of all walks of life”. But Yang supposes “inclusivity” is just a snappy word these days, just like “contraception” or “peanut butter”.
So, Yang took the good ole bootstraps route and studied time travel on his own using pirated, outdated Academy training manuals (getting his hands on those on the Black Market nearly bled him dry) and secondhand jump suits stolen from the Academy’s incinerator-dumpsters. He transformed his personal lab into a time machine using scraps scavenged from junkyards, and then whatever he couldn’t find or afford on the Black Market he stole straight from the Academy itself.
Hey, don’t give him that look. Yang would’ve loved to do everything legally and nice if he could have. He tried that, and all it got him was six months of waiting around for a lousy rejection hologram.
It worked out in the end for the most part. Except that Yang must have gotten the wiring wrong with the jump remote because the machine just plops him down whenever it pleases, no rhyme or reason to it. Although the machine seems to prefer traveling forwards over backwards in time. Out of the 617 jumps he’s done so far, Yang’s only been able to go backwards for about twenty of them, and none of them have been backward enough.
He needs to go back. Back, back, back, back, back. Needs to retrace his steps (437,991 of them in this timeline – he’s getting soft). Back before his memory started going to shit. Back before everything started going to shit.
∞
Going back is hard, Yang’s realizing. It goes against the very laws that govern, well, everything. Some examples:
You can vomit out a meal that doesn’t agree with you, but you can’t say you never ate it. You can apologize for something you said, but you can’t take it back. You can break up with someone, but you can’t reverse the heartbreak.
You can build a time machine to try to bring your dead lover back, but it doesn’t change the fact that He died. It doesn’t make the grief any easier to swallow.
There is always a before and an after, but most people don’t realize they’re in the before until they’ve already moved on to the after.
Before them, it was Yang and Him. Separate, lost, orbiting. After, it’s just Yang. Separate. Lost. Orbiting. Sometimes the two can feel the same.
Yang’s mother taught him a trick when he was young, and the world still seemed a little too big. Count things. Anything. Count trees, count bees, count your own stinking knees. Numbers make sense. Not much else does, but numbers do, have, and will. They’ve been proven time and time again. They’re the bedrock of existence.
But Yang learned a new trick as he grew older: sometimes you don’t need numbers. Sometimes, if you’re really really really really lucky, you’ll meet someone who makes everything make sense. All that crazy, messy, awful shit that used to bury you daily, it’ll still be there, but you can see through it now, like a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. And together you’ll roll around in it and laugh and kiss and fall in love, and somewhere in there’s supposed to be a happy ending, like maybe some babies, a SUV, two dogs, and a sunny place in the suburbs. There’s not supposed to be hospitals and chemo, or caskets and condolences.
Things aren’t supposed to go back. People aren’t supposed to go back.
But Yang is not people. Yang is Yang, and Yang has always been a little bit of a stubborn motherfucker.
∞
Self-doubt is a bitch.
Because even if Yang went back to the very beginning, who’s to say he would find Him? Maybe, like everything else, He’s moved on, too. Yang knows he’s already done irreparable damage to his original timeline. How does he know he hasn’t killed his husband twice?
Maybe if he’d noticed it sooner. Caught it when it was still early, still treatable. Paid more attention, talked a little less, didn’t take so much for granted.
Maybes are for losers. Losers and Yang, who is a special type of loser.
∞
He has to go further, further back. Maybe before he was even born, before he became Yang.
Maybe that’s the trick.
∞
These are the things Yang remembers:
1. This is jump #1,103
2. His name is Yang
3. He is 33 and 91 years old
4. He took his sanity pills today
5. 8497
The weather in this timeline is nice. Tropical but with a breeze. Yang’s toes dig into the soft, soft ground beneath him. It jiggles and makes a fsshp fsshp sound. Something swims near his ankle, nibbles on his heel, then poofs away.
Yang hums. Feels himself sinking, sliding into warmth and slime. It’s safe to let go, so he does.
Lets go of his bladder, that is.
∞
6,097… 6,098… 6,099… 6,100… 6,101… 6,102… 6,103… 6,104… 6,105… 6,106… 6,107… 6,108… 6,109… 6,110… 6,111… 6,112… 6,113… 6,114… 6,115… 6,116… 6,117… 6,118… 6,119… 6,120… 6,121… 6,122… 6,123… 6,124… 6,125… 6,126… 6,127… 6,128… 6,129… 6,130… 6,131… 6,132… 6,133… 6,134… 6,135… 6,136… 6,137… 6,138… 6,139… 6,140… 6,141… 6,142… 6,143… 6,144… 6,145… 6,146… 6,147… 6,148… 6,149… 6,150… 6,151… 6,152… 6,153… 6,154… 6,155… 6,156… 6,157… 6,158… 6,159… 6,160… 6,161… 6,162… 6,163… 6,164… 6,165… 6,166… 6,167… 6,168… 6,169… 6,170… 6,171… 6,172… 6,173… 6,174… 6,175… 6,176… 6,177… 6,178… 6,179… 6,180… 6,181… 6,182… 6,183… 6,184… 6,185… 6,186… 6,187… 6,188… 6,189… 6,190… 6,191… 6,192… 6,193… 6,194… 6,195… 6,196… 6,197… 6,198… 6,199… 6,200… 6,201… 6,202… 6,203… 6,204… 6,205… 6,206… 6,207… 6,208… 6,209… 6,210… 6,211… 6,212… 6,213… 6,214… 6,215… 6,216… 6,217… 6,218… 6,219… 6,220… 6,221… 6,222… 6,223… 6,224… 6,225… 6,226… 6,227… 6,228… 6,229… 6,230… 6,231… 6,232… 6,233… 6,234… 6,235… 6,236… 6,237… 6,238… 6,239… 6,240… 6,241… 6,242… 6,243… 6,244… 6,245… 6,246… 6,247… 6,248… 6,249… 6,250… 6,251… 6,252… 6,253… 6,254… 6,255… 6,256… 6,257… 6,258… 6,259… 6,260… 6,261… 6,262… 6,263… 6,264… 6,265… 6,266… 6,267… 6,268… 6,269… 6,270… 6,271… 6,272… 6,273… 6,274… 6,275… 6,276… 6,277… 6,278… 6,279… 6,280… 6,281… 6,282… 6,283… 6,284… 6,285… 6,286… 6,287… 6,288… 6,289… 6,290… 6,291… 6,292… 6,293… 6,294… 6,295… 6,296… 6,297… 6,298… 6,299… 6,300… 6,301… 6,302… 6,303… 6,304… 6,305… 6,306… 6,307… 6,308… 6,309… 6,310… 6,311… 6,312… 6,313… 6,314… 6,315… 6,316… 6,317… 6,318… 6,319… 6,320… 6,321… 6,322… 6,323… 6,324… 6,325… 6,326… 6,327… 6,328… 6,329… 6,330… 6,331… 6,332… 6,333… 6,334… 6,335… 6,336… 6,337… 6,338…
∞
If he concentrates hard enough, Yang thinks he can recall the sound of his own voice. He’s not sure though. He hasn’t spoken a word for the past 500 jumps.
It’s not that he won’t speak, he’s just sort of… forgotten how. It’s not a big deal. He doesn’t need to talk to finish what he’s set out to do.
The silence is sort of nice, anyway.
∞
Yang’s forgotten most things by this point. The timeline, his shoes, his age, his underwear, his pills, his glasses, breakfast, the list goes on. Also, he misplaced the jump remote sometime between Earlier and Now, so this will probably be his last jump for the foreseeable future.
It’s not a bad place to end up. Really. There’s nothing actively trying to harm him, no noxious fumes, no inter-galactic war, no pixelated sandwiches, no bright orange cows, or women with hairy finger-boobs. And no currency. Thank fuck.
The air is breathable, light. Gravity is as close to normal as it’ll get. All in all, not too shabby.
Yang has no idea if he’s backwards or forwards, but he finds that he no longer cares that much. It is enough to just exist in time.
He unlocked the safe Earlier and was relieved to see it still there. It’s held its color well and the texture is as Yang remembers it. He rubs it between his young, young fingers, seeking its touch, memorizing its taste. There’s a memory tugging at the seams of his mind trying to get out.
Good luck with that.
This is funny to Yang, who would laugh if he could still remember how. It feels nice to laugh. Maybe someday it’ll come back to him. No matter. He is closing his eyes. He is at peace.
One moment, Yang is alone, and then the next, he is not.
Hmm, Yang grunts.
Ung Ung, the voice responds.
Rurrrrrrrr fing BuBuBu. Yeop! KRIEEEEET pewwwe neh.
Goopoo cee. Weowowowow Brrrrrrrr.
Ginta teww. Mewp alalu fing.
Syeit? (Yang?)
Sa. (Yes.)
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