Learning to Love Time Loops Without Going Insane

Cal gasped for air, sitting straight up in his bed. He turned his head to look at his clock. It was only five past midnight. He had woken even earlier than the last time something like this had happened. More importantly, was that really future Andy? Had he somehow found where the man’s consciousness was stored? Was that why Andy’s blood reacted so strangely to the presence of the brightstone? There was so much new to consider, but it could wait until morning. He was exhausted mentally. It felt like his brain had been fried, which he supposed it had. God, he hoped he could avoid doing that one again in the future. Somehow, he thought he actually preferred Many Eyes’ stomach. He pushed aside this line of thoughts and tried to resume his sleep.

He gave up on sleep shortly after and started doing something unheard of this early in a loop. He was cooking breakfast as a surprise for his father. The man deserved it with how well he had been going along with what had to seem insane claims and demands every loop. Someday, Cal would figure out how to keep his father’s memories across loops as well, but for now, the best he had to offer was bacon and eggs.

“Oh good, Cal, you’re alive. Andy got very worried when the white flash happened. Are you cooking bacon? I love bacon. Can I have some?”

“Of course, Bug, the best dog in the world, always gets bacon when I make it.”

“Yay, bacon. Today is the day when Dad, Andy, and Ethel are confused, and we have to explain to them I can talk again, isn’t it?”

“Sure is.”

And that was exactly how they spent their day: meeting Andy, playing phone tag and ultimately bringing the rest of the group back up to speed. Later that week came the very long phone call with Andy, where Cal did his best to explain the energy that had been detected in the last loop and his meeting with future Andy in the void.

“And you’re sure it was me, not some doppelganger?”

“He had the same sarcastic jackass attitude I usually associate with your future self.”

“I know we learned new information from this, but I honestly have no idea what this means. I think I’m going to need to do some reading on quantum mechanics to have any good guesses here.”

“I’m not surprised. Your future self seemed just as baffled. It was the first time since meeting him I’d seen him make that face. It almost made the pain of feeling each nerve fire as my body exploded worth it. So, it’s probably time for another educational loop. Time to get my studies on.” Cal laughed, still finding the idea that he willingly attended more school after high school hilarious. These loops had undoubtedly changed him.

Cal decided to focus on languages for now. He figured as things were progressing. Eventually, they would need to visit the international locations where the aliens had been sighted, and he would much rather understand the languages needed than try to hire a translator he trusted. He wasn’t really sure where to start on languages and ended up rolling dice to decide his course. The dice ruled in favor of the French and Spanish.

*

One night, several years into the loop, Cal was in his backyard playing with Bug. No matter how much she learned, she still begged Cal to play fetch with her as often as he could. He tossed the ball across the yard for her and started running towards her himself. “Better run Bug, I’m coming to get you.” He tried to sound like a madman as he chased her. He knew this was one of her favorite games as well: avoid the crazy Cal.

Cal tripped, sticking his hands out in front of himself to avoid face-planting the ground. His left hand collided hard with a small rock, and he felt something tug inside himself. It was similar to what he felt when he passed through the crack. He was suddenly terrified that he was about to explode again, but that didn’t happen. He just continued his crash to the ground as he felt the tugging go up and out of his left hand. He sat up and looked down at the rock that he had been in contact with. It was bigger, and there was no way his hand would cover it now. It was also warm to the touch.

“Fuck” Cal shouted. “What did that energy do to me?” his voice moved to a whisper as he continued talking to himself.

Bug ran to his side. “Cal, Cal, Cal, Cal, are you okay?” She rapid fire spoke his name, the worry evident in her voice.

“It’s alright, Bug, I’m probably fine. We just need to go call Andy and get him here ASAP. He’s going to hate the news.”

“Magic isn’t real Cal.” Andy entirely dismissed Cal’s claims. “The rock was likely just warm because you touched it, and it’s pretty hard to judge the size of a rock in the middle of a fall.”

“Then explain the weird feeling I had. It felt just like the crack the energy was pouring from.”

After a brief silence, Andy finally responded, “I can’t. I’ll be on a flight out there tomorrow.”

“Perfect, I’ll let Bug know you are bringing her some Texan barbeque.”

“HE IS?!? Tell him I love ribs, Cal.” Bug’s voice could be heard over the phone line from somewhere in the background.

Cal heard Andy sigh as the phone call disconnected.

*

“Alright, I’m ready. Place the stone on the metal pan, as close to the center as you can.” Andy has spent the last three days setting up some equipment in the garage in order to test the stone. He had also taken several samples of Cal’s blood as soon as he arrived. Those were now in different machines being analyzed.

He pressed a series of buttons, and a laser fired, carefully cutting a section of the rock free. Andy then directed a mechanical arm to pick up the section and place it into a test tube with a solution of some liquid in it. Cal hadn’t asked the details, so he wasn’t sure what. He trusted Andy knew what he was doing, especially when it came to geology. That was where his biggest passion for science had been in every loop.

“Alright, we just need to let this dissolve, and then we can measure the ratio of uranium to lead particles,” Andy stated as he took his gloves off and headed for the door.

“Which ratio means I have magic?” Cal called after him.

“Likely neither, though a high ratio of uranium could mean you were able to grow the rock in some fashion, but I still doubt it was magic.”

“You never want it to be magic.”

“While I can’t speak for sure on all my past loop selves, I’m going to guess we are all in agreement that science is real and magic isn’t.”

“So then, no D&D tonight? Bug is going to be sad. She really was really excited to hit the fifth level finally.”

“Well, I wouldn’t say that. We have to do something to pass the time until the experiments run their course. And I do like Bug more than you, so I can’t disappoint her.”

“I convinced him, Bug, we are good to play,” Cal yelled into the house.

“Yay, can Ethel join the game? She’s never played before.”

“Yeah, sure, why not? It’s pretty hard to form a good gaming group when you don’t want the world to know about the talking dog paladin.”

“Thanks, Cal, you’re the best.” Bug walked away, wagging her tail furiously.

*

After several weeks of waiting, Stan joined Cal and Andy in the garage as Andy read through the data the tests produced. Every so often, he would say things like “Huh” or “That’s odd” and finally a good old fashioned “Well fuck”.

“Hah, it is magic, isn’t it?!” Cal shouted in excitement.

“Why would I have a machine able to detect magic? No, the readings are just very strange. So, first up, your blood is now slightly radioactive. Which normally seems like it would be a very bad thing, but I’m not a doctor, so we are stuck in a wait-and-see on that one. It looks like somehow you were able to push some of that energy into the rock and expand it.”

“So, and correct me here if I’m explaining this wrong. Through an unknown means, I am able to harness the energy stored in my body, project it into another object, and cause that object to increase in size?”

“Yes”

“Let me phrase this a different way. Using my internal mana reserves, I am able to channel said mana into inorganic matter, magically increasing their size.”

“...You could phrase it like that, yes.” Andy sighed as he gave in to Cal’s dreams of magic.

“So, Cal has magic now, Bug can talk, and your future self exists in a void outside of space and time. I’m starting to feel left out.”

“Don’t worry, Dad, next loop, I promise you can eat some of the glowing stone to see what happens. This loop, we get to see if I get magical cancer or not.”

Stan’s face dropped at the mention of cancer.

“Sorry, Dad, I wasn’t thinking. I’m sure I’ll be fine.”

“It’s okay. It’s not your fault. At this point in your mind, your mother is a lot further behind you than she is me. It’s natural to heal from that. It just hits me every so often.”

Cal gave his father as much of a hug as he was capable, and with the size of the man, it wasn’t much.

“Alright, gentlemen, next up, we try to see if Cal can enlarge another rock, and then we start testing out the limits of his newfound power.” He headed for the backyard once he was done speaking. Cal and Stan followed after.

“Catch.” Andy tossed a small rock at Cal. Cal grabbed it out of the air.

“Now what?”

“How should I know? You’re the one who felt it last time. Try to feel that again.”

“How do you try to feel something?” Cal looked at the rock in his hand and started thinking as hard as he could about the rock growing. “Come on, grow you stupid ro…” He was cut off as he felt the weird internal tug, but not at his hand, at his back as something small slid down the back of his shirt.

“Well, that worked!” Stan exclaimed happily. “I was a bit worried I was about to send my own kid to the hospital, though.”

‘What did you do?” Cal asked while he fished a small pebble from the ground behind him.

“Oh, I threw a rock at you about the size of a baseball.”

“So you just hoped that my magic would kick in and stop the rock from hurting me. Thanks, Dad.”

“Hey, what’s the worst that could happen? You start the loop over? Now we know it’s repeatable, and it’s just a matter of figuring out how to do so in a more controlled manner, well, unless you want to try using your arm as a baseball bat -and I start tossing rocks at you.”

“I think I’m good there.”

*

By the end of the loop, Cal was reasonably able to control his ability. Initially, he had been able to grow or shrink stones by about one kilogram. This grew the more he practiced, and on the final day of the loop, Andy was able to measure him at about one point one kilogram of change. It took him a day to recover after using the maximum amount of change he could do. Andy theorized that the energy within worked something like a muscle, so the more he used it, the more he would be able to use it, but it was very slow going.

They had already tried using more pure elements early on, but they ended up with either small explosions or severe burns for Cal. Gold was the worst, and he still had a scar on the palm of his hand from that one. He had been hoping for a new method of money making, but it looked like he was still stuck in lotteries and sports gambling for now.

Bug was also the subject of several experiments to see if she, too, could do something with rocks. They tried several times, but she seemed to have no special powers there. This meant it had to be the cracks and not just the stone that caused this.

The downside to using his new powers was just how draining it was. If he hadn’t needed to wait on future Andy, he would be sleeping off how much he did with them today, but he needed to talk to him, so that wasn’t an option. The upside was no cancer so far.

“Cal.” Future Andy greeted him after finishing the usual vomiting routine.

“Hey buddy, so that was really you, right? We saw each other in some weird void?”

“It was, and we did, though I object to the use of the word buddy.”

“Of course you do. So I thought you were just yourself but trapped inside your younger self.”

“So did I.”

“Alright, well, any guess as to what’s going on then?”

“Well, we now know the stone radiates a huge amount of energy. We know it was found resting in a lake that was also the home of a spatial tear that ripples energy outwards. We know that spatial tear apparently leads to a void where my body exists. We also know that crossing it caused you to explode. I’d rather not attempt a cross back given that information.”

“We also know crossing it gave me magical powers.”

“Yes, we know that crossing it gave you some sort of ability to control the mass of composite rocks. We also know that the aliens are able to track the stone somehow. So the plan for the next loop is Stan tries eating a piece?”

“Yeah, seems like a good course of action.”

“Probably yes, we should see how the experiment replicates. It is possible Bug is a fluke, at least as far as remembering the time loops go. Neither Many Eyes nor Many Legs appear to remember anything across loops.”

“Yeah, I was worried about that too.”

To the surprise of both men, there was a loud knock on the door.

“That’s new,” Cal said, looking over at the door.

“Don’t answer it. We have limited time,” Andy responded.

“OPEN THE DOOR OR WE WILL OPEN IT FOR YOU. WE HAVE A WARRANT FOR THE ARREST OF CAL MARSHALL.” A voice screamed through the door.

‘What, how, what did I do to piss off the government?”

“Interesting, maybe you should answer it. We still don’t know all the things the government redacted on their report about the stone.”

“I’m coming,” Cal yelled at the door as he stood up and moved to open it.

“Mr. Marshall.” There were two men dressed in black suits standing at the door. “Would you like to explain the significant discharge or energy, more often referred to as magic, earlier today at this house?” The man on the left asked him, his tone perfectly controlled.

“Oh god, would I? I told you it was magic, Andy, and the government is apparently aware of it, too. What do you think that means?”

“I think it means we just added even more that we need to investigate to our ever-growing list.”

The white flash found Cal with a giant smile and Andy with a grimace as the loop ended.