“So, who’s the twink?” Fellis nodded toward the man who’d left the table to get more drinks when he saw her coming.
Louise cocked one eyebrow at Fellis, a now-familiar amused look on her face. “My younger brother, Barry. I’m staying at his place.”
“Ah, fuck, right.” Fellis reached up to twiddle with her ear, making the jewelry in it jingle. “I, uh… sorry about, uh, that.”
“It’s not your fault. Kevin and I have been…” Louise looked down into her empty glass. “This was bound to come eventually.”
“Still, I -”
“I’d rather not talk about it.”
The two sat in uncomfortable silence until Barry returned with three glasses of beer. He nervously introduced himself to Fellis.
“So, you’re the infamous time traveler?”
“I guess I am.” Fellis smirked and took a long swig of the drink he handed her. “Yeah… yeah. I’m from the fuckin’ future. What the fuck?” Fellis put one elbow on the table and rested her forehead on her palm.
Louise put a hand on Fellis’ fuzzy shoulder. “Are you alright?”
Fellis took a deep breath before lifting her head and shaking it. “This week has been goddamn weird.”
Louise gave her a sad smile. “So, what are you going to do about it? Find a way to get back and try to avoid changing the future in the meantime?”
Fellis laughed mirthlessly. “I wouldn’t even know where to begin. And it’s too late to not change things, I fucked the shit out of this timeline the second I shook your hand.”
Neither of the siblings at the table spoke, staring at the doctor in apprehension as she finished her drink. She muttered expletives under her breath between each sip. She’d soon drained the glass, which she slammed down on the table a little harder than she meant to.
“Ok, so… uh, how do I explain this?” Fellis reached across the table and took Barry’s glass, which he hadn’t touched. She chugged it down and sighed in satisfaction before continuing. “Ok, so long story short, I have these tiny machines inside me that prevent me from aging. Where I’m from, everyone has them already, so I didn’t even think about it. But every person I’ve made contact with since I got here, I spread it to them.”
By now, most of the bar was crowded around listening, in wide-eyed, stunned silence.
Louise leaned forward intently, pushing her own glass out of the way. “Are you saying…” She put a hand over her mouth and cleared her throat. “Are you saying that I’m never going to get old?”
Fellis rubbed one ear. Her chunky hoop earrings jangled noisily, ringing out in the dead silence of the bar. “It’s a bit more complicated than that. It reverses the main mechanism of what you’d refer to as ‘old age’, but it doesn’t prevent everything that’s associated with getting older… um, I guess it depends on what people in this time understand about-” Fellis waved a hand dismissively and trailed off in the middle of her sentence. “But yeah, basically. You, everyone you’ve been in contact with, everyone they have, and so on.”
She reached across and took what was left of Louise’s beer. She drained it and stood up, leaning heavily on the back of the chair she’d pushed out of the way to kneel by the table. The crowd of shameless eavesdroppers parted as she made her way to the bar.
“What’s the strongest drink you have here?”
The barkeep pulled out a bottle of clear alcohol and handed it to Fellis. He stared at his fingers where they brushed against hers, completely oblivious to her saying she’d have to owe him for the drink.
*****
Barry carefully made his way around Fellis’ sleeping form, stepping over her splayed legs. Her bulk was taking up most of the floor space in the main room of his small apartment.
He took the cup of coffee his sister handed him. “Do you think she’s… alright?”
Louise shrugged. “She did have a lot to drink, but with her size, who knows?”
“She’s breathing fine, at least.”
The two made their way back around the doctor and sat on the couch Barry had just woken up in. They sat in silence for a couple minutes, enjoying the warm drinks to stave off the cold.
“She said something about making breakfast, didn’t she?” Barry put his empty cup on a side table. “Should we wait for her to wake up or just make it ourselves?”
Hearing this, Fellis groaned and mumbled something indecipherable.
“I guess that’s a no?” Louise put down her own cup next to her brother’s and slid off the couch, kneeling beside Fellis’ head. “Good morning.”
Fellis pushed herself up off the saddlebags she was propped up against. “Morning. Fuck, I feel like shit.” She reached into her bag and pulled out her synthesiser, lifting it up onto the side table and knocking the cups off. The clattering of them falling made her head throb. “Shit. Sorry. I’m gonna make some food, just a sec.”
The machine unfolded at the press of a button, its arms springing into readiness and its display lighting up. After a few taps on the screen, Fellis looked up to her two hosts, who were watching in silent curiosity.
“Do either of you have anything you can’t eat?”
When both siblings shook their heads, Fellis pressed a final command and the synthesiser whirred to life. In less than half a minute, a plate of six warm wraps stacked in a perfect triangle had formed, seemingly out of nowhere. The smell of fresh vegetables, mushrooms and spices quickly filled the room.
Barry dropped the cups he’d picked up off the floor. “Holy Christ.”
Louise put her hand over her mouth. “I… I didn’t really believe you about that machine. This is…”
Fellis grabbed the plate and handed it to Louise, then turned her attention back to the machine. “Are diamonds easy to sell around here? They’ve gotta be worth decent money in this time, if I remember right.” When no answer came, she grabbed the topmost wrap and took a bite. “Eat up. They’re packed with all the nutrition you need. Not as tasty as natch-made, though.”
Louise lifted herself back onto the couch and put the meal down on the seat beside her. Her and Barry each grabbed one and tentatively began to eat.
Barry finished off his first wrap and grabbed another one. “These are delicious, actually.”
“Yeah, I eat them a lot. I don’t really have many food models in this thing.” Fellis poked at the display of her synthesiser a bit more. “I spoke to mayor Shankar when I got back yesterday, he’s giving me an abandoned building on the edge of town. I’m gonna need some fuckin’ money to set up a clinic, though, I guess. So, diamonds?”
Barry shrugged. “That or gold, I suppose.”
“Diamonds are cheaper to synthesise. Carbon is easy.”
Louise looked troubled at the conversation. “So, does this mean you think your own world is gone?”
“No, it’s still there. I just have no fuckin’ clue how I’d even begin working on getting back.” Fellis pressed a button and a keyboard popped out under the display, which she started typing on nimbly. “I’ll keep looking into it, of course. I’m not giving up on getting back to my family.” She stopped for a moment and sighed. “Gotta keep on with my life in the meantime though, eh? There’s a lot of important work I can do in this timeline.”
Louise stared at the half-eaten wrap in her hand. “What exactly is a ‘timeline’?”
Fellis continued typing away. “Uh, hm. That’s a question. I guess it makes sense that it’s not a common concept yet. Let me think about how to explain it a minute.” She finished up what she was doing and the synthesiser began working again. “There’s still coffee, eh?”
The doctor hauled herself up to her hooves with a groan and went to pour herself a cup. By the time she returned, a pile of identical perfectly cut diamonds sat in the synthesiser. She plucked two of them up and handed them to Barry and Louise. She lowered herself back onto the floor and leaned her human half sideways against the unoccupied chair across from them.
“Ok, so imagine that every time you, say, flip a coin… uh, it can come up one of two ways, eh? And so like, say there’s two possible worlds, one where it comes up heads and another where it’s tails. The thing is that both of those worlds exist… but like, only as long as it matters?”
Fellis sat drinking her coffee for a minute and rubbed her temples with the thumb and middle finger of her other hand.
“So, like, assuming you, like, don’t make a decision that has longer impact based on the coin flip, eh? Ugh, sorry, I’m trying to make this fuckin’ simpler than it is. Not even sure this shit I’m saying is right. I mentioned the other day that I’m not a physicist, eh?”
Louise and Barry each looked at the other, as if to ask if their sibling was following this.
“Anyway so, eventually you’ll forget about what the result of the coin flip was, eh? And so, since it doesn’t make any difference to the world around it anymore, they’re the same world. So basically, for a while there were two timelines there, but now there’s only one again. But at the same time, on the other side of the world, nothing was effected by your coin flip, so it was always just one timeline.”
All three sat quiet for a moment, an expectant look on Fellis’ face.
Louise was the first to speak. “So, these timelines, uh, coming back together… does that have something to do with your situation?”
“No, it’s just a basic fact about how time works, I guess. Or at least as far as I remember learning it almost thirty years ago in school, it was. My concept of time has faced some significant challenges lately.” Fellis finished off her coffee and shrugged. “I don’t know, maybe it does have something to do with why I’m here, or how I could get back. I have absolutely no fuckin’ idea, eh?”
Fellis sighed deeply and laid her head back on the seat behind her. “This is all just… so fuckin’ stupid.”
*****
The next day, citizens of Baigna noticed a rumour-sparking sign hanging above the door of the rundown grocer’s at the edge of town. It read ‘Fellis Nanosurgery and Transgenics Clinic’.
