As the sliders reclined across the church pews, Quinn looked down at the notebook he’d filled up in 1978. Colin sat beside him, holding the little metal box that neither of them recognised.
“What do you remember writing in there?” Colin asked him.
Quinn tried to think back to what had only been a week ago at most, to his understanding, but it was frighteningly out of focus. Certainly, he recalled building the machine with Sam, and the Professor, and his Dad, and the other Sam. And Colin?
Yeah, he was there.
But the memories tapered off into a distorted mess as he tried to drill down into them.
“I know I wrote a whole lot of technical stuff in the front half,” he said, scratching his head. “The personal stuff though? Drawing a blank.”
He opened up the notebook, and flipped through the equations, diagrams, and instructions on the sliding machine. Nothing unusual there that stood out.
But when he hit the back end, the words surprised him.
“Dad died…”
He felt his head swim as he remembered a fractured memory of his Dad’s funeral, pressing against contradictory memories of his Dad being alive and well after that point.
Colin’s mouth curved upward. “In 1984, Doc Beckett pulled him out of the path of a car. That’s how we first met him. I guess that’s what happened in the new timeline, anyway.”
Quinn let out a laugh, as he pieced together the new memories. Memories in which he grew up with Sam Beckett as a personal hero, and then as a teacher.
This is wild.
He flipped through more pages. No more tragedies ensued that he could see, just page after page of things that needed to happen to set him on the path to the current point. Then, he reached the part about the Professor’s death, and he felt his heart ache as he realised that the Arturo of Earth Prime couldn’t have prevented the death of his double. And now…
He continued paging through the notebook, until he hit the end, and felt a wave of confusion.
“There’s nothing in here about you…” he said to Colin, feeling cold. “He… he said there would be answers…”
Colin looked pensive. “Maybe it’s in here?” he said, holding up the box.
Quinn watched him twist the latch, and open it.
A cocktail umbrella?
Indeed, sitting solitary in the box was a single red paper umbrella; the kind that was used to decorate tropical cocktails.
A memory fired off in Quinn’s mind:
“Why does the drink have an umbrella in it?” asks Colin.
“Uh, I never really thought about it,” Quinn replies, amused. “More decoration, I suppose.”
Quinn begins to drink his beer.
“Maybe it’s important to protect your drinks from the elements?” Colin suggests, and Quinn almost chokes on his drink, as he stifles a laugh. He isn’t sure if that was a joke or an honest question, and Colin’s face remains straight.
The memory made him smile, despite everything. He controlled the reaction, and looked up at Colin, who had a faraway look.
Yeah. I definitely remember him being confused by everyday stuff, like flushing toilets. Why would that be?
“Why in the world would you put that in a box for safe keeping?” Quinn asked.
Colin picked it up, and tried to avoid breaking apart the paper that had become brittle with age. He turned it over in his hands for a minute, brows knitted and face draining of colour.
And then, out of nowhere, he started laughing.
Quinn raised his eyebrows. “You alright, man?”
“I remember!” Colin, through his laughs, placed the umbrella back in the box, and on the pew beside him, before throwing his arms around a bewildered Quinn.
“It all makes sense now,” said Colin, squeezing Quinn to an uncomfortable point. “Originally, I never grew up with you at all.”
He finally let go, and pulled back, revealing tears in his eyes. “I asked our birth father to bring the young me to live with you.”
Quinn blinked. “You remembered all that from an umbrella?”
Quinn felt like all his confusion was finally starting to sort itself out. It must have been something to do with his fusion that had fractured his memory and allowed the old timeline to resurface.
“It wasn’t just any umbrella,” Colin said, and turned his gaze towards the stained glass Jesus. “But I’m… not sure I can accurately describe just what happened to me when I acquired it.”
He pursed his lips as he tried to form words. “I… met this weird guy who knew a frightening amount about me, and Doc– I mean, Sam – told me he was some… I dunno, supernatural entity, for lack of a better term. The whole thing was nuts, but it was pivotal in my decision. And that umbrella is the only thing that proves it really happened to me.”
More ‘higher power’ stuff?
The two of them sat in silence for a moment, and Quinn felt like a veil had been lifted. His relief was palpable. He wasn’t going crazy, his mind wasn’t playing tricks. He just had to reconcile conflicting timelines. It wasn’t so different to his bubble universe lifetime. Just another layer of memories to add to his ever-expanding collection. As long as he knew what the current correct version of his memory was, he’d be alright.
It occurred to him that if they managed to succeed in stopping the Kromagg invasion, all of this could be purged from their memories, too. He gripped the notebook in his hand tightly; it was a vital document.
“I think you made the right choice, Colin.”
“Me too,” Colin agreed. “I don’t remember my original life, but I do remember how worried I was about that decision. And when I finally asked you about it, you said ‘go for it.’”
I remember that, too…
“Thanks, man,” he said.
Quinn gave him a light punch in the arm. “You weren’t a bad addition to the family, all things considered. For example, those times you did the dishes just so I could play Nintendo in my boxers. Truly selfless.”
Colin reciprocated the arm punch. “You just had to ruin a touching moment, huh?”
“Tell you what,” Quinn said, “next time we play, I’ll be Luigi and you can be Mario.”
As Colin gave him an amused eye roll, Quinn couldn’t help but smile, as he realised this kind of silly sibling banter wouldn’t have been possible before. It warmed his heart to think about all the fun times that one change had brought the two of them.
As his mind drifted to the hazy circumstances that led to Colin joining him in his sliding when he knew he had not been there in the beginning, someone tapped him on the shoulder from behind. He turned to find Maggie’s gaunt face, as she held the timer aloft.
Nine minutes remained.
“He’s… not coming, is he?” she said, her voice breaking.
Quinn felt his heart sink. “No.”
“He put his trust in us to finish what they started,” Colin said, leaning back to meet Maggie’s eye. “If we can prevent the invasion, we can undo all the deaths that have happened since.”
Quinn nodded, swallowing hard. “Including his.”
Maggie blinked back tears. “Yeah, you’re right. We have to do this.”
She handed Quinn the timer. “Can you get us back there?”
Quinn nodded, and began to program the timer with the coordinates to the world where they had first met Sam.
“One problem, though,” he said, as he pressed buttons. “We’ll have to stay there a while. Way longer than the timer will give us.”
Silence fell over the group.
“So, anyone who wants off the ride…” Quinn said, “I guess that will be your last chance; at least for a bit.”
The sound of a throat being cleared came from across the room, and they turned to Mallory, whose hand was raised.
“I’d like to go home, if you wouldn’t mind.”
Quinn gave him an understanding nod. “Alright. When we get there, I’ll set the timer to get you home, and I guess that’ll be the last we use of this thing.”
The group gathered under the stained glass window, as the timer reached zero, and Quinn opened a wormhole for the penultimate time.