Learning to Love Time Loops Without Going Insane

Cal woke up in his bed again to the sound of his father yelling at him to wake up and take the dog out. It was repeating, the same as the last loop. This surprised Cal but brought a much-needed sense of relief. He didn’t want to admit it to himself, but there had been a nagging fear he was blowing his only chance to do what he could about the future invasion, and so far, it looked like that wasn’t true. He hopped out of bed with a smile on his face this time.

“I’m awake. I’ll be out in a few minutes, Dad.” Cal yelled back.

*

Cal spent the majority of this loop in the same way as the last, with one giant exception. He tracked Andy nearly constantly. He started by ensuring he got his address when they first talked and kept up a series of letters for the first few years, moving that to email and social media as soon as possible. He didn’t enjoy having to wait for the evolution of technology.

Six months before the white flash, he moved to Dallas and began a closer friendship with Andy. He started a Dungeons & Dragons campaign and got Andy involved, partially because he liked gaming but mostly because he wanted to see how Andy reacted to different hypothetical situations.

The big problem he kept encountering was that Andy refused to talk about any exact details of his work. It was always in broad terms. “Oh, I do some university-funded studies into physics, nothing too special. Now CERN, that’s who you want to watch,” was all he managed to pry loose, yet again, the day before shit hit the fan for the third time.

Cal woke up the morning of May 8th, ready for plan B. He didn’t really want to do it, but he just couldn’t get enough information otherwise, and he needed to maximize the time he had with loop-aware Andy. He had a list of prepared questions and was reasonably sure he could get through them in the thirty minutes they would have.

It was time to kidnap Andrew Thomas.

He tracked Andy down to the local diner, where he routinely ate breakfasts and walked inside. “Andy didn’t expect to see you here,” Cal feigned surprise as he greeted his friend.

“Oh hey, Cal, yeah, this is where I like to eat my eggs before work.” Andy looked as normal as he ever did. He wondered exactly what the change looked like as he sat down in the bench seat across from Andy. Cal was concerned if he could even notice until he spoke up about it. He hoped so.

After finishing breakfast and some small talk, they left the building. “Hey Andy, want a ride to work? I’ve gotta head in that direction anyway.” Cal decided it was now or never to kick off the plan.

“Oh sure, that would be great.” Andy happily accepted the offer.

“You can just drop me off here… or here, hey Cal, we just passed my building.” Andy’s annoyance was evident in his voice as Cal’s driving didn’t slow.

Cal lifted his shirt and pointed to a gun on his hip. “Look, I’m sorry about this, but I assume you know what this is?” Andy nodded, a look of panic showing in his eyes. “Good, don’t worry, everything is going to be fine. We’re just skipping out on work today for a small road trip.” Cal’s words failed to reassure Andy, and the man’s panicked expression worsened. Cal drove the car onto the expressway, put on the radio, and started waiting for the change.

“Cal, why are you doing this? Why today of all days?” Andy pleaded for answers from his friend.

“Because the world is about to end, and you’re at the center of it. This will all make a lot more sense in about an hour. Well, I think it will. This is the first time I’ve tried this, so apologies if it goes wrong, but hey, the good news is you won’t remember if it does.” Cal’s answers were still doing nothing to calm Andy down. His face had moved from panic to severe agitation, though Cal thought that was something.

“Cal, what’s wrong? Has the stress at work been getting to you? We can talk about it. Let’s just pull over and talk it out, preferably without the gun.”

“Sure, we can stop here and talk.” Call pulled the cover into a rest area and parked as far away from the building as he could. He reached into the center console and pulled out a few pieces of paper, handing one to Andy.

“What’s this?” Andy asked.

“It’s a list of questions I have for you. I don’t fully expect you to answer any of them for another twenty minutes or so, but feel free to read them over and give it a go if you’d like.”

The questions on the sheet were numbered.

What exactly is your job?

What is the gravity generator?

I looked into McCarthy, and I’m planning to personally investigate on the next loop. Do you know anything specific about the ore?

What causes the white flash?

Is it possible to bring someone else into these loops?

Why aren’t you fully in them?

What’s something you can tell me that I can use to easily convince your younger self to trust me at the start of a loop?

Is there anything else you can think of that I should know?

Andy read the questions over and looked up at Cal. “What the fuck are these? How do you know about the ore and gravity generator? Are you a spy? Wait, am I a spy? Is that what you are waiting for, some kind of time-delayed hypnotic suggestion kicking in and my real personality coming to the forefront? Who do we work for?”

“We aren’t spies, though you aren’t far off on the personality thing. We are trapped in some kind of time loop, and your more knowledgeable self apparently reasserts itself near the end of each loop. He’s probably in the back of your head right now screaming at me for ignoring his orders on the last loop.”

“What did he tell you to do?” Cal could easily tell Andy was pretending to play along, as he was still visibly scared of Cal.

“He wanted me to stay as close to you as I could, which I did in this loop, but in the last loop, I needed to learn how much of what he said was bullshit. Turns out it wasn’t. We hit the end with a white flash, the same as the time before, and I woke up yet again in my bed the day we met. If it’s any consolation, I do know none of this sounds plausible, and I doubt I can do anything to convince you it’s real at the moment. That’s why question seven is so important for the other self.”

“Cal, I really don’t think we are in any sort of time loop. How about we just go back to Dallas, we forget this part happened, and we take you to a doctor?” Andy looked sincere in his request. He was genuinely worried his friend was having a psychotic break.

Cal still somewhat wished that were true. It would be so much easier if this were all just his own paranoid delusions, Cal thought, not for the first time or the last time. He was about to respond when Andy’s face scrunched up in pain.

“You okay?”

“Ugh, I need to vomit. Please unlock the door now,” Andy ordered, the last word more a snarl than anything else. His tone was now different. Something had changed. Good. Cal unlocked the door and watched Andy stumble out and deposit this morning’s eggs onto the grass. He pulled a napkin from his pocket and cleaned himself off before rejoining Cal in the car. “I’m not as angry as you think. I’m actually surprised it only took one extra loop for you to decide to talk to me again. I was initially worried you wouldn’t be able to handle the stress at all, and I’d have to work towards a new solution.”

“Can we go over the list? I’d prefer not to have to kidnap you again.”

“Yeah, yeah, next time we do this, though, can you bring me a burger? I haven’t had one in, well, actually, I don’t know how long. Things started to blend together after the fiftieth loop.”

“Wait, how long have we been stuck in this before I was brought in.” Cal cut in. He was now worried there wasn’t any way to end this.

“No idea. I’d need some time to track that, but it’s not really worth it to spend my limited time at the moment. As for your questions, let’s see” Andy picked up the sheet and looked it over. “My doctorate is in geology. The main thing I’m studying here is the sample MAL2021-DAN, which is the ore found in the mine. It has very unique properties when it comes into contact with gravitons.”

“Do those even exist? I thought they were entirely theoretical.” Cal wasn’t sure about his question, but he remembered reading something like a while back.

“Yeah, lots of things don’t exist outside government-funded labs. No idea who actually figured out how to isolate them, but they are used to power the gravity generator. This covers your second question, feed them into the generator, and we get power. On the other hand, if they come into contact with the ore, they start to multiply. I’ll return to question three in a minute, as this phenomenon is tied to question four. I believe that the white flash is caused by the ore creating infinitely many gravitons for the generator, leading to some sort of universal collapse into a singular point. Clearly, we can bring others into the loops, seeing as how you’re here, but as of now, it’s tied to their relation to me. We may be able to extend it to their relation to you as well, as the energy in your body continues to radiate across these recurrences. Do you have something to drink in here? I’m parched.”

His abrupt topic change annoyed Cal, but he popped the trunk and grabbed two soda cans nonetheless. He was willing to put up with this as long as he needed to get his life back to some semblance of normal. “Here, it’s all I’ve got.” Cal handed him a Pepsi.

“Really, no Coke? Next time bring Coke, but back to the list. I took a blast of energy from the ore sample directly during my initial experience with all this. I won’t say before the loops because, for all we know, there are other people out there also doing this, and could have been doing this longer than me. That said, one of the aliens fired that weird stick weapon they carry everywhere at me. The ore absorbed the blast but then exploded, bathing the room with energy. I don’t fully understand what happened, but now I’m tied to the white flash we experience somehow. I then spent many loops trying to figure out what was going on and then trying to figure out how to bring someone else into one at an earlier time in control of themselves. I started refining small bits of the ore and giving them to you in pill form every loop, and then only a few dozen loops later, and here we are.”

“You’ve been feeding me experimental ore pills for dozens of loops?” Cal stared at Andy with an incredulous look on his face.

“Sure, I figured either it worked or it killed you. At this point, there wasn’t much of a difference.”

“I really don’t think I like you.” Cal shook his head, still in disbelief at being a guinea pig.

“Irrelevant. Back to question three, so all I really know is there was some sort of mutated animal found around the site, which led to a team going into investigate. The ore was retrieved somewhere in the mine. The details were fully redacted in the paper I read. Now, as for something you can tell me, hmm, tell me about the time when I was six, and I tried to mix some household cleaners together in an experiment. I burnt a hole in the carpet in my bedroom, which I managed to keep hidden for years. As far as I know, my parents never discovered it. Think that will work.” Andy finished, opened his soda, and downed the whole can.

“As good as anything, I suppose, not much longer left, so question eight?”

“In future loops, please don’t sully my mind with such nonsense as Dungeons and Dragons?! I’m a man of science, thank you.”

“I’m really starting to understand why you had no friends before I came along.”

“Jealousy?”

“Oh good, there’s the rumbling, not much longer.” Cal's sarcasm dripped out of his mouth as he spoke.

“We will see just how social you are in another fifty loops. Now I think it’s time for some music before this ends again.” Andy turned the radio to a classic pop station. He then cranked the radio as loud as it would go.

Cal found the music strangely comforting as the white flash arrived on time, as usual.