 
Tiem Mechine

a novel by

Alex Hansen

©2014 Alex Hansen. All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. The author has not checked any alternate timelines to verify that characters and events were not present elsewhere, but he can promise that none of this stuff is real in the timeline of this book's publication.

(25)

Yesterday I met an alien. He was having a yard sale. He sold me a time machine.

I thought it was kind of a weird time for a yard sale—late October, when nobody else was doing it and it was too cold to expect people to just walk by and start browsing. I told him so. He said that it wasn't really a yard sale so much as a household liquidation sale. He'd just lost his job and he was moving back home.

"I just lost my job too," I told him. "But I'm not moving back home unless I absolutely have to."

"Trust me," he assured me. "I have to. I don't really belong here anyway, and with my company closing up shop, I have no reason to stick around anymore."

"Seems like you're getting rid of a lot," I commented mildly, tripping over a case of canned apple butter as I stared at a pile of used loofahs that he was hoping to sell.

"My vehicle has a weight limit," he explained. "And it's not a very high limit, so I have to get rid of everything I don't need or my wife and I won't be able to make the trip home." I thought that was odd. Couldn't he just rent a U-Haul? But I wasn't in the most talkative of moods, so I just somberly browsed the rows of crap he had spread across his lawn.

He wasn't kidding about getting rid of everything. I found three microwaves, a gas grill, a box of Golden Grahams and two unopened bottles of generic shampoo for oily hair. I got the sense that he'd already packed everything he absolutely needed in his "vehicle"— I didn't know he was an alien yet and I didn't realize that he was referring to his spaceship—and then scooped everything that was left out onto the front lawn.

And, by the looks of things, he scooped some of it out onto the back lawn as well.

"Is this a remote control?" I asked him, fishing what was obviously a remote control out of a pile of used electronics.

"It is," he said. "Someone came by and bought the TV, but she didn't want the remote. But for ten cents it's yours!" he added enthusiastically.

"I'll pass," I said, tossing it back into the pile. "What's this?"

I picked up a colorful cardboard box that was sitting next to the jumble of USB cables and VCRs. On the front of it was a picture of a glowing circular disc about the size of an electronic scale. A child was depicted standing atop the disc with an obnoxiously happy expression, flashing a thumbs-up. In brilliant, bulky letters, the box was labeled TIEM MECHINE.

"Tiem mechine?" I asked.

"Oh, that," the owner said abashedly. "Yeah, that's from my old job."

"Your old job was to sell misspelled sci-fi toys?" I asked dubiously.

"Oh, it's not a toy," he assured me. "That is a genuine article. Fully-functional personal temporal relocator. The real deal."

He'd seemed quirky before. Now I wondered if he were crazy. "I find it hard to believe that someone smart enough to design a working time machine isn't smart enough to use spell check," I said dryly, pointing to the horrendous spelling on the box.

He chuckled fondly. "The misspellings were intentional. They were part of our marketing strategy, actually. We wanted to evoke the American consumer's comfort with buying certain foreign products. You know, German cars, Swedish furniture, Japanese electronics. The idea was that subtly advertising the product as foreign would distract buyers from wondering where the technology actually came from exactly."

I remained unsure as to whether he was pulling my leg or whether he hadn't taken his meds. "Uh-huh," I nodded. "Which is where?"

He waved the question away. "Oh, it's a small planet you've never heard of near the star you call Vega."

I stared at him. "This was made on another planet?"

"No, it was designed on another planet," he corrected. "It was built here, though."

"This was designed on another planet?" I said.

"That's right," he replied. He was being perfectly personable. He didn't seem to be secretly laughing at me because I was a gullible idiot but he also didn't seem to be crazy enough to seriously believe that his company was a producer of portable time machines either.

"And that planet is near the star Vega?" I asked.

"That's right," he replied. "It's called Pyson."

"And this little glowy thing inside this little box can transport me through time?" I asked.

"That's right," he replied.

"I think I'm gonna have to call bullshit," I said.

He rolled his eyes. "You humans and your expletives," he said derisively. "Look, I've been blending in with the human marketing demographic for ten years. I know how oblivious you lot are to other life in the universe. Let me show you something." He pulled a small black device out of his pocket. It looked like a keyless entry remote for a car. He pointed it at his garage—no, above his garage—and pressed a button.

The space above his garage opened slightly to reveal a glimpse of some hidden room. He pressed the button again quickly, leaving a section of the air that was about two feet tall and twenty feet wide looking completely out of place. Apparently this guy had a second, invisible garage on top of his normal garage. And even though he only let the door open a little bit, the sleek silvery thing behind it looked unmistakably like some kind of really cool aircraft.

My jaw dropped. He smugly pressed another button on his remote and closed the door. Suddenly his garage and the space above it looked totally normal again.

"Was that...your spaceship?" I asked, suitably impressed.

"Sure was," he said.

I admit that I was feeling a little bit more impulsive than usual. I'd had a rough couple of weeks to begin with, but having lost my job only a few hours earlier, I was wandering around aimlessly and a little more open to the idea of trying something reckless and idiotic—like purchasing a time machine from a complete stranger, for example. I'd gone for a walk to clear my head and only succeeded in spending that time filling my head to the brim with negative and unwelcome thoughts. Taking a stupid risk like buying the power to move freely through time from a complete stranger claiming to be a space alien might be just the kind of distraction I needed.

"So how much do you want for this thing?" I asked.

"Two bucks," he replied swiftly.

I'd already been reaching for my wallet. Now I thought he was pulling my leg again. "No, really, how much?" I said.

"Two bucks," he repeated. My expression probably prompted him for an explanation, so he gave a little shrug. "Exchange rates. The Standardized Pysonian Monetary Unit is really weak right now. Trust me, two bucks will buy me enough juice to get back to my own star system and still have a couple fuel cells left."

"Okay then," I agreed, handing him two singles. "I guess it's a bargain then. A time machine liquidation sale."

He stuffed the money in his pocket. "Pleasure doing business with you," he said. "Anything else here catch your eye?"

I was holding the box close to my face and staring. "Not like this has," I assured him. "Is there anything I need to know about using this?"

"It's all pretty self-explanatory," he said. "It comes with assembly instructions, owner's manual, that kind of thing. You can expect the same endearing misspellings on just about everything in there except for the 'safe usage' section and the warranty, of course."

"Okay, cool," I said. "Thanks. Uh...good luck with your move, I guess."

"Good luck with your time travel," he said. And with that awkward farewell, I wandered off his property, still in awe of the impossible power I might have just purchased for two dollars.

(24)

I took the box back to my apartment.

The kitchen light was on, so I knew my roommate was home. The pulsing bluish glow from the living room also confirmed that, as usual, he was gaming. I let myself in and tossed my keys on the counter.

"Hey," I said.

Reclined on our couch a little too comfortably (by which I mean he was wearing nothing but his underwear), Travis murmured, "Yo, what's up?"

I set the box down on the kitchen table and walked back over to the living room. I plopped down next to him. "So I got fired today," I told him.

"Yeah, what for?" he asked, not looking away from the television screen.

"For not being important enough," I said.

He violently mashed a few buttons and then grunted in disappointment when it failed to produce the desired result. "Oh, so you got laid off, then?"

My shoulders sagged. "Yeah."

It always amazed me how well Travis was able to converse while he was playing video games. Everything about his body language indicated that he wasn't paying any attention to me at all, but a lot of the most interesting and important conversations that we've ever had have taken place while he was playing Modern Warfare or Assassin's Creed. I think something about having the controller in his hands stimulates his higher brain function.

"It's no big deal," he told me. "You hated that place anyway, right? The money sucked, your boss was a dick, and it was below your skill set anyway."

"I don't know if it was below my skill set," I disagreed dejectedly. "It's not like I have a degree in IT or anything."

"Maybe not," he admitted, jumping back as an alien lurched forward at him unexpectedly. "But it's not like you don't know your shit. Be honest, how many times a day did you tell people to try restarting their computers or making sure their printers were plugged in?"

"A lot."

"You're better than that," Travis assured me. "You may not have a piece of paper to prove it, but you are. Losing this job will just force you to find another one. Maybe you'll find a place that's willing to let you do something you're better at, like some actual computer repair instead of that pussy call center shit they had you doing." He took one hand off the controller briefly to point meaningfully in what was almost my direction. "Trust me—one day you'll look back and be glad those fuckers decided to can you." He'd given me that entire pep talk and still hadn't made eye contact with me once.

"I hope you're right," I said. "But that doesn't help me now. I have enough money for my half of the rent this month, but next month...." I trailed off.

He shrugged. "I got you covered," he offered. "Save your money. I got your half of the bills until you're gainfully employed again."

"No, you don't have to do that," I said quickly. "I don't want to be a mooch. I'll figure something out."

"You know what, you're right," he agreed, and it took me a while to realize he was being sarcastic. "If you can't make your rent next month I'll just kick you out. What are friends for if not to force each other to fend for themselves in a cold, unforgiving, assraping world?" He paused his game, saved it, and finally turned to look at me. He gave me an unwavering, squinting glare. "I'm going to pay your fucking bills next month, and you're going to fucking like it."

I nodded. "Thanks," I said timidly. "I really appreciate it, man. But I'll do everything I can to get a job before then, I swear."

"I know you've had a shit time with things lately," he told me. "But this...and Amy...someday you'll look back and realize these weren't setbacks. They were steps forward."

I didn't really believe him but I appreciated him saying it anyway. "I hope so," I murmured.

He stood up, ignoring me on purpose. "So now that all the mushy stuff's out of the way, I'm hungry. Want to order pizza?"

I just stared at him.

He rolled his eyes. "Do you want me to use my money to order a pizza which you will be entitled to exactly half of?" he asked dryly.

I smiled. "Sure."

He went into the kitchen to grab his phone. "Kenny?" he asked.

"Yeah?"

"What the hell is this?" He paused. "Tiem Mechine?"

"Oh, that," I said. I'd been so absorbed in my post-employment self-pitying that I'd already forgotten my encounter with an alien and his hidden spaceship garage and his little misspelled time machine. I got up and walked over to where Travis stood staring in perplexity at the cardboard box. "It's just a dumb little toy I found on my way home," I lied. "Figured I'd give it to my nephew or something."

"Where'd you find it?" he asked, turning the box to read another side. "Whoever made this couldn't spell for shit. Is it Japanese?"

"I don't know," I shrugged. "Found it at a yard sale."

"Who has a yard sale in October?" he asked.

"Apparently that one guy," I replied.

"Weird," Travis said, bored with it already. "I'm getting pepperoni and sausage, is that cool with you?"

I nodded, staring at the colorful packaging of my new toy. I was dying to see what was inside and if it really worked. But my unhesitating lies to Travis had proved to me that I was embarrassed by it. If it didn't work, I didn't want him to ever see it again. Luckily, he didn't mention it again for the rest of the night.

The next morning, Travis, being still employed, went to work. I, being unemployed, did not. As soon as he left, I took the box into the living room and set it down on the carpet. Excitedly, but handling it with a ginger reverence, I began opening the packaging.

It was taped. I spent ten minutes trying to find a box cutter. Then I realized that we had scissors, so I hurried back to my precious parcel with scissors—although some part of my childhood programming made sure I only walked briskly because you don't run with scissors.

I sliced the tape open and flipped the lid up. Inside, neatly seated in molded Styrofoam, were a whole bunch of tiny little pieces—screws, bolts, wires, metal plates. The largest piece was what I assumed would eventually be the glowing platform that I'd stand on. Inside of it was a complicated-looking device about the size of a pack of cigarettes that appeared to be the heart of the contraption. It also seemed to be made out of a seamless piece of indestructible metal. There were several tiny holes around the sides through which various wires ran, but other than that it was an impenetrable fortress housing what must surely be a technological marvel.

I pulled out the owner's manual.

The first page said "Welcome For Tiem Mechine" at the top. The spelling and grammar of the instructions themselves followed suit. The wording was vague at best and totally useless at worst. Sometimes I wasn't sure if the problem was my understanding of the instruction or the horrible translation of the concept. The diagrams were large and detailed, but they only matched the real product about half of the time.

After roughly an hour, I managed to reach what seemed like the logical finishing point. I'd reached one about fifteen minutes earlier, but I'd had two extra pieces. Deciding that it was probably not as wise to take the same risks with a time machine that I'd be comfortable taking with a cheap coffee table, I pulled the thing apart and reassembled it with the right number of pieces. It was a frustrating, nerve-wracking hour of infuriating anticipation.

Finally, the finished machine sitting in front of me on the living room carpet, I picked up the owner's manual. I flipped to the section titled "Inflictions of Use" and slowly began reading. As best I could tell, there was a small display on the side that could be adjusted to show the desired destination. The destination, unfortunately, was relative to the current time. It was at least broken down by years and days, but (possibly owing to its alien design) instead of minutes and seconds, it had a different unit, which it kept referring to as a yilk. The days were divided into one hundred parts with two places after the decimal point. If I wanted to travel twelve hours into the future, I needed to use the arrow keys to select zero years, zero days and fifty-point-zero-zero yilks. Put a minus sign in front of all that, and it would put me twelve hours in the past.

Then—and this was the most bizarre part—I was supposed to stand on the disc and clap twice to activate it. Maybe the guy who invented the Clapper was also from Pyson.

As a responsible adult, I took the precaution of perusing the Safe Usage section of the owner's manual. It was a relief to read something that didn't hurt my brain.

Tiem Mechine is intended for single carbon-based-humanoid use only.

Not for use outside of the planet Earth's atmosphere

Use of Tiem Mechine while under the influence of mind-altering chemicals is discouraged

Frequent use of Tiem Mechine may complicate pregnancy

For reasons unknown, most citrus juices may be transmuted into hydrochloric acid when transported using Tiem Mechine

Those were definitely some strange warnings. But, as promised, they were in clear, readable English. None of those things seemed too difficult for me to handle. So I decided I'd test it out.

The digital clock next to the TV said 9:58. So I carefully set the machine to zero years, zero days and one-point-zero-zero yilks. I hit the button next to the display to lock in my selection. The disc began to glow and hum. Trembling, I stepped onto it, and staring at the clock, I brought my hands together and clapped twice.

I felt a column of air blow from beneath me but I felt no sense of movement. The clock said 10:13.

"Holy shit," I breathed excitedly. "That has got to be the most anticlimactic form of time travel ever!" I was giddy and lightheaded. I quickly stepped off the disc and lowered myself onto the couch.

"I just time traveled into the future," I said aloud, but not loud enough for the neighbors to overhear. I didn't need them to worry that I was going crazy, especially because I was a little worried about it myself.

I decided that I wanted to test out traveling into the past but I immediately hit confusion. What would happen if I traveled back half an hour? I'd be right in the middle of my own living room as I was trying to put the damn thing together. But obviously that didn't happen, so I must not have gone back and done it. But if I did it now, then I obviously did it, so it should have happened already, which it obviously didn't, but I could change that now by going back anyway, which didn't make any sense.

This was making my head hurt.

But now my curiosity was piqued. Could I use this fancy little device to make things happen already that never happened already? That could be interesting. Or even useful. Could I change the past? Could I change the future? Could I change my present? I stared down at the Tiem Mechine. It was sitting quietly on the floor.

Taunting me.

(23)

I gazed reverently at the source of my newfound power.

Less than twenty-four hours earlier, I was cleaning out my half-cubicle at work, feeling like my entire life had been nothing but failure compounding on disappointment compounding on disaster. Now I was starting to think that my entire life had been nothing but lead-in material to this experience. The first twenty-six years of my existence had been nothing but the "previously on Kenny's Life" blurb and now we were getting to the action, the new material, the heart of today's episode.

I had a time machine. A real, fully functional time machine that actually travelled in time and everything.

I stared at it like I could feel it silently egging me on. Take me back in time, it whispered. Satisfy your curiosity. It wasn't quite as audible or as poignant as If you build it, he will come or Use the Force, Luke, but I imagined it as being just as authoritative.

I got up and began adjusting the controls with an intensely invigorating sense of purpose. I was about to become a pioneer, a brave trailblazer into the even-more-final frontier. I set the dial to negative six yilks, locked in my selection, and stepped back onto the humming, shimmering disc.

I wondered briefly if I was about to do something that was going to destroy the fabric of the time-space continuum Doc Brown style. It seemed hard to imagine something like that ever being the case. My heart was pounding, so I knew I comprehended the presence of the risk on some level, but it just didn't seem real. So I took a deep breath and clapped twice.

After another anticlimactic burst of air washed over me, I looked around. The clock said 8:58. Apparently I'd arrived. On the floor next to me was the unopened box. So where was I?

"OH JESUS!" came a yelp from across the room. My past self had just returned from the kitchen after finding the scissors and seen me unexpectedly standing in his living room.

"Hey," I said awkwardly. How do you introduce yourself to yourself?

My past self was breathing heavily, leaning against the wall for support. He looked up at me in annoyance. "You scared the hell out of me," he said. Did my voice always sound that whiny?

"Sorry," I apologized to myself.

"I take it this thing actually works, then?" he said cautiously.

I nodded, stepping off the disc. "Yep. It's pretty cool. Want me to help you put it together?"

He walked over to my finished machine and compared it to the depiction on the box. "I don't know," he said warily. "If I don't figure out how to put it together myself, will you have been able to put it together without your own assistance in your past to enable you to come back in time and help me put it together?"

I blinked at him. "A simple yes or no would work," I suggested.

"Did you get any help?" he asked.

"No," I said.

"Then I guess my answer is no," he replied. "Don't want to mess up the timeline or anything."

"But this didn't happen to me when I was in your place," I said. "I don't know if we can mess up the timeline." My face looked weird. Maybe it looked backwards because I was used to seeing my reflection in a mirror. Were my cheeks always that chubby?

"That's like saying it's safe to drive an eighteen wheeler across a bridge because it supported the weight of your Corolla," my uppity past self quipped. Then he gave me a sideways, narrow-eyed look.

"What?"

"Why would I think of that but you wouldn't?" he asked. "How much time are we separated by?"

"A little over an hour," I said.

"So what happened in that hour that made you less cautious than you were when you were me?" my overinquisitive past self queried.

"Probably reading the directions for safe usage," I guessed, "which didn't contain any warnings against creating time paradoxes."

"Is that because they can't be created or because the machine doesn't allow them?" my stubborn past self wondered.

"Whatever," I said irritably. "This is getting too confusing. Have fun putting the thing together." I quickly set the controls on my completed machine to six yilks in the future, stepped on, and, to the amusement of my judgmental past self, I importantly clapped twice and left in a solemn huff. I had never realized how annoying I was until I actually had a conversation with myself.

All the excitement had made me hungry. I decided to take a break from messing with the natural flow of time to make myself a sandwich. I'd just gotten the bread and the mayonnaise from the fridge when my phone rang.

I looked at the screen and my heart sank. It was Amy. "Hello?" I answered meekly.

"Hi," she greeted me, all business. "I just thought you should know I found another one of your books."

"Oh," I said. "Thanks, Amy."

"Yeah," she replied flatly. "So if you want it back, it's at the house. Drop by whenever. If I'm not here, my mom will give it to you," she added with a hard edge to her voice.

"Okay," I said. I desperately wanted to stretch this brief interaction out as long as I could. I knew she would probably prefer to cut it short anyway, but I had to try. "Um, how are you?"

"I'm fine, Kenny," she said. Maybe it was just wishful thinking, but I thought she softened up just slightly. "Have a good one." And she hung up.

"Bye, Amy," I said to a closed phone line. "I miss you."

I set my phone down on the table, and, my excitement effectively killed, I made a Sandwich of Self-Loathing and sat at the Kitchen Table of Loneliness to stare mournfully out the Window of What Could Have Been. Self-Loathing tastes a lot like honey-smoked ham and baby swiss cheese on wheat bread. I guess the mayonnaise was actually the Mayonnaise of Squandered Opportunities, which comes on any self-respecting Sandwich of Self-Loathing. Although, I guess, by definition there aren't many self-respecting Sandwiches of Self-Loathing.

I had to admit that I might be at my lowest point in my life. I'd just been getting the hang of being an adult. I had a job that, despite my distaste for it, seemed steady. I had a girlfriend to whom I was planning on proposing eventually. I didn't have a great life, but I liked it. A few weeks ago Amy dumped me. Yesterday I lost my job. I wasn't at the point of going on a bender and then jumping in front of a train, but I was definitely more discouraged than I could remember being in a long time.

But I had a time machine.

Maybe I could use the time machine to fix my life. Or, more accurately, I could use the time machine to make my life so that it never needed to have been fixed. I'd had a working time machine for less than an hour and already I was getting hopelessly confused about my verb tenses.

What would I need to do? What problems with my life did I need to fix? I relaxed on the Couch of Rumination and began brainstorming. Unfortunately, I had more success thinking of better names for the couch than I had thinking of problems in my life that I could use the time machine to solve.

What is the source of my misery? The Couch of Pondering. What events in my past need to be altered in order to guarantee my happiness in the present? The Recliner of Reflection. What are my priorities for securing that happiness? The Sofa of Meditation. The Cloth-Borne Conductor of Revelatory Cognition.

The brainstorming was not going well.

Eventually, I was able to force myself to focus on something that had nothing to do with overwrought naming conventions for furniture. I decided that my first big problem was Amy. I was jobless, but maybe if I still had Amy I'd be happier and have a brighter outlook. But that only led to more complex and baffling questions—why did Amy dump me and how do I stop it?

Amy and I had met in tenth grade. We had been in an English class together. I had known who she was for years, as she was pretty and well-liked, but we'd never actually run into each other. We didn't talk for most of the year other than basic classmate interaction until we were assigned to do a project together—a presentation about the life of a British literary figure. It was the most fun I'd ever had doing a group project, mostly because she actually flirted back a few times when I worked up the courage to be funny in her presence.

Of course, I didn't actually wind up asking her out—the first time—for another seven years or so. But a lot of worthwhile things can take some time. When Travis and I moved into this apartment way back when, we saved our money for three months to be able to afford the Television of Wondrous Splendor. Amy was definitely twenty-eight times as good as the TV.

How could I ensure that I didn't lose Amy? Let's say I went back in time to the day we met—what could I do? Or if I went back to our first date or the day she broke up with me? I had the technology that would allow me to fix the problem but I didn't actually have a solution.

Maybe I needed to start with a smaller problem. If I could experiment with that and hopefully learn how to fix it on the fly, then I'd be much better prepared to tackle something like getting Amy not to stop loving me.

So what problem should I fix? Should I convince one of my past selves to get a different job? Buy a different car? Move into a different apartment? And then it came to me: a gym membership.

Suddenly I was excited again. I was imagining going back in time, convincing my 18-year-old self to join a gym, and then traveling back to the present to enjoy a stronger, less flabby, more attractive body without actually working out. I stood, cracked the Knuckles of Resoluteness, and set the controls on my new favorite toy to send me back to my eighteenth birthday. Standing atop the Tiem Mechine of Awesomeness, I clapped twice.

(22)

I arrived excitedly on May29th, 2006. I was still in my living room, although I'm sure it wasn't actually mine at this point in time. I heard noise from behind me. It started as the shuffling sound of movement and quickly turned into the sound of someone screaming.

I whirled. A woman who appeared to be in her mid-thirties had apparently had her televised exercise program interrupted by some unknown guy appearing in the middle of her apartment on a glowing white disc.

"Who are you? Where did you come from?" she shrieked, rolling off of her yoga mat and backing away from me fearfully. Then, as an afterthought, she picked up her yoga mat and held it in front of her to cover her legs. I guess she was embarrassed of how she looked in her leotard. But her legs and her leotard weren't really the center of my attention at the moment. Mostly I was worried about whether she would call the police or whether her husband was about to burst into the room and beat the shit out of me with a baseball bat.

"I'm no one!" I assured her. I picked up my time machine and backed quickly out of the room. "I'm leaving!" I told her. She stared at me in fear and confusion as I retreated. "Sorry!" I called before breezing out the front door. I scrambled out of the apartment complex altogether and then hurried a few blocks away just to be safe.

Once I'd decided I was that I'd put enough distance between me and my home invasion victim and that I didn't hear any sirens, I took a moment to catch my breath and gather my thoughts. It was May of 2006. It was my eighteenth birthday. It was warm, a little too humid, and overcast. I was in town, probably five miles from my parents' house, which is where my eighteen-year-old self would be living.

Now I just needed to find myself and talk myself into taking better care of my body. "Okay, where was I on the morning of my eighteenth birthday?" I whispered aloud to myself. "Probably sleeping."

I couldn't remember a whole lot about that birthday. Did anything interesting happen? I knew my parents took the family out to dinner. Did I do anything with my friends? Did I have a girlfriend when I turned eighteen? I guess my eighteenth birthday wasn't particularly memorable. Was is it a school day? I was pretty sure it was a weekday, although I wasn't sure which one. The odds were in favor of that assumption, though, so my eighteen-year-old self was probably in school. He was probably preparing for his final exams. I definitely didn't miss that.

I guess if I really needed to make sure I ran into myself today, the best place to go would be my parents' house. That was where I lived, that's where I would wake up, and that's where I'd go to sleep. So instead of wandering through the city streets with this futuristic Roomba, I should probably look into catching a bus out to suburbia.

I walked a few more blocks and sat down on a bus stop bench. While I was waiting, I decided I would start trying to figure out exactly how I'd talk myself into becoming fit and muscular. Would I appeal to my vanity? Discuss the limits of my dating options? Approach it from a health perspective? Or could I just convince the 2006 Kenny to do what I say because I'm from the future and I'm all-knowing?

That raised another problem that I hadn't considered. The first time I went into the past, the Kenny I talked to there didn't have much of a problem accepting my presence because he'd already been introduced to the possibility of time travel. But I was in 2006 now. I wouldn't chance across the alien yard sale for another eight years and five months. Explaining who I was and where I came from might take more effort than explaining what I wanted from the 2006 version me.

I shook my head. It's a good thing I had a time machine, because this could take some time.

"It's not going to work," someone said, sitting down next to me.

"What?" I replied instinctively, turning to face the speaker. Sitting on the bench, grinning at the expression of shock on my face, was me. It wasn't the eighteen-year-old me—he looked about the same age as I was. And he seemed to be wearing the exact same clothes.

"Where did you come from?" I gasped.

"I came from you," he said dismissively. "Look, I know you want to make yourself work out and get ripped and stuff, but I'm telling you right now—I tried it, and it doesn't work."

"You're me from the future?" I asked stupidly. Even though I'd recently discovered time travel, it was somehow surprising that my future self would also use that ability.

"Yes, you from your future's future," he said. Then, apparently thinking better of his awkward phrasing, he added, "I'm from an alternate timeline of yours, but I'm from 2014, just like you."

I was about to ask another question to clarify what he meant by future's future and alternate timeline, but he waved me off and said, "But I'm telling you what you're going to try won't work, because I already tried it a bunch of different times."

That was disheartening news. "So what did you try?" I asked.

"Everything," he said. "It didn't work the first time, so I kept coming back to today. Every time I went back to the present, I was just as flabby and average-looking as before."

A bus pulled up to the stop and opened its doors. A woman whom I hadn't noticed standing nearby got on. I stared at it as the bus driver waited for us. My future self waved her on, so she closed the doors and pulled away from the curb, leaving me sitting on the Bench of Many Failures with my other self.

Once the noise and exhaust from the bus had dissipated, I suggested, "Maybe you weren't convincing enough."

My condescending future self chuckled. "Oh, I sincerely doubt that."

"Sounds like there's a story behind that," I said, my curiosity piqued.

He shrugged. "The last approach I tried was maybe less elegant than the others. I combined the omniscient-future-self angle with the threats-and-violence angle, with maybe a little fire-and-brimstone thrown in."

"Fire and brimstone? You told him he was going to Hell unless he lost a little flab?"

"Not exactly, but I did make it sound like the wrath of God would rain down on him," my violent future self explained. "You know, 'it's your duty to take care of the body you've been given, you and those around you will suffer if you do not do your duty,' blah, blah, blah."

Did I somehow go from normal to psychopath in whatever time separated me from the guy sitting next to me? "That sounds...intimidating," I said.

He shook his head. "I lost it. I was frustrated. And I shouldn't have done it anyway, because, as I said, it didn't work." It was a relief to hear what appeared to be genuine remorse in his voice.

"Why don't we keep trying?" I suggested. "I'll go talk to him, and maybe I can get through to him if you just tell me all the stuff you already tried. We'll work together."

"That's what I'm trying to do," he said. "I'm trying to work together...with myself. Which is a bit unorthodox. Come on," he said, standing up, "there's something I need to show you."

"What is it?" I asked.

He smiled mysteriously. "I think it's best to explain it to you when we get there."

(21)

He led me away from the bus stop. I was carrying my glaringly-out-of-place futuristic time travel device, but my alternate-timeline self didn't seem to have one.

"Where are we going, anyway?" I asked him, partially because I was curious and partially because making conversation helped dull the weirdness factor of the entire experience.

"Oh, it's not far now," he assured me. "I'll know it when I see it." We'd walked past a sandwich shop, a Starbucks, an insurance agency, and now a garage and he didn't seem to be slowing down, but he did seem to be looking all over the place for whatever our destination was.

"Don't forget, I grew up around this town just like you," I reminded him. "Where is this place?"

He threw an exasperated glare at me over his shoulder. "Would you calm down?" he snapped. "You'll understand when we get there so just be patient."

Be patient. Sure. I could do that. But I couldn't stop being curious. I was trying to figure out a less direct line of questioning so that I could get some information out of my short-tempered alternate self without pissing him off any more than he already was when I suddenly jumped out of an alley.

Well, not me personally. But another one of me appeared from a side street. I was surprised by his sudden appearance, and it seemed that my alternate self was, too.

"Hey, I gotta talk to you," the third one of us murmured to my alternate self. All three of us were wearing the exact same clothes. Considering we were all in the exact same bodies, too, I feared I would lose track of which version of myself I'd been walking with for the last five minutes and which version had just appeared from nowhere.

Looking wary and suspicious, my companion entered the alley with our newest counterpart. I followed. The two of them were already holding a whispered conversation when I reached them. The one that I was pretty sure had just shown up abruptly stopped whispering and glared at me. "I don't have to talk to you," he said. "Get lost."

The one I thought I'd met earlier just shrugged at me and said, "Wait around the corner. This should just take a minute." Only after I'd disappeared from sight did I faintly hear them resume the Discussion of Inexplicably Requisite Secrecy. I was more than a little offended that I wasn't allowed to be a part of a conversation with myself. And I was also extremely curious about what it is they were talking about that another one of them was not permitted to be privy to.

I'd been sulking around the corner of the building for only a few seconds when someone ran up to me. It was another version of myself, but at least he was wearing a green shirt instead of the brown one the rest of us had on.

Without an introduction, he grabbed my arm. "Dude, we gotta go," he said.

Getting a little annoyed with the sudden appearances of all my other selves, I refused to move. "Who the hell are you?" I snarled, tugging my wrist from his grasp.

Impatiently, he said, "It's a long story, but I'm pretty much you. Those two guys around the corner are bad news and I'm pretty sure I'll need your help getting rid of them." He just about yanked my arm out of its socket. "We have to go," he urged. "Now."

Just then, my two other selves emerged from the alley way. One of them narrowed his eyes at the newcomer in the green shirt. "Oh, shit, it's this guy again," he muttered.

"Who the hell is this?" my other self asked him.

"Kenny," Green Shirt Kenny prodded, "Run!"

I glanced at the expressions of the other two and decided that maybe my best bet was with the one in the green shirt. He pulled my arm again and I went with him. We fled down the street and my two other selves gave chase immediately.

It must have looked bizarre to anyone watching. Perhaps it would have only looked slightly odd to see a pair of what must have been identical twins tearing down the sidewalk at full tilt. But to see another set of the exact same twins barreling after them...that might have seemed surreal to any unlucky spectators. And it might have added to the strangeness if any of them noticed the futuristic Frisbee I was carrying. But it was a sleepy morning and the skies looked like they were about to open up at any moment, so pedestrian traffic was pretty low. Anyone else who might have seen us would have been blazing past on the road and probably wouldn't have realized that all four of the people running down the sidewalk had identical faces.

It was definitely bizarre and surreal to me, though. We'd just sprinted past the GameStop where Travis had forced me to wait in line with him so that he could pick up Halo 2 on its release date. And here I was, in front of that store, a year and a half later but also ten years later, running after myself while trying to escape from two of my other selves. Complicated by the fact that none of these selves was actually from the current year and made even stranger by the frailty of my loyalty to the one in the green shirt and the unquestioning speed with which I followed him, this situation was, to say the least, pretty fucking weird.

I was hurrying after the one in the green shirt like he could guide me to salvation, but I knew even less about him than I did about the other two—which, admittedly, was also not very much. I guess my knowledge about each of my alternate selves kind of rounded down to zero. So really, I'd sided with one guy I had no reason to trust and opted to side against two other guys who I had just as little reason to distrust.

As we cut across a side street and through the parking lot of a Pizza Hut, I tried to make a quick, rational list of what I knew about all of my companions.

First—at one time, they were all me. No, wait, that might not be true. If they were from parallel universes or something, then they were like me, but not actually me. I'd only just begun trying to start thinking logically and already I had to start over again.

None of these guys was necessarily me, and therefore none of them was inherently deserving of my trust. This opened up a mindbending philosophical avenue into whether or not I could trust a more-or-less-exact copy of myself, anyway, but I figured that was a bottomless pit of useless existential debate that was best saved for another time. Or probably best ignored forever.

Kenny Number Two, the one I'd met at the bus stop, was evasive and seemed to have possible psychotic tendencies.

Kenny Number Three, the one who'd pulled Number Two into the alley, didn't seem to like me. He'd excluded me from the conversation with Number Two. He wasn't necessarily evasive, but he was definitely rude and unhelpful. It was also interesting that he seemed to be trying to help Number Two with information but Number Two didn't know who he was.

Kenny Number Four, the one in the green shirt, who I was currently allowing to guide me to freedom, also didn't give me much of an explanation when I asked him about himself. He didn't seem overtly evasive, but I would have preferred a lot more detail than "I'm pretty much you." He struck me as kind of bossy and the only reason I was trusting him was because he'd assured me that the other guys were "bad news." And maybe because Number Three (I think) seemed pretty pissed off by his presence.

For some reason, I was important to all of them. Number Four wanted me to get away from Two and Three. And Numbers Two and Three wanted me to stay with them and get away from Number Four.

When I added up all this vague information in my head, I came up with exactly nothing. I had no idea what was going on. I didn't even know what to demand that my alternate selves tell me except to explain everything.

Kenny Number Four was clearly aiming to leave the center of town. We were three blocks away from the main street and heading into a more sparsely populated corner of the area. All four of us, in a display that might have been hilarious had I not been participating, seemed to be running out of energy at the same rate. We slowly lurched our way along the sidewalk past a nursing home, dragging our feet and breathing heavily. I expected all of us to be passed by a septuagenarian with a walker at any moment.

As we slowly put the nursing home behind us, the skies finally did open up. They dumped one of those massive spring downpours on us. It made my time machine slippery. I gripped it with both hands to make sure I didn't drop it, but that made running a little more awkward.

Kenny Number Four was leading me through the back yard of the nursing home when he decided to change direction—he began hurrying up a long hill toward a lightly forested area. I did my best to follow, though my shoes were slipping in the drenched grass and the rain was running down my face into my eyes. In my blurry peripheral vision, I saw either Number Two or Number Three angle toward the crest of the hill to cut Number Four off. The other one continued to chase me directly—and because he wasn't lugging a time machine, he was catching up.

At the top of the hill, Number Four seemed to hesitate. After surveying the scene ahead of him, he turned around to shout "Hurry up!" at me. Somehow, he hadn't seen the one who'd been trying to cut him off, because just as I reached the top of the hill, he got tackled from the side. As I watched Number Four tumble wide-eyed down the far side of the hill, which had turned out to be the embankment of a stream, I got hit from behind.

I fell forward onto a long, muddy slope. The impact with the ground jarred the time machine from my grasp. I tried to get up but the riverbank was uncooperatively slick and I had another version of myself landing on top of me. Despite our efforts to stop, the four of us all rolled in an undignified, tangled mess to the bottom of the ravine. We landed, sprawled out, in the stream. It was maybe three inches deep where I was, but one of the others had landed a bit further out and it looked maybe twice as deep. I stood up and looked around.

I had no idea who any of these guys were. I'd most recently thrown my allegiance in with the one in the green shirt—but now we were all wet and muddy, and I couldn't tell any of my three clones apart. Based on my brethren's body language, I could assume that they all had the exact same problem.

The time machine had landed closest to me, upside down and half-submerged against a rock near the shore. It was mine. But if I went for it, the guys chasing me would know which version of me I was and catch me. I froze.

The rest of them froze alike. And there we stood, ankle-deep in the River of Uncertainty and shrouded in the Mud of Mystery, forming the vertices of the Square of Mutual Suspicion, unable to make a move for fear of giving something away.

Finally, one of me took a risk. "Biff's Revenge," the one directly across from me muttered.

At that, the one standing to my right darted forward, heading for my time machine. I shot my foot out and tripped him, causing him to belly flop painfully in four inches of water. I grabbed the time machine before the one across from me could react and quickly sloshed away, heading upstream.

(20)

"Come on, you idiot," I heard Biff's Revenge urge Belly Flopper. "He's getting away!"

Spurred by their implied pursuit, I headed for the far embankment. Even though my feet were completely underwater, the rain was still falling hard enough that my toes felt like they might still be the driest parts of my body. The embankment was steep and muddy, but there were enough rocks and tree roots sticking out of it that I was pretty sure I could climb it. I tossed the time machine up onto the grass at the top and began climbing with both hands free.

From the confused cries of my pursuers, I surmised that neither one of them had seen whether I'd stayed in the stream or gotten out. Their sounds grew closer, but they seemed to be proceeding cautiously. I was hidden around a bend in the stream and shielded by greenery, but if I didn't conquer the Slope of Zero Friction and reach the Crest of Triumph to frolic in the Crabgrass of Freedom, it wouldn't take them long to find me.

In normal conditions—by which I mean without the incessant downpour—this climb would have taken only a minute. But the rocks and roots were all slippery and smeared with slick mud. My head was about two feet away from looking over the edge onto level ground when a hand reached down and offered itself to me.

I looked up and, of course, saw another one of myself. At this point, I really had no idea whether it was one of my selves that I'd already met or whether I was meeting a fifth, even more confusing iteration of Kenny.

He was smiling broadly, and it seemed like he was a nice guy who wanted to help, but based on my experiences with my selves over the last few minutes, I didn't think I could afford to make that assumption.

"Who are you, then?" I asked, spitting rainwater from my lips.

"Well," he said with a half smile, "It's a long story but I'm pretty much you." He nodded in the direction from which I'd fled. "I found an easier way out of the river," he added. Then I realized that he was covered in mud, making him almost definitely one of the corners of the Square of Mutual Suspicion. I was ninety percent sure that he was Number Four.

That was good enough for me. For now, anyway. I gripped him tightly around the forearm and he hauled me the rest of the way up the embankment. But a moment before I disappeared over the crest of the cliff, I heard my voice call out from a hundred feet behind me, "Wait! I see them! There they are!"

"Shit," Number Four grunted. "Well, at least we have more of a head start this time. Come on."

I grabbed my time machine and followed him away from the stream. Gasping and slipping, I followed him through a small grassy field, across a quiet street and into an arrangement of modest ranch-style homes. Our pursuers must have used some impressive teamwork on the river embankment, because we'd only gotten across the first street when they appeared over the top of the ledge.

"They're out of the river," I called breathlessly to my companion. He immediately led us into the neighborhood, undoubtedly hoping to lose them in the winding, tree-lined streets.

"Do you know where we are?" I asked him.

He shook his head. "Nope," he admitted. "But since those guys had the same childhood we did, I'm betting they don't know either." He stepped off the street and started leading me through back yards.

"So what's the plan?" I asked. "Run until they stop chasing us?"

"We'll need to find someplace to hide," he said. "Look for some big bushes or something. If we're behind something big and we stay close to a house maybe they'll go right past."

"And what if they don't?"

"They'll be in a hurry," he reasoned breathlessly. "They'll be worried that we're getting away, so they'll be more focused on looking ahead than checking behind every tree."

"Yeah, I guess," I agreed uncertainly.

Suddenly, Number Four's eyes lit up. He pointed excitedly, though I wasn't sure at what. "Even better," he said. "There! Follow me."

He moved over to the nearest residence and pressed himself against the siding, creeping slowly toward the front. I followed him to the corner of the garage, where he stopped, staying flush against the building.

"What are we waiting for?" I whispered, flattening myself next to him.

He nodded toward the driveway, where a middle-aged lady was backing her car out to the street. "As soon as she turns away," he said, "We're going to sneak into her garage before it closes."

"We're going to what?" I asked shrilly, but he hissed, "Now!" and lunged forward. Feeling like I had no better choice than to follow him, I skirted around the corner and crept under the garage door. It had stopped its descent, apparently sensing when Number Four had slipped beneath it. When I got inside, my ballsy alternate self was waiting by the button on the wall. He gave it a quick tap and the door resumed closing, sealing us off from the world and, more importantly, hiding us from our other selves.

"Stay low," Number Four advised, ducking beneath the sill of the only window in the room.

I obeyed, dropping into a squat, but I was immediately struck with an overwhelming urge to pace. "So I have no idea what the hell is going on," I said. "Who are you?" He opened his mouth to speak and I cut him off. "Just do me a favor and don't say you're pretty much me."

Number Four smiled. "Well, that's the simple explanation, although I guess those other two goons out there could say the exact same thing."

"So what's the not-so-simple explanation?" I asked.

Number Four put a finger to his lips and shushed me urgently. I heard the sounds of angry shouts from outside. They seemed to be approaching our location, so the two of us hunched under the window in silence.

Either Number Two or Number Three bellowed from outside, "They can't just fucking disappear! They have to be around here somewhere!"

"Obviously," the other one grated with irritation. "But there's lots of places for them to hide out in this neighborhood."

"So what do we do? How do we find them?"

"They're us, right?" the second one replied, so loudly that he must have been walking past our window as he spoke. "So we just have to think like them. Get into their headspace."

"Okay. So what would we have done a few hours ago?" the first Kenny asked.

"No," the second me corrected. "What would we have done when we were cowards. Before we learned to take control of our lives and force the universe to bend to our will."

"And we learned all that in just the last few hours," the other one said dryly, his voice fading.

"Extraordinary circumstances force us to grow," came the faint response. "Sometimes it forces us to grow very quickly."

"Yeah, well, grow me a pair of infrared goggles so we can see where those two are hiding." Those were the last words I could make out.

I looked over at my fourth self. "So?" I whispered. "You gonna tell me what the hell is going on?"

He nodded. "This is going to be kind of confusing," he began.

"Well, we have the same brain, so if you understand it, I should be just fine," I said thinly.

(19)

"I'm not really sure I understand it," he confessed. "And I'm not even sure I'm right about it. I could be making some of this stuff up."

"You're stalling," I said.

He rolled his eyes. "Okay, so...when I was nineteen, an older version of myself showed up out of nowhere. I'm pretty sure it was one of those two guys."

"Okay," I said expectantly.

Hesitating like I needed his last comment to sink in longer, he continued haltingly. "He explained that he was a future version of me...and that he was going to make me rich. He gave me a couple of sports almanacs that had dates from 2014 on them and told me to start using them to place bets."

"Just like in Back to the Future?" I asked. "Real original." It was only after speaking that I realized I may have been scoffing at my own lack of imagination.

"Yeah, well, it doesn't have to be original as long as it works," Number Four said. "I started gambling, conservatively at first, but after a while when it became clear that the almanacs were right, I started being more aggressive. I made tons of money off of it. I tried to be smart about it, too. I bought myself some cool stuff—a house, a car, the usual. Then I poured the rest of my winnings into investments. I had an epic savings account and I got myself a financial advisor to try and help me go from rich to absurdly rich. I only wished that my future self had possessed the foresight to also provide me with intel on what stocks to buy."

"That would have been smarter," I pointed out. "Instead of doing the Back to the Future thing. Did you buy something that didn't work out?"

"Blockbuster," he sighed.

"Seriously?" I screeched. "Literally everyone saw that coming!"

He shrugged off his embarrassment. "Well, whatever. Either way, I got rich. But the other thing that my future self explained to me was where and when I could buy the time machine he was using. He asked me to meet him at a certain time and place once I got the time machine. Considering I had gobs of money because of him, I followed his instructions and used the machine to meet up with him somewhere around this time in whatever timeline that was, more than a year before we would eventually meet for the first time."

"You met him a year before you met him for the first time?" I repeated, shaking my head. "This is crazy." Time travel certainly made simple narratives a little more complex.

"But instead of a happy reunion, he'd set up an ambush," my earnest alternate self continued. "He attacked me, stole my time machine, and used it before I could get it back."

"Then how did you get here, in 2006?" I asked him. I was worried once again that I'd trusted the wrong version of myself. Any inconsistency in his story could mean he was lying to me.

"Because I used his machine," Number Four explained. "I assumed that I'd just be returning to where I came from, but when I got back to 2014, it wasn't my 2014."

That part I didn't follow. "What do you mean?"

After risking a quick glance out the garage window to verify the absence of our pursuers, he explained, "I'm not a hundred percent sure about this, but I think the timelines follow the machines. You came back here to change something about your future, right?"

"Yeah...I wanted to get myself to join a gym so that I'd be healthier and more attractive in the time I came from," I mumbled. It was shameful to admit to that out loud, even to my other self. I felt so shallow having gone through all that trouble to use a time machine to achieve such a vain objective. Even if it was supposed to be a trial run so I could learn to use the machine to solve more important problems in my life, it didn't stop it from sounding childish and superficial. I'd never considered anything like trying to warn the captain of the Titanic about the iceberg or assassinating Hitler before he kicked off World War II. I just wanted some sweet abs so I could get a date.

"Even if you'd succeeded in convincing yourself to join that gym, you'd have travelled back to your own time to discover that nothing had changed," Number Four said. That sounded a lot like what Number Two had told me, but I wasn't sure if that meant they were both right or they were both lying. "The moment you arrive in the past, you've split the past into two timelines. One timeline is the one you lived, growing up without having some future version of yourself tell you to start working out. The other is the one you're creating, in which you tell a younger version of yourself to get in shape. I think when you return, you'll return on your own timeline—the one your machine originated from—and even if you're successful in making the changes you wanted, you'll be in the wrong timeline to reap the benefits of it."

"So if I talked eighteen-year-old Kenny into becoming a black belt and then returned to where I came from, there will be two universes? One with a ripped Kenny who has women throwing themselves at him and one with a Kenny who's exactly the same loser he was before?" I clarified.

"I don't know if I'd use the word universes," my other self said. "I think the word timelines is more accurate, although I guess I'm not entirely clear on the differences." I guess it was evidence of our shared sense of inferiority that he bothered to correct my phrasing but didn't bother to correct my self-categorization as a loser. Maybe we were the same person after all.

He shook his head and continued. "Sorry. The terminology probably isn't that important considering that I'm not even sure I'm right about the concept."

"Terminology aside, I'm correctly grasping your basic idea?" I asked.

He nodded. "Yep. Two timelines. One Kenny would be you, the way you were before, and the other would be a kung fu master, assuming he followed your advice."

I was starting to understand. "And if the machine is tied to the timeline of its origin instead of its user...."

He finished my thought. "The Kenny that ambushed me stole my time machine so that he could hop timelines and go to a 2014 in which he was filthy rich."

I whistled in awe. "Wow, dick move," I said.

"Pretty much," Number Four grunted. "Imagine my horror when I used his machine to return myself to the present, only to discover that I wasn't rich anymore."

"Not only that, but you're recently unemployed," I added.

He nodded. "Yeah. I spent the better part of a decade amassing my wealth and the dude who selflessly got me started turned out to be a prick who stole everything in the blink of an eye and left me with nothing."

Nothing? Is that what my life was? "Well, not nothing," I contradicted him pointlessly. What could I say after that? You still have Travis? No job, no girlfriend, no money, but hey, at least you have a bro who puts up with you even though you're useless?

To my surprise, he actually backpedaled. "I'm sorry, you're right. It's not nothing, but it was just so radically different from the existence I became used to and the life I spent years working for that it felt like nothing."

"Thanks," I said, "But I'm not sure that really softens the blow. My life isn't nothing, it just seems like it's nothing? Not really a pick-me-up."

He chuckled. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be rude. But I guess when somebody breaks into your house and takes all your valuables, people tend to say 'they took everything,' but the robber didn't take the furniture or the family photos or the house itself. There's still a lot left, but the absence of the comforts you were used to make it seem like the place is completely gutted."

"That was actually kind of nice," I admitted. "So instead should I be offended that you called another version of me a prick?"

He laughed again, a little more heartily. "Hey, that prick said it himself—extraordinary circumstances force us to change very quickly. Ninety-nine percent of your lives may be identical, but the stuff that's happened to the two of you recently is enough to make each of you change in different ways. The four of us share appearances and mannerisms and favorite ice cream flavors, but we're becoming more behaviorally and morally distinct by the minute."

"Maybe I should be disappointed with myself at how quickly two versions of me turned into psychos," I murmured.

"Or you could not dwell on that and worry about something else," he said, speaking urgently now. "Can I count on you to help me steal back my time machine so I can return to my own timeline?"

That didn't sound like something I wanted to do. I just wanted to go home. In fact, I'd been holding onto my way home like a security blanket the whole time we'd been hiding in this dank little garage. Why didn't I just use it, go home, and get away from all this mess?

"I don't know about that," I said. "I mean, he dicked you over and everything, and that sucks, but I don't think I want to get involved."

"Are you kidding me?" my judgmental alternate self rounded on me. "Look, I didn't really want to put it this way, but you owe me."

I blinked. "I do?"

"Why do you think you ran into the other Kenny? It wasn't coincidence."

"I don't know," I admitted. "I hadn't really thought about it. There wasn't time."

"He was trying to lure you into a secluded area so he could steal your time machine and ride it back to your timeline," Number Four said.

"Wait, what?" I asked. My heartbeat, the Pulse of Mounting Horror, felt like it had just tripled. I was starting to realize that maybe I'd gotten caught up in the middle of something seriously dangerous. "Why would he want that?"

"Because he already stole my time machine, went to my present, and decided that he didn't like it. He doesn't have his machine anymore so now he's trying to steal your machine, go to your present, and get back to a future that's more like the one he's used to."

I shook my head like a stricken cartoon character trying to clear the fog of stars and birds away. "Wait...you're saying this other version of me stole your time machine, used it to travel to a universe in which he was insanely wealthy...and he didn't like it?"

My pushy alternate self shrugged. "He's still pretty similar to you, he just went off the deep end a little. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but you're a pretty humble guy. You'd be uncomfortable if you were suddenly surrounded by all that wealth and attention, am I right? I mean, I actually have a chauffeur. He wears a suit and everything. You'd hate that, wouldn't you?"

I hung my head like he'd just said something to be ashamed of. "Yeah...you're probably right about that."

"So now this other Kenny wants to go back to the way his life was before, except he doesn't have his old time machine. So he needs to steal yours because you come from a timeline similar to his own and he can get back to a lifestyle he's more comfortable with."

I let out a long breath as I sat hunched beneath the Window of Vulnerability in the Garage of the Expository Mindfuck. My adventure had been a lot to take in already without the confusing explanations my wealthier self had just provided. Now I was getting to the point where my brain was actually full. Acquiring new information was like throwing a piece of crumpled up paper into a trash can that was already mounded above the rim—if it stayed put, I'd regard it as a minor miracle.

My urgent alternate self didn't seem to have time for my cognitive meltdown. "So?" he asked. "Can I count on your help?"

I shrugged. "I'm in way over my head here," I weaseled. "I'm not sure how much good I'm going to be."

He scoffed. "Who else am I gonna ask? Besides, if you're anything like me—and we had identical lives up until a few years ago—you'll be able to help. We're not stupid."

That was quite a pep talk. "Okay," I said finally. "What do you need me to do?"

(18)

Number Four opened the garage door and we exited cautiously. I was confident that Numbers Two and Three were about to jump out from around the corner and beat the living tar out of us, but Number Four seemed to be merely wary of the possibility.

"You're sure they're not going to pop out of nowhere and kill us?" I whispered.

"I guess I'm not," he said. "But in their situation, after a while, I think we'd probably decide that the best way to figure out where we went is to go back in time to when they still knew where we were and follow us."

"But then they would have found us right away," I protested. "They would have followed us right to the garage and ambushed us when we came out like thirty seconds ago."

My not-so-knowledgeable alternate self shook my not-so-knowledgeable alternate head. "Not necessarily," he told me. "I'm not really clear on all of the mechanics of this time travel crap, but I'm guessing that if they went back in time to look for us, they might have branched off into another timeline, which means some other version of us just got ambushed. In this timeline, we appear to be in the clear."

I stared at him with The Glare of Having It Up To Here With This Shit. "Do you have any idea how stupid that sounds?" I asked him.

"What do you mean?" he asked distractedly, leading me back toward the muddy creek. I yanked on his elbow so he stopped walking. He eyed me suspiciously for a moment. "What?" he asked impatiently.

"Your explanation for why we didn't just get the shit kicked out of us by our doppelgangers is because they probably already went back in time to do it," I babbled in frustration. "And your explanation for how it could have happened even though it clearly didn't happen is that it didn't happen in this timeline. Are you making this up as you go along? Because it sounds like you're making this up as you go along."

"Of course I'm making this up as I go along," he said. "But that doesn't mean I'm wrong. I'm so very sorry if I'm not as all-knowing as you'd prefer, but time travel is kind of uncharted territory for me, so forgive me a few growing pains and try not to rip me a new asshole for figuring out all of this on the fly because I left my time travel manual in my other pants!"

"Oh! Sarcasm!" I shot back. "Because that's super constructive in this kind of a situation! Thank you so much for introducing that important element into our dialogue!" I realized, somewhere behind the panic and the rage and the indignation, that it must have looked odd to anyone in the neighborhood who might have glanced out the window. There we were, basically identical twins, practically frothing at the mouth as we screamed at each other about time travel on somebody's front lawn.

"I think sarcasm is an appropriate response," Number Four shouted, "Considering that I saved your ass from those two more than once and that you've been following me around like a lost puppy only to start getting uppity when I ask you to help me out or when I offer a plan that doesn't conform to your standards of strategic perfection!"

His anger, or maybe his whole persona, was stronger than mine. I felt myself weakening. "I'm sorry," I growled. I was still pissed, but I was letting myself back out. "But all this is really confusing and I don't understand what's going on. And I don't know if I can trust you. How do I know you're not just making up some ridiculous story to trick me into giving up my time machine or something?"

Number Four rolled his eyes. Then he punched me in the stomach. I had no idea I could move that fast or hit that hard, but apparently one version of me could. I doubled over, coughing, and he easily plucked the device from my grasp.

"Hey!" I wheezed.

He lifted the machine above his head triumphantly. "Now I have it!" Then he tossed it on the grass beside me and walked away. "And you can have it back," he called over his shoulder. "Now hurry up!"

I picked up my machine and trotted after him. "Okay, so that was some kind of needlessly violent demonstration that you could have taken my machine if you'd wanted to?" I asked. Why was I still following him?

"Pretty much," he said haughtily. "I don't want your machine. If I used it, I'd only go back to your future instead of mine. No offense, but I liked my future. I don't want to go to yours."

"Oh, so because you're rich, your future is so much better than mine?" I asked. He'd warned me not to take offense, but of course that had only served to sharpen the barb by implying that offense was expected.

"How much money do you make in a year?" he asked me, easing down a gooey embankment of the stream.

"Nothing, now," I admitted sourly. "I just lost my job."

"Fantastic," he said. "I'm not interested in your future."

I considered presenting the argument that there was a lot more to life than making money, but then I remembered that I was single, heartbroken, aimless, and, with the exception of Travis, pretty much friendless.

"I realize there's more to life than money, of course," he said, and for a second I was worried that he had a mindreading device to match his personal temporal relocator. "But money is what I'm used to. I'm sure there are plenty of other differences, big and small, between our lifestyles. I like what I have, I'm comfortable with it even though it isn't perfect, and I have no interest in being thrust into a different existence from the one I'm used to just because I have most of a lifetime in common with the subject of that existence." He paused. "You ever continue playing a video game from a save point from like a year earlier?"

I shrugged. "Sure," I said.

"It feels wrong, doesn't it? It's kind of familiar, but you can't remember exactly what you were doing. You're not in the same headspace you were way back when, you know, when you left off playing it. You can play it if you want, but usually you'll want to load a game from more recently or even just start the whole thing over again." He extended an arm to help me traverse the Treacherous Slope of Villainous Mud. "It's the same kind of thing. If I took over your life, I'd have the same family and the same physical appearance, but I'm not you. As much as I could just kind of learn my way around and figure out what's going on, it would be too uncomfortable. It would feel wrong. I wouldn't have the stuff I'm used to. I wouldn't have the money or the friends or the coworkers or the same shoes or the same brand of shampoo or all the other things that, collectively, make up a huge part of my life and who I am. I don't want that. I want to go back to my life and live with the reality that I've seen shaped by the last twenty-five years of gameplay."

We scrambled up the less steep bank on the other side. "That was quite a speech," I admitted.

"Do you get what I'm saying?" he asked me earnestly.

I nodded. "Yeah, I do. But I wish our doppelgangers felt the same way."

Number Four frowned. "I think the problem is that they do feel the same way. The one that stole my time machine learned it the hard way. He doesn't have his original machine anymore, which is why he wants to steal yours and go back to a future that's almost identical to his own."

"But I can avoid him by travelling back to the future right now, right?" I asked.

He sighed. "Yeah. You can. But I need your help to get my own machine back from the other Kennies. Remember," he added, "you owe me. Without me, they'd have conned you out of your machine by now or taken it by force and you'd be stranded here."

"Okay," I said. "You're right. But I'd like to be clued in on your ingenious plan, if you don't mind. Where are we going?"

"Back to our eighteen-year-old self's house," he told me. "I have a feeling that one of our counterparts probably reasoned that the safest place to hide a time machine is with ourself."

"Ourself isn't even a word," I mumbled to no one in particular.

"What?" he asked.

"Nothing," I replied. "So back home then? You didn't manage to smuggle a Honda into 2006 with you, did you?"

He cracked a slight smile as we headed down the hill toward the retirement home. "Sorry. The only vehicles I have are my feet." Then he stopped and stared at me like I'd just told him that dress made him look fat.

"What?" I said, becoming alarmed.

"We do have one other vehicle at our disposal," he murmured, gazing with the Expression of Supreme Ocular Creepiness at the oversized portable CD player in my hands.

"This doesn't have wheels," I reminded him. I was a little confused as to why he needed the reminder in the first place, but I issued it anyway.

"It won't help us get there faster," he told me with a sly grin. "But it can help you get there at a point in time previous to when our evil twins get there."

I figured out what he was trying to say halfway through his sentence. Maybe it was because we shared similar brains and nearly identical mental development. He wanted me to travel back in time, take a leisurely stroll over to our old house, and still arrive long before our wicked counterparts even thought about going back.

"You want me to do another time jump," I said.

He shrugged. "I'm not crazy about you leaving me here, but I don't know how else I can make sure we beat them to the machine."

I fidgeted. He didn't seem like he was trying to pressure me, but I felt pressured anyway. "So...what do I do? Go back in time an hour and walk home? Then knock on the front door and announce that I'm here for the time travel device?"

He squinted, his eyes focused on something on the ground that wasn't visible to me. "No. Wait. This is a bad idea," he said. "I think if you use your machine to travel backward, you'll split off into a new timeline and I'll be stuck here."

"That can happen?" I asked.

"It wouldn't matter if I had my own machine," he grumbled. "I think we need to do this the old fashioned way—on foot." With a wave, he spurred me onward and took off at a jog.

(17)

Once we returned to the main thoroughfare, my affluent companion paid for our bus ride out to the suburbs. Then the two of us, the Unsightly Twins of Deplorable Physical Stamina, dragged ourselves as quickly as we could through another residential neighborhood toward an exact replica of a house we'd both grown up in.

Number Four breathlessly stopped me when we were directly across the street from our target. "We should get a plan together before we go in," he puffed.

I was grateful for the rest. I was starting to realize that, contrary to what I'd originally thought, the rich version of me was in marginally better shape than I was. Either that or he just hid his exhaustion better than I did—which honestly wasn't saying much. I leaned against a sign that said "Slow—Children at Play" and tried to stop my chest from heaving. My lungs were pretty much in an all-out panic.

"So...what do you want to do?" I asked.

He took a moment to respond so he could time his answer with his abnormal breathing rhythm, which made me feel a little bit better. "Obviously," he said, "I think it would be best if we only spoke to the eighteen-year-old Kenny. If Mom or Dad sees us it will only complicate things."

"And if Christine sees us, that will only make it worse," I added.

"And we'll confuse the hell out of that damn dog if there are three of us at the same time," he agreed.

"Great," I said. "So we need to sneak into the house with exactly one of its occupants noticing. That seems doable."

"Well, it's a Monday afternoon," Number Four reasoned. "So Dad will still be at work. If we're lucky, Christine stayed late at school. So all we really need to do is avoid Mom."

"And the dog," I reminded him. "Wait...how do you know it's a Monday. Like, off the top of your head?"

"Because I looked at a friggin' calendar," he told me, adding a sarcastic, "Smart, right?"

"Okay," I replied a little more sullenly than I'd wished. "So what, you want to throw some gravel at our bedroom window or something?"

"Actually, that sounds like a decent idea to me," he said. "It targets the place where eighteen-year-old Kenny is most likely to be and most likely to be alone." He started off across the street.

I scurried after my headstrong alternate self. "I feel like we should put a little bit more thought into this before we just rush in all guns blazing and everything," I urged him.

He looked back at me over his shoulder so I could see him roll his eyes. "If by all guns blazing you mean both pebbles ricocheting harmlessly against the window, then I don't think we're being all that reckless," he said.

"Fine," I whispered furtively, hurrying to keep up as we crossed the lawn and snuck around behind the house. "But if we get seen, I'm blaming you."

"Yeah, okay, sure," my surprisingly pompous alternate self intoned. He stooped to pick up a few tiny pieces of ground-up stone from the landscaping. "Come on, grab some gravel."

Number Four chucked a few pieces at our old bedroom window. They clacked softly against the screen. I hurled my handful upward as well and scored a few hits. I was about to ask my other self how long we should wait before trying again when a face I hadn't seen since I looked in the mirror in high school appeared at the window. Then the face disappeared abruptly. Moments later, an eighteen-year-old Kenny was stepping out onto the back porch, looking panicked.

"Will you guys please stay out of sight?" he hissed. "I don't need people seeing my time traveling twins running around all over the place, willy nilly."

Number Four and I exchanged a glance. "I'd forgotten that phase we went through when we thought it was cool to say things like 'willy nilly' all the time," I muttered.

"The only way this could be more embarrassing is if all of the parties involved weren't also me," he responded under his breath.

Ignoring our criticism of his idiom of choice, our younger self waved us across the porch and into the comparative safety of the house, away from prying eyes. He closed the door and immediately rounded on us. "What do you guys want now?" he asked. "What balderdash are you up to? What gobbledygook are you going to hit me with this time?"

"Oh no," Number Four said in quiet horror. "It's not just 'willy nilly.' We're right in the middle of the full-blown nonsense word phase."

I felt a strange bond with my almost twin brother over our ability to be humiliated by the speech patterns of our past self. "It's so ridiculous it almost physically hurts to listen to it," I whispered back.

"What the dickens happened to you two, anyway?" Little Kenny asked.

I'd forgotten how we must have looked with matted mud covering us from head to toe. "We fell down in a river," I said.

Simultaneously, Number Four responded, "We almost lost a fight."

Little Kenny stared at us in confusion. "You lost a fight to a river?" he asked. "Whatever. The point is, whatever you guys want, let's get it over with so you can leave me alone."

"We need the machine," Number Four said.

"The machine?" Little Kenny answered cautiously.

"Yeah, the machine," I said impatiently. "You know, the giant white CD player looking thing?"

"I know what you mean," he returned defensively. "But I can't give it to you."

"Don't tell me you don't have it," Number Four said. He seemed to be losing his patience at approximately the same speed as I was.

"I have it," our adolescent mirror image countered. "But I can't give it to you without the password."

"The password?" I asked.

"The password?!" Number Four repeated hysterically. Perhaps he was losing his patience at a faster rate than I was after all.

"Yeah, the password," Little Kenny pressed. "You told me when you gave me the machine that I was not to return the machine to you under any circumstances unless you gave me the password beforehand."

Obviously we didn't know the password. Instead of trying to guess it, I attempted to convince our brother-from-the-same-mother that it was totally unnecessary. "That's totally unnecessary," I reasoned with him.

Number Four tried a slightly different approach. "For fuck's sake, just give me the damn machine so we can get out of your hair!" he raged.

"Don't start a kerfuffle. Your instructions were very clear," our self-righteous alternate self maintained. "You said there could be others and the code word would ensure that the machine didn't fall into the wrong hands."

"It's already in the wrong hands, you idiot!" Number Four roared, his fists balled so tightly that I expected to see blood seeping from between his knuckles at any moment. Hoping to defuse the situation a bit, I quietly reminded him that he'd just called himself an idiot, but he just glared at me like I'd suddenly switched sides.

Our younger counterpart crossed his arms and shook his head. "All I know is there's nothing I can do for you if you don't give me the password."

There came a sudden tapping at the Portal of Visual Vulnerability behind us. A quick glance through the window revealed two more Kennies standing outside—presumably the ones I'd dubbed Number Two and Number Three.

Number Four swore under his breath. "Because that's just what I need right now," he grumbled. To adolescent Kenny, he warned, "Don't open that door."

Our foolhardy alternate self with a penchant for peculiar jargon gave him a look of disbelief. "Why, is somebody going to kill me?" he asked. "Because I hear killing a past version of yourself creates all kinds of headaches."

"Don't open the damn door!" Number Four shouted, but the birthday boy was already turning the handle.

"Nice of you to drop by," Little Kenny greeted his two newest visitors. "I was just having a little powwow here with some of your associates." He stepped aside to allow them entry.

Judging by the similar mud stains adorning their clothing, it was a safe bet that they were, in fact, Number Two and Number Three. Which one was which was lost on me, of course. They eyed us warily as they moved into the room.

"You beat us here," one of them said. He sounded half annoyed and half impressed. "Did you use the machine?"

"Couldn't," Number Four returned sharply. "Somebody took mine."

"Oh yeah," The Kenny Presumably Identifiable As Number Two snickered. "That was awesome."

"I'd like it back," my irritated companion snapped.

"Not gonna happen," Number Two said.

Clenched fists trembling and spitting the Flecks of Salivary Indignation from his lips as he spoke, Number Four argued, "But you didn't like my future! Why do you need a time machine that can only return you to a future you don't even want?"

"Because a bad future is better than no future," Number Two countered angrily. "I don't have my original machine, so I can't get back to my original timeline. But if all else fails, I can always go back to your future. It's better than being stuck in the past."

"But better than either option," Number Three said, eyeing me hungrily, "is going back to a future that's close enough to your own to feel like home."

"This is preposterous," our eighteen-year-old self commented. "Ludicrous. Outlandish."

"Shut up," at least three of our older selves chorused.

"No matter which way you cut it, one of us is gonna be stranded in the past without a time machine," Number Two said. "And it sure isn't gonna be me."

"I think it should be you," the wealthiest Kenny retorted. "You're the one that started this mess. You're the one who should have to be stuck here."

"Not gonna happen," my increasingly militant alternate self reiterated.

"There aren't too many reasonable hiding spots for a time machine in this house anyway," Number Four scowled. He turned to the adolescent us. "Where'd you hide it, Wordsworth, under your bed?" The younger Kenny's face went pale and Number Four barked out a laugh. "Well," he crowed to Kenny the Second, "At least you could trust yourself to follow instructions, but it looks like you couldn't trust yourself not to be a dumbass."

"Now listen here, you namby-pamby," our shamefully ill-spoken self squawked. "You have no right to insult me in my own house!"

Without missing a beat, Number Three mumbled, "It's our house, too, dipshit."

Number Four leaned in close to our youngest self and growled, "Skedaddle, you rapscallion." Thoroughly intimidated and just as thoroughly mocked, Little Kenny scurried off with a yelp, probably to hide out in the basement. That's when Number Four and Number Two simultaneously made a break for the stairs.

I reacted slowly, which is to say that I hardly reacted at all. I looked on in impotent detachment as Number Two dropped his shoulder and plowed into my ally, gripping the banister with his free hand to swing himself around onto the stairs. Number Four rebounded much more swiftly than I would have suspected my body to be capable of and grabbed his opponent's feet from behind, bringing them both down on their stomachs and probably giving them both carpet burn on their faces.

As I watched them grapple their way up toward our old bedroom, Number Three made his move. I saw him coming out of the edge of my sight and instinctively pulled myself out of his path. Unfortunately, my hands were the last thing to leave his path and my hands held the target of his attack. He swatted the time machine with outstretched fingers—not hard, but hard enough to loosen my grip. As he stumbled past me, his foot shot out to kick my legs out from under me—not hard, but hard enough to make me stumble, trip over him, and lose my balance completely. The time machine tumbled to the floor as I went down.

I could hear swearing from the stairwell. Numbers Four and Two had reached a landing, turned the corner, and gone out of sight, but it sounded like they were still fighting their way to the top. Number Three was trying to heave my body off of him so that he could grab the personal temporal relocator. As I struggled to keep him pinned so that I could get to my feet first, the situation aligned itself in my mind with a sudden and unexpected clarity.

Kenny Number Four, Rich Kenny, the Kenny of Lesser Malevolence, whatever I was calling him...he was right. Number Two had pretty much admitted to stealing his time machine, trying to steal his future and then trying to maroon him in the past when he wanted his own future back. And the final step in his plan to reclaim a facsimile of his original future was to steal my machine. He'd even managed to somehow rope Number Three into working with him, although I was assuming that Number Three was pretty much a future version of Number Two, separated by a few more minutes and a few more time jumps. Anyway, my realization was that if anybody deserved to be trapped here, it was Number Two, the one who'd selfishly initiated all this chronological mayhem in the first place.

And Number Four needed my help. Without me, he was outnumbered two to one. Without me, his team was missing the most potent weapon in play—the fucking time machine. That's what I had. And I needed to help my down-and-out brother in his time of desperate need. I needed to because it was right and because I could. And because he couldn't rely on anyone else. And the best way I could help would be to introduce a few unexpected variables into the equation. I needed to do a little outside recruiting.

Probably for the first time in a long time—and at the very least for the first time since Amy dumped me—I felt strong, self-motivated, and capable of great things. I was going to bring someone else into this mess to tip the balance. I was going to bring Travis back here and raise a little hell. I was going to kick Number Two's ass and give Number Four his life back. Because it was right. Because I could.

And because literally no one else could.

(16)

My miniature epiphany didn't occur in the optimal tactical timeframe. As my eyes were opened to the exquisite purity of my purpose, Number Three bucked me off and scrambled for the overweight Frisbee. I reacted out of some kind of savage instinct by punching him ruthlessly in the testicles. He let out a very undignified "oof" and keeled over against the couch.

I had to give him credit for the speed of his recovery. I'd hit him pretty hard and he was obviously in pain, but I still only beat him to the time machine by a fraction of a second. I managed to swipe it from the floor, turn on my heel, and race out down the hallway into a powder room. No sooner had I locked the door than I heard him slam bodily against it.

"Unlock the damn door!" Number Three thundered.

I didn't answer. Instead, I busied myself by trying to calculate as quickly as possible how many yilks I needed to travel to get back to the morning I'd started all this. The mental math was difficult under the stressful circumstances. I was pretty sure Number Three couldn't break down the door with his shoulder (although that didn't stop him from trying) but it was only a matter of time until he procured a weapon heavy enough or sharp enough for him to bash the thing open. I expected his face to appear in a splintered opening at any moment, Jack Nicholson style.

I didn't want to miscalculate and wind up six hundred years in the future, so I did the math a second time under the barrage of colorful threats that Number Three was punctuating with impacts against the bathroom door. Then I did it a third time. I thought Number Three had given up trying to blow the door off its hinges, but after a few moments of silence, I heard him come back. Then the doorknob shuddered slightly. I was pretty sure he had gotten a screwdriver and planned to dismantle the knob.

No more time to check my math. I punched in the settings, climbed on board, and clapped twice. I felt the peculiar sensation of rushing air without the sensation of movement and then I was enveloped by darkness.

The sudden darkness was completely disorienting and it took me a moment to realize that I was now standing in my parents' bathroom in 2014 in the middle of the night. And, since they were probably asleep upstairs, they had no reason for the bathroom light to be on. Thus, I was standing in a dark room on a dark night and I hadn't died or gone blind or any of the other crazy theories that clattered around in my brain during that brief moment of panic.

And now it was time to sneak out of my parents' house in the middle of the night as a full-grown adult. I tucked the Tiem Mechine under my arm and opened the bathroom door slowly, bracing myself against the inevitable creaking that would evoke fears of my dad charging down the stairs in his underwear, brandishing a plunger or a shoe or something.

The door creaked. I froze, but it had a little momentum and the long, painful whine of its frail hinges continued for a few more seconds after I stopped pushing. I stood motionless in the silence and strained my ears. There was no cry of alarm from the second story. There was no thumping of frantic footsteps.

I slipped out of the half-opened doorway and crept into the den. I'd originally planned on just hurrying out the front door, but the blinking light on my parents' answering machine caught my eye. How was I going to get home? My car was parked at home. My keys were still inside my apartment. My cell phone was in my apartment. I could walk but it would take forever. I tiptoed over to the phone and dialed Travis. It was only then, as I heard the line ringing, that I glanced at the clock next to the television set.

It read 3:27. I was calling Travis at three thirty in the morning. I'd be lucky if he answered. And even if he did, I'd be lucky if he was lucid. And even if he were, I'd be lucky if he didn't hang up on me. And even if he didn't, I'd be lucky if he didn't fall back asleep the moment we were done talking.

It rang and rang.

"Hullo?" came the groggy voice of my rudely-awakened roommate.

"Travis!" I whispered as loudly as I could into the handset. It was a little embarrassing how elated I was just to hear his voice. "Hey, sorry to wake you, but I really need a favor."

It took him almost ten seconds to answer. "You know what time it is?" he mumbled.

"Yeah, I know," I said. "Sorry about that. But I need a ride."

"You need?" he asked. I wasn't sure if he was aware that he hadn't finished his sentence. "What? You called me in the middle of the fucking night for a ride?"

"It's...I know it's a dick move, Travis, but trust me, there are extenuating circumstances. I'll explain everything on the way home."

"Wait...Kenny?" he asked, like he'd only recognized my voice just now. "Where the hell did you go, man? You didn't come home tonight. I tried calling you, but your phone was in the kitchen all day."

"Yeah, I know," I told him. Dealing with someone who's just been abruptly woken up in the middle of the night was arguably as difficult as dealing with someone who's had too much to drink. "I didn't have my phone on me. Can you come get me? I really need your help on this, man."

"Um," he said, apparently thinking it over. He unsuccessfully attempted to suppress a yawn. "Sure, I guess. Where are you?"

"Uh...my parents' house," I told him.

"And you need a ride now?" he asked incredulously. "Just crash on the goddamn couch, dude."

"They're...asleep. They don't know I'm here," I said.

"What?" he sounded pissed off. I think he was waking up a little. "What did you do, break into your parents' house at three in the morning? How did you even get there?"

"I promise you, there's an explanation for this," I told him. "It's gonna sound stupid in person, but it'll sound even stupider over the phone. Please, just come get me."

"Yeah," he said. "I'll be there in like twenty minutes."

"Thank you!" I practically gushed. "I'll be out front."

"No problem," he responded, although it obviously was kind of a problem. He hung up. I gently replaced the handset and continued creeping through the den. I stepped on a creaky floorboard somewhere near the front door, but by that point I was pretty sure I could make my escape without being caught. I painstakingly opened the door as silently as possible and flipped the lock on my way out, sealing the house behind me.

As I waited for Travis at the end of the driveway and tried to keep myself from shivering in the cool predawn air, I considered my plan of attack. I needed to get back to 2006 and help my other self get his time machine back so that he could go back to his 2014. This was when I made the Discovery of Unparalleled Obviousness—Travis couldn't travel through time without a time travel device.

I'd been so motivated and so excited by my idea that I had overlooked a very important logistical issue: I only had one time machine. Travis and I definitely were not going to fit on top of that thing together. And the user manual had been very clear on the machine being designed for single-person use anyway. I swore to myself in the half-darkness as I sat on the cold curb a few yards down the street from the lone functioning street light—The Street Light of Dawning Understanding.

How could I have been so stupid? I guess the good news was that, since I still had my time machine, I had a lifetime to think of a solution before blinking back to a point in the past not a second after the point from which I'd departed. But how much thought and planning could produce the second device that I would obviously need in order for my hastily-formulated and even-more-hastily-acted-upon stratagem to come to fruition?

Travis's big black Chevy Equinox rolled up. It was a mid-size SUV, but it had always seem fitting in the way that it dwarfed my Corolla the same way his income and self-esteem dwarfed mine. I pulled open the passenger side door and clambered in.

"Thanks again, man," I said, making a concerted effort to sound sincere.

"Sure, dude," he said, turning around in my parents' driveway and heading back the way he'd come. "You know I got your back. But I really hope you're planning on telling me what the hell's going on with you." He paused, apparently having just noticed the large white disc in my lap. "The fuck is that thing?"

"That's a...uh...um...." I searched for more words I could use to fill the silence and provide me with more time to come up with an acceptable answer, but none came. So I went with the truth instead. "It's a time machine."

"That thing you got for your nephew? Why do you have it with you now?"

"I was, uh...using it," I said lamely. "You know...for...time travel."

"Are you high?" he asked. From his inflection, I could tell that he wasn't simply using a colloquial expression of disbelief. He was legitimately concerned that I was wandering around in the middle of the night, breaking into my parents' house and toting around a plastic toy that I claimed to be a functioning time machine because I was under the influence of an illegal substance. When I considered the evidence, I guess I couldn't blame him.

"No, of course not," I said, more than a little defensively. "Just...let me show it to you when we get back to the apartment. It's legit, I swear."

"Let me tell you what we're gonna do when we get back to the apartment," he returned sternly. "We're gonna make you the strongest cup of coffee you've ever had and then we're gonna sit you down and talk about how your life isn't over just because you lost your job and you lost Amy and it's time for you to quit dicking around with stupid shit and just get back on the fucking horse already."

I expected him to keep going, but we lapsed into a murky silence as he merged onto the highway. Finally, I asked, "Was that the speech? Because if it was, then all we're missing is the cup of coffee, and then—"

"That was not the speech, that was simply a condensed version of the speech," he interrupted. "There's a lot more nuance to it and the movie trailer doesn't do it justice. But let me tell you, it is one hell of a speech and you're gonna sit through the whole fucking thing and when it's done you're going to tell me that I'm right and one day when you're the President of the United Fucking States of America, you're going to credit all your success to that one goddamn speech."

"It sounds like a really good speech," I told him.

"You bet your ass it is," he snapped. People who didn't know him as well as I did might not have realized that he was being facetious. I was certain he truly planned to give me a good talking-to about all this, but he wasn't nearly as angry as he sounded. Despite his fervor and his profanity, he was smiling on the inside. He'd always had an interesting take on the concept of tough love.

A few minutes later, he parked in the lot outside our apartment building and we headed up to our place on the second floor. Immediately after we'd closed the door behind us, Travis headed over to the coffee machine and started brewing a pot for us.

"So why don't you tell me what's going on?" he asked, sounding like a psychiatrist with maybe a little concerned parent and stern guidance counselor thrown in.

"It might be easier if I just demonstrated," I replied, setting my machine to one tenth of a yilk into the future.

"You're not seriously still going on about this time machine thing, are you?" he said. He gazed at me with sad eyes as though he were watching me in the final stages of a degenerative mental disease. Considering how crazy my little adventure had been, I probably should have given some thought to the possibility that I'd imagine the whole thing in a fit of insanity.

"Trust me," I assured him, "this is gonna blow your mind. I'll be back in like a minute or two." I stepped onto my machine and clapped twice.

After the slightly unsettling but now-familiar sensation of temporal travel, I looked around at a setting that seemed identical to the one from which I'd departed, except that the coffee pot was half full of freshly-brewed joe and my best friend was standing in a slightly different spot with a wildly different pallor to his skin.

"Holy fucking shitcakes, dude, what the fuck?!" he gasped. It almost seemed as though he hadn't breathed once since my departure.

I smiled broadly as I stepped off of the futuristic waffle iron. "Cool, huh?"

He shook his head, still in shock. "What the fuck?" he repeated.

"'Shitcakes'?" I asked him.

He shrugged, his eyes still bulging out of his head. "You know, you're excited, you're scared, you're surprised...stuff comes out, you say stuff that doesn't really make sense...holy shit, though."

"Yeah," I agreed.

"Where the fuck did you get something like that?"

"Yard sale," I said.

"You weren't kidding about that? A yard sale in October?"

"Right, because the fact that there was a yard sale in October is the weirdest part about all this," I said. "Not the whole time travel thing."

"It's the weirdness icing on top of the mindfuck of a cake, then," he amended. "Still...a time machine? Who sells a time machine at a yard sale? Who even has a time machine?"

"Well," I admitted, "I probably didn't mention that the guy having the yard sale was an alien."

He stared at me. "You're fucking with me, right?"

I shook my head.

"You gotta tell me whether you're fucking with me right now, dude, because I am being forced to completely rethink everything that I thought science was and was not capable of and I'm in a really vulnerable position right now, gullibility-wise, and considering that I just did you a solid by picking you up in the middle of the night even though I was asleep and having some very nice dreams about voluptuous Brazilian soccer fans, I don't think it's entirely fair of you to be fucking with me right now."

"I'm not," I assured him.

"Okay," he said with a shake of his head that seemed to signify the admission of defeat. "Well, I'm going back to bed. In the morning, if I wake up and all of this is still happening, then feel free to tell me more, but for now I think my brain has reached its maximum capacity for mind-blowing revelations." He wandered off to his bedroom in a daze.

I'd had a crazy day myself. And I had a problem I needed to solve if I was going to help out my other self who was currently stranded in the past. And considering I had a time machine at my disposal, I didn't need to solve the problem right away. I decided to sleep on it. I trudged into my room, collapsed on the bed, and slipped into unconsciousness almost immediately.

Time travel can really take a lot out of you.

(15)

Travis was already up by the time I wandered groggily into the kitchen several hours later. He was pouring the entire pot of coffee into the sink.

"Wasted a huge batch of perfectly good coffee, man," he remarked forlornly.

"Sorry," I told him. "I needed some sleep."

He shrugged. "There's plenty more where that came from," he said, pouring some more grinds into the machine.

I opened the fridge to grab a couple of slices of bread and slip them into the toaster. Travis busied himself by replenishing the water supply in the coffee maker. It was a strangely normal morning considering the conversation we'd had the night before. I stared at the toaster in silence. He stared at the gurgling coffee machine in equally silent silence.

"So I think I need to ask you a favor," I said finally.

He gave me a wary sideways look. "What kind of favor? My friend Daphne is a psychiatrist. She could probably get you a list of names for people who specialize in—"

"Not that kind of favor," I interrupted. I was pretty sure he was just joking. Mostly. "I need to get you a time machine so that you can go back in time with me and help me out with something."

He blanched, his mouth agape. "You want me to time travel?"

"Yeah."

"So you're pulling me into your impossible delusions?"

"Yeah."

"That's incredibly selfish of you, Kenny."

"Maybe."

"I mean, I'll still do it, but I just want it on the record that I have reservations about being involved in your lunacy."

"Okay."

"It increases my risk of catching your crazy."

"Sure."

"What I'm saying is that I value my sanity and time travel is impossible and if you involve me in the impossible I'm likely to lose my sanity."

"I understand."

"I don't want to go insane."

"And why would you?"

"You're gonna owe me."

"Definitely."

"I mean you're gonna owe me big."

"Agreed."

"Next time we order pizza, you're paying for the extra topping."

"Fair deal."

He gave me an amused smirk. "So what's going on somewhere in time that you need my help with?"

I took a deep breath. "Okay, well, originally I went back to my eighteenth birthday so that I could convince my younger self to start working out so that when I came back to this time I'd have muscles and stuff."

He gave me a goofy grin. "You received a device that affords you the awesome power of travelling through time at will and you decided to use it to get ripped without actually having to do any work?"

I looked down, blushing. "It was kind of a trial run kind of thing. I was trying to tackle a simple problem to see how it worked before I tried doing anything really...um...important."

He nodded, still grinning like an idiot. More accurately, he was grinning like I was the idiot. "Okay," he said. "I can buy that."

I felt surprisingly vindicated by his acceptance of my motives. I continued my explanation with a little more confidence. "Anyway, when I went back in time, I kept running in to other...mes."

Travis blinked. "Other yous?"

"Yeah."

"Other yous other than you and the other you you expected?"

"Right."

"I don't follow."

"Other versions of me from other timelines...or, wait, I guess a lot of them were future versions of me from the same timeline...only they're not future versions of me anymore because events changed when they talked to me, meaning that I won't ever turn into them but if they hadn't interfered with my timeline I would have...anyway...other versions of me that had time machines and had been bouncing around through time with them contacted me."

Travis shook his head, wide-eyed. "Fuck, man. You didn't seriously expect me to understand any of that, did you?"

I sighed. "Look, I'm barely hanging on to how all this works in my head as it is, so figuring out how to say it so that it makes sense is kind of a secondary priority here."

"Right, whatever. The point is that there are other Kennies with time machines running around in 2006 and you met some of them?"

"Yes! Exactly!" I said. "And some of them were kind of...evil."

His eyebrows went up. "Evil Kennies?" The idea seemed inherently funny to him, but he managed to stifle his laughter.

"Not all of them," I assured him. "The first two I met were pretty screwed up and apparently they were trying to take my time machine away from me. The next one that I bumped into helped me get away from them, and he's trying to help me because apparently the first two already took his time machine away from him."

He put a hand to his stomach like he was getting nauseous. "Fuck, man," he repeated. "So what exactly do you need me to do?"

"I don't know," I admitted. "But I figured I could use you as a secret weapon or something."

"I'm your secret weapon?"

"Yeah," I said. "What's wrong with that?"

"Aside from the fact that I don't have a time machine," he pointed out, "It sounds like you want me to ride in and save the day without any idea of how I'm supposed to do that."

Travis was displaying his usual ability to penetrate the bullshit and get to the heart of the matter. It was a talent that, while useful, was endlessly infuriating. He was about to state out loud that I had problems solving my problems and that I often needed to employ outside help to get anything accomplished in the face of adversity. I know I have flaws, and I know Travis knows about them, but I don't enjoy serving them up as a matter of discussion, even in the most indirect form. I struggled to hold my tongue and not lash out angrily. He was, after all, trying to help. And I did, despite what I'd prefer, require his help.

"Okay, well I haven't worked out a detailed plan yet," I said between gritted teeth. "Having only just been made aware of time travel yesterday, I think it's fair to allow me a grace period to adjust before I figure out what I'm going to do with it."

"Ah yes," he replied with mock solemnity. "I'd forgotten about the learning curvature of the space-time continuum."

I was frustrated, but not too frustrated to think without a semblance of clarity. "I need more information," I muttered.

"What kind of information?" Travis pressed.

"We need to talk to the alien," I said with sudden inspiration. "He'll know what to do. Or how to do it, maybe."

"Sure," Travis said oddly. "Talk to the alien. Yeah, that's...that's always the best thing to do in these types of situations. Talk to the goddamn alien."

I cracked a smile. "You want to drive?"

He stared at me for a moment. Then he grabbed his coat from the hook by the door, snatched his keys from the table and announced, "I didn't have anything better to do with my weekend than follow my buddy around with his toy time machine anyway."

We headed out into the crisp autumn morning and climbed into his Equinox. I guided him through town until we arrived in front of that unassuming split-level suburban home where all this mess had begun. The yard was still littered with secondhand merchandise. Travis pulled the SUV over to the curb and we cautiously got out.

Rubbing his hands together to stave off the cold, my roommate stared up at the house. "So an intergalactic traveler who manufactures time machines lives...here?"

"Guess so."

"At some point, I'll have to wake up from whatever acid trip I'm on and then later I'll be able to go on the lecture circuit and talk about how vivid and how frightening it all was and that one bad trip is as good a reason not to do drugs as you could ever need. It's like I'm tripping balls right now, only I'm pretty fuckin' sure that I'm not."

"...guess so."

"Surreal, dude. Totally surreal."

"Yeah," I said. "Uh, you ready, or do you need like a moment to collect your...uh..."

He sniffled and squared his jaw. "Nah, dude, I'm good. I'm good. I'm jazzed. Let's go talk to the alien."

"You sure? Because you seem a little rattled."

He rolled his head across his shoulders and cracked his neck a few times. "No way. I live for my understanding of the universe to be rocked wildly out of alignment. Let's do this."

"I'm gonna leave the time machine in your car, okay?" I told him, setting the device on the seat and getting out of the SUV. He nodded at me and beeped his remote twice as soon as our doors were closed.

"Okay then," I said, and I led the way across the grass, through the aisles of piled junk. We stepped up onto the porch, which seemed more worn than the rest of the house and felt like it sagged under our weight. Then I reached out and rang the doorbell.

Nothing happened. I rang again.

"Maybe he's not home," Travis said. "Maybe he's at his job or something."

"He doesn't have one," I said, pressing my thumb against the bell a third time. "He lost it. That's why he's selling all his crap and moving millions of miles away."

"Okay, so the doorbell's broken maybe?" He reached out and rapped loudly on the door itself. Moments later we heard movement from inside. Travis gave me a brief look of pride and condescension.

The door swung open and the same guy I'd bought the time machine from only two days earlier stood before us, appearing supremely confused. "Yes?" he said.

"Hi," I replied excitedly. I suddenly realized that I had no idea what to say. "Sorry to bother you, uh, sir...um...do you remember me?"

He nodded. "Of course. The young man who bought the personal temporal relocator." He raised his eyebrows expectantly. "What are you doing here?"

"I had a couple questions about the...personal temporal relocator," I said. "I don't know exactly how all of this stuff works and I'm trying to get back to the past to help myself out and I don't know if anything I'm going to do is going to do any good...you know what I mean?"

I stopped because it was clear that he wasn't listening to me. Travis was staring at him in a most inappropriate manner, like he was some kind of cubist sculpture that he couldn't quite wrap his brain around. The alien, for his part, was staring back at Travis like he was some kind of crazy person.

"So...this guy's an alien?" Travis asked me.

"I'm standing right here, why not ask me?" the man replied.

I glanced nervously toward our host. "I'm sorry, he doesn't mean to be rude. He's just...in shock a little, I guess."

"So how come you look exactly like us, anyway?" Travis said skeptically. At least he was talking directly to him this time. "You're not a little green man with antennae or a freaky slime tentacle monster with suction cups all over your face or whatever."

The alien blinked. "Thank you for noticing that I am not a freaky slime tentacle monster," he said dryly.

"With suction cups all over your face," Travis added helpfully.

"What are you doing?" I hissed at him. "If you piss him off, he's not going to help!"

"I'm just trying to get to know the guy better," Travis said defensively.

"My species has...technology," our new friend explained awkwardly. "It can help us take the forms of different species."

"Technology?" Travis echoed. "A little vague, don't you think, buddy?" he appealed to me with a jab of his elbow. "What is it, like a trade secret? Proprietary information? You signed a non-disclosure agreement?"

"But that's not why we're here!" I practically shouted over my incorrigible best friend, plastering a huge smile across my face. Like an advanced alien life form was really going to be comforted by a horribly forced grin and instantly forgive my companion's rudeness.

"Then why are you here?" the otherworldly visitor asked.

"If you have a minute," I said as humbly as I could, "I'd really like to understand some of the details about how time travel works. Please. I really need your help."

He stared at me. "If I have a minute?"

I nodded hopefully.

"If I have a minute," he repeated, "You want me to explain time travel to you?"

I nodded somewhat less hopefully.

"If you think it's only going to take a minute, this is going to take a lot longer than usual." He moved aside and motioned for us to enter. "Come on in, boys."

As we crossed the threshold, Travis whispered at me, "What if this was all a clever trap and now he's going to like grind our bones to make his bread?"

"Wasn't that a giant that did that?" I asked.

"Oh, okay, so because a giant did something that means a space alien can't?" he snapped. Even I could no longer tell whether he was joking. I wasn't used to seeing him so uncomfortable.

We were ushered into a very cozy (and very human) living room and guided to a very cushy (and very human) sofa. Other than the furniture, the room was blandly unornamented...probably because every single knick-knack he owned was out on his front lawn with a fifty cent sticker on it.

The alien studied us as we sat. "Would you like some coffee or something?" he asked. "I'm not used to entertaining younger human adults. Usually just a few middle-aged couples so my wife and I can practice having human social interactions."

"No, that's fine, thanks," I told him. I felt the need to be particularly polite. Not only did I want to counteract my best friend's boorishness but I also wanted to balance out the fact that I was about to ask for some pretty important information with the fact that he had no reason whatsoever to help me. "I'm sorry, sir, it occurs to me that we don't actually know your name. I'm Kenny and this is my friend Travis."

"Quentin Lundquist," he said with a corny half-bow. "But my friends call me Pilz."

"Pills?" Travis echoed.

"Pilz," Quentin Lundquist corrected, drawing out the buzzing sound of the last letter.

"That's a nickname for Quentin?" Travis said incredulously.

Quentin rolled his eyes. "No, Quentin is just the name I assumed when I took on a human identity. My friends back on Pyson call me by my given Pysonian name, which is Pilz."

"Both are...lovely names," I complimented him clumsily.

"It means 'defender of the latrine' in Pysonian," Pilz said with a frown.

Travis failed to cover his brief fit of laughter. "Really?!"

"No, not really," Pilz answered with a self-indulgent grin. "It means 'traveler.'"

Travis scowled at him.

"So, then," Quentin Pilz Lundquist Traveler began, sitting heavily in a lazy chair across from us, "I hope you have some specific questions about the nature of time travel? Because if you want to know everything, we could be here for several days."

I nodded. "Um...maybe it would be easier if I explained my situation first, and then you'd understand the kind of stuff I'm looking for." He gestured for me to begin, so I launched into my story.

(14)

I told the alien about wanting to fix my life and opting to try fixing something less important first. I told him about running into other versions of myself once I got to the past and I told him about their attacks and my narrow escapes. I told the Tale of Greatest Embarrassment and the Saga of Intertwining Confusion. To my surprise, he listened very closely and didn't say a word until I had finished.

Gravely, he began, "You might not like what I'm going to tell you."

"Okay," I said, mentally bracing myself.

"First and foremost, you can't use time travel as a cheat to change who you are. You're always yourself. If you want to change yourself then you have to change who you are. Any meaningful growth can't come by virtue of tricks and shortcuts."

"That much I was starting to figure out," I admitted.

He continued. "Just to make sure I understand you properly, your objective is to travel back in time with your friend here so that you can outsmart some of your other time-selves to steal back the device that belongs to yet another time-self so that he can return to his original timeline, correct?"

I nodded.

The alien spread his arms in a broad gesture of sympathy. "I don't think I'll be much help to you," he said.

He'd been right—I didn't like what he told me. "Can you at least tell me if it's possible?" I blurted desperately.

"Probably," he said. "But it's very unlikely."

"Why is that?"

"Because when you travel through time, you don't have much control over which timeline your destination will be on," the alien said.

Travis's jaw dropped. "Wait, what? Say that again?"

The alien sighed as though he were endlessly frustrated by the cognitive limits of our primitive human brains. He rephrased. "When you use that device to travel backward in time, you create a second timeline when you arrive. In one timeline, the past as you remember it is what happened, and in the other, the past where you appeared out of nowhere is what happened."

"Right, I got that," Travis said. "But what was all that about not having control over where you end up?"

"Each additional time you travel, you create more and more timelines branching off from each other," our host continued. "But you don't get to choose which timeline you land on when you travel. And it gets more and more difficult to pinpoint the one you wanted as you use the device more and more."

Travis shook his head. "That...really didn't explain anything." He glanced at me. "You following this?"

"Only a little," I admitted. This didn't sound like the theories Number Four had shared with me back in 2006. I felt like we'd based our understanding of what was happening on those theories and it seemed reasonable to assume that if they turned out to be inaccurate then perhaps our understanding of events was also inaccurate.

"Okay, let's try an example," our exasperated teacher said. "Let's say the first thing you do when you get the device is to travel one hundred years into the past. When you arrive there, you now have two timelines. One in which history continues normally, and one in which you existed a century ago. Then you travel back to your own time. But when you arrive in your own time you'll create another timeline. If you arrive in the original timeline in which you don't appear out of thin air in 1914, then you'll have three timelines—one in which history is completely unaltered and you disappear never to return, one in which history is completely unaltered and you disappear but return a moment later, and one in which you show up out of nowhere in 1914 and in 2014 you disappear never to return. But if you arrive in the same newly created timeline in which you arrived in 1914, the three timelines will be the one in which history is completely unaltered and you disappear never to return, one in which you arrive in 1914 and disappear from 2014 never to return, and one in which you arrive in 1914, disappear from 2014, and return to 2014 moments later."

"I'm getting really tired of the word timeline," Travis grumbled, scratching his head.

"I'll try to mix it up with event stream and time stream, then," Pilz said dryly.

"What about event line?" Travis asked.

"Nobody uses that one," our alien instructor replied brusquely. "It sounds stupid." He switched back into professor mode. "Then suppose that, after returning to the present day, you wanted to revisit the last century, so you set your device to transport you one hundred years into the past again. You'll of course be creating a new timeline when you arrive, but you don't know which previously existing timeline it will branch off of. That far back in time, there are only two concurrent timelines, since you've only inhabited that timespace once. But you'll have no control over whether you arrive in the timeline with you in it or the timeline without you in it."

"This is crazy," Travis whined. "I mean, everybody knows time travel is confusing or whatever but what the fuck, dude? You invented this horseshit? Intentionally?" I shot Travis a glare, horrified that he would offend our gracious and long-suffering tutor.

"I'm a marketing consultant," the alien said simply. "My species invented it, but I'm not the scientist. My understanding of how it all works is cursory at best. Although from my discussions with those who designed it, I would think that it's fair to say that these machines were designed to work around existing natural laws as best as they could. But some problems could not be solved." He shrugged. "Maybe in a future model we'll have all these kinks ironed out, who knows?"

"Can't you just use your current model to go to the future, steal your future model, bring it back to the present, and reverse engineer it?" Travis suggested.

The alien blinked at him like he was being dense. "That would be cheating," he said. Travis slapped himself in the forehead exasperatedly.

"Moving on with your example," I prompted.

Mr. Lundquist continued. "Let's say that when you arrive one hundred years in the past, you arrived in an undesired timeline. You wanted to assist yourself in a specific task, but you've landed in the timeline in which you do not exist. What do you do?"

"Go back to the future and try again?" I asked.

"But the problem is that it will be less likely, each time you try again, that you will succeed," the alien said. "The first time you tried to reconnect with a specific version of yourself in the past, there were only two timelines available one hundred years back."

I was beginning to understand. "So my odds were fifty-fifty that I'd hit the one I wanted, right?"

Travis seemed to be coming around, too. "But the next time you try, you've created an additional timeline and your chances of getting the one you want are one in three," he finished.

"Very good," the alien approved. "Then one in four. Then one in five. And so on. With each iteration, your chance of targeting the single timeline you want approaches zero."

Remembering my calculus, I said hopefully, "The limit is zero, but it never actually reaches zero, right? Just smaller and smaller odds that can still be one in a million instead of zero in a million?"

The alien graced me with a nod.

Remembering his statistics, Travis added, "But that's just the probability of each individual attempt working. The limit of the individual attempt approaches zero, but the probability of one out of any attempt succeeding gets closer and closer to one hundred percent, right?"

Our host smiled condescendingly. "Sure," he agreed. "You'll get the one you want eventually. Assuming your number of attempts is infinite, it's guaranteed."

Travis rolled his eyes. "Great. Fuck that."

"To make matters worse, of course," the alien continued, "You don't know how many timelines you're already working with."

"We don't?" I said. That was a surprise. "I only travelled back that far once. There are only two timelines for me on my eighteenth birthday."

"But you said you made contact with multiple of your other time-selves," the alien pointed out, leaning back in his chair. He seemed to be growing weary of our comparative lack of intelligence. "Your travel along time streams is tied to the time stream in which the machine you are operating was first used. If someone else had a time machine, for example, he could only travel to the parts of your timelines that overlap with his. If neither one of you has gone further back than a few years, the year 1950 would be identical for you. But once you travel to the future, he would branch out along his version of events and you would branch out along yours, according to the origin of the device you were each using. You could both travel fifty years into the future and wind up in completely different timelines. But someone reusing the same machine could, as you have, cross paths with himself many times in his travels. Each time any version of himself travels through time, he'd be spinning the roulette wheel of which event path he arrives at locally, and it's likely that sometimes multiple versions of himself would land in the same timelines, overlap, and interact."

Travis was leaning forward with his head down. "This is fucking crazy. Of all the dumb shit I've ever heard, this is the dumbest dumb shittiest shit."

"So that's what that evil Kenny was trying to do by swapping machines," I said. "He was trying to hop timelines and go to a different version of the future...and that was actually going to work?"

The alien nodded. "It could have," he said.

"But wasn't that the same time machine?" I asked. "I mean, the rich Kenny still got the machine from you. So wasn't it the same exact device? Wouldn't it have been tied to the same exact timelines?"

"Probably not," he replied. "The evil Kenny, as you call him, shares a lot of his timeline with you. You were the same person when you received and first used the device. It wasn't until after the time machine had been in use that the two of you—and your timelines—separated. The rich Kenny, on the other hand, simply got some good financial advice but hadn't actually interacted with the device in any way until the day he was instructed to buy it from me in a timeline separate from the one in which you and your not-as-yet-separated evil self bought it from me. His time machine should be tied to a different bundle of timelines, though that bundle could conceivably intertwine with yours."

"But when I came back to the present both times I used the machine," I said, "I wound up on this timeline, the same one I started from. Was that...dumb luck?"

"It could have been," Pilz replied. With a shrug, he amended, "More likely you just returned to a present so similar to your own that you didn't notice any differences. The original Kenny that inhabited this particular timeline probably could have wound up in your original timeline and also not noticed."

"You know," Travis said loudly, "For being some super-smart technologically advanced alien time travelling badass dude, you're using the word 'probably' a lot. Why do you have such a loose understanding of your own damn product?"

The alien bristled in the face of Travis's continued disrespect, but he spoke calmly. "There's a light bulb in that lamp," he said. "Your people invented that."

Travis narrowed his eyes. "What's your point?"

"Do you know how to turn it on and turn it off?"

"Of course."

"Do you know to keep it plugged in? Not to break the filament by jostling it too much? You know how to switch it out with a new bulb if it burns out?"

Travis nodded. "Yeah, I know how to use a lamp."

"You understand its limits, too, I assume?" the alien continued. "You know that it won't shine through walls? You know that if it's a low wattage bulb in a big area you might need a couple more lights to fill the room?"

"Yeah," Travis said sullenly.

"Okay. Then how exactly does a light bulb work?" our host inquired. "Explain the science to me."

"Uh...there's the filament, which is like, incandescent or something," Travis floundered. "When it gets hot, it glows."

"Why does it glow?" the alien pressed. "How is it heated? How is the electricity generated and then conducted to the bulb?"

"All right, all right, I see your point," Travis admitted grudgingly. "You don't always need to know all the science behind it to know how to use it properly."

"And that's just for a light bulb," the alien said. "In the history of Pyson, my home planet, it took almost three thousand years for us to advance from the invention of our first artificial light source to the invention of our first temporal relocation device. The complexity of that machine is mind-bogglingly greater than the complexity of that floor lamp."

"It also looks a hell of a lot cooler," Travis said pointlessly.

"And then we have one other problem," I pointed out, rubbing the Temples of Increasing Pressure. "Travis doesn't have a time machine. I don't suppose you have another one of those things I could buy from you?"

"Sorry," the alien said. "I only ever bothered to bring one home from the office. What would I need two of them lying around the house for?"

"And even if you did sell us another one," Travis moaned, "when we both used them, we'd almost definitely wind up in different timelines anyway."

"Now you're getting it," the alien replied. I wasn't sure if his tone betrayed approval or sarcasm.

"So pretty much, fuck all of this," Travis concluded. "Kenny, dude, this isn't gonna work. There's too much bullshit in the way."

"I can't give up on this," I insisted. "I promised myself—I mean, I promised my other self—that I'd help him get back to his own time, his own home. I can't leave him hanging like that."

Travis exhaled from his lower lip hard enough to blow his shaggy hair around. "Well, then I guess you better find a way. But I'm hungry. Alien dude, thanks for your help and all, but I'm going to excuse myself to grab a burger." He stood up and awkwardly offered our host a handshake. Pilz returned the gesture firmly if hesitantly.

"Thank you so much for explaining everything to me, Mr. Lundquist," I said, extending my own hand.

Pilz shook it, looked me in the eye, and said, "Good luck. I honestly admire your determination, but I hope you'll prepare yourself for the possibility that your best intentions may not be practical."

I smiled. "Where there's a will, there's a way."

He snickered wryly. "An adage unique to humans. No other sentient species I've met has had the same tendency to be quite so oblivious to its own limitations."

I considered that somberly as he led me back toward his front door. "Anyway," he said, giving me a reassuring smack on the shoulder. "Best of luck." And then he practically pushed me out onto his porch and closed the door.

Travis looked at me and shook his head gravely. "Fuck, man," he said wisely. "Fuck."

(13)

I trudged down the steps and headed back to Travis's car.

He jogged after me. "Hey, I'm starving. You want to hit up Burger Baron on the way home?"

I stopped and turned around to deliver what I hoped was the Glare of Greatest Resentment. "Why did you have to be so rude in there?" I asked him.

Even if the Glare wasn't as intimidating as I wanted it to be, he knew me well enough to recognize that I was truly angry with him. "Hey, come on, man, galactic space aliens freak me out, okay? It's one of those phobias you never realize you have until it's too late."

I squinted at him. "What?"

"You know. You could have a deathly fear of unicorns or something," he continued. "But since they don't exist, it never mattered and you never knew you were scared of them. Until one day a unicorn corners you in a dark alley and you're all quivering in your boots and shit."

I shook my head. "Unicorns? What the hell are you talking about? I needed that guy to explain how to use the machine to fix this mess and you had about as much cultural sensitivity as a blind rhinoceros!"

"Rhinos are culturally insensitive?" he asked.

"Fine, a racist rhinoceros!" I blustered. "You had about as much cultural sensitivity as a blind racist rhinoceros!"

"If he was blind, he wouldn't be able to tell what race anybody was," Travis pointed out.

"Come on, man, you know what I'm talking about!"

"And the problem wasn't the guy's race," Travis added. "It was his species because in case you didn't realize it, we were talking to a fucking alien from outer space who mysteriously sold you the ability to travel through time for two dollars!"

He was shouting now. And I felt idiotic because I hadn't actually realized how angry he was until he raised his voice.

"And it was United States dollars, no less!" he continued. "You bought a time machine at a yard sale from an alien for two US dollars and immediately used it to fuck shit up in the past that you're now somehow desperate to fix again using the two-buck time machine despite the fact that you escaped already."

I couldn't deny that, when he summarized it like that, my recent activities sounded kind of...stupid. "Okay," I said defensively. "I know this is a lot of really bizarre information to accept all at the same time. But somebody needs my help back in the past, and that person is pretty close to me."

"What, so because you can't fix your own life, you gotta fuck yours up worse just so you can fix your doppelganger's life instead?" Travis retorted. "That's fucking idiotic, man, and as your friend, your roommate, and the guy who wants you to be able to pay your half of the rent at some point in the foreseeable future, it's my responsibility to stop you."

I shook my head. "It never occurred to me that, when I came back to my own time to ask you for help, you'd refuse. As my friend and my roommate, you'd think it would be your responsibility to say, 'yeah, man, I totally got your back' instead of hassling me with speeches about how you don't like aliens and people shouldn't buy two-dollar time machines."

"People shouldn't buy two-dollar time machines!" he exclaimed, his eyes wild. "Don't tell me you're actually gonna stand there and say that buying a fucking time machine for two hundred goddamn pennies was actually a safe and responsible decision."

"Don't tell me you're gonna stand there and say that you're still my friend even though you're doing your best to keep me from trying to do something that's important to me!" I shot back.

He furrowed his brow at that. I felt like I'd scored a critical hit to the Solar Plexus of Friendship. "Come on, dude," he said, his voice softer. "I know you've been through some shit lately. Amy's gone. You're unemployed. You have all these problems and you're desperate to fix them and you feel like you can't. But that doesn't mean that you have to go and fix all these other problems. This is the time when you gotta focus on yourself and get back on the horse, dude."

"This isn't about Amy or that stupid job," I told him.

He shrugged. "Where I'm coming from, dude, it seems like it is."

"This is my mess anyway," I told him. "I have to clean it up. At least some of it. Otherwise I'm not good for anything."

He slapped me across the face. I stared at him in shock. "What the fuck, man?"

"I'm not putting up with that shit," he snapped. "That's my best friend you're talking about, asshole."

"What?"

"Look, if you're sure it's your responsibility, then I guess it's your responsibility," he agreed. "But if you can't fix it, you can't fix it. That's a reflection on the limitations of time travel, not on your lack of character."

I sighed. "Right, okay. I'm just saying though, that if I can fix this, I need to do it. Because I fucked up my relationship with Amy, I fucked up my job, and now I'm fucking up my time stream bundle or whatever, so if I can't fix this then—" I was interrupted by his palm across my cheek a second time.

I rubbed my jaw angrily. "Fuckin'...stop that!" I bellowed.

He feigned innocence. "Hey, it's not my fault. Some douchebag keeps talking shit about my buddy, so I gotta keep teaching him a lesson until it sinks in."

"I'm just saying that I really need this to work," I said. "Because nothing else I do seems to work and it's just really important to me. I don't want to keep being a fuckup."

He slapped me again.

"God dammit, Travis, quit smacking me!" I shouted, charging him.

He absorbed my tackle and wrapped me in a headlock, his face next to my ear. "Quit being stupid, then," he whispered. "You and me, we go way back. I know you better than anybody, and while you're not perfect, I still have a pretty high opinion of you. So shut the fuck up about why you suck and start fixing shit. Make your life the way you wanted it to be."

"Okay," I choked. "But I need to fix this first."

"No, come on," he insisted. "Move forward, dude, don't keep dwelling on this."

"No," I grunted, struggling against his strength and clawing ineffectually at his black t-shirt. "I mean I need to get out of this headlock first."

He immediately loosened his grip. "Right, sorry."

I scrambled away, coughing weakly. "But I also need to try and fix this time travel crap too," I amended.

He sighed. "Okay, Kenny. Fine. If you need to do this first, then we'll do this first. I just want to go on the record here and state that I have very serious qualms about this lunacy you're roping me into."

"Noted," I said, rubbing my throat. "Again."

He grinned contentedly. "Good talk. Wanna grab that burger now?"

(12)

We stood in line at Burger Baron, looking at the menu above the cashier. Travis was reading it attentively, but I was kind of blankly staring at it because that's what you stare at when you're in line at a fast food restaurant.

"I'm thinking I'm gonna try that Baron's Bacon Beast Burger," Travis murmured. "I wonder if they put barbeque sauce on that."

"I wonder what would happen if you sat on my shoulders or something while I used the time machine," I mused. "Maybe that would let both of us time travel simultaneously."

"I'd rather not have my bottom half wind up in the previous decade while my top half stays here," Travis said. "What are you gonna get?"

"I don't know," I said dismissively. "Probably just the number one. You think the device only works up to a certain height? Like if an NBA star used it, the thing would only send a decapitated body into the past?"

"I don't know," Travis said. "But either way, we should probably have you on my shoulders if we're gonna try that. Not only am I stronger than you, but if anybody gets decapitated, it should be the guy that came up with such a stupid idea in the first place."

"Thanks, that's really constructive," I told him.

Travis chuckled. "If you don't mind, I think I'd like to have some down-to-earth time for a while. Can we lay off this time-space-continuum bullshit for a few minutes? Let's talk about your professional life and your love life."

"What's there to talk about? I don't have either one," I said sourly.

"Yeah, but you could," he said. "I'm getting really tired of using the get-back-on-the-horse thing, do we have another cliché I could employ. You know, just for variety or whatever?"

"I...don't know," I said, shuffling forward as the line moved.

"You know, that girl is pretty cute," he observed. "You should try chatting her up, see how she responds."

"What, the girl at the counter?" I whispered. "She's like sixteen!"

"Not that one, dumbass, the girl behind her. The manager or whatever. If you play your cards right, maybe you can get her number and then you'll be well on your way to fixing one of your two biggest problems right now."

"You mean other than the time travel thing?" I asked.

"We're not talking about that right now, remember?" he scolded me. "We're in the here and the now."

"Right, so I do the super classy hit-on-the-fast-food-chick thing and I'll be happily married before you know it," I said sarcastically.

"You gotta start somewhere," he reasoned.

The customers in front of us moved off to the side to wait for their food and the teenaged girl grinned at us. "Welcome to Burger Baron, what can I get for you guys?" she asked.

Travis started ordering his high-calorie Grease Burger of Manliness while I stared a bit too much at the girl he'd pointed out to me. She was definitely attractive. She might have been more attractive than Amy. Although it was also possible that, in my State of Seemingly Interminable Loneliness, every woman I saw had a good two-point bump on the usual one-to-ten scale. If I'd been thinking straight, maybe she would have been a seven instead of a nine.

But it didn't matter because she'd never be Amy. If Travis were in my thoughts, he'd have told me that was a good thing, anyway, because whether I realized it or not, I didn't want another Amy. The girl saw me staring at her and smiled uncertainly. I broke away, hoping that I was nonchalant enough about it and that I wasn't blushing.

"And what can I get for you?" the cashier asked me pleasantly.

"Um, I'll just take a small number one," I mumbled.

Travis paid the girl and we moved off to the side to wait for our meals.

"Dude," he hissed at me. "She totally smiled at you! She could be your first post-Amy hookup! She can be the one to get you on the road to recovery!"

"She was being polite," I told him. "She smiled at a customer, not at a smoking hot hunk who she is desperately hoping will take her home and ravish her."

"Eh, whatever," he said. "Your attitude is terrible, you know that?"

"I've been told."

"Let's talk about the job situation," he continued. "What are you thinking? Going back to school? Submitting a resume to a competitor? Working the grill at Burger Baron? What?"

"I don't know," I admitted. "I've been kind of caught up in this time travel thing for a while. I haven't really thought about it."

"Sure, because you've had this dazzling distraction in front of you that you refuse to ignore in favor of what's really important," he said. "It's like you're allowing yourself to be distracted because you don't want to face what you're scared of."

"Very perceptive, Dr. Freud," I said.

The attractive manager placed our last sandwich on the tray and slid it toward us. "Thanks a lot, guys," she said in a smooth, sexy alto voice. "Enjoy your meal," she added, smiling openly at me.

"Thanks," I mumbled, taking the tray. Travis gave her an appreciative nod and she slipped away to help her next customer.

As we headed out toward the tables, Travis exulted quietly, "Dude, you were so in! Come on, what would have been the harm in flashing her that charming Kenny Scanlon smile and working some charm?"

"You just said 'charm' twice," I grumbled, filling my cup with Coke and searching for the right lid.

"Sure, when you can't attack the reasoning, you attack the phrasing," he said with a knowing grin. "You've been spending too much time on the internet, my friend. Seriously, though, what's the harm?"

I rolled my eyes. "Hey, I'm hitting on you while you're at your job because I'm desperately lonely and also I'm recently unemployed and I'm kind of mediocre-looking so I don't really have anything special to bring to the relationship, but do you want to go out with me? Just remember, I don't have a job, so you'll have to pay for all the fun we're going to have!"

"Don't make me slap you again in front of all these people," Travis warned me. We headed over to a table by the window and sat down.

"Look," he said, "I know getting over Amy is rough. But you gotta understand that she wasn't perfect. And more important than that, she wasn't perfect for you."

I bit into my sandwich and felt the excess ketchup run down my chin. As I reached frantically for a napkin, I said thickly, "Don't judge a relationship you're not a part of. Isn't that one of those things you're always saying?"

"Sure, but one of the other things I'm always saying, you slob, is that you gotta get back on the goddamn horse. If a relationship ends and shows no promise of ever restarting, you need to look forward and find something better instead of something just as good or worse. If you're not improving you're not moving."

"That sounds like the title of a really bad self-help book," I said.

"It may sound corny as fuck, but that doesn't mean it's not true," Travis reminded me. "I just don't like seeing you wallowing in your misery and putting all your energy toward something that's unlikely to amount to anything of importance. You're at a low point. Dig yourself out of the hole and give yourself a solid foundation again before you take risks."

I took a long sip of Coke. "I feel like you're saying the same things over and over again with different words," I observed, "and my responses are still pretty much the same."

"Then this conversation is a pretty good illustration of how much it sucks to spin your wheels instead of doing something extraordinary to get out of the mud," he said.

"I see you've switched from a horse metaphor to an automotive metaphor," I observed.

"You gotta try and gain some yardage instead of just taking a knee," he continued.

"Oh, football now," I replied. "That happened fast."

"Charge a herd of imps with the chainsaw because the shotgun isn't working for you."

"Was that...a Doom metaphor? Seriously?"

"If you're tired of the same old story, turn some pages."

"Don't you dare try and take credit for that one," I warned. "That's an REO Speedwagon song."

He shrugged. "I figured it would be best to draw from a variety of subject matter to get my point across," he explained modestly.

"So I need to do something extraordinary to jar myself out of this funk?" I summarized.

"Exactly," he agreed, crunching on a crispy strip of bacon.

"Like use a time machine to go kick some ass in the past to rescue another version of myself who's from a different timeline?"

"Noooo," he said in a deep voice. "That's not what I meant. I might have to rethink my approach here."

"Maybe we should talk about you for a while," I suggested belligerently. "How long has it been since you had a girlfriend? Why don't we focus on fixing your life?"

"Because mine doesn't need as much fixing," he insisted.

"Really?" I retorted. "Because even if Amy was a terrible girlfriend or whatever, at least I had one. It's been years for you!"

"Yeah, but I'm good," he said with a shrug. "I don't really need one right now, you know? But you do."

"Wait, what? You're impervious to the need for companionship now? Talk about a lame superpower."

"It's not that," he explained. "Everybody's needs are a little different, you know? You crave that kind of companionship more than I do. Me, I like being depended on. I like being the guy who pays your rent when you get laid off. I like being the friend who follows you on your lame-ass adventures because you thought it was a good idea to buy a time machine."

I winced at him. "You say that like I'm your girlfriend." I instantly regretted putting that unnerving thought into speech.

He winced back. "Oh, fuck no. I just mean that I feel validated because you rely on me and you feel validated by female companionship. So I'm good right now. If I meet an awesome chick, I'm not gonna pass up the chance to be with her, but I don't feel that it's particularly urgent for me to be scouring the four corners of the globe for a girlfriend right now."

"I guess that makes sense," I conceded. We lapsed into the Silence of Muffled Gluttony.

"How is everything?" the soft, silky voice of the eye-catching manager cut in. She was standing next to our table, looking beautiful. And polite. But mostly beautiful.

"It's great," Travis said. "Listen, though, my buddy here thought you were attractive but was a little too shy to ask if you were single."

I practically choked on my burger.

"He went through a rough breakup a while back and he hasn't really regained his confidence yet," Travis continued. "I don't suppose there's a man who's lucky enough to be in your life?"

She smiled sweetly, although she appeared uncomfortable. "Um...no, I'm single," she said hesitantly.

"That's great news, thank you so much for your help, Travis," I snarled at him. Turning to the pretty girl, I said, "I'm really sorry about this. He thinks it's his job to find me a girlfriend."

"No, no, it's okay," she assured me. "I'm flattered."

"I'm not actually this pathetic once you get to know me," I said. Pathetically.

She laughed. "Good to know. I have to get back to work, guys. Let me know if you need anything." She shot me a quick smile and moved on to another table.

"What the fuck did you do that for?" I growled at my best friend, who was struggling to contain uproarious laughter.

"Because you were in dire need of a wingman, dude," he wheezed jovially. "And, hey, it wasn't that embarrassing because she turned out to be somewhat receptive."

"Receptive? No, she was just being polite. She gave me the brush-off without actually brushing me off. It was excellent work, though, I must admit. It was a smooth, gentle, streamlined letdown. She's definitely done this before."

"That wasn't a brush-off," he assured me. "She's tabling it for later because she has work shit to do."

"Sure," I said, unconvinced. "Tabling it, yeah."

"So in the next few days, you'll go out with that chick, you'll start job hunting and putting out resumes, and before you know it, you'll be back on your feet," Travis assured me. "You'll be fine."

"I think you're too optimistic," I grumbled. It would probably take me months to find a good job and the odds of going out with that girl were so slim they could hide behind the decimal point between the zeroes.

"Oh, I'm not actually this optimistic," he said. "But you are way too depressing right now and somebody needs to balance things out. It won't be as good as I say, but it won't be as bad as you think. The reality's somewhere in the middle. I'm just trying to guide you toward it."

I stared at him. "What kind of new age nonsense is that?"

He shook his head. "Never mind. The point is, you gotta be more optimistic about shit. It's not all as fucked as you think it is, and you won't get anywhere by dwelling on how fucked you think it is."

"Sure," I said. "Let me just flip that attitude switch in my brain from P to O."

He squinted at me in confusion. "Pissed to Off? Post to Office? Portuguese to Old English?"

"Pessimism to Optimism," I said irritably. "You knew that. Look, can we get out of here so that I can go back to figuring out how I'm going to rescue that other Kenny from 2006?"

He shook his head. "I'm not done with my burger yet."

"Yeah, well, take your time," I said.

He laughed. "Time isn't exactly something you're short on right now," he pointed out. "2006 is just a couple of claps away whether you go right this minute or whether you go next week."

"I just want to take care of this and get it over with," I said. "I know it doesn't actually make much difference when I do it, but it makes me uncomfortable thinking that the other Kenny is still trapped back there with no time machine and we're sitting around eating cheeseburgers."

"Mine's a Beast Burger," Travis corrected around a mouthful of beef.

"Didn't your mother ever teach you not to talk with your mouth full?" I said wearily.

"Didn't your mother ever teach you not to take time machines from strangers?" he mocked.

"Yeah," I said. "Right after she taught me to look both ways before crossing the intergalactic expressway."

"Okay, fine," Travis said. "I'm going to savor this delicious burger as quickly as I can without sacrificing the sanctity of my savoring experience. Then we'll get out of here, go home, and figure out your mindfuck of a time pretzel. But you gotta do one thing first."

"I'm not going to like this, am I?"

"You have to wave at that hot chick as we leave," he said.

I sighed. "What, like a 'you acknowledged my existence and I've interpreted this as permission to be even more creepy' kind of wave?"

He chuckled. "What? No. It's more like a, 'hey, girl, I hope we see each other again,' kind of wave."

"You're sure it's not a 'hey, girl, you got a purty mouth, want to hang out in my basement against your will and watch me dress up in women's clothing' kind of wave?"

Travis frowned. "The hell's wrong with you, dude? It's just a friendly wave."

I practiced waving at him. "Hey, girl," I said. "Want to come back to my place and check out this cool necklace I made out of the toenails of ten dead prostitutes?"

"That's disgusting," he commented. "You do realize that flirting doesn't make you a serial killer, right? It's possible to flirt without making a woman think you want to rape her to death. Guys flirt harmlessly all the time. This is a normal thing."

"Maybe flirting is. But waving all suave-like to a girl you just met while she's trying to do her job is the kind of wave that gives her the heebie-jeebies," I countered.

He shook his head. "I'm just now starting to realize how lucky you were to ever get a girl like Amy. I mean, she's a heartless bitch for dumping you and next time I see her I'm going to cut her tongue out with a can opener, but I'm truly impressed that you managed to get with her in the first place."

"Oh, God, the hot manager's coming back," I said with horror. "Don't look now," I added, but he was already turning to look as she approached our table.

"How was everything?" she asked us.

"Delicious, thank you," Travis said.

"Yeah, it was great," I mumbled awkwardly.

"Glad to hear it," she said sweetly. "You boys have a great day." She headed over to another table again, but not before slipping a small piece of folded paper onto my tray.

"You too," I said, staring down at the note. I opened it.

"Her number, right?" Travis whispered excitedly, leaning over the table to try to see it. "She gave you her number?"

I passed him the note, which he practically devoured. "Aisha," he said approvingly. "That is a sexy name. And the winky face after 'text me' is encouraging."

"I'm surprised you're not over the moon that her area code is local," I said dryly. "Considering that every detail is a cause for celebration as far as you're concerned."

"Aw, come on," he said. "She's hot. She seems nice. She seems to like you. It's not like the planets are aligned against you. This was a pretty decent run of luck." He passed the note back to me and I stuffed it into my pocket.

"Yeah," I admitted. This girl wasn't Amy, though.

"But she's not Amy, right?"

"I didn't say that," I said defensively.

"You were thinking it," he replied disapprovingly.

I didn't have a counter argument for that one. "Come on, hurry up," I urged him.

"This is not a burger that's designed to be inhaled," he chided me. "It deserves to be properly enjoyed."

"Sure, okay," I said impatiently. "Do you have a pen?"

"Not on me," he said. "But there's one in my glove compartment. Why?"

"Gimme your keys."

He gave me a sly look and a slight shake of his head before pulling his keys out, remotely unlocking the Equinox, and returning them safely to his pocket. Apparently he considered me a flight risk.

I hurried out to the parking lot and retrieved the pen from the glove box. When I came back in, I flipped over the tray liner that advertised the exact sandwich that Travis was devouring and began drawing.

"What are you doing?" my gluttonous friend inquired.

"Trying to figure out how many timelines we're dealing with," I explained. "This line was the original timeline that existed before I got the machine. This little swoopy thing is from when I jumped a few minutes forward in time to test the machine, which created this other timeline that branches off." I continued drawing, attempting to narrate as I went. "And then this swoopy thing is when I jumped backward to when my past self was putting the machine together, which is where the third timeline branches off from."

"All the complexity of time travel technology and you've got it boiled down to a series of swoopy things," Travis commented.

"Then I came back to the present because my other self was kind of rude," I said, drawing another swoop and a fourth diverging event stream. Then I sketched a much larger curve to signify my first trip back to my eighteenth birthday. "And this one, when I went back to try and talk myself into working out more, splits off into this timeline." I added a fifth branch to my already complicated diagram.

"But you had already done that when you got there, because three versions of yourself appeared in that timeline," Travis pointed out.

"Let's just try and get the stuff we know down first," I said, stretching a new arc across the page to signify my return trip to the present. "Now we have six timelines."

"But you still have at least three versions of yourself to add," Travis insisted, using a wad of napkins to wipe bacon grease from his fingers.

"So we need to add in the first four attempts that Number Two made," I agreed. I used a dotted line to signify a different Kenny's time travel.

"You can't just have him descending on your timeline out of nowhere," Travis argued. "Until the point at which he arrived in your timeline in 2006, you guys were identical. He's from the original timeline too."

"Fine, let's make him the original," I said, drawing a branch from the first line I'd drawn to meet the origin of his dotted line at the top of the page. "And then we'll have him jump back to his present a few times and back to our eighteenth birthday again...."

"That is a fuckton of timelines already."

"Yeah," I agreed. "And I'm already confused. This is pointless." I crumpled the page up and tossed it on the tray with my sandwich wrapper. "I thought this would help me understand our chances."

"It seems to have reinforced the idea that our chances are slim," he said, swallowing the last of his burger and washing it down with a sip of Coke.

"Yeah, but you're just hoping our chances are slim enough that I'll decide it's not worth bothering."

"You caught me." He gathered all of our trash together and carried it to the garbage can. "But if you're that set on it, fine. Let's go save your alternate-self buddy. And since you got the girl's number, I'll let you off the hook for the waving thing."

"I wasn't going to do it anyway," I said sourly. "Let's go."

(11)

I unlocked the door to our apartment to the sound of Travis's preaching.

"You're wasting too much thought and energy on the past," he pointed out. "And I don't mean just the Amy thing, I mean in general. You get a time machine—do you travel to the future? Nope! The past. Multiple times. And the other versions of you do the same thing. The past is important, sure, but you can't give yourself a decent future if you're too busy looking backwards."

"That is so profound," I said. "I'm going to make that into a cross stitch. Then I'm going to frame it and hang it on the wall by the front door so I never ever forget it."

"I didn't know you could cross stitch," he said. I shot him a glare and he continued, "If you head into something new still looking backwards, you'll...well, you'll bump into shit. A stubbed toe is almost guaranteed and you might even roll your ankle. Metaphorically speaking."

"I'll just have to wear metaphorical steel toe boots with metaphorical ankle support then," I responded dryly.

He rewarded me with a little chuckle. "Nice. But look, the point I'm trying to make here is that you're never going to move past Amy if you keep comparing her to every girl you meet."

I sighed, setting my keys and the time device on the kitchen table and heading into the living room. "Why is there something so wrong with having standards?"

"There isn't," Travis insisted, following me. "Standards are good. But the standard shouldn't be just...Amy. You can decide not to date drug addicts or to only date blondes or to only go out with chicks who have tattoos, but you can't just decide not to date anyone who isn't Amy."

"But Amy is who I want," I said, sitting heavily on the couch.

"Well, that's probably not true. You just think you want her because you were used to having her. But it doesn't matter, because you can't have Amy."

"Thanks," I said with a wry smile. "That was a grade-A pep talk. Right up there with 'win one for the Gipper' and the President's speech from Independence Day."

"No, fuckhead, that's not what I meant," he said earnestly. "As much as you want Amy, or as much as you want to clone Amy and keep the copy, you can't. So you might as well set some different expectations, because when you try them out, you might find that they're pretty damn good. Better, even."

"Holy shit," I whispered.

"Finally, after an hour of this, I get through to him," Travis said, rolling his eyes.

"No, not that," I said. The genius of the idea forming in my head was so exciting that my fingers were actually trembling. "Make a copy. That's how I can do it."

"Kenny, dude, please do not tell me that you bought a cloning machine from that alien guy," he said sternly.

"No, I'm not talking about cloning Amy," I said. "I'm talking about making a copy of the time machine."

"Yeah, just stick it in one of those big Xerox machines and you'll have a pretty good two-dimensional representation," he joked nervously. "Okay, seriously, you gotta fill me in here, dude, I have no fucking idea what you're babbling about."

"I'm going to travel back to last night," I explained to him, getting to my feet. "The time machine will be on the kitchen table. I'll carry that with me when I return to the present, and then we'll have two versions of the same time machine that both originated from the same timeline. That way, when you use that one to travel into the past, you'll be targeting the same bundle of timelines that I will."

"God," he moaned. "I was really hoping I could get you to lay off this time travel bullshit for a little bit longer."

I ran my brain through my idea a few more times. It was so beautifully simple that there had to be something wrong with it, but the more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that it was theoretically sound. Theoretically.

"I'm gonna do it," I said, returning to the kitchen to retrieve the machine.

"This sounds like a really bad idea," Travis said. "This is like one of those things that breaks the time-space continuum and ends the universe or something."

"Since when are you the timid one?" I jabbed.

"Since you started fucking around with the flow of time, asshat," he said. "This is some serious shit."

"Look, Pilz's planet has had this technology for a while and clearly the universe has not been destroyed," I reasoned. "So I think we're fine."

"You heard the freaky alien dude," he said. "Other life forms understand their limitations better. Maybe none of them ever tried doing something this stupid."

"This is really important to me," I told him. "I have to help the other Kenny out, and I've finally figured out how to do it. Do you really think it's going to break the universe?"

"No," he admitted. He seemed to sense, at long last, that I didn't appreciate how hard he was pushing against what I was trying to accomplish. "But then I'm not a super-smart alien scientist. It's not something I'm really qualified to voice an opinion on."

"Look, just let me get you a time machine and then come with me to 2006. Okay?"

He nodded. "Sure. I'll be here when you get back."

I silently set my machine for negative zero-point-five yilks, and transported myself twelve hours into the past with a brief round of applause. After the soft puff of air, I found myself in what was probably the exact same place—but once again I couldn't see a thing.

I took a moment to let my eyes adjust and I was eventually able to make out the dark outlines of the sinks and the chairs. I stepped off my space-age discus and was caught in a moment of hesitation—should I try to find the other device or should I try to find the light switch?

I was pretty sure I was closer to my primary objective than I was to the light switch, so I stepped toward the table. I could see the chair nearest to me okay, but everything beyond that was smothered in blackness. I inched around to what I hoped was the side of the table, moving gingerly in my blindness.

Despite my caution, my foot caught the table leg and my toe bent painfully inside my shoe. I jerked my leg back reflexively and smashed my ankle against the side of a chair. I felt my balance going but I'd reacted to the pain too quickly to be able to save myself. I went down slowly and gracelessly, cursing as I grappled vainly in the dark for something to hang on to. I'd done battle in the Bleakness of Uncertainty and been felled by the Cunning Snares of Kitchen Furnishings.

The light flipped on as I struggled to get back to my feet. Last night's Travis was standing in the doorway in his underwear, looking groggy.

"What the fuck are you doing, dude," he griped. "It's like a gazillion o'clock in the morning."

"Sorry," I said. "I, uh...I fell down."

"I can see that," he replied. "What the fuck are you blundering around in the dark for?"

I racked my brain for a suitable answer and found exactly none. "I...didn't want to wake you up?"

"Just in case the light from the kitchen magically pierces the door to my bedroom and shines directly on my face?" he asked with a yawn.

"Yes...."

"What are you dressed for at this time of night, anyway? You got a job interview with Batman?"

"I was...going to go for a walk," I said.

"Travis?" my voice floated faintly from behind my roommate. "Who are you talking to?"

Travis's eyes bulged as I watched myself shuffle into the room. "Would either one of you care to explain," he growled angrily, "why the fuck there are two of you assclowns in my kitchen at the same time?"

The other Kenny stared at me in confusion. "I have nothing to do with this, man," he assured him.

"Clearly, you do, because there's an extra one of you here," he snapped.

"Yeah, but that's a different me," Kenny replied. "This me doesn't even know what's going on. Maybe that me does," he concluded, pointing at my me.

"Fair enough," Travis admitted, turning his glare in my direction. "So what the fuck are you doing here?"

I held my hands at chest level, palms outward, in a gesture of peace. "I'm from the future," I told them. "Later today, actually. I just need to borrow your time machine for a while," I said.

"What's wrong with yours?" Travis asked, indicating the disc that was on the floor as opposed to the disc that was on the kitchen table.

"Nothing," I said. "I just need two of them so that both of us can time travel."

Travis actually laughed. "You're going to time travel while carrying another time travel machine? Does that sound safe to you?"

My groggy other self came to my defense. "Actually, I think that's pretty clever. If the alien doesn't have another time machine to give us, we can just steal the machine from ourselves during times when we're not using them."

"Yeah, sure, that's clever, I guess," Travis admitted. "But using a time machine on another time machine sounds like the kind of thing that could break the time-space continuum and blow a gigantic Kenny-shaped hole in the universe."

"Actually, it won't," I said upon sudden inspiration.

"How do you know that?" Travis asked sharply. I felt like he was pointing a gun at me except that he was half-dressed and obviously unarmed.

"I'm from twelve hours in the future. When you and I got up this morning, we went and spoke with the alien that sold me the machine and he explained a lot of the background information about it. It's totally safe to use a time machine on another time machine," I lied. "In fact, it was the alien's idea."

"You're lying," my annoyingly perceptive best friend said. Maybe I had oversold it.

"Oh, don't be so overdramatic," the sleepier Kenny chided. "It's me. Give him the benefit of the doubt."

"Really?" Travis said. "You actually trust this guy?"

Kenny shrugged. "He's me."

Travis chuckled derisively. "Didn't you just get done telling me about how two other yous spent the better part of a day hunting you down so they could beat the crap out of you and leave you marooned in the past?"

"That's a good point," my gullible alternate self admitted.

"Don't worry, guys, I'll bring this machine back when I'm done with it," I said, hoping to smooth things over.

"No," Travis said. "You're going to leave empty-handed and get a second time machine some other way."

My twice-wounded leg was throbbing and I was getting tired of trying to convince them so I decided to get this over with by any means necessary. I lunged toward the kitchen table and grabbed the device. I had just turned back, prize in hand, toward my own machine when Travis tackled me from the side. My head slammed against the wall and the device slipped from my grasp. Travis was reaching for it when we both became aware of another presence in the room that was not the Groggy Kenny. Yet another Kenny was hunched over the machine on which I'd arrived, pressing buttons on the little console.

"Who the fuck are you?" Travis shouted angrily. I took advantage of his distraction to seize the time machine and wriggle out from under Travis's weight.

"I'm him," the newest arrival said with a grin, pointing at me. "Only ten minutes in his future."

The sleepy Kenny, realizing that shit was getting real, was hurrying over to help Travis, who was practically frothing at the mouth as he clambered to his feet. The new Kenny plucked a chair from the floor and swung it violently at Travis's stomach, sending both Travis and the Sleepy Kenny reeling backward.

"That was harsh," I commented.

"Hurry up and get back to your machine," he said, swinging the chair again to keep the two natives of this event stream from advancing on him. "I've set it twelve hours into the future for you. Just get on it and go!"

"What about you?" I asked him.

"Mine's in the living room, all set to go to," he replied. "I'm just making sure you get out of here with the second machine."

I was extremely surprised by the newest Kenny's arrival, assistance, and violence, but he seemed to have the same goals as I did, so a quick glance at my device's console was all I needed to confirm that I could trust him. Carrying my freshly-stolen cargo, I stepped onto my machine and clapped twice. The last thing I saw before being whisked away into the future was the other Kenny bodily heaving the chair at Travis before turning to run back toward the safety of his own machine.

I reappeared in the following afternoon, stepped off my device, and peered into the living room. Travis, seated on the couch, got up immediately. "It's good to see you didn't get stuck in a different timeline or anything," he said sarcastically, but I could sense his relief.

"I brought you something," I said, offering him the second device.

He stared at it like I'd offered him a plate of fried human tongues. "You don't really want me to use that thing, right?" he asked.

"I need your help, man," I told him for what felt like the hundredth time. "You're my secret weapon."

"You know," he countered, "if you really want a secret weapon, I'd suggest using an actual weapon."

"All the guys I'm fighting back there are some form of me," I explained. "We both know you can kick my ass. Now I'm asking you to kick my ass, so there's no way you'll want to pass this opportunity up."

"I'm serious," he told me. "Why don't you bring an actual weapon? Didn't that alien guy have a light saber or anything sitting around in his yard waiting to be sold?"

"Huh," I said, nonplussed. "That's actually a really good idea."

(10)

I rang Quentin Lundquist's doorbell again.

"Hey, it's broken, remember?" Travis said. He banged loudly on the door a few times.

Our foreign friend answered again. Upon recognizing us, he adopted a weary expression. "So, how did your adventures in the past turn out?" he asked, as though he were afraid our answer.

"Haven't really finished them yet," I said. "Um...I was wondering if you maybe had any other technological marvels we could look at, maybe buy from you?"

"I don't know about that," Pilz replied. "I've gotten enough headaches just from selling you the one."

"We just need something to turn the odds in our favor," I said. "Something to make sure that we succeed."

"Yeah, like a laser gun or something," Travis added helpfully.

Pilz narrowed his eyes at us suspiciously. "You want me to sell you a weapon?"

"Oh, no," Travis said with dawning horror. "Don't tell me you're one of those super-peaceful utopian alien races and that you don't have any weapons on your planet."

"Of course not," he scoffed. "But even if I were inclined to provide you with weapons, I don't have any to give you. My company does not manufacture any."

It seemed like he was about to close the door, so I blurted, "Well, any device that's far enough beyond human technology could be kind of like a weapon. It doesn't have to be something designed to hurt people, but that doesn't mean it couldn't help us out."

The Pysonian considered that for a moment. "Very true," he said, opening the door wider so that we could enter. "I do have a few pieces left in the basement that I could show you."

"Thank you so much," I gushed, stepping quickly over the threshold.

"No problem," he said, closing the door as soon as Travis was inside. "I'll need you to pay for whatever you want, of course. I still have some last-minute arrangements to make and I could use the extra cash."

"Sure," I said.

He led us toward the center of the house where a narrow doorway next to the kitchen led down a rickety staircase to a poorly lit basement.

"Who is it, Quentin?" came a cheery voice from the living room. A tall blonde in a long red dress and classy heels stepped out to greet us.

"These are two young men who are interested in buying some of the old crap from work I have downstairs," he explained. "Gentlemen, this is my wife, Oizu."

Travis stared. "So you guys aren't human, right?" he asked in awe.

"No, we're not," Oizu said.

"You use some kind of crazy technology thing so that you look human, right?" he asked, his eyes shamelessly scanning Pilz's wife from top to bottom...and then back up again.

"That's right," she replied.

"You did a fantastic job," he insisted. "I mean, really, nice work. Top-notch."

"Travis," I growled, gripping him by the shoulders and steering him toward the basement door, "Please don't hit on the nice alien's pretty wife."

"I wasn't," he protested. "I was just—"

"You're too young for her," I whispered angrily, following Pilz down the dark, creaking stairway.

"Now that I think about it," Travis murmured, "Pilz is a pretty fine-looking man, too. They're a gorgeous couple and none of it's even real! What if they really do have suction cups all over their faces?"

"Will you shut up?" I hissed.

Pilz yanked a string at the base of the stairs that lit a naked bulb above his head. The single dim source flooded the unfinished basement in an eerie, unsettling light that left long shadows and dark corners. Standing on the last two steps, we surveyed the weird little workshop the alien had set up beneath his home. Two bare concrete walls were lined with simple wooden work tables. Each table had two or three complicated-looking devices on it in various stages of disassembly. Chips, wires, and technological components that neither one of us had ever seen spilled from the guts of mysterious equipment ranging in size from a cigarette lighter to a washing machine.

"Wow," I said. "That's...that's a lot of stuff."

"How much of it actually works?" Travis asked.

Pilz strode into the center of his work room with a hint of pride. "All of it, of course," he said. "With the exception of the Personal Spatial Magnitude Adjuster," he amended, patting the side of the silvery washing machine thing. "I dropped one of the dimensional integrity fortifiers and it rolled under the...uh, well, anyway, it's missing a piece. But everything else is at worst a few little tweaks away from fully-functional."

That didn't exactly inspire confidence. "Oh, cool," I said weakly.

"So, what strikes your fancy?" Pilz asked, spread his arms wide to indicate the breadth of options.

"What do they all do?" Travis asked.

Our foreign host launched into a surprisingly detailed description of each device's capabilities. Many of them were of questionable practicality, such as the machine that allowed the user to grow a temporary additional finger, but he graced us with a summary of the specs anyway.

Finally, moving on to a gold-colored thing that looked like a laser pointer, Pilz managed to capture our attention. "This," he announced theatrically, "Is the working prototype for the Personal Invisibility Tent. It's very easy to use. Two buttons—one surrounds the user with a thin force field rendering him and his immediate surroundings both invisible and impenetrable, and the other retracts the shield, returning him to his original state."

"Wait, that thing can make you invisible?" Travis said.

Perhaps relieved that we were finally expressing interest in anything, Pilz gave us a quick demonstration. He slid his thumb along the gadget and in less than a second a barrier of invisibility had covered him, starting at his feet and working its way up.

"That's really cool," I said. "That could probably come in handy for us."

"Is that bullet-proof?" Travis asked.

We stared expectantly at the empty space in the basement, awaiting a response.

"Mr. Lundquist," I said after a moment. "Are you still here?" Travis and I exchanged worried looks.

Suddenly Pilz returned, the device revealing him from top to bottom. "Bullet-proof, yes, easily," he said. "It's also soundproof. One-way. I could hear you, albeit somewhat muffled. But I could have screamed my lungs out in there and you wouldn't have heard a thing."

"I guess that could be problematic," I considered.

"Or advantageous," Travis pointed out. "If you're trying to hide, whoever you're hiding from won't be able to see or hear you."

"And the other drawback is your mobility," Pilz continued. "The force field cannot be moved or altered while it is in place. The field is pyramid-shaped, roughly eight feet tall and around five feet by five feet at the base."

I looked at Travis. "Still could be useful. Right?"

"Better than taking that twenty-fourth-century trash compacter into battle," he agreed. He reached into his back pocket for his wallet. "How much are you charging for the invisibility thing?"

"Whoa, whoa," I interrupted. "Let me get this."

"Don't be a dumbass," Travis chided. "You don't have a job."

"Yeah," I said. "But you keep making fun of me for buying cheap futuristic technology from friendly aliens. Let's not make a hypocrite out of you. Right?"

"Hard to argue with that," he admitted meekly, sliding his wallet back into his jeans.

"So how much, Mr. Lundquist?" I asked, taking out my own, much thinner wallet. The Wallet of Dwindling Fortunes. The Wallet of Fiscal Humility. The Wallet of Bulimic Slenderness.

The alien shrugged. "Two bucks," he offered.

I handed him a pair of singles and he handed me the surprisingly light cylinder. "I don't suppose you have two of these...?" I asked hopefully.

"Sorry," he said. "Just the one."

"Does it have like a battery or anything?" I asked. I suddenly wondered when my Tiem Mechine was going to lose power.

Pilz chuckled derisively. "A battery," he snorted. "Because everything manufactured on Pyson runs on two Duracell double-As."

I could sense he was mocking me but I still wasn't clear whether the basis of my question had been appropriately addressed. I still didn't know how to keep it from running out of power. "So is that a no...or...?"

"The Personal Invisibility Tent won't last forever," he told me. "But by the time it dies, your grandchildren will be in nursing homes. You have nothing to worry about."

"And the Tiem Mechine, too, right?" I clarified.

"Obviously," he said with more than a little condescension.

"That's good enough for me," Travis said.

"Me, too, I guess," I agreed. "Mr. Lundquist, thank you again, so much, for your help."

"Yeah, sure," he said dismissively, leading us back up the stairs. I wasn't sure if he was being so curt out of modesty or annoyance. "Good luck with your...you know."

"Thanks," I said. "And good luck with your move back to Pylon."

"Pyson," he corrected.

"Right, Pyson, sorry," I said swiftly.

"I may be the insensitive one," Travis whispered to me, "but at least I can remember the name of the goddamn planet our guy's from."

"Shut up," I hissed.

Once we were on the ground floor, we waved goodbye to Pilz's suspiciously attractive wife, thanked him again for his help, and found ourselves quickly back on his porch with the door securely shut behind us.

"Did you get the feeling he was in a hurry to get rid of us?" Travis asked me.

"Probably because you kept ogling his wife," I said.

"Sure," he replied. "Or maybe because you offended him by not remembering the name of the planet that he mentioned like ten times."

"Let's split the blame," I said, staring up at the evening sky. "It's getting dark out. We should get home and get started."

"Why?" Travis asked, following me toward where he'd parked at the curb. "Because we might not have enough time to get all our time traveling done before bedtime?"

"I just want to get this over with," I said. "Now will you unlock the damn door so I can get in? It's getting cold out here."

(9)

Travis and I drove to a community park a few streets over from my parents' house and sat in his car to discuss our strategy.

"So what, exactly, is the plan once we get there?" Travis asked me.

"I'm going to hide in those trees over there and go back to two thirty PM on May twenty-ninth, two thousand six," I told him. I'm going to run over to the bus stop next to the park and see if me and the other me get off at this stop. If they do, I'll run back to the trees and wait for you to show up."

"And if they don't?"

"Then I'll run back to the trees and try again. And I'm going to keep trying until I find the right timeline," I said.

"So what am I going to do?" Travis asked. It was an interesting and not entirely unpleasant feeling realizing that I was in charge. Travis was, overall, more responsible, more capable and a better leader. But in this case, I was the man with the plan. Trained in the arts of temporal travel, I was the Chronological Crusader. The Time Titan. The...well, I was the one who knew the most about the craziness that was going on. So I guess it made sense that Travis would look to me for leadership, but I was surprised to feel qualified in that role.

"You're going to aim for three PM on the same day," I said. "If I'm not there waiting for you, just travel back a few minutes into the past and try again. Once you see me, you'll know you hit the right timeline."

"And what if it never happens?" he asked.

"It will," I said confidently. "The alien agreed when you said that success was inevitable."

"Given infinite attempts!" he reminded me. "That's not very encouraging! I could be time jumping for a few decades before I get lucky!"

"But the most likely times to get lucky," I pointed out, "are the first few times."

"Right." He shook his head. "This has so many ways of going horribly wrong."

"Very true," I agreed. "Try not to think about it." I handed him the Personal Invisibility Tent.

"You're not gonna use it?" he asked me.

I shrugged. "Nah. You're my secret weapon. It just makes sense that you should be the one who actually has a secret weapon."

He slipped it into his pocket. "This is a bad idea, buddy. I just want to go on record before all this shit goes down."

"This is gonna work," I told him. "Remember what you told me—it's not all as fucked as you think it is and you won't get anywhere dwelling on how fucked you think it is."

He frowned. "I don't like it when people ironically use my own words against me."

"You just need to be more optimistic about shit," I told him with a half-smile.

"The reality is somewhere in the middle," he reminded me. "I said that too."

"I can accept that," I said. "Let's go."

We got out of the Equinox, each carrying our versions of the duplicated time machine. The sun had mostly set, so the park had emptied completely and we had just enough light to see where we were going. We hurried across the pavement, onto the grass, and into a little copse of evergreens behind the tennis courts. My reasoning had been that, when we arrived in broad daylight in 2006, we'd attract less attention if we appeared in the midst of the trees.

Travis, apparently, was more concerned about how it appeared on this end of the timeline. "If anybody sees us right now," he muttered, "they probably think we're sneaking around behind the tennis court to have some kind of torrid sexual encounter right now."

I turned back to glare at him. "Thanks. That makes me feel totally not awkward about this."

"I'm just saying," he said defensively. "What will the neighbors think? Sex in a public park? Think of the children!"

"I think they'll be a lot more astonished that we're about to step on top of a pair of plastic pancakes and disappear into thin air than they'll be about us sneaking off into the trees under cover of darkness," I said.

We crouched on the bed of fallen pine needles and set our time machines down. "The fuck is a yilk?" Travis asked.

"It's a day broken down into hundredths, instead of using minutes and seconds," I said, pulling out my phone for its calculator. "So it's six twenty-two, and I'm shooting for two thirty, which means...once I get the right day, I'm going about sixteen point one yilks back." I punched a few more keys on my phone. "And you're shooting for three in the afternoon, which means you'll need to go like fourteen yilks back."

"If they designed these for humans, you'd think they would have used human units of time," Travis said.

I leaned over to help him set his device. "Any questions on what to do?" I asked.

"Get on it and clap twice," he said. "Then if I don't see you waiting for me, set it for 3 PM again and give it another shot."

"Good luck," I said, stepping onto my own machine.

"See you on the other side, dude," he replied wryly.

I clapped twice and was gone.

I'd just transported myself from near-dusk to midday, but I was lucky enough to be in the shade of trees in partially overcast weather, so my eyes didn't immediately burn out of my head from the shock. I took a moment to adjust to my familiar but different surroundings.

I stepped off of my machine and tackled my first order of business—finding a hiding place for my space-age tortilla warmer. I looked around the little grove of trees and found a sizeable, low-to-the-ground bush that I could slide the machine beneath. It was May now, and the greenery was thicker and provided more coverage, but I still bent a few of the branches to more completely obscure the device from view just in case somebody happened to be snooping around and stumbled across it. As much as I didn't want to carry the machine around everywhere, I didn't want to run the risk of getting stranded without it.

I walked out from under the shade of the evergreens and headed through the parking lot, back toward the main road. A clock mounted on one of the picnic pavilions said two forty. I was pretty sure I had about fifteen minutes until the bus with me and Kenny Number Four on it would pull up. I made myself comfortable on a park bench facing the street and waited.

Why had I allowed myself this much time?

As I waited, I tried to focus on the road, but it wasn't much to look at. I did a little people-watching. I recognized a few of the kids from my neighborhood. I wondered what would happen if any of them saw me or recognized me as being an older version of myself. I spent a little bit of time working on a cover story in case I needed it. I was Kenny's uncle, visiting from out of town. I was from Portland. I worked as an insurance adjuster. My name was Angus. Angus was a good name for an uncle. Uncle Angus. People would buy that if for no other reason than it made a hell of a lot more sense than the truth.

As I sat in the intermittent sunlight and watched for the arrival of the bus, I overheard something that made my stomach drop.

"Yeah," a girl's voice said in annoyance. "My parents were like, 'he's your brother and you need to spend some time with him, like, take him to the park' or whatever."

I turned toward the source of the sound. I knew who it was before I saw her. I would have recognized that voice in any timeline in any year. It was Amy. It was my Amy. It was the Amy that used to be mine but wasn't anymore, except it was the Amy that wasn't mine yet. She was eighteen. She wouldn't be my girlfriend for several more years, but the eighteen-year-old me was probably thinking about her right now.

I tried not to stare. I wasn't staring lustfully, just mournfully. She looked great, of course, but mostly I just missed the days when I longed for having her instead of longing for having her back.

Amy was walking across the grass toward the playground, slowly trailing her rambunctious younger brother, who was careening toward the jungle gym with the excitement only someone that age could have about a jungle gym. Amy was on her cell phone—her now hilariously out-of-date top-of-the-line flip phone.

"So anyway," she continued, "I'm totally sorry about ditching you guys today and all, but I figured refusing to take my brother to the park wasn't worth being grounded for Karly's graduation party. Yeah. It's all about priorities, you know?"

Had Amy always sounded like that? She was speaking a unique dialect that was half stuck-up drama queen and the other half cold, calculating bitch. I was a little disappointed with my eighteen-year-old self for having such a hopeless crush on her.

She sat down on another bench a few feet away and continued talking, lazily eying her energetic brother as he clambered up the wrong end of a slide. "So anyway, I'm just sitting here in this lame-ass park watching my brother do as much as he possibly can to fall on his dumb ass. What's up with you?"

It was painful to be able to hear her entire conversation. I knew she'd matured over the years—we all had—but I was embarrassed for myself to hear just how much of a selfish brat she'd been. She made no attempt to interact with her brother. At least she occasionally looked over at him to check on his well-being, but beyond that she was utterly absorbed in her loud phone conversation with her friend. Maybe it would have been easier if I'd accidentally bumped into a ten-year-old Amy. At least that was an Amy I'd never known and at least then I could have rationalized my later infatuation with her by telling myself she'd have grown up a bit before we met. But here I was confronted with the greatest desire of my teenage years, and she was nothing but an ugly soul in a pretty girl's body.

Each sentence she spoke into her phone made me cringe a little more. What was I thinking?

I got up to move a few benches away to put myself out of my misery when I realized that the bus I'd been waiting for was pulling away from the curb.

"Shit," I muttered to myself, hurrying toward the road to see if anybody had disembarked. "How did I miss that?" I knew the answer, of course. Amy had always had a way of distracting me from the things that I wanted to focus on.

I stared down the road in the direction that Kenny and Number Four would have gone if they'd gotten off. I didn't see anyone walking. The bus had pulled away only a few moments ago. The previous Kenny and Kenny Number Four weren't here. I was in the wrong timeline.

I turned and started to run back to my machine. It was silly to run, and I knew it, but despite my ability to arrive at any moment in time that I desired, the sense of urgency was difficult to shake. I knew a good part of it was doubt. Doubt that I hadn't just missed the two Kennies stepping off the bus. Doubt that I'd be able to find the right timeline. Doubt that Travis would be able to find me once I did. Doubt that any of this had a hope of working.

Doubt that I'd ever get another job. Doubt that I could get Amy back. Doubt...that I wanted Amy back.

Running made me focus on my ragged breathing and the burning in my legs. It allowed me to focus less on the Doubt of a Thousand Inadequacies. So I ran.

I burst back into the trees and yanked the time machine out from under the brush. Not finding the right timeline on the first try was something we'd been expecting. But now that it had actually happened that way, I was beginning to become more and more concerned that I'd never find it. My fingers trembling slightly, I punched in a new destination, giving myself approximately five fewer minutes to sit around waiting for the bus, and sent myself back into the past.

When I arrived and shoved my machine underneath the same bush, I had to bend the branches again, which meant that I wasn't in the same timeline I'd arrived in on the previous trip. I hurried out into the park and sat down on a bench facing the street for the second time. Amy was already seated nearby, yapping obnoxiously to her friend. She was far enough away that I couldn't make out the exact words, but her disagreeable tone carried perfectly across the playground to assault my ears.

I used to struggle with myself through entire class periods, willing myself not to stare at her and inevitably spending at least a few seconds admiring her from across the room. The days when I couldn't remember which shirt she was wearing were the days when I silently congratulated myself for not being too creepy and too pathetic. How was this the same girl? I mean, she looked the same, but how did that awful personality not turn me off completely?

The bus rumbled past again, the groaning sound of its engine as it labored away from the curb awakening me from my Reverie of Retrograde Scrutiny. I took off at a run and managed to reach the street before the bus had even gotten to the next stop sign. I cast my gaze frantically in the direction of my parents' house. Again, no one was walking on the street. No past me, no alternate me. Nobody.

Wrong timeline again. I hurried back to the grove of pines and reclaimed my precious temporal vehicle. I glanced at the readout to verify my desired destination (Timestination? Linestination? Whenstination? Thenstination?), got on board, clapped my hands two times, and suddenly found myself staring at the back of my own head.

The head I was staring at turned around suddenly. "Holy shit," he said. "I was just standing right there a second ago. It's a good thing you didn't materialize in the exact same spot as me! I don't want to find out what would happen."

"Who are you?" I asked.

He gave me a disapproving look. "Kind of a silly question, right? Look at me."

"Okay, obviously you're me," I said. "But which me are you?"

"I don't know," he countered. "Which me are you?"

"I'm trying to see who gets off the bus," I told him. "This is my third try."

"Well, this is attempt number eight for me," he said. Then, furrowing his brow, he corrected, "No, nine. Maybe eight. Probably nine. I haven't exactly been keeping a tally."

My stomach knotted. If he hadn't succeeded by now, his chances were probably awful. I wasn't prepared to face the possibility of impossibility. "Nine? Seriously?"

"Yeah," he nodded sadly. "Listen, we'll cover more ground if we split up."

"More ground? It doesn't matter, there's only one bus stop."

He rolled his eyes. "It's an expression. I mean split up into different timelines, not split up, you know, spatially."

He was suggesting that I leave his timeline? Did that make sense? I tried to think about it, but all this time travel nonsense had given me some serious cognitive constipation.

He motioned for me to leave. "Pick a different timeline, man," he urged. "I got this one under control. It only takes one of us to flag Travis down if this turns out to be the right one."

"I guess that makes sense," I murmured. I mentally reviewed all the things I'd seen myself do. One of me had been a liar. Another one had been helping him. They both chased two of me across town to try and forcibly remove something valuable from my possession. The first me that I had met who wasn't actually me simply refused my help in assembling the time machine. The one I'd met in my apartment the other day helped me steal the time machine from our past self (and a past Travis), although he'd surprised me with his violence. And then there was Number Four, who seemed like an okay guy, but wasn't exactly me because he was filthy rich in his home timeline.

As best I could tell, it seemed like, with the exception of Number Four, the closer a version of me was to me event-wise, the more likely it was that I could trust him. The more me he was, the more me I could rely on him to be. But if he was less me, he could be unpredictable or psychotic or something. If I was going to follow that rule of thumb, I had to figure out if being six time jumps ahead of me was enough temporal distance for me not to trust this version of myself.

Ugh.

"I think I'll tag along, if that's okay," I said.

He squinted at me. "What? Why?"

"Because if this is the right timeline, then there will be two of us here to fight off the evil Kennies," I pointed out. I was a little proud of myself for coming up with a believable lie so quickly. "If it's not, we can both just try again. It's not like we're wasting any time being in the same time stream."

"Won't it look weird if two of us are sitting on the bench waiting for the bus?" the other me countered.

I shrugged. "If anyone asks, we'll tell them we're identical twins. We're Kenny's uncles from Portland."

"Uncle Angus and Uncle Fargus?"

"I was gonna say Angus and Dennis, but Fargus is probably better," I admitted.

"Sure, whatever," he said. "Come on, we'll miss the bus."

I slipped my machine into the bush on top of his and followed him toward the park. We sat next to each other on the bench. I was trying not to listen to Amy's incessant blathering, and I could tell he was struggling with the same thing.

"It's crazy we ever had such a huge crush on her," the other me commented, probably just to drown her out.

"Yeah," I agreed. "It seems so stupid now."

"You ever wonder what chicks we could have gone out with if we hadn't wasted so much time pining over Amy?" he asked.

"I don't think it was wasted," I said.

"It was wasted," he replied bitterly. "I know it and I know you know it whether or not you're willing to admit you know it."

"It eventually turned into a relationship with her," I reasoned. "It wasn't all for nothing."

"The relationship was kind of a waste too," he said.

"What?" I replied. I wasn't nearly as horrified by his suggestion as I would have thought. "No way."

"Come on," he told me. "All that relationship was about was kissing her ass. She knew we didn't think we deserved her and she milked that for all it was worth. That was voluntary servitude, not a relationship."

"It's easy to say that now, sitting across from her when she was still in high school," I said. "It's obvious now how selfish and manipulative she was, but she wasn't like that when we started dating her. She grew up."

"She just got better at hiding it," he disagreed. "She was always—shit!" He lurched forward off the bench. "That was the bus!"

(8)

I took off after my unobservant alternate self, cursing my real self for being just as unobservant. We'd become so engrossed in our self-assessments that, for the third time, I'd completely failed to notice that the bus I'd been waiting for had arrived.

I skidded to a stop beside him as he stood at the edge of the street, peering down its length for a sighting of another Kenny. "I don't see them," he said.

"Me neither," I agreed. "Wrong timeline again."

"Ugh," he grunted disgustedly. "This is taking forever."

"It's good to know what I have to look forward to," I said.

"Yeah. Compounding frustration upon compounding frustration."

"Well, I guess I'll head back to my machine and try again," I said with a shrug, backing away from the curb.

"Yeah," he sighed. "Guess I should too."

We headed in joint dejection across the grassy playground and along the high chain-link fence surrounding the tennis courts, expressing our shared discouragement with our manly silence.

"Listen," he finally said as we neared the clump of trees. "I hope you'll think about what I said earlier. About Amy."

I chuckled. "What, you're giving yourself relationship advice now?"

"It's not so crazy," he pointed out. "At one time, both of us thought it was a good idea to go back and give ourselves exercising advice."

"Sure," I said. "And look how well that turned out."

"Look," he said with a sincerity that surprised me, "I'm serious here. I've been sitting on that bench alone for the last nine iterations in an all-out effort to stop listening to Amy's conversation over and over again. I've had some time to think."

"Yes, I see," I replied sarcastically. "Because you're a version of me who's like two hours ahead, you're so much older and wiser now."

"It's not that," he insisted. "I just feel like I've hit a point where I have better perspective now."

That was just meaningless enough and just meaningful enough to pique my interest. "What do you mean?"

"I mean, we've lived most of our life letting ourself become crippled by things. You know, when we were like six years old it was all 'Oh, woe is me, I'm not good enough for the tee-ball team!' Then it was, 'Horror of horrors, how will I ever pass sixth grade social studies?'"

"And then, 'Golly gee, how will I ever work up the courage to ask Amy out?'" I offered.

He grinned. "Followed immediately by, 'Well, shucks, I'll be alone forever.'"

"'And then it was, 'Doggone it, I'll never prove to her that I deserve her.'"

"'Don't forget, 'Fie on me, I'm not cut out for this college stuff,'" he added. "And now it's 'I'll never get her back' and 'I'm worthless without a job.'"

"I think I see where you're going with this," I said.

"Even when we almost moved forward by entertaining the idea of getting a girlfriend who wouldn't necessarily be Amy," he continued, "It was 'I don't have enough muscle tone to attract a woman.' And instead of changing the present to improve the future, we looked backward. We used a fucking time machine to try to go back to fix the past. We didn't progress. We kept dwelling on what most people wouldn't have had the ability to change in the first place. And it turned out that, even when we acquired an impossible power, we still didn't have the ability to change that stuff. If we learn anything from this ridiculous time traveling mess, I hope we learn that we need to take responsibility for the present and take action for the future instead of wallowing in our misery and focusing on what we wish had been different way back when."

It felt weird to be standing there receiving such a poignant speech from a guy who looked exactly like me—and who was me, or who I would have been in a few hours had his time machine not transported him to a timeline that he'd already visited when he was me. Come to think of it, even the explanation of our relationship was pretty mindbending, but that didn't change the oddity of fact that he was preaching to me like he was endowed with supremely greater knowledge than I despite being, to simplify things, the same person.

"But why does it matter to you?" I asked. "We overlapped, so even though I'm your past, you're not my future. What I decide to do when we get back home won't affect you at all because we'll be in separate timelines."

He shrugged. "What with all this bouncing around we've been doing," he said sagely, "There's got to be dozens of Kennies living simultaneously in different universes now. We all started from the same person, and that person is a good person, but he's also good at letting himself get stuck in the mud. He deserves better. So if you and I both go back to our separate futures and we both make something better out of ourselves, at least that's two Kennies who'll be better than they were when this whole mess started."

I stared at him. "You really have had a lot of time to think, haven't you?"

"Oh my God, she says everything exactly the same way every time. 'So anyway, I'm just sitting here in this lame-ass park,'" he said, mocking Amy's voice. "I had to keep my mind occupied so that I didn't run over there and wring her neck."

I laughed. "Well," I said, digging my machine out from our shared hiding spot. "Good luck to you, Kenny."

"Same to you," he said. "It seems like should shake hands, but that might be weird."

"Yeah," I agreed, setting my device for a few minutes into the past, "Good talking to you, though. Good luck with the time travel stuff, and, you know...life afterward." How weird would life be afterward? Would life be normal after I was done jaunting around the timestream? Would I ever be done anyway?

"Same to you," he said, programming his own machine. "Hey," he called out suddenly, "In case we bump into each other in a different timeline, it would be nice to know if it was the same you."

"So we need like a code word?" I asked.

"Yeah," he said. "How's tee-ball?"

"Works for me," I replied. "See you." And I clapped twice, shifting myself backward through time. Though the scenery around me remained almost constant, suddenly I was alone. I slipped my machine under the bush again and took a stroll over to the park to await the bus for the fourth time.

This was becoming tedious.

"It's all about priorities, you know?" I heard Amy say as I sat down on a bench that I'd been hoping was out of earshot.

Priorities. It was all about priorities. Maybe that other Kenny I was just talking to was right. Maybe I was prioritizing my sense of victimhood over my need to progress. Maybe I was spending too much time discussing how difficult things were and not enough time figuring out a solution to my difficulties.

I'd come to a realization: I kind of sucked.

I wasn't a bad person, mostly. I was good to other people, but I'd never really learned to take care of myself or solve my own problems. I let my problems consume me, define me and dominate me. I didn't like being miserable, but somehow I seemed to consign myself to that fate a lot. Maybe I needed to stop doing that. Not being miserable seemed like a pleasant enough concept. I should give that a thought.

And there went the bus.

"God dammit!" I shouted suddenly. A few people shot me dirty glares for my open profanity in the presence of children. Amy, of course, hadn't batted an eye because she was too busy talking about how annoying her little brother was and how her parents were such control freaks.

I hurried over to the bus stop yet again and peered down the road. In a peculiar if irrelevant divergence from the other timelines I'd visited, there was a person walking in about the place that Kenny Number Four and I would have been, except it was an overweight woman carrying what appeared to be a flimsy portable dog kennel. Its occupant stared longingly back at me.

That dog was me. I mean, I didn't have the adorable little nose or the curly white fur, but we were kindred souls. Both trapped. Both equipped with claws to fight our ways out of the traps. Both apparently convinced that even attempting such a task was pointless.

"Stop philosophizing to yourself and do something!" I admonished myself under my breath.

I ran back to my time machine and set it for a fifth attempt. I knew wishing wouldn't make it so, but I desperately, desperately wished that this one would work. Then I briefly wondered if I was doomed to make at least nine trips and run into my old self. Then I remembered that it didn't work that way. But then my understanding of how it work just drifted away from me like one of those idiotic dead dandelion blossoms that is propelled away from your grasp by the slightest movement of your hand.

How did time travel work again? Was I going to meet my old self? No. That didn't make any sense. I didn't know how it worked anymore, but I was pretty sure that wasn't it. Which meant that maybe this attempt could be my last.

I crossed my fingers and stepped onto the Platform of Cruelest Probabilities. I tried to clap once, but it was a little uncomfortable and I didn't make much of a noise, so I uncrossed my fingers and sent myself into the past again.

In an instant, I felt someone's presence beside me. A second Kenny had just arrived and was still perched atop his device to my right. As the two of us stared at each other awkwardly, a third Kenny materialized in front of us.

"Didn't see that coming," I said.

"I was just going to say that!" the one next to me exclaimed.

The one in front of us about jumped out of his skin and turned around. "Holy shit, you guys scared me!" he gasped.

Then the three of us stared at each other some more.

"Um...tee-ball?" I suggested hopefully.

The one to my right frowned. "What?"

The Kenny in front of us rolled his eyes. "Damn, my code word was toadstools."

"Toadstools?" I said. "What the hell were you guys talking about?"

"Will someone please explain what's going on here?" my frustrated alternate self to the right begged.

The one in front of us took pity on him. "On one of my earlier trips, I bumped into another one of us," he said. "We got to talking, and we decided that, in case the same two of us cross paths again, we should use a word from the conversation we had as a code to identify ourselves to each other. We picked toadstools. I'm assuming that's what happened with you as well," he said, nodding toward me.

"Pretty much," I confirmed. "Except mine was tee-ball."

"Tee-ball?" the self next to me echoed with a hint of disdain.

"Hey, it's better than toadstools," I said.

"So all that this conversation has established is that none of us know each other?" Kenny-on-the-Right clarified.

"Pretty much," Kenny-in-the-Front replied. "We should probably head over soon or we'll miss the bus."

"...Again," all three of us chorused. We exchanged awkward looks before wordlessly stuffing our time machines underneath the bush and heading out into the grass.

"So isn't it going to look weird if the three of us all waltz out into the open?" I asked.

"We'll tell people we're triplets," one of them suggested. I wasn't very good at shell games and they'd switched positions more than once now so I didn't know who was who. Not that it mattered much.

"Come on," I said. "Triplets in their mid twenties who still wear the exact same clothes in public? That's gonna look weird."

"Hey, it's not my timeline," the other other Kenny said lazily. "Besides, it's not like we're going to drop a nuclear bomb or anything. One weird sighting of three identical-looking people is not going to tear apart this version of the world. At worst, we'll make the back page of a cheap tabloid."

"Right next to the crocodiles in the sewers," I said dryly. "Great."

"They're alligators," the one who'd suggested the triplet persona corrected.

"What?"

"There are alligators in the sewers," he clarified. "Not crocodiles. I mean, there aren't actually any of them in the sewers at all, obviously, but the urban legend is alligators."

"What's the difference?" I asked.

"I don't know," he said, sitting down on the wooden bench facing the street. "But it's alligators."

"What I want to know," said the Kenny who remained standing, "Is if we all had exactly the same education, why is it that only one of us knew that alligators—as opposed to crocodiles—supposedly lived in sewers?"

The one sitting next to me shrugged. "My guess is that you guys do know that. But something in the differences between our experiences must have sparked my brain to have that particular bit of knowledge more readily available."

"So the details of reptile-related urban myths are in our brains somewhere," I summarized, "Just buried deep down?"

"Sure," the standing Kenny said curtly. "Makes sense, I guess."

In the silence that followed, we all strained to tune out eighteen-year-old Amy's conversation.

"So," Bench-Kenny said. "This is my fourth try at finding the right timeline. How about you guys?"

"Number five," I replied.

We both looked to the one standing next to us. He stared grimly toward the road for a while without answering. Finally, he muttered, "Somewhere in the low twenties."

"Damn," I said. Was I really in for that long of a ride?

"I'm surprised you're not homicidal by now," Bench-Kenny said. "Number Two would have been."

Battle-Ready-Kenny grunted. "At least I have some company this time. The last five or six times I've been completely alone. I threw a rock at Amy's head a few trips ago."

"Wow," I said, shocked.

"What happened?" Bench-Kenny asked in concern. "You didn't hit her, did you?"

"No, I missed," he said. "And what's worse is that she was so wrapped up in her stupid discussion of what Amber Feldman was wearing last Wednesday that she didn't even notice the thing go past. A big dude saw it, though, and he chased me off."

My eyes went wide. "What if that was the right timeline?"

"It wasn't," Action-Figure-Kenny assured me. "Part of why I threw the rock is because I was pissed that the bus yet again failed to produce the two people I was looking for. I may have taken my anger out on the wrong person," he admitted sheepishly. "This time travel stuff is beginning to take a toll on me."

"Apparently," I said.

"Dammit," Bench-Kenny said.

"What?" I asked.

"The bus," he said sadly, getting to his feet. "It just drove past. Nobody even got off."

"Are you sure?" I asked. Anger-Issues-Kenny was already sprinting toward the street to double check.

"Yeah," Not-on-the-Bench-Anymore-Kenny replied. "I really hope it doesn't take me twenty tries to get this right. This is not exactly a fun time."

"Agreed," I said. "It might be more confusing than anything.

"So do we need a code word in case we see each other in another life?" he asked me.

I shrugged. "How about 'alligator?'"

"Works for me," he replied. "But if you say 'crocodile,' I'll know you're an imposter," he added jokingly.

"I'll keep that in mind."

The other Kenny returned from the street, panting. "I saw the bus leaving. Nobody's on the street. This timeline is a bust," he said, suddenly punctuating his sentence with a loud, colorful epithet and a violent kick to the side of the bench.

"Whoa," my calmer alternate self advised, "let's not break any toes here."

"Sorry," Anger-Issues-Kenny sighed. "It's just...this is getting really old."

"Well," I reasoned, "The best way to end the cycle of misery is to try again." I motioned toward the tree line. "Gentlemen...shall we?"

The three of us trudged back to our time machines to make three more attempts.

(7)

After clapping my hands to activate my machine, I stepped out into a fresh timeline and took a quick look around. There were no other versions of me in the little grove.

"I guess I'm on my own this time," I said to no one. I was a little relieved to be freed of the complications of trying to keep track of multiple versions of myself. It would be nice to have a little peace and quiet. I stowed my device in the branches of the underbrush, turned around, and promptly walked into myself.

It seemed that another me had materialized at the precise moment that I had begun moving, and I didn't have any time to react. My nose smashed painfully against the back of the new Kenny's skull. I doubled over, clutching my injured face. The new Kenny yelped in surprise and scampered away.

We eyed each other suspiciously for a few moments before we began a conversation composed entirely of utter nonsense that nobody else in the universe could have possibly understood.

"Foghorn?" he asked me.

I shook my head. "Alligator?"

"Wonder Woman?"

"Bench-kicker?" I asked, waving him off.

He frowned. "Triscuit?"

"Nope," I said wearily. "Tee-ball?"

His eyes bulged. "Tee-ball! Yes! That's me! You're the one I gave the lecture about Amy to!"

"That was me," I said. I couldn't help but grin. It was genuinely good to bump into a friendly face. Or a friendly memory behind an all-too-familiar face, anyway.

"Well, actually you're not the only one I gave that lecture to," he confided. "But you were the first. And probably one of the few who benefited from it in any way." He winced. "It got kind of...angrier with each successive permutation."

"Geez," I asked him, "how many trips have you taken since I saw you last?"

He shrugged. "I have no idea. Which trip was I on when I ran into you?"

"Eight or nine, I think you said."

Tee-Ball Kenny thought for a moment. "Then it's probably been at least twenty-five since then," he said.

"Ouch," I breathed. I did not like where this was going. Success was stretching further and further away from attainability.

Our conversation was interrupted by the sudden arrival of another copy of ourselves. His face registered surprise, but before he could step down from his tiny pedestal, another Kenny appeared next to him. And another a few feet behind him. And another right in front of me.

"Looks like we were a bit early," I said in awe as almost a dozen Kennies popped into view in the little wooded area.

"At least we beat the rush," he murmured, just as amazed as I was. "I think," he said more loudly over the growing noise of conversing Kennies, "that this is actually a good thing."

"You think this is the right timeline?" I asked, failing to contain my excitement with dignity.

"Right," he shouted back. "It makes sense that the right timeline would be one with a lot of Kennies in it, because for every single one of us, once we hit this timeline we don't need to go to any others. This is the one every single one of us will stop in."

"Unless some of us give up," I replied.

He frowned. "Right," he agreed. "I've considered that many times over the last ten trips or so and it's bound to happen to some of us. Either way, I think we have some pretty good odds here." He looked out over the small crowd of Kennies who were frantically trying to introduce themselves to each other with bizarre code words. "We need to get control of this group."

"Definitely," I said.

"HEY!" Tee-Ball bellowed suddenly. "SHUT UP!"

The gaggle of our other selves quieted down obediently and stared at him.

"Listen, we're all here for the same purpose but we can't all go out into the park for obvious reasons," he began. My name, for today's purposes, is Tee-Ball and this is...um...." He broke off and whispered to me, "I guess Tee-Ball is a code word for both of us, and we can't both be called Tee-Ball. Gimme another one."

"Spartacus," I supplied sarcastically.

"My name is Tee-Ball," he announced, "And this is Spartacus."

"No, I'm Spartacus!" someone in the back called out.

Tee-Ball shot him an amused look. "Considering we're all pretty much the same guy, if you think all of us didn't also think of that joke and refrain from saying it because it was too lame, you're lying to yourself."

The crowd of Kennies chuckled appreciatively.

"Spartacus was the first one to arrive in this timeline," Tee-Ball continued. "And I was the second, so we'll be in charge. The two of us will go sit in the park and wait for the bus. The rest of you need to stay here and stay hidden. If this turns out to be the right timeline, as we're all hoping it is—"

He was interrupted by a collective murmur of approval.

"—then one of us will come back to get you and we'll all go kick some evil Kenny ass together. Okay?"

"Don't forget we need to wait for Travis!" one of the other Kennies said.

"I was just going to say that exact thing!" another exclaimed as though that phenomenon were somehow a surprise.

"I think we should take a third out with us," I told Tee-Ball.

"What for?" he asked.

"I'm assuming your plan is, if we see the other Kennies get off the bus, one of us follows them to the house and the other one comes back for the"—I glanced nervously at the sea of my own faces—"army."

"That's what I had in mind," Tee-Ball said. "You want to give the guy that runs to the house some backup?"

"Exactly," I said. It was spectacular how much more quickly brainstorming went when I was using two of my own brain.

"Good idea," Tee-Ball agreed. "You got any friends in the audience?"

"Well, considering they're all me," I said dryly, "no, not really."

He smiled. "You knew what I meant."

I sighed and faced the crowd. "We're going to take one of you with us to the park," I announced. "Alligator? Are you here?" The Kennies looked around expectantly but no one stepped forward.

"Bench-kicker?" I said hopefully. I was met with the same reactions.

"I'm out of friends," I told Tee-Ball.

"Foghorn?" he said.

One of the Kennies moved forward from the middle of the pack. He had a dark bruise forming along his jawline. "Did you say Foghorn?" he asked.

"You're Foghorn?" Tee-Ball asked.

"I bet you're glad it's me and not Tugboat," he replied with a wide grin.

Tee-Ball laughed heartily. "You got that right," he agreed. "What the hell happened to your face?"

Foghorn rubbed his wounded chin tenderly. "I don't want to talk about it," he mumbled.

Tee-Ball shrugged. "Well, whatever. You're coming with us. Ready, Spartacus?"

I nodded. "Either way, at least one of us will be back, hopefully with good news," I told the crowd. "Just stay put for now."

"And stay quiet!" Tee-Ball added. The three of us stepped out of the trees and headed toward our usual spot.

Spartacus, Tee-Ball and Foghorn—an unlikely trio of words comprised the Unlikely Trio of Clones. Now we just had to cross the Grasslands of Preparation, sit down on the Bench of the Watchful Eyes and wait for the Mass Transit Vehicle of Destiny to reveal our fates to us.

"So, seriously, man," Tee-Ball asked. "We have a little bit of time to kill. What happened to your jaw?"

Foghorn sighed. "Really? It's not that good of a story."

"It has to be if it's that embarrassing," I said.

"Besides, what's there to be embarrassed about?" Tee-Ball pointed out. "It's just us. We're only you."

"I hit it on a rock," he admitted grudgingly.

"That's not much of a story," Tee-Ball complained. "How did you hit it on a rock?"

We reached the benches and Foghorn sat down, talking a little more loudly than we were accustomed to so that we could hear him over Amy's squawking—but just barely. "I was leaning over to pull my time machine out of the bush," he explained. "And some asshole decided it was a good idea to use the time machine directly in front of the hiding spot we were all using. So I was reaching into the bush and suddenly another one of us appears right in front of me. It took about a tenth of a second before I realized that my face was about an inch away from my own junk."

Tee-Ball and I laughed. "And you freaked out and fell over?" I asked.

"Bashed my face against a rock on my way down," he confirmed. "Not my most graceful moment."

"So listen guys," Tee-Ball interrupted. "I've noticed in my thirty-plus trips to this spot that we have a tendency of getting distracted and missing the actual moment when the bus pulls up."

"Yeah," Foghorn and I agreed in simultaneous shame.

"I've also gotten pretty used to the timing," he said. "You know, the specific events that lead up to..." he trailed off.

"Now!" he said exultantly, pointing toward the street. At the same instant, the bus rolled to a stop from behind the sycamores that lined the edges of the playground.

The three of us leaned forward in the Shared Anticipation of Overdue Success. Foghorn gasped as we watched one of our past selves step down from the bus.

"Wait for it," Tee-Ball murmured tensely.

Another Kenny, adorned in a green t-shirt, exited the bus and the three of us erupted in cheers, drawing all kinds of strange looks from everyone except Amy, who was still engrossed in her conversation. Unfortunately, we also drew the gaze of our two comrades, who, after eying us warily and exchanging a few words, took off at a run.

"Dammit," Tee-Ball muttered.

"I'll go get the rest of the group," I said quickly. "I'll have them meet you at the house."

"Don't forget to have someone wait for Travis," Foghorn said.

"Don't worry," I replied, already breaking out into a run. "I'll catch up with you guys later. Good luck!"

I was already out of breath before I reached the tennis court, but I was so energized by my presence in the precise timeline I'd been searching for that I managed to push myself a little bit beyond my normal limits.

One of the other mes saw me coming and met me at the tree line. "You look excited," he said, almost bursting with his own excitement. "Tell me it's good news."

"This is it!" I gasped. "We're in the right timeline!"

"Fantastic!" he cried, turning back to the remaining group of Kennies. "Come on, guys! It's the right timeline! Let's go kick some ass!"

Amidst the cheers, somebody shouted, "Who's gonna wait for Travis to show up?"

I raised my hand weakly, leaning against a tree for support. "I got that covered," I wheezed. "I need to catch my breath anyway."

"Okay," the first one said. "Good work, Tee-Ball."

"But I'm Spartacus," I protested pointlessly.

"Sure you are," he replied patronizingly. "We all are."

I rolled my eyes as he and the other Kennies thundered away into the park like a stampeding herd of buffalo. The comparison seemed appropriate considering our graceless, heavy gait. Besides, it's not offensive to compare people to buffalo if I'm only talking about my selves.

They hadn't quite escaped my hearing when Travis appeared in front of me. He was completely drenched from head to toe and he didn't look happy. His demeanor brightened when he saw me waiting for him, but it was almost imperceptible.

"Good timing!" I said. "What the hell happened to you? Why are you wet?"

"I accidentally hit an extra button when I was setting my machine for the trip I made before this one," he grumbled. "Incidentally, did you know there was a violent thunderstorm at about three o'clock in the afternoon the day after you turned eighteen?"

I shrugged, trying to keep myself from laughing at him. "I'm sure I knew that eight years ago," I said.

"So this is the right timeline, I take it?" he asked.

"Yup," I replied. "And I wasn't the only one who found it. There's a whole bunch of other versions of me running over to my parents' house right now."

Travis looked impressed. "Well...I guess time travel has a way of throwing you curveballs, doesn't it?"

"Sure does," I said. "Hide your time machine real quick and we'll go join in the fun."

All the bushes in the area big enough to hide a time machine already had two underneath them. Travis looked around for a moment before placing his device snugly against a rock and burying it with handfuls of pine needles. "That will have to work," he muttered.

"You should be okay," I said. "Come on, we gotta go."

He nodded and followed me out of the grove. We angled out across the grass, hurrying toward the house.

(6)

We raced across my parents' back porch, through the door and into the middle of the most awkward fight scene I'd ever witnessed.

Nobody was really sure who anybody else was. The only three people who looked any different from the rest were my eighteen-year-old self, who was obviously younger in appearance than the rest of us, Good Ol' Number Four, who was wearing the only green shirt, and Foghorn, who still sported a rather conspicuous bruise. Travis made four distinguishable people. Everyone else in the room looked exactly like me.

It looked as though the Vengeful Swarm of Future Kennies had burst in and started throwing punches, only to find that, within seconds, their enemies had mixed in with their allies. Nobody really knew who to hit. Everybody wanted the time machine that was hidden somewhere in this house. Some wanted it for themselves, but most of us wanted to return it to Number Four, its rightful owner. But nobody knew who was going to try to stop them from doing what.

It was a fight scene. But it was motionless. Most of the Kennies were simply staring at one another with clenched fists as if they could determine their clones' identities by peering into their souls.

"Uh...what's going on here?" Travis asked as we stepped into the living room.

"Travis?" the eighteen-year-old Kenny said excitedly. "Great googly moogly! You look old!"

"You know Kenny, I forgot how much of a fucking dork you were when we were in high school," Travis whispered to me.

"Once you listen to this clown speak a few more words," I replied, "You'll realize that there is literally no way you can embarrass me worse than I already am."

"So," he asked me. "Who's who?"

I pointed to Number Four. "The one in the green shirt is Number Four, the one we're rescuing. We need to get his time machine from the eighteen-year-old Kenny's hiding place, but he only wants to give it to the one who has the password, which would be Number Two or Number Three."

"Which ones are Number Two and Number Three?" he asked.

"That's a good question," I said.

"Okay, well who's the guy standing next to Number Four? His face is all banged up, so he'll stand out."

"That's Foghorn," I said.

"That's his name?" Travis asked incredulously.

"Yeah, kind of."

"I thought his name was Kenny!"

I sighed. "Yeah, but we're all named Kenny, so we had to kind of make up new names for practical purposes."

"And you came up with Foghorn?"

"Don't look at me," I said defensively. "I didn't come up with it. A different me did."

"Whatever." Addressing the entire room, he said, "Listen, Kennies, I don't understand what's so difficult about all this. The bad guys here are outnumbered like six to one, so if you're on our side and you have a hunch about which one of your neighbors is secretly evil, you don't need to worry about getting beat up because you have plenty of help."

"You don't get it," one of the Kennies said nervously. "This is like playing Minesweeper. On expert."

"Yeah, and all the mines are also yourself," another one added helpfully.

"I have a guess," one of them grunted, courageously tackling the Kenny standing next to him. Another one piled on to help and soon the whole group was battling each other again.

"Stop!" I shouted impotently above the din. I surged into the pile to try and pull the two original combatants apart only to immediately lose track of which two they were. With the help of Travis's shouts for order, however, I managed to bring the scuffle to a halt.

"Little Kenny," Travis said impatiently, "Why can't you just give me the time machine?"

"Because I don't really know who any of you nincompoops are," eighteen-year-old me said defiantly. "Just because you're from the future doesn't mean you aren't lying to me. I'm only giving the time machine to the person who entrusted me with it. That person knows the password. That's the only person who I'll tell where it's hidden."

"That's stupid," Travis said. "We're from the fucking future. We know more about what's going on here than you do."

"Sure, that's what you say," eighteen-year-old Kenny said.

"Fine," Travis growled. "Then, Mudflaps, I need you to help me organize all of your fellow Kennies so that we can start solving this living, breathing, mindfuck of a logic puzzle."

"Wait, you mean me?" Foghorn asked.

"Yeah," Travis said. "You and Green Shirt over here will have to help me out because you're the only two I can tell apart."

"It's Foghorn," Foghorn said.

Travis squinted at him. "What did I say?"

"Mudflaps."

"Oh," Travis said with a little chuckle. "Yeah, I guess that wasn't exactly right, was it? Sorry, dude."

"What about me?" I asked.

Travis stared at me. "What about you?"

"I'm the one who was waiting for you behind the park when you arrived," I said.

Travis shrugged. "You look exactly like everybody else," he said. "Sorry, but I'm not going to take your word for it."

"I know why you're all wet," I blurted. "You misjudged your time jump and you landed in the middle of a thunderstorm."

Travis gave me a sympathetic smile. "I kind of believe you," he said. "But that could have been a lucky guess." He turned to the eighteen-year-old Kenny. "You guys have any markers around here? Like a sharpie or something?"

The birthday boy pulled a thick black marker from a collection of pens and pencils near the telephone. "What do you need it for?" he asked.

"I'm going to talk to each Kenny here, one by one," he said. "And figure out who's who." He reached out to the nearest version of me and drew a long dark stripe down his shoulder. "This guy gets to be number one." He moved to the next me and drew a numeral two on his shirt. In a few moments, the crowded room consisted of Travis, Number Four (whom Travis referred to as Green Shirt), Foghorn, Birthday Boy and Kennies numbered one through twelve. I was number three.

"So here's what we're going to do," Travis announced. "Birthday Boy and I are going to call each of you into the bathroom individually for a series of questions that each of us can use to determine which Kenny you are. Green Shirt and Corndog here—"

"Foghorn," Foghorn interrupted irritably.

"—are going to stand guard to make sure there's no switching shirts or other funny business. Number one? Follow me."

I watched as my first-marked alternate self followed Travis and Birthday Boy into the Bathroom of Truth-Seeking. The Lavatory of Investigative Questioning. The Powder Room of Inevitable Discovery.

A few minutes later, they emerged. The rest of us had taken seats on the worn living room carpet to wait in silence. Nobody wanted to speak for fear of drawing suspicion to himself. Nobody wanted to be accused of being part of the wrong faction.

Number One came and sat down heavily on the floor. Travis gestured toward Number Two and said, "Step into my office."

As soon as the door closed, Number Seven took a risk by leaning towards the recently returned interviewee and whispering, "So? What happened? Did they figure out who you are?"

"I think so," Number One whispered back. "But they didn't say."

"Why," Number Eleven said to Number Seven. "Are you worried they'll figure something out about you?" Number Seven scowled at him but didn't answer. The room lapsed back into silence.

Finally, Number Two emerged from the bathroom looking a little shaken. He sat down in front of me and Travis invited me into his makeshift interrogation room. Birthday Boy was sitting on the countertop. He pointed me to the toilet and had me sit on the closed lid.

Travis closed the door behind us. "This won't take long," he said. "Which one are you? Did you come here with me or did you come here earlier to leave your time machine with your younger self?"

"What, you're just gonna ask me outright?" I said. "That doesn't seem like the best way to get information."

"Answer the question," Travis ordered, staring at me intently. Birthday Boy nodded, apparently to lend his silent support to Travis's command.

"I came here with you, Travis," I said, swallowing thickly. I was starting to become nervous that they'd conclude I was my evil twin and burn me at the stake or something. "I was the one who waited for you to make sure you knew this was the right timeline."

"Then you must know that I have something important in my pocket that I brought with me from the future," my best friend continued. "Don't tell me what it is, but tell me where we got it."

"From the alien," I said. "He had it in his basement."

"And what was the alien's wife's name?" Travis asked.

For a brief moment of panic, I struggled to remember. "Um...Oizu? Yeah, it was Oizu!"

"Okay, then," Travis said, motioning toward my eighteen-year-old doppelganger. "Your turn."

Birthday Boy leaned forward and asked, "The password you need to lay claim to the time machines that I have hidden is a three word phrase. The first word starts with a P. Without saying the whole password, just tell me what the next word starts with?"

I was starting to understand how this worked. Travis wanted to verify my identity without letting Birthday Boy know what his secret weapon was. Birthday Boy was trying to verify that I knew the password without letting Travis know what the password actually was.

"I don't know," I said.

"Take a guess," Birthday Boy said.

"Okay, uh...R."

"And the last word starts with?" he prompted.

"Um...T," I said.

My enigmatic eighteen-year-old self leaned forward to whisper in my ear. "If you were really the one who gave me the password, I'd be telling you the location of the machine right now. But we both know you're not, so I'm just doing this for show. If I whisper something to everyone, he doesn't know for sure who knows the password." He pulled away before I could answer. "Okay then," Birthday Boy said, glancing toward Travis. "Is that good enough for you?"

Travis nodded. "Yeah, I'm done with Number Three," he said. He stood up to usher me toward the door.

Desperate to prove myself, I said, "You told me that time travel has a way of throwing you curveballs! Then there wasn't enough room for your time machine, so you had to cover it with pine needles and stuff!"

He gripped me firmly around the bicep and led me out the door. Once we were out of Birthday Boy's earshot, he said in a low voice, "Okay, you've convinced me. Listen, I'm pretty sure the guy before you passed Birthday Boy's password test."

"Number Two?" I asked.

"Yeah, that's the one."

"What are the odds that Number Two would turn out to actually be Number Two?" I mused.

Ignoring me, he continued, "Once we're done here, you stick to him like glue and maybe he'll lead you to Green Shirt's time machine. I'll try and figure out who the other wolf in Kenny's clothing is and then I'll shadow him. One of us is bound to find it."

"Okay," I agreed. "Good plan."

"Now sit back down and act like you don't know what's going on," he whispered, sending me out into the crowd of my nervous alternate selves. "Number Four?" he called.

The Kenny with the four on his shirt stood up and followed Travis back to the porcelain-adorned office.

(5)

"What did they ask you?" Number Two whispered to me once the bathroom door had closed.

"Weird stuff," I whispered back. I wanted to be vague. "I didn't know all the answers."

"So which one are you?" he asked me.

"Which one are you?" I countered.

He sighed. "Right. You can't tell me because I might be one of them."

"Sorry," I said with a sympathetic frown. "I don't want to tip my hand unless I know who I'm tipping it to." Of course, the real reason I didn't want to tip my hand was because I was pretty sure I did know who I'd be tipping it to.

"Right, me neither," he said. He turned around and left me sitting in the Silence of Paranoid Tension.

The cast of identical-looking suspects watched uncomfortably as contestant after contestant entered the little conference room with Travis and Birthday Boy. Green Shirt and Foghorn kept a watchful eye on us all. I guess the guards and the fear of discovery kept anyone from attempting to escape.

Immediately after the bathroom door closed behind Number Five, the thirteen of us who remained in the living room heard a familiar sound—the opening of the garage door.

"That'll be Mom and Christine," three of us muttered gravely. We didn't know what would happen if our family discovered a dozen or so of my older clones just hanging out in the house.

"Nobody move," Green Shirt said sternly to the Host of Numerically Organized Kennies. "We're not hiding."

"I'll go get Birthday Boy," Foghorn said. "Maybe he'll be able to deal with this."

As Foghorn disappeared toward the bathroom, my mother and my fifteen-year-old sister entered from the garage. I should have been expecting it, but I was still surprised at how young both of them looked. My mother, of course, was considerably more surprised than I was and she let out a sharp yelp when she saw all of us sitting calmly on her carpet. Christine, on the other hand, stared for a while before breaking into a slow, nervous giggle.

The dog bounded in behind them and stopped abruptly, falling back to his haunches and looking around, appearing defeated by the bewildering scene before him. I was struck with the previously lost memory that Cornelius had been taken to the vet on the afternoon of my eighteenth birthday.

"That explains why the dog wasn't here," one of me whispered. Apparently my memory hadn't been the only one triggered.

"What's going on here?" my mom said uncertainly, moving to position herself between her daughter and the horde of young men who closely resembled her teenage son. "Who are you?"

"We're Kenny," Number Seven said. Maybe it wasn't helpful, but one could make the argument that it needed to be said, if only so that we could start with the basics before explaining the confusing parts.

"From the future," Number Eleven added.

"Mom!" Birthday Boy cried, hurrying over from the bathroom. "Sorry, I know this is kind of a shock. I can explain."

Gazing out at us as though we were armed to the teeth, my mom said distantly, "I think that might be a good idea."

"Did that one just say he was you from the future?" Christine asked.

"Yeah," my eighteen-year-old self replied. "Yeah, he did. But first let me say that this whole snafu isn't really my fault."

"Okay," my mom said expectantly.

"It's the fault of my future self, who bought a time machine and then used it to come back to today."

"Then why are there so many of him?" my mother asked. It was slightly insulting for her to refer to me as a him, considering that I was just as much her biological offspring as the version of me she was used to seeing. But I could forgive her the insensitivity, considering the situation she had been suddenly confronted with.

Birthday Boy frowned. "That I'm not actually too clear on," he admitted.

"Long story short, we're from other timelines," Green Shirt cut in.

"And I'm just supposed to welcome you all into my home?" my mom said. I wasn't sure if she was still scared of us or if she was trying to figure out how many place settings she'd need for dinner.

"No, they'll be out of your hair soon," Birthday Boy assured her. "Right, guys?" We responded with an enthusiastic smattering of yeahs, oh absolutlies and sure things.

"Besides, we're all your sons," Number Eight said. That drew a look of revulsion from her and a goofy grin from my sister.

"Right. Um, please make this quick, Kenny," she advised. "I think I feel nauseous. I'm going to go lay down for a bit." She shuffled out of the room and headed toward the stairs.

Christine let out an excited cackle and plopped down on the couch to watch. As my sundry selves resumed our ordered interrogations, my sister had very little of consequence to observe—until Number Seven came out of the bathroom and, instead of taking his seat on the floor, walked calmly to the door to the back porch and began opening it.

"Whoa, whoa, where do you think you're going?" Green Shirt said sharply. He and Foghorn hurried over to block his exit.

"I'm leaving," he said. "The other two said I was free to go."

"I think they meant, free to go back and sit down in the living room," Foghorn said.

"Exactly," Travis boomed from the bathroom doorway. "Sit your ass down! Number Eight, please?"

Number Eight stood up and stepped toward Travis. Number Seven chose that moment to jab his elbow sharply at Foghorn's already-wounded face. As Foghorn reeled back, swearing and clutching his jaw, Number Seven violently threw his fist under Green Shirt's ribcage.

"What the hell are you doing?" one of me shouted.

"He's one of the evil Kennies!" another whooped. "Get him!"

"Evil Kenny?" Christine echoed gleefully. "You're kidding, right?"

"Stay out of this, Chrissy!" four of me snapped. Another one of us had snarled simply, "Shut up!"

Four or five of my bloodthirsty alternate selves leapt up to tackle Number Seven, who had proved unexpectedly adept in combat. Another of me lurched forward and charged Travis, who was gazing distractedly at the fighting by the door. Before I could warn Travis, the Kenny had lowered his shoulder, slammed my friend painfully into the wall and left him groaning on the floor. The unknown Kenny stepped past him and went for the door to the garage. Somehow, amid the chaos, I was the only Kenny who seemed to have noticed this.

I feared that it was the other evil Kenny, headed for Green Shirt's time machine. If he got to it and spirited himself away, then all of this would be for nothing. We'd never catch him and Green Shirt would be trapped in this timeline.

Travis seemed to be taking a long time to get up, but he was moving, so I hurried past him, reasoning that he couldn't possibly be too badly hurt. I burst into the garage, which had my mom's gray PT Cruiser parked on the far side. The evil Kenny, however, had ignored the car, the old sports equipment, the rusty outdoor grill and the lawnmower in favor of my dad's massive upright tool cabinet. He was pulling the unmistakable form of a time machine from where it had been wedged in the bottommost drawer.

"Stop!" I shouted. It was pointless to shout, I suppose, but if nothing else I asserted my disapproval of the situation.

He glared at me as he turned around and set the device on the floor. I could see the number two that had been scribbled on his shirt. Maybe Number Two really was Number Two after all. "Why? So you can stop me?" he taunted. "You know all I need to do is get on and clap. I can do that before you've closed half the distance between us."

"You'll trap an innocent guy in a foreign timeline," I told him. "You're me. How can you have no conscience?"

"I'm not you," he replied disdainfully. "I haven't been you for a while now. We were weak and driven by pointless emotions back when we were the same person. All this time traveling madness, all the failures, all the futile attempts to improve my life by stealing someone else's...it taught me to be assertive. It taught me that a conscience was holding me back. You...you're still weak. You're shouting 'stop' and counting on kindness. In your position, I would have already taken what I wanted."

"I'm not counting on kindness," I countered. "I was just curious. Mostly, I think you should stop because you don't know if you have the right time machine."

He squinted. "What? What do you mean?"

"Our eighteen-year-old self hid two machines for you, didn't he?" I said. "Did he tell you where the right one was?"

"This is the right one," he said uncertainly.

"Because if you have the wrong machine, you could end up in the wrong timeline," I continued. "Are you going to go back to your real future on that thing or are you going to go back to the one you tried to steal? Are you going to be stuck in that unfamiliar lifestyle surrounded by unfamiliar people?"

"He...told me this was my machine," he faltered. "My original machine."

"How do you know he didn't get things mixed up?" I asked. "The machines are identical and so are the owners. How did he know which machine you needed?"

He glared at me. "You know what? It doesn't matter. This machine is still my ticket out of here. Regardless of which timeline I end up in, at least I'll get away from all of—"

He was interrupted by the sudden and violent contact of an airborne shoe with his stationary forehead. It was my forehead, too, and I wondered if that made my empathetic wince that much more empathetic. As Number Two collapsed, I looked behind me.

Travis was rubbing his back and wearing only one shoe. "Fuckin' asshole!" he screamed at my inert alternate self. "You see what this motherfucking cocksucker just did to me?"

"Yeah, maybe I should've gone out for the football team in high school," I commented. "Looks like he hit you pretty hard."

"It wasn't that," Travis said, sliding the machine away from Number Two as he lay groaning on the concrete. He gave him a quick kick to the ribs to convince him to stay down and then began putting his shoe back on. "He pushed me right up against the hinges of that damn door. Broke the skin, hurt like hell and probably bruised my fucking kidney. This had better be one of the bad guys, Kenny, because I really want to fuck this asshole up."

"It is," I told him. "I think it's the first one of my alternate selves I met. The one who came up to me at the bus stop."

The Kenny on the floor let out a long, wheezing laugh. "No," he said, still on his back. "I'm the one who came to warn that one about the two of you working together."

"What, me and Travis?" I asked.

"No, stupid," he moaned. "You and the rich Kenny. The one in the green shirt. I was trying to explain to the other one in the alley that the one in the green shirt was going to try and interfere with his plan to steal the device from us the first time we traveled back to our eighteenth birthday. I was telling him he needed to hurry up instead of finding a quiet place to take the machine and use it when the one in the green shirt butted in anyway and screwed everything up."

"Is this as confusing for you as it is for me?" Travis asked. "Because it's pretty fucking confusing for me."

"I think I get it," I said. "This one is the one I used to call Number Three. He's the one that showed up in the alley right before I met Number Four. I mean...before I met Green Shirt."

"So if this is the third one, this is his machine, right?" Travis said. "The second one was the one who wanted to steal yours because he didn't have one."

"Yeah," I said, staring at my defeated alternate self clutching at his injured skull. "I'm pretty sure."

"How sure is pretty sure?" Travis asked me.

Remembering the fight between Number Two and Green Shirt on their way up the stairs toward my old bedroom from the first time I'd visited 2006, I said, "I kind of know where Green Shirt's machine is, approximately. And it's not the garage. So this one has to be Number Three's."

Travis shrugged. "Okay then."

A Kenny with a number ten on his shirt appeared in the doorway, panting. "One of the Evil Kennies just escaped out the back door! We think he figured out where our time machines are and he's gonna steal one. Come on!"

Travis rolled his eyes. "Of course he did. You go help your clones stop him. I'll keep an eye on Shoeface, here."

(4)

Kenny Number Ten and I hurried out the back door and joined our other selves in pursuit of the self who was, by overwhelming popular vote, our least favorite. I gathered from Number Ten's occasional comments to me while we ran that The Evil Kenny Once Referred To As Number Two had a decent head start on us but that other Good Kennies were hard on his heels.

As we cut through yards in our neighborhood, we could occasionally glimpse our other selves darting between houses further ahead. It was hard to determine exactly how many of us were chasing down the Evil Kenny, but I hadn't seen anybody left in the house, so it might be eleven of us plus Green Shirt, Birthday Boy and Foghorn. We were in for a very confusing showdown in the park if we could catch up to everyone in time.

After a moment, that idea became kind of confusing to me. Every single person sprinting toward the park was me. They had the same lung capacity, the same lack of stamina, the same failing leg muscles and the same overworked brain guiding them on the same route. How could I possibly expect any of me to outrun any of my other selves? Perhaps motivation was the key. If I had the willpower to push myself further and harder and faster because I was that much more dedicated to my cause than my foes or my allies, maybe I could outrun them all.

Number Ten and I exited our housing development and turned onto the road that would lead past the park. It was an unwinding, mostly treeless street with buildings set back a decent distance from the curb—which meant that we could see the entire remaining stretch of road and every person on it. All of me were visibly tired. The Evil Kenny trudged doggedly ahead of a knot of five or six of me, who all seemed to be dragging their feet in the same slow-motion marathon. The rest of us were spread out over the few hundred yards behind them, with Number Ten and me bringing up the rear. It was a pathetic display of physical urgency and athletic prowesslessness. It was even worse than when three of us had run past that nursing home on my first visit to this date. Number Ten was a few feet ahead of me, and even with the wind blowing in my face I could hear his wheezing.

Up ahead, the Evil Kenny appeared to have finally reached his destination, because he took a hard right toward the park. A few seconds later, the pack following him did the same. I hoped they would catch him before he reached the grove of trees, but it didn't seem likely. Gasping for breath and feeling my pulse in my ears and my toes, I followed Number Ten in executing the same turn, which lead across a grassy field into the center of the park.

My diabolical alternate self seemed to have encountered some trouble. Whatever he'd overheard about the location of our time machines apparently wasn't specific enough. He'd hesitated and lost some of his lead, and even though he was pushing past the tennis courts in the right direction, two of our other selves were close enough that a good strong leap could tackle him. The problem was that, in our harried, exhausted condition, a good strong leap was probably too much to ask for. An attempt at a tackle would probably just give the Evil Kenny a bigger edge.

People were staring. There were fifteen of us doing a stop-motion hustle through the park. Twins aren't too unusual and triplets aren't unheard of, but if you tear through a public area chasing a dozen of your clones, you're going to draw some attention. But that didn't matter to any of me quite so much as making sure that the asshole in the front didn't have the chance to steal another time machine and use it as his own.

The Evil Kenny was heading toward the wrong end of the grove of trees where our precious temporal vehicles were stashed. That gave all of us in pursuit a chance to put ourselves between him and his prize. When Number Ten and I entered the miniature forest, eleven of our doppelgangers were standing in front of the pile of time machines, arms crossed, staring down the would-be thief.

"So," I gasped. "I guess we didn't miss anything?"

"Join the party," one of me said. "We're just deciding whether or not to kick this guy's ass."

"The vote seems to be going in favor of it," another one added.

"Look," Evil Kenny growled, clearly disappointed. "All I want to do is go home, okay?"

"Then use your own time machine," the Kenny with the number nine on his shirt spat. "Stop stealing ours."

"I can't," Evil Kenny explained. "I don't have it."

"Why not?" Number Ten asked.

"He destroyed it," Green Shirt said. "Bashed it to pieces with a rock."

"Why the hell would you do that?" Number Five and Number Eight sputtered.

"Spite," Green Shirt summarized, gazing at our least likeable self with the Scowl of Unmitigated Enmity. "Whatever frustration he accumulated over the first few attempts with time travel, he took it out on me. He dicked me over just because he could and he stranded me in this timeline on purpose."

The Evil Kenny rolled his eyes. "Quit your bitching and get over it," he snapped. "I took that machine from you fair and square. You deserve whatever you can take, and if you can't take anything, you only deserve whatever's left."

"Which was nothing!" Green Shirt fumed.

"Way of the world, pal," Evil Kenny droned. "You shouldn't have trusted me just because I looked like you."

"You are me!" Green Shirt said.

"Wrong," our coldhearted alternate self said. "No two of us are the same. Each of us has different experiences from the point our timelines diverged. Yours made you weak. Mine made me strong."

"It also made you outnumbered," I pointed out.

"There are a lot of time machines over there," the Evil Kenny countered. "I only need one."

"Not gonna happen," Green Shirt growled.

"Before you ruffians all try to kill each other," Birthday Boy cut in suddenly, "I just want to clarify something. You really stole his time machine?"

Evil Kenny sneered at him. "Stole, forcibly requisitioned, pried it out of his feeble hands, whatever."

"And unless he gets it back he's stuck here?"

"Stuck, temporally marooned, too weak to defend his only way home, whatever."

"And he has to get his specific machine back or he can't get back to the timeline he came from?" my eighteen-year-old self continued. Half a dozen of us grunted in the affirmative.

"And the machine that you gave me was really the one contraption this guy needed to get back home?"

Evil Kenny nodded. "Yes, yes, I know, I'm a terrible person for trying to act in my own best interest, blah blah blah, you're barely even an adult, what the fuck do you know?"

"I know I should probably give the machine back to its real owner," Birthday Boy said. He glanced apologetically toward Green Shirt. "If you want to head back to the house with me, I'll show you where it is."

"Hey! But he doesn't know the password!" Evil Kenny protested. "What was all that crap you were saying about only giving it to the guy who knows the password?"

Birthday Boy shrugged. "That was before I knew for sure that I was holding stolen property."

"Don't you fucking dare," Evil Kenny thundered. "That's still my backup plan! I need that machine in case I can't get another one!"

Green Shirt smiled at him. "Then you should have kept your original machine as your backup plan when you stole mine," he said.

Evil Kenny lurched forward to take a swing at him, but as Green Shirt dodged backward, the army of Kennies descended upon the attacker. Evil Kenny went down under a pile of his more virtuous selves. This time, however, he wasn't able to wriggle free in the confusion. Numbers Six and Eleven grabbed him by the arms arms and dragged him up against a tree.

"Ready to go home?" Birthday Boy asked.

"Definitely," Green Shirt replied. He turned toward the masses of his rescuers. "Thank you, all of you, whoever you all are, for coming back for me. I know it's obvious but it's still worth saying: I couldn't have done it without you."

I was surprised to feel pride welling within me. "You saved our necks once," I told him.

"Yeah," Number Ten agreed. "It was the least we could do."

"And more than that," Green Shirt continued, "It was...an interesting experience. You know, running with an alternate version of myself for a while. You always wonder how your life would have turned out if some particular event had never happened, or if some specific decision hadn't been made. How you would have turned out. When I first met you, I thought you were kind of a wimp. Not physically, I mean. At least, no more of a wimp physically than I am. Just...weak-willed. Timid. Frightened."

"Maybe I was," said Number One, speaking the words that were on the tip of my tongue.

Green Shirt shrugged. "Well, whatever. You aren't now. It's just reassuring to know that, had my life been different, had that future version of myself never given me all those money-making schemes, I would have turned out okay. Whatever I choose, however my life goes, my capacity to become the kind of person I want to be is never diminished. It's good to know."

"How touching," the Evil Kenny said. "Should we join hands while he leads us in the chant of serenity?" He struggled against his captors, but Six and Eleven held his arms firmly behind the tree.

"Except for you," Green Shirt said. "You're a reminder that focusing on what I want and disregarding everyone else is a recipe for internal corruption."

"You say tomato, I say tomahto," Evil Kenny retorted. "You say internal corruption, I say fuck you."

"Take care of yourself back home," Number Ten told our wealthy comrade.

"Thanks," he replied. "You guys too."

"Ready?" Birthday Boy asked. Green Shirt nodded and gave us a brief wave before he disappeared from the grove.

"Now," Number Six grunted, straining to keep our angriest counterpart at bay. "What do we do with this one?"

"He doesn't have a machine anymore, so he can't go home," one of me said.

Another piped up, "But we can't just leave him here. He doesn't belong."

"Yeah, and if we just leave him here, what if he does something to our eighteen-year-old self?" said a third.

"Sounds like you need an expert opinion," Travis said, stepping into the grove.

"What are you doing here?" I asked him. "What happened to the other Kenny?"

"Relax, dude" Travis told me. "He's gone. When he expressed a desire to use his machine to come back again to assist his cohort, I explained the staggeringly long odds of his finding the correct timeline. I got through to him."

"But what if he comes back and helps the Evil Kenny escape in another timeline?" one of my desperate alternate selves said.

"I got through to him," Travis repeated. "Look, Kennies...you guys gotta understand. You can't fix fuckin' everything. You can fix your own timeline, and you can lend your influence to a few others, but there's a limit to the shit you can do. Sometimes you just gotta do your best and have some faith that the world will go on as intended. Some things can't be fixed and some things shouldn't."

"Yeah, but what if another version of Green Shirt here gets stuck in the past because of this?" one of my stubborn alternate selves countered.

"Then he'll live. He'll adapt. Hopefully it doesn't happen, but if it does, he'll just have to learn to cope. You guys have done a remarkable thing here. Don't discount the value of your solution just because you didn't solve everything."

"Some parts of the solution are kind of non-negotiable," Number Five said. "I mean, we still have this lunatic version of ourselves running around and we can't just leave him here."

"That's why we need the expert opinion," Travis said. "Maybe the guy who sold you that machine will be able to help."

"That's actually a really good idea," four of me said in stunned unison.

"I was just going to say that," mumbled an astonished alternate self.

"Yeah, he said he'd lived here for ten years," said a less nonplussed Kenny. "So he's gotta be here somewhere."

"Probably in the same house," added another.

"We just need to figure out a way to get our greedy alternate self over there," pointed out yet another Kenny.

"Unless we hold him here and let Pilz come to us," I suggested.

"Yeah, let me just call him really quick," a sarcastic alternate self replied. "I have his number in my phone that hasn't been invented yet."

Travis stared at us. "It's really fucking trippy watching like twelve of you all standing there having a complete, rapid-fire conversation with yourselves."

"You're telling me," two of my comrades chorused.

"Okay, so we need to get in contact with Pilz," Travis said. "But it's probably going to be way too difficult to transport your evil twin over there without him escaping, so maybe you guys should hold him here and I'll go get Pilz."

"How are you going to convince him to go anywhere with you?" Foghorn asked.

"I'll be persuasive," Travis said. "I'll use my charm."

"Sure, but what will you do when that fails miserably?" my smartass alternate self called out.

"I'll go with you," I volunteered. "We'll get Birthday Boy to borrow my mom's car and drive us over to Pilz's house. The two of us, standing side by side, identical except for our age, should help convince him that we're telling the truth about buying a time machine from him in the future."

"Sure," Travis said. "That sounds like a good idea."

"We'll all just guard the prisoner?" one of me asked as another said, "So we get to guard the prisoner, then?" They exchanged a weird glance, suspicious of each other for their slightly different wording.

"It'll be ten-on-one," another of me reasoned. "That should make escape kind of a longshot, right?"

"It's pathetic that you think it takes ten of you to guard one of me," the Evil Kenny sneered.

"I'm comfortable with that," one of me retorted.

"Yeah, we're used to being pathetic," said another.

Travis nodded to me. "Come on," he said. "Let's go. We need to get this over with so we can go home."

(3)

Considering that Birthday Boy had gone home and Green Shirt probably had returned to the future by now, Travis and I decided that it might be best to ring my mom's doorbell instead of barging in like last time. Despite our attempt at courtesy, she was clearly not happy to see us.

She kept the door mostly closed to block our view of the inside and gave Travis a particularly nasty look. "What do you two want?"

"We need one more little favor before we get out of your hair," I began delicately.

"We need your car," Travis interrupted. "It's important."

My mom scoffed at us. "Absolutely not."

"Thanks, man," I moaned under my breath. "Here I was trying to introduce the idea gently and you just go charging in."

"We'll have it back in less than an hour," he promised her. "I'd offer to fill it with gas, too, except my credit card probably isn't valid because it hasn't actually been issued yet."

"What if we have your son chaperone us?" I asked desperately. "Your real son. Give him the keys, he'll do all the driving. I was him once and I know you let him borrow the car. You trust him even if you don't trust his friends. This isn't that different."

She sighed. "And using the car will help you go back to where you came from and leave us alone?"

"Without a doubt," Travis said.

"Kenny!" she called over her shoulder. "Those future boys need your help!"

Moments later, my eighteen-year-old self was at the door. "Why are you still here?" he asked.

"We can't figure out what to do with his evil clone," Travis explained. "But if you borrow your mom's car and drive us over to where that alien dude lives, we're hoping he'll be able to help us."

"You need me to borrow my mom's car?" he said flatly, like he was repeating back a bungled punchline.

"Yeah."

"Apparently she doesn't trust future clones, even if they're family," Travis summarized.

Birthday Boy shrugged. "Okay. Mom?" He turned to ask her for the keys, but she was already holding them out to him.

"Kenneth," she said in a low voice, "Get rid of them. And don't let them out of your sight until you do."

"Okay, Mom," he said. "No problem."

"And don't let them drive."

"Okay, sure," he said, reaching for the keys again.

She pulled them just beyond his reach. "Don't ever let these keys leave your person. They can't borrow them, they can't touch them, they can't even look at them."

"Mom, come on!" he said in exasperation. "I won't lose your car!"

"Okay," she said finally, despite appearing somewhat unsatisfied. "Be safe."

My younger self rolled his eyes and snatched the keys from her. "Yeah. Be back in a jiffy."

The car ride over to Mr. Quentin Lundquist's house was awkward and silent. The Birthday Boy drove our mother's ash-colored PT Cruiser while Travis rode shotgun, giving him directions. I sat in the back worrying that the Guard Detail of Freakish Uniformity would fail to keep its prisoner from escaping.

Soon but not soon enough, we pulled up in front of the Lundquist residence. I was surprised at how well-maintained the yard was. The grass was green, trimmed, and meticulously edged and a broad, colorful flowerbed sat in front of the porch. The property looked like its inhabitants intended to stay put for a good long while.

Perhaps out of some uncommunicated reverence for the unexpected integrity of the lawn, the three of us walked up the driveway instead of cutting across the grass as we had on our previous visits. Once we had gathered on the porch, Travis reached out and knocked loudly.

Nothing happened. He knocked again.

"Maybe he's not home," Birthday Boy said. "Maybe he's at work."

I glanced up at the quickly darkening evening sky. "If working in marketing for an intergalactic manufacturing company is a nine-to-five, he should be home by now," I theorized. "Unless he has a really long commute or something."

"Okay, so maybe the doorbell hasn't broken yet?" Travis said. He reached out and pressed the bell and was immediately rewarded with sounds of movement from inside. He and I exchanged an amused grin.

Moments later, the door opened to reveal Pilz's surprisingly attractive wife, who looked strikingly less young than I had been expecting—over the next eight years, she wouldn't undergo any visible aging. She was rocking a t-shirt and a worn pair of jeans ably and admirably. I found myself speechless and unable to recall her unusual name.

"Yes?" she said uncertainly. She was probably unaccustomed to three strange young men ringing her doorbell around dinnertime.

"Hi," Travis said. "Mrs. Lundquist, we're looking for your husband. Is he home?"

"What is this about?" she asked suspiciously. What was her name?

"I guess we're what you'd call clients?" Travis said, his failure to suitably describe our relationship immediately obvious to everyone.

"We met, actually," I told Mrs. Lundquist. "I mean, not yet we haven't, but we met in the future, where we came from."

"Way to not sound like a crazy person," my younger self muttered under his breath.

"I'm sorry," she replied. "I'm afraid I don't know you boys." What was her name?

"Oizu!" I blurted suddenly. "Your name is Oizu! Your husband is Pilz and he sold me a time machine in the year 2013!"

She narrowed her eyes at me. "My husband isn't in sales," she replied.

"But he's in marketing, right?" I pressed. "He has a whole bunch of prototypes for stuff his company is developing in your basement. We were there in the future!"

Mrs. Lundquist drew a deep breath. "All right," she said. "So you know us in the future. What do you want?"

"We need to talk to your husband about the time machine he sold us," Travis explained. "We've hit a snag and we're hoping he'll be able to help us out."

She looked us over for a few moments and then pushed the door open. "Very well, come in," she said. "My husband just got home from work and he's just upstairs changing his clothes. He should be down in a minute."

"Thank you," Travis said.

"I really appreciate this, Mrs. Lundquist," I gushed.

My eighteen-year-old self, who probably felt the most awkward as he'd never met either of the Lundquists in his life, gave her a curt nod as he entered.

Rather than welcome us into the comfort of her living room, she had us wait in the entryway under her watchful eye. It was only a minute or two before Pilz came trudging down the stairs, dressed in sweatpants and an off-white Property of Zyglur University Athletic Dept t-shirt. He stopped abruptly when he saw us.

"Who are you?" he asked gruffly.

"Dear," his wife informed him, sounding quite displeased, "these are some boys who you apparently sold a time machine to in the future."

"We need your help," I said as humbly as I could. "Please."

He frowned at us. "Why would I personally sell anyone a time machine? That's not my job."

"Your company, uh, downsizes in a few years," I said. "You were getting rid of some prototypes in a yard sale before you packed everything up and went home to Pyson."

"Interesting," he said slowly. He didn't seem to believe me, at least not entirely. "What is it, exactly, that you want from me?"

"It's kind of...complicated," I said. "Um...I kept using the machine and bouncing around timelines and now there are a whole bunch of me here and we started fighting amongst ourselves and one guy lost his time machine and tried to steal someone else's so now we need to figure out a way to get him back to his own time without a time machine."

The alien stared at me. "You've really made a mess of things, then, haven't you?" he commented.

I felt myself blushing. "Yeah, well, that's true," I admitted. "I think I need some help cleaning it up."

"What do you expect me to do?" he asked. "Wave my magic fairy wand and make it all better?"

Apparently Pilz had been a little snippier in his younger days. "You know way more about the logistics of time travel than I do," I said. "I was hoping you'd be able to help me come up with a way to get rid of my evil clone."

"Have you tried killing him?" Pilz suggested, drawing a reproving look from his wife.

"I...what?" I stammered. "Killing him...seriously?"

"It's cleaner, simpler." Pilz reasoned. "You don't need a time machine to do it and best of all you wouldn't need to bother me about it."

"That's not an option," Travis cut in firmly. "The guy's a selfish asshole, sure, but killing him would be kind of an overreaction to what he's done, you know?"

"Okay," Pilz said, continuing down the stairs and wandering into the kitchen. "Then it looks like you're stuck with him."

Mrs. Lundquist shook her head and said, "I'll go talk to him," before going after her husband.

Travis, Birthday Boy and I stared through the open doorway as the two of them held a furious whispered conversation in the next room.

"What do you think they're talking about?" my eighteen-year-old self asked. Travis and I shushed him immediately and continued straining our ears.

"It's not that big of a deal!" I was pretty sure I heard Oizu say.

"Sure it is!" I thought Pilz replied. "I don't know these people, I'm not just going to give them something I brought home from work!"

"Why not? You'll do it in the future!"

"I won't do it just because they say I did it!" he returned angrily. "Will do it. Already will have done it. Whatever."

"What they're asking from you is not that much," she told him. "Just be a nice guy for once and then they'll be out of your hair."

"Oh, fine," he grumbled, breaking off from her.

"Take protection!" she hissed after him.

He turned on his heel. "Excuse me?"

"I meant a weapon," Oizu said swiftly.

He nodded grimly. "Right."

"If it's any consolation," Travis told the alien when he returned to the entry room, "Your relationship with your wife will improve in the future."

Pilz stared at him with an unreadable expression. "It's not. Now, let's get this over with. Where are you taking me, exactly?"

"Don't you need protection?" Birthday Boy asked.

Pilz rolled his eyes, reached into a drawer near the front door, and withdrew a gadget that looked very much like Marvin the Martian's ray gun.

"A bit cliché, don't you think?" Travis mused disappointedly.

Pilz jammed it in his face. "It has a biometric lock and it only functions in my grip. It may look similar to things you've seen in cartoons, but I can assure you it's not as cheesy as you think."

Travis nodded appraisingly. "Better," he admitted hoarsely.

"Fantastic," Pilz snarled. "Now...let's get on with this."

The car ride back from Mr. Quentin Lundquist's house was even more silent and awkward than the last trip. I was stuck in the back seat with a curmudgeonly alien armed with a ray gun. Conversation was a struggle, but I kept trying because the lack of it was even worse.

"So Travis wasn't kidding, by the way," I told our guest. "Your relationship with your wife does improve."

"I'm sorry to hear that," he replied sourly, gazing out the window.

"I'm sorry about the losing your job thing, though," I added. "That's a tough break."

"Sure."

"If it helps, you seemed kind of at peace with it. You know, all set to move back to Pyson, start afresh."

"Only an idiot would move back to Pyson," he snapped. "So I must turn out to be pretty desperate. Thanks for letting me know my life goes completely down the toilet."

"I'm sorry," I said, taken aback. "I never would have guessed all that, based on the way you spoke about it in the future. You seemed happy enough."

"Yeah, maybe your planet will get better in the next few years," Birthday Boy offered hopefully.

"Doubtful," Pilz replied simply.

For a while, the only sounds were the low humming of the car and the occasional irritating staccato of a turn signal. I tried again. "What's wrong with Pyson?" I asked. "Why don't you want to go back?"

The alien turned to give me a weary look. Then, as if resigned to my determination to converse, he said, "The entire civilization had to move underground. It's not much of a life."

"Had to move?" Travis echoed interestedly. "Why? War? Pollution?"

"Both," Pilz said. "And more. We rode that planet hard and dirty until it was worthless. The air is toxic, but we've managed to sustain ourselves beneath the surface."

Travis chuckled. "Ah, yes. An advanced alien race serving as a cautionary tale for the future of humankind."

"It actually worked to our advantage," Pilz said defensively. "Most of us moved off-world and we kept the underground facilities as a kind of bunker for the government and the military. If we're at war and someone wants to take out our capital, they literally have to go through our planet's crust to do it."

"Clever," I admitted.

Birthday Boy frowned. "If most of your...species...I'm sorry, is that the right term? Is that like derogatory or something? Species? Race? People? Kinfolk? What do I call a group of ethnically-linked extraterrestrials?"

After a long pause, Pilz said, "Species works."

"Okay, so if most of your species lives on other planets, why do you have to go back to Pyson?"

"My family is in the government," Pilz said. "I'd probably have nowhere else to go."

Travis turned around in his seat to stare at him. "Wait a minute. Are you...royalty?" He looked at me with an enormous grin plastered across his face. "Dude, there's a fucking alien prince in the back seat of your mom's car."

"A wayward alien prince, it seems," Birthday Boy added.

"Kind of the black sheep of the family," I agreed.

"Probably disappointed his parents," Travis theorized. "Probably ran away because he didn't want to follow in his father's footsteps or because he didn't want an arranged marriage or something."

"What?" Pilz objected sharply.

"During his adventures among the humans, he proves the value of making one's own decisions while simultaneously learning to understand and respect his parents," Birthday Boy went on.

"Where are you getting this from?" Pilz said.

"But we need him to hang out with a typical modern-day American who can inadvertently teach him these things while keeping the story relatable and grounded," my garrulous eighteen-year-old self continued.

"Don't forget the part where he learns the true value of friendship," I added.

"We can pitch this script to Disney and make a killing," Travis concluded.

"Nah," I said. "I think it has more of a Dreamworks vibe."

"We'll call it...Intelligent Life," Birthday Boy said reverently.

"You three are significantly more deluded than typical humans," Pilz complained. "And that's not a minor claim."

I chuckled. "We'll try to make this quick and then get out of your hair," I told him. "Then you can be rid of our human delusions forever."

"I'm looking forward to it," he muttered.

"Not forever," Travis corrected. "For about eight years."

"Better than nothing," Pilz said. "I'll take it."

By the time we arrived at the park, we had lapsed back into our uncomfortable silence. We silently got out of the Cruiser, silently walked through the lot and past the tennis courts, and silently entered the Grove of Replicated Kennies.

That was where Pilz finally broke the silence. "You weren't kidding," he said, gazing around at my clones. "You've really made a mess of things, haven't you?"

"Oh, hey," sneered the Kenny who was still being restrained against a tree. "It's the genius who started it all by selling near-infinite power to some random dude for two bucks."

"I take it this is the one that went off the deep end?" Pilz surmised. "The one you're not sure what to do with?"

"That's right," two of me answered.

"Okay," he replied, drawing his ray gun. "Does this solution work for everyone?"

"No!" shouted at least eight Kennies and one Travis.

Number Eleven said, "Isn't there something you can do to send him back to his own time without a way to come back and mess things up again?"

"Yeah, we were hoping for something with a little more pizazz," Birthday Boy added unhelpfully.

The alien rolled his eyes. "I'm in marketing. I'm not a scientist. I can't just whip up some technological marvel for you out of thin air."

"Can scientists on your home planet actually whip up technological marvels out of thin air?" one of me asked. "I mean, like, literally?"

"It's a figure of speech," Pilz griped. "A human figure of speech, at that, so you'd think you'd have a better handle on it than I would."

"So what can you do?" I asked.

"Short of killing him," another of me clarified.

"I can take him back to my home world of Pyson," Pilz suggested. "Then I can sell him for a small sum of money and he can become a slave in the Mines of Cloiza."

"What? No!" one of me said indignantly.

Another's eyes bulged. "You guys have human slaves?"

Pilz rolled his eyes. "Of course not, you imbecile. We're an advanced civilization, unlike you glorified monkeys. Slavery is abhorrent."

"But you were just talking about your planet's wars," Travis said.

"Sure, we have wars," Pilz replied matter-of-factly. "But we don't have slaves. We're not savages."

"I think we're digressing a little bit here," Number Six said.

"I don't know what to do," Pilz proclaimed irritably. He was met with a stunned silence. "I don't know what to do," he repeated. "This is your problem and your mess and I don't have any way for you to clean it up, so you'll just have to figure it out yourself."

"Man, I liked you better in the future," one of me told him.

"And I would have greatly preferred if you lot had all stayed there," the alien shot back.

As almost every single version of myself simultaneously struggled to come up with a suitably snarky comeback, the only one of us who wasn't worried about it made his move. The Evil Kenny jerked his right arm forward so hard that it must have nearly wrenched it from its socket. Number Six, who'd been restraining that arm, was thrown violently off balance. My evil self then used his newly freed hand to punch Number Eleven squarely in the nose. As both his captors staggered away from him, he launched himself at Pilz, tackled him neatly, rolled off of him, and popped up wielding his ray gun.

I'd had no idea that any version of myself could have ever been capable of such quick thinking, of such athleticism, or, frankly, of being such a badass.

But the Evil Badass Kenny carefully backed away from us as he pointed the gun at the Knot of Mostly Identical Targets. "Okay," he announced. "Now it's time for things to play out a little differently."

I glanced over at Pilz and was surprised to see him with his hands up. "What are you doing that for?" I asked, fearing that I already knew the answer. "You said the gun has biometric controls and you're the only one who could use it."

The alien gave me an apologetic sidelong look. "I lied. Some models of that gun do come with that option, but I was too cheap and I just went with the basic package."

"Are you fucking kidding me?" Travis hissed angrily.

Mr. Lundquist shrugged. "In retrospect, I really should've listened to the wife on that one," he confessed.

(2)

"Everyone move away from the time machines," our armed counterpart ordered.

Obediently, we all shuffled to one side of the grove. Our experience with time travel had just shifted from surreal to real. Instead of being a mindbending, confusing adventure through the past, this was now an officially dangerous situation. Previously, the biggest dangers were exhaustion, a few bruises from fighting off my evil twins, and being trapped in the wrong time. Now I could be shot to death. It was a sobering, terrifying change that definitely of put a damper on the wacky fun of running around with a bunch of my clones.

The Evil Kenny moved over to the bushes from which the pile of giant smoke detectors spewed forth. "I'm going to use one of these machines for myself, of course," he said, keeping the gun trained on us. "But just to make sure none of you manage to visit me in the future and fuck everything up again, I'm going to have to make sure you all stay here." As he spoke, he began stacking the time machines on top of one another.

"What are you doing?" one of me said in horror.

The Evil Kenny shot him a condescending frown. "Oh, come on. I think you know what I'm doing." He had eleven of the machines balanced precariously in one tall stack with the twelfth sitting alone, waiting for him to make a getaway.

Birthday Boy snarled at him. "I don't like the cut of your jib," he said.

"Somebody has got to tell this guy he sounds like an idiot," Evil Kenny complained.

"My idiomatic preferences aside, I think we need to put an end to your tomfoolery," Birthday Boy replied boldly.

"Okay, you know what?" our psychotic self raged impatiently. "Just shut up. Shut your mouth. Stop talking or I'll shoot you. Okay?" He leveled the ray gun at him to drive the point home and my eighteen-year-old self wisely fell silent.

Travis stepped forward suddenly. "I can't let you do this," he said boldly.

Our villainous clone brandished the gun unflinchingly. "Get back," he ordered.

"Not a chance," Travis said defiantly, slipping a hand into his pocket.

"I will shoot you in the face," my drunken-with-power alternate self warned.

"Not a chance," Travis repeated. Then, suddenly, he disappeared.

"What the hell?" Evil Kenny whispered in astonishment. Then, angrily, he appealed to the rest of us, "What the hell was that? Where did he go?"

"He went invisible," I told him. "We picked up another little futuristic gadget from our alien friend before we came back to kick your ass."

"He's invisible?" my diabolical twin replied hysterically. "He just Bilboed the fuck right out of here?"

"He's probably behind you right now," I lied.

One of my cleverer selves decided to play along. "Did you hear that?" he said sharply, pointing behind our nerve-wracked foe.

The Evil Kenny whirled around and fired his gun frantically. A beam of orange light blasted out of its muzzle and burned a hole halfway through a tree trunk. He couldn't be trusted with that gun—and not just because he was crazy, but because he was handling it erratically.

"...and this is how people get shot," one of me muttered under his breath.

"Where the fuck are you?!" our most paranoid incarnation bellowed, backing away from where he thought Travis was lurking—which, by design, was also where all the time machines were stacked. As he backed up in our direction, his heel kicked the corner of Travis's pyramid-shaped force field. He stumbled and fell, landing ungracefully on his back. He managed to keep his grip on the weapon, but Number Six swooped in to step on his wrist and keep his gun hand immobilized. Number Eleven pried the alien firearm out of his stubborn fingers and delivered a hefty kick to our would-be conqueror's ribs to keep him subdued.

Travis retracted his force field, pressed his foot gently against the vanquished villain's chest and grinned down at him. "I guess you could say my little gadget kind of tripped you up, didn't it?" he gloated with a roguish grin.

"I ought to shoot you for that," Number Eleven said.

"Agreed," came a voice from the back of the group. "That joke was terrible."

"...and you should feel terrible," another one of us added. The two of them shared a quick high five.

"This still doesn't solve the problem of what we're going to do with him," I pointed out.

"I already offered to kill him," Pilz said. "By the way, I'd like my gun back," he added. Number Six carefully handed it over, but not before exchanging a grave glance with his nearest doppelganger. Everyone seemed to be in silent agreement that the gun was safer in its owner's hands than in our violent counterpart's hands—but not by much.

"Doesn't your home planet have laws about time travel?" Foghorn suggested. "Can't you like take him back there and throw him in time prison or something?"

"Yeah, because a life sentence in an alien prison millions of miles from home is so much better than death," one of me commented dryly.

"My people don't actually do a lot of time traveling," Pilz said. "And when we do, we don't pull this kind of crap, especially not on ourselves."

"Yes, yes, I know, humans suck, especially me, I'm the lowest form of scum in the known universe, blah blah blah," Evil Kenny mocked.

"Why don't we just let him stay?" Birthday Boy asked.

We all turned to give him a shocked look. Even Evil Kenny, still pinned under Travis's shoe, craned his neck to see if my eighteen-year-old self were joking.

"Run that by me again?" Travis said.

"Let him stay here," Birthday Boy repeated earnestly. "You all know it's the only real solution to this conundrum, and honestly I'm okay with it."

"You can't possibly be okay with it," one of me replied.

"Yeah, you don't want to have a psychopath like him stuck in your timeline," another said.

"Oh, don't give me that claptrap," Birthday Boy said dismissively. "What's the worst he can do? He has no money, he's basically homeless. He'll be punished enough by being stuck here and he'll be too busy worrying about his own wellbeing to do whatever it is you think he's going to do to me."

"That's kind of a big risk you're taking," I said. Birthday Boy's selfless offer had been more than I was expecting from him. Maybe we were all doing a little growing up in the midst of this mess—except for the dickhead on the ground, of course.

"Maybe," he admitted. "But at least he won't be a problem for any of you. You guys ride your little manhole covers back home and then there's nothing left for him to use to cause more trouble. No time machines, no invisibility doohickeys, nothing. He'll be neutralized as far as all of you are concerned."

"But what about you?" someone said.

"Codswallop," he replied bravely. "I'll be fine."

Pilz interrupted the stony silence with feigned enthusiasm. "Fantastic! Wonderful! Brilliant! Who's taking me home?"

"Now, hold on a minute," Number Nine said. "We still need to figure out how we can go back to the future without this asshole stealing one of our rides."

Three of me chuckled. "You just said 'Back to the Future,'" one of them murmured appreciatively.

"Grow up," another one whispered back.

"Shut up. We're the same person so you're just as immature as I am," came the retort.

"Well, what are we waiting for?" said Number One, hurrying forward toward the pile of personal temporal relocators. "Let's hand these suckers out and go home."

"Stop!" Travis cried suddenly. "He mixed them up! I don't know which one is mine!"

"So?" Number One said. "They all go back to the same time."

"But two of them go back to the exact same timeline," Travis said. "What if we go back to the future and there's a timeline with two Kennies instead of one Kenny and one Travis? That would mean that I'd go to the wrong timeline that's missing a Kenny but not a Travis and then I'd wind up stuck with the other future Travis and no Kenny."

"What kind of nonsense are you spouting?" Pilz muttered.

"But that's not a function of the machine, right?" one of me theorized. "I thought it was a random shot at which timeline you wind up in. So if you're in the wrong timeline, you can just travel a few seconds into the future and maybe you'll be in the right one that time."

Travis looked uncomfortable. "Yeah, but since my machine is a copy of yours from a different timeline, what if my timeline bundle is slightly different because of that and I might not have access to the same event streams if I use a different—"

"It doesn't really matter either way," I interrupted. "If you're really that worried about not getting your original machine back, yours is the only one with mud on it."

He stared at the stack of machines. Sure enough, third from the bottom of the Precarious Tower of Temporal Power was a disc with dried mud caked across the bottom.

"It has to be yours," I told him. "You went to the wrong day right before you arrived here and got caught in a downpour. Nobody else did that."

He grinned at me gratefully. "Good call, dude." He busied himself removing his machine from the pile. "I mean, maybe it was a stupid thing to be scared of anyway, but at least I don't have to worry about it anymore."

"So we're all just going to grab a machine, travel to the future, and keep trying timelines until we find one that isn't already taken?" Number Ten summarized. "Just so everybody's clear?" It seemed clearer that he was only saying that to make sure that he, personally, was clear.

"Yeah," a few of us agreed.

I turned to Pilz. "That'll work, right?" I asked him. "Eventually, all of us are going to find a spot that's not taken, right?"

Pilz shrugged. "How should I know? I've never seen a time machine before, much less studied how they supposedly work."

"You're a big help," two of me chorused sarcastically.

"We'll just have to hope it works then," announced Number Five.

"We don't seem to have a better idea anyway," Number Twelve agreed.

We each picked a personal temporal relocator out of the pile and began setting our destination times. "So...this is it?" one of me said with a heavy sigh.

"You're gonna be okay dealing with our evil twin here?" another one asked our eighteen-year-old self.

He nodded. "As soon as you guys disappear with all the remaining time machines, he'll be powerless."

"Okay," I said. Turning to my similarly-aged brethren, I concluded, "See you on the other side."

"Well, hopefully not," Number Four corrected.

"Good luck, everyone," Number Eleven said with a meaningful glance at our younger self. "Especially you."

One by one, we clapped our hands, shimmering out of the timeline. At least, I assume that all of us did so. I was the fifth or sixth to go so I guess I can't really be sure that everyone followed after me. It was just one of those things that I had to assume would work out because my ability to control it had dwindled to almost nothing from the moment I blinked back to the future.

(1)

I didn't move through space at all. Sometimes I think that was the most disconcerting aspect of time travel. You have no sense of movement despite the fact that you've just hurtled a few thousand days from where you started. Everything around me just changed. The trees were a little taller. The shade from the afternoon sun was a little fuller. The sound of middle school wannabe gangsters trying to sell weed behind the tennis court was a little douchier.

Travis was right next to me, standing atop his own giant skipping stone. "Whoa," I said. "I'm the one that found you when you arrived in the right timeline the last time."

"Cool," he said. "What are the odds?"

"One in twelve, I guess."

He shook his head. "With all the timelines we've created, I'm betting the chances were closer to a billion to fuck-all."

"Well, whatever," I replied, exhilarated to be back in my own time. "It was lucky."

"I guess," he said.

Suddenly Number One appeared in front of us. As soon as he saw me his face fell. "Damn. This one's taken too. This is my fourth try!"

"Sorry, dude," Travis said.

"Good luck," I offered pointlessly.

He nodded dejectedly, adjusted the settings on his machine, and applauded his way out.

More of my less fortunate alternate selves appeared in their search for their own timelines. We waited a few minutes after the third just to make sure nobody else was going to show up.

"So...shall we go home?" I suggested finally.

"I wonder where my car is in this event stream," Travis mused.

"We can grab the bus if we have to," I pointed out.

He peered out toward the parking lot. "Nope. My car's here. Looks like we're good."

It felt strange to climb into Travis's SUV and ride home. All that time travel business was over with. I was going to go back to the apartment, go to sleep, and get up tomorrow like the Debacle of Convoluted Temporal Adventure hadn't happened. Although, as far as my current timeline was concerned, it was possible that it actually hadn't happened.

But it had happened to me, I reasoned, as Travis drove silently back to our place. Even if I hadn't reaped the benefits I'd set out for and returned to the present as a healthier, happier and more muscular man, the experience had been real. And the experience had taught me that even when I had the ability to travel to the past, dwelling on it still wasn't productive. It couldn't be changed, at least not for me. If I was really that concerned about my future, I needed to focus on the present. I could make the choice to be happy now instead of worrying about what past failures I could blame my miseries on.

"We have to destroy these," I said suddenly.

"What?" Travis said distractedly. Apparently he'd been just as absorbed thought as I was.

"The time machines. We need to destroy them."

He shook his head. "Aw, come on, dude. That's the lamest cliché of time travel. I mean, we've been doing pretty well so far. We didn't visit a super-historic moment like Lincoln's assassination or the sinking of the Titanic. We didn't travel to the future to see a bunch of people in ridiculous shiny clothing and ludicrous hairstyles. And we didn't have some idiot decide to stay behind in the past for true love or self-sacrifice or anything. Let's not ruin our streak now by deciding that time travel is too powerful and too dangerous and that the moral thing to do for humankind is to destroy it."

I stared at him. "That was quite a speech."

"Sorry," he said. "I'm still getting over my disappointment that it was a plastic pancake instead of a DeLorean."

"I'm serious, though," I said. "We should wreck these things."

"What for?" he asked. "What if you want to take a quick vacation to the year three thousand?"

"Are you kidding? You saw how much mayhem this thing caused. I don't want to be tempted to use it again and I don't want anyone else to be able to create the same chaos."

He sighed. "Fair enough," he said. I felt silly for not realizing sooner that he was just playing the devil's advocate. He pulled over to the curb. "Get out and stick those fuckers under my wheels."

"What if it's made out of some super-strong alien alloy and it punctures all your tires?"

"They're plastic," he said.

"So?"

"So alloys are metals."

"You knew what I meant," I snapped.

He rolled his eyes. "If it punctures my tires, then I deserved it. Just fuckin' do it."

I clambered out of the vehicle and wedged the devices between the pavement and the rubber. "Ready?" he called.

I flashed him a thumbs-up in the side mirror. "Go for it!"

He rolled forward and we were immediately rewarded with two satisfying crunches. "Now back over them!" I suggested.

He reversed, ran over the cracked machines again and stuck his head out the window. "How's the damage?" he called out.

"Better do it a couple more times to be safe!" I replied. After their third and fourth crushing experiences with the Wheels of Destruction, the personal temporal relocators were both in pieces. Travis hopped out to examine them with me.

"That seemed to do the trick," he said.

I leaned in to collect the shards of the casings. Amid the scraps of fragmented plastic were the twin cores of the twin machines. The sleek little metal boxes that protected the most wondrous secrets of this alien technology had defied the repeated assaults by the Wheels of Destruction and resisted the pressures of the Tires of Tribulation. The plastic shell was just the dressing. It was the showmanship, the marketability, the pizazz that made the gizmo appealing to consumers. But the heart of the machine, the thing that actually wielded the awesome power of temporal manipulation, was the true danger.

"That thing is one tenacious little bastard," I murmured, picking up the core and inspecting it.

"Two tenacious little bastards," Travis corrected.

"Depends on how you look at it," I said with a shrug. "Technically, they're identical machines. And not because of mass production. Because we stole a past version of the exact same one."

"I see," he agreed. "Two instances of the same tenacious little bastard."

"Look at this," I said, handing one of the cores over. "It's got to be made out of some kind of indestructible material or something. There's not even a scratch or a scuff mark."

Travis let out a low whistle of admiration as he examined the impenetrable box. "I tell you what, we need to figure out what the hell this is and start making cars out of it. Maybe we could stop people from burning to death in the mangled wrecks of twisted steel and shitty plastic." He paused, squinting in an expression of intense thought. "Although the whiplash from two indestructible cars smashing into each other could probably still kill you," he amended.

"I think we're going to need some help disposing of these," I said. "We should pay Pilz another visit."

Travis rolled his eyes. "Great, we get to go bother the alien version of Doc Brown one more time." He bent down to finish scraping the shattered remains of the casings off the pavement.

"Don't be silly," I chided him. "He doesn't have the crazy hair and he doesn't talk like he's shouting all the time."

"He could have crazy hair and a loud speaking voice by Pysonian standards," he contended. "They could be an exceptionally soft-spoken and well-groomed civilization. You don't know."

"You're right," I said dryly, tossing the pieces of our Dearly Dismembered Temporal Vehicle in the back of his Equinox. "I'll ask him when we get to his house."

"Fine," he said with a sigh, getting into the driver's seat.

"Don't be so xenophobic," I said.

"There's xenophobia and then there's offworlderphobia," he clarified. "I don't give a shit about people hopping fences and fording the Rio Grande. I'm a little concerned that somebody is coming from another galaxy to sell the human race some terrifying consumer technology that we're clearly not ready for."

"You can tell him that when we get there, too," I laughed.

"Oh, no way, dude," he replied with a grin. "He's got all that terrifying technology. If I piss him off he might vaporize me or something."

"Maybe the past Pilz would, but not the present Pilz."

"I try not to take chances when the stakes are my vaporization," he replied.

After a few minutes, we pulled up to the curb in front of Quentin Lundquist's disarmingly ordinary abode. "There's no shit on his lawn," Travis pointed out.

"You think he sold it all?"

"Not a chance," he said. "There was some pretty worthless junk in those piles."

"Then where did he put it all?" I wondered. "He clearly didn't want to take it back to Pyson with him."

Travis shrugged as we stepped up onto the porch. "Maybe he crammed it all in the basement for the next owner to worry about." I reached for the doorbell, but he stepped in front of it and banged on the door itself. "Broken, remember?" he said.

We waited in silence until Travis became impatient enough to warrant another Barrage of the Impetuous Fists. "Maybe the door's broken," I quipped slyly. Travis shot me a dirty look.

"What do you two want this time?" came a distant cry from an unexpected direction. Travis and I both looked around in bewilderment without successfully locating the source of the sound. "Up here!" came the exasperated follow-up.

I stepped off the porch and turned my gaze to the top of the garage. Our friendly neighborhood alien salesman was peering down from the partially-opened door of the invisible hangar where he kept his space ship. "We need one last favor!" I called up to him.

"Of course you do!" Pilz answered, and I got the sense that the volume of his response masked some of the annoyance in his voice. "Come on up." A previously invisible staircase shimmered into view in front of his human garage.

After exchanging a hesitant glance and an ambivalent shrug, Travis and I headed up the narrow steps, ducked under the door, and entered a Resplendent Chamber of Unsurpassed Shininess. The walls were chrome. The floors and ceiling were reflective. The lights were dazzling. And, of course, the giant space ship sitting in the center of the room was the shiniest thing I'd ever seen in my life.

Travis squinted against the glare. "This place is like heaven after an overdose of acid."

Pilz ignored him. "Oizu and I are packing the very last of our things. We'll be on the intergalactic expressway within the hour, depending on traffic," he said. "So this will have to be the absolute last favor I do for you. What do you need?"

"The intergalactic expressway is actually a thing?" Travis whispered in shock.

I showed our host the two unmarred boxes from the smashed time machines. "I wanted to destroy the device so I can't make any more messes with it," I explained. "But we couldn't figure out how to destroy the cores."

"Why are there two of them?" Pilz asked me in slight horror. Then he shook his head. "Never mind. I don't want to know. But I can dispose of these for you."

"You can?"

"Absolutely," he replied. "I'll just pop them into my incinerator and it'll melt them down in no time."

I didn't know how to respond. Travis came to my aid with much more tact than I'd come to expect from him. "I'm not trying to be rude," he said. "But I honestly have no idea if you're messing with us or if you actually have an incinerator that can melt down indestructible metal."

Pilz flashed us a mysterious grin and turned back toward his ship. "Honey?"

Oizu popped her head out of what appeared to be a porthole in an interstellar vehicle. "Yes?"

"Can you toss me the incinerator?"

Oizu obliged by lobbing a yellow box the size of a Rubik's Cube out the window. Pilz caught it and inexplicably pulled a stretchy length of what appeared to be plastic wrap from its edges, expertly smothered the surviving remnants of the Tiem Mechines in the glossy film, and watched in boredom as the whole contraption went up in smoke. After mere seconds, all that remained was the yellow cube.

"Well, that's taken care of," he said, casually slipping the incinerator into his pocket. "You boys have a nice life."

"Dear, that's hardly an acceptable goodbye," Oizu scolded gently, gliding gracefully down the glimmering entrance ramp of the blindingly bright spacecraft.

Pilz sighed with a knowing grin. "I suppose so," he admitted. He extended his hand for a shake. When I gripped it, he looked me in the eye and said, "I have to give you credit for choosing to destroy the machine. Ultimately, we opted not to put the machine into full production because we didn't expect your species to have that kind of restraint. That, and we expected to be buried by the amount of legal troubles your people would foist upon us once you actually began time travelling."

Travis chuckled. "That was definitely a good call," he agreed.

"You two make humankind look good," Pilz admitted sincerely as he shook my best friend's hand. "Well...not that good, but a lot better than we were expecting."

"Thanks?" Travis replied uncertainly.

"Hey, can I ask you one last question?" I said.

Our surprisingly gracious host hesitated, and his even more gracious wife answered for him. "Of course," she said sweetly.

"We visited you when we were in the past," I said. "In 2006. You were kind of crotchety and the two of you didn't seem to get along that well. Can I ask...what changed?"

The alien marketing consultant sighed heavily. "Our marriage was kind of on the rocks at that point," he admitted. "Oizu and I had gotten married because we wanted the same thing—to get away from Pyson. We misread our passion for that objective as passion for each other, and once we came to Earth...we realized we didn't have much chemistry but we were kind of stuck with each other."

I glanced at Oizu for signs of resentment but she was nodding solemnly. "We'd blundered into our marriage for the wrong reasons," she agreed. "We made a mess of things, but we kept moving forward and something special blossomed out of it." She and her husband shared a loving gaze.

"I think I'm going to be sick," Travis said. He swiftly added, "Okay, honestly, that's pretty romantic, though."

"Also we were having some serious intimacy problems around that time," Pilz added helpfully. "But I'm sure you don't want to hear about that."

Travis cringed. "Not if it involves steamy suction cup lovemaking."

"Well, good luck with your move back home," I said awkwardly.

"Thank you," Oizu replied genuinely, exchanging Eskimo kisses with her husband. "And good luck with your earthling lives."

"We'll...see ourselves out," Travis said.

"Yeah, thanks for all the help," I added. The two of us tried not to hurry too much on our way over to the stairs and back into the optical safety of natural sunlight. We walked across the grass in stunned silence and got into the car.

Travis paused before turning the key in the ignition. "Damn," he commented. "I'm actually kind of sad that this ridiculousness is over. This was pretty fun, dude."

"Yeah," I agreed. "Let's never do it again."

0

Travis and I returned home and chucked the remaining shards of the Tiem Mechines in the dumpster behind our apartment complex. We then agreed that we were both desperately in need of something normal, so we ordered a pizza and played Halo 4 for a while before catching a Seinfeld marathon on TV.

When I awoke the next morning, I felt surprisingly refreshed. I was planning to go job hunting and I was kicking around the idea of picking a community college to go to next semester so I could get back into the swing of school and actually get a degree this time. I was focusing on the present. I would fix my future now instead of moaning about how it had been poisoned by the past. I was motivated and optimistic. I'd even flossed.

Then my phone rang. It was Amy.

"Hello?" I answered.

"If you don't come over to get this book, I'm just going to throw it in the trash," she snapped, apparently having opted to skip all politesse and pleasantry.

I sighed. "What book is it?"

She paused. "Um...The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn."

"That's not mine," I said. "It's yours. I gave it to you for your birthday. You said that was one of the only books they made you read in school that you actually liked."

"Yeah, well, I don't want it."

"Do whatever you want with it," I said. "It's yours."

She huffed as though I'd told her to shove it up her ass—which had crossed my mind.

"Amy, don't call me anymore. If you find something else of mine, just chuck it."

"Well, excuse me for trying to help!" she said defensively. "I know you're still not over me, but that's no excuse for being so...hostile!"

"No, I'm definitely over you," I told her. "You're self-absorbed and selfish and our relationship was pointless. I'm not the best guy in the world, but I deserved better than you."

Travis shuffled groggily into the kitchen. "Morning," he mumbled.

I put a hand over the phone and whispered, "Shhh...I'm breaking up with Amy."

He turned to give me a wild-eyed look of confusion. "You're breaking up with Amy. Didn't she dump you?"

"Yeah." Amy was cussing me out shrilly.

"So you're breaking up...with your ex-girlfriend?"

"Yeah."

"Kind of a parting shot? Gotta get the last word in?" he guessed.

"More of a long-overdue reality check," I said. "For both of us, I think."

He chuckled. "Good for you, dude. I guess." He sat down at the table and poured himself a bowl of cereal.

"...you begged me to go out with you, and I tried to make it work, but you were just too pathetic!" Amy was shouting.

"Yeah," I agreed. "But that was then, when I was too bent out of shape over the fact that I couldn't get you to pay attention to me in high school. But now I realize that I was too focused on what I wanted then and not focused on what I need now. I never should have asked you out. I should have been mature enough to see that I wanted a woman, not a girl who's still stuck in a self-centered preteen persona."

She blew a Raspberry of Salivary Derision. "Wow, you could open for Doctor Phil on the motivational speaker lecture circuit with that little gem."

"Amy," I said, "You're not seeing anybody right now, are you?"

"Like that's any of your business," she replied softly.

"And you'd been single for a long time before we were together," I reminded her.

"What's your point?"

"You only agreed to go out with me for the ego boost, didn't you?"

"Well, it wasn't much of an ego boost," she said. "It was as much fun as dating a mop."

"It had been years since graduation and all the guys who used to fawn over you had moved on," I said. "You were still the same selfish bitch you'd been all through school and you were having more and more trouble attracting anybody because of it. So you went with me because I was still clinging to that pitiful crush I had on you way back when and nobody else wanted to put up with your shit."

"Well you got the pitiful part right," she said.

"Amy, you're not a terrible person. You're not really a good person either, but you could be. If you tried. You just need to grow up. Because until you do, you'll probably continue to be just as alone and just as miserable."

"What the fuck do you know?" she snapped.

"Anyway," I concluded. "It was nice talking to you. Have a nice life." I hung up.

Travis applauded me quietly. "I think you might actually be over that insufferable woman," he said. "About fuckin' time."

"Thanks," I said. "It feels good to let go of something like that. Something I should never have held on to so closely for so long."

He extended his hand for a fist bump. "Kenny," he told me solemnly, "you're the fuckin' man." He pushed his chair back and stood up. "I gotta get ready for work."

1

As Travis entered the bathroom and turned on the shower, I began setting up a little workstation in the living room. I sat down on the Couch of Renewed Dedication and got to work. I had my laptop out with CareerBuilder open. I had bought a newspaper from downstairs and set the employment section on the coffee table beside the computer. I was ready to compare local colleges online and keep track of locations, available programs, tuition costs and registration dates. And I was ready to take a quick selfie on my phone to upload to a dating website or two.

But as I pulled out my phone, I remembered the phone number I'd gotten from the girl at Burger Baron. In a sudden fit of optimism and confidence, I hurried back to my bedroom, snapped up yesterday's jeans from where I'd tossed them haphazardly in the corner, and fished her note out of my pocket: Text me ;)

I punched the number into my phone and sent her a message: "Hey, Aisha, this is Kenny. We met at your restaurant yesterday. I was the one whose friend was doing most of the flirting for me. You remember?"

I'd hardly gotten back into my Life Revitalization Power Stance when I received her reply: "Of course I remember! Was he the best wingman, or the best wingman ever?"

"You texted me back," I typed feverishly, "so right now I'm thinking best wingman ever. As my wingman alluded to, I'm pretty bad at this flirting stuff. Do people still go bowling?"

"Not since it was outlawed in '75," she replied.

"Let's live on the edge," I texted back, impressed with my own boldness. "Want to break an imaginary law with me sometime?"

It only took a minute or two, but I desperately wished I had a time machine again if only to jump into the future to read her response. Finally my phone vibrated again. I read her message: "Tomorrow night? Let's each bring a wingman or a wingwoman so we can ease you back into the scene."

"Sounds great," I replied. After a few minutes we'd hammered out the details for my first post-Amy date. It may have been a little silly, but it felt like a big step and I was overcome with this exhilarating sense of momentum. I returned to my job searching and school scoping with renewed vigor. The future was going to be awesome.

Two days ago, I met an alien. He was having a yard sale. He sold me a time machine. I used the time machine to try and fix my life but I failed completely and made an enormous mess in the process.

And that's exactly how I turned my life around.
Thanks for reading!

If you enjoyed _Tiem Mechine,_ I hope you'll consider leaving a quick review on Smashwords (which you can do here) or Goodreads (which you can do here). Reviews and ratings go a long way toward encouraging others to read.

Also, feel free to connect with me online.

Send me an email: alexhansenauthor@gmail.com

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Read my blog: http://alexhansenblog.wordpress.com

I hope to see you in a few of my other books!

Alex

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