Listen to the audiobook of this chapter:

  “We’re going to a movie!”

  Valorie was practically dancing on my doorstep as I answered the knock. Aaron grinned at me from behind her.

  “I think she’s excited. What about you?”

  I looked at Val. “I don’t know. I think maybe she’d rather stay home and do homework.”

  Val stuck her tongue out at me and I motioned them in, laughing. “Let me just turn off my VR and find my shoes,” I said, heading over to my loveseat, where I’d been playing a single-player RPG.

  “Kitties!” I heard Val squeal behind me, and I looked over to see both my cats going over to investigate the new person in the room, then quickly bolting away as the little girl tried to pick them up. Val chased one of them into my bedroom, laughing.

  I looked at Aaron and we laughed together.

  “Thanks for coming along,” Aaron said.

  “Thanks for inviting me,” I replied. After three weeks of feeling sorry for myself, I knew it was time to start living life again, and an opportunity to spend some time with Aaron and Val had sounded like a great way to do it when he had suggested it a couple days earlier.

  I switched off my computer and turned around to see Val walking out of the bedroom, a cat hanging from her arms. She’d managed to catch Tammy, my blue-eyed, cream-and-brown ragdoll-breed cat. She was the most patient cat I ever met, even when being carried like a bag of potatoes by an eleven-year-old.

  “I got one!” Val called triumphantly.

  I laughed and nodded. “Yes you did. But you have to let her go now, if you want to go to the movie.”

  “Awww,” Val said in disappointment. She dropped Tammy to the floor, where the cat sat down at Val’s feet and started purring.

  “She likes me!” Val giggled and leaned over to pet the cat.

  “Yes, she does,” I replied as I slipped on my shoes.

  We made it to the theater half an hour ahead of the showing time of our movie, Slightly Charmed, a 3D animated film about a fairy who couldn’t quite get her spells right and accidentally made all the characters in the books on her bookshelf into real people, who then started causing havoc around town.

  Aaron stood in line for snacks and drinks while Val and I grabbed some center-row seats and watched the amateur short films created by university students in Arts and Video Production classes. Many theaters supported local and national students this way, giving them exposure early on so they might be “discovered” by studios looking for fresh talent when they graduated. The films ranged from children’s comedy to adult horror, and were featured according to the movie being shown.

  By the time Aaron got back with the movie goodies, the theater was packed and the trailers for other upcoming movies had started. Sitting on the other side of Val, he passed out the popcorn, candy, and drinks, and we settled in for the show.

  After a highly amusing hour and a half, we stopped by a sandwich shop for lunch and an ice cream shop for desert. Then Aaron took us all back to his place, where Val made a beeline for her brother’s virtual reality system and loaded up Bonko the Good Dragon.

  “Shouldn’t you two be doing something together?” I asked Aaron.

  “Let her play for a while, she’ll be here all day. Her dad is at some get-together until this evening.”

  I nodded and Aaron settled onto the couch next to Val. I took a seat next to him. Aaron had set up the system to display the game on his TV as Val was playing it on her headset, so we were able to see what she saw.

  I glanced at the coffee table on the floor in front of us. On it was the magazine Science & Nature. I picked it up and scanned the table of contents.

  Global Freezing: Fact or Fiction? With the subtitle Is Snowball Earth Real?

  How Restoratives Are Helping Scientists Fight Cancer.

  What Alchemy Has Taught Us About Chemistry.

  A Better Way To Store Solar Energy.

  How It’s Made: Magi-tech Power Converters.

  The LHC and Antimatter.

  It was the last article that Aaron had bookmarked this time. The Large Hadron Collider under Switzerland was the first major application of magi-tech in the world, back before it was commercially available. Aaron had circled and underlined several lines about scientists storing antimatter produced in proton collisions using magnetic fields.

  “What’s all this about?” I asked, showing the article to Aaron.

  He looked away from the TV and down at the magazine. “Oh, it’s a theory I’m working on. I think antimatter might be the key to time travel.”

  “How?”

  Aaron thought for a moment. “Since antimatter is the opposite of matter, it can be thought of as backwards-flowing matter. It’s complicated, but there’s a physical law called CPT Symmetry that theorizes you can make certain physical transformations of particles to create a mirror image of our universe. My hypothesis is that if you only do two of the three transformations, you can make matter flow backwards in time. But it all hinges on the ability to make and contain antimatter.”

  “Uh huh,” I said, returning the magazine to the table and turning back to the game. “I honestly only understood about half of that. Glad you’re the magiphysicist and not me.”

  Aaron chuckled and we watched Val swim through an ocean cave, searching for the key to the cage the magic fruit of the level was locked in.

  My phone suddenly pinged. I recognized it as a notification from Chatterbox. Holding my breath, I pulled my phone out of my pocket and glanced at the screen to see a message from Mikael. My heart lurched in my chest momentarily. I hadn’t really expected him to write again after how long he’d been AWOL.

  The preview showed a link to a song. This one was a music video of one of our mutual favorite bands. It was a group that had been popular about 15 years earlier and was considered "uncool" now. But we never really cared about being cool.

  I stared at it a moment before putting my phone back in my pocket. I didn’t really want to listen to it right then. I wasn't surprised though; he often "apologized" by linking some kind of song relevant to our situation. Sometimes it seemed like we communicated as much through shared songs as through spoken or written words.

  “Everything ok?” Aaron asked, apparently noticing a change in my expression.

  “Yeah. It can wait,” I tried to reply as casually as I could, but Aaron knew me too well. His expression showed he was obviously unconvinced, but he didn’t push the topic, only gave me a concerned look for a moment before turning back to Bonko’s adventures.

  The game was entertaining, but not enough to keep me from getting lost in anxiety about the message I received. I thought desperately about something I could do to distract myself.

  “What are your theories on the ‘singularity bomb’ from Bruchette?” I asked Aaron quietly.

  He considered me for a moment before answering.

  “Honestly, I have no idea,” he chuckled at himself. “I can figure out time travel, but I can’t figure out a bomb.”

  “Well, what do other magiphysicists think?”

  Aaron leaned back into the couch. “It actually has most of them stumped, too. The name, ‘singularity bomb’, makes it sound like it creates a black hole.”

  “Wait, what?” I said in alarm.

  Aaron laughed, this time at my reaction. “Not all black holes will destroy the world. Their gravitational strength is related to how big they are and how far away an object is from it. For example, if the sun suddenly turned into a black hole, it wouldn’t have enough mass to even pull Earth into it. We’d just continue orbiting around it, but as a dead, frozen ice ball.”

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  “Ok, if you say so,” I said skeptically.

  “So that and the fact that there was no debris left over, but ungodly amounts of heat radiation, makes it seem like the most likely explanation. The bomb created a small black hole that burned itself out almost instantly. But you need to smash particles together extremely quickly to create even micro black holes, which would not have done the damage the bomb did. Or you need extremely dense material under the kind of pressures found in the middle of collapsing stars.”

  “Well, could it have been that, then?”

  Aaron tilted his head side to side. “Maybe. But there’s no natural material dense enough to make a black hole. Unless you wanted to lug around a Mount Everest’s weight in iridium.”

  “So how could that be the answer?”

  “Theoretically,” Aaron strongly emphasized the word, “a bomb made of neutronium could be small enough to work, but who knows how they’d transport something that heavy.”

  “Isn’t neutronium a super strong metal?”

  Aaron grinned. “Only in science fiction. In the real world, it’s a fluid. It’s made up entirely of tightly-packed neutrons. In a star, pure neutronium weighs somewhere around a billion tons per cubic centimeter. Telekenetics working together can lift a lot, but I don’t know how even a thousand of them could lift that much weight.”

  I stared at him wide-eyed. “Damn.”

  “Yep. Add to that the half-life of neutronium is ten minutes unless it’s under pressures equal to a star’s core. That means every ten minutes, half of the neutronium turns into protons and electrons.”

  “And we can’t artificially create those kinds of pressures?”

  “The kind to not only keep it from decaying but also compress it enough to make a singularity point? Not yet.”

  “But maybe the Yedrimor could?”

  “Doubtful,” Aaron frowned. “HIT and CSIC create the most advanced technology in the world. I couldn’t imagine how Yedrimor, who live in parts of the world where technology never even works, could figure out how to create a magi-tech that our brightest people can’t.”

  “Then… what?”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Magicle fields. Magicles have two properties that could potentially help, though not completely solve the problem. Telekinesis works by manipulating the gravitational property of magicles. The pressuric property is synchronizing gravitational and magnetic properties. If magicle fields could be properly built and maintained, they could reduce the weight of neutronium. Issue is, it would still probably weigh a few tons, so it’s not a complete solution.”

  “Huh,” I say. “I guess I’ll trust you on that. Those terms are familiar to me from basic magicus classes, but I don’t know enough about the specifics to say more.”

  We continued to quietly talk together about school and life and other everyday things while Val played her game. I told Aaron about the study-abroad opportunity, and he enthusiastically encouraged me to accept, current events in the world notwithstanding.

  After letting Val play her game for an hour or so, Aaron pulled her off the computer and we played card and board games until it was time for Val to go home.

  Aaron dropped me off on the way to her house.

  “Thanks again for inviting me over today,” I said as we pulled up to my place.

  “No problem, it was fun. Hopefully you can come along next time Val and I hang out, too.”

  “I’d like that,” I replied. Turning to the back seat, I smiled at Val. “See you again soon.”

  “Next weekend?” The girl asked hopefully.

  I laughed. “Maybe. We’ll see how it goes.”

  I got out of the car and returned Val’s enthusiastic wave through the back window until they turned the corner and disappeared from view.

  I looked at my apartment and gave a huge sigh. Despite wanting to talk to Mikael again, I was anxious about it. I wasn’t exactly sure why, and it made me hesitate going inside. I glanced at the sunset but didn’t see the single bright star I was looking for.

  Venus must be on the other side of the sun right now, I idly thought to myself.

  Turning back to my apartment, I sighed again and made my feet walk up to the door and my hand open it. Two fluffballs greeted me at the door, as always.

  “Yes, I’m home,” I told them, smiling and reaching down to pet them.

  I fed them and found a small something for myself. After all the snacking we did that day, I wasn’t hungry enough for a full meal.

  Finally sitting down in my chair, I put on my VR gear and started it up. Chatterbox automatically loaded, as usual. It pinged me that I still had the video message to watch. I ignored it for a bit and instead opened up VidShare, a website where people could upload videos of whatever they felt like, minus the XXX-rated stuff.

  One of the videos on my subscriptions list caught my attention instantly. It was called “10-10 BrainSnacks” – ten second answers to questions from viewers on ten different subjects. At the end, people voted on which topics the channel was going to do more in-depth discussions on that week. I started the video.

  A woman was standing in front of a blue gradient background. “We all know magic doesn’t work in space, but do you know why? And what is the average litter size of those adorable kitties who’ve taken over the internet? Welcome to 10-10 BrainSnacks, where we answer your questions.”

  Up popped text with the woman’s voiceover reading it as it appeared.

  “Astronomy: why doesn’t magic work in space? The sun emits a type of electromagnetic radiation that prevents magicles from interacting with each other unless they’re protected by a planet’s magnetic field. However, magic does work outside the solar system, as proven by the Voyager probes that reached deep space earlier this century.

  “Alchemy: how can I make gold? I’m sorry, but you cannot make gold at home. Both magical and physical chemical reactions have the same types of reactions, though the exact outcome with any two chemicals will be different based on the time of day. Making gold involves fusion, which is not possible at home.

  “Biology: what is the average size of kitten litters? Generally, litter sizes vary between 1 and 9. The average number of babies is between 3 and 5. Fun fact: the largest litter ever recorded was 19 kittens by a Burmese-Siamese mix cat in Oxfordshire, UK in 1970.

  “Chemistry: why do different elements burn with different colors? When you heat up an element, it excites the electrons in the atoms. Electrons orbit the nucleus in specific energy levels, and when an electron is excited, it jumps up an energy level. When it releases the extra energy and falls back to its original level, it releases a photon. The wavelength of the photon is the color of the flame.

  “Food: what’s the difference between baking powder and baking soda? Baking soda, also called sodium bicarbonate, produces carbon dioxide gas when mixed with an acid, such as buttermilk or coffee. Baking powder is essentially baking soda with a powdered acid already mixed in, so it reacts with any type of liquid. Fortunately for us, both ingredients work the same all hours of the day.

  “Magic: why can I only use my talents at night? Of the six innate talents, five only work at night because that side of the planet is not facing the sun and the EMM radiation from it is too weak to disrupt magic. The exception is if you are underground, where your talents will work during daylight hours. And, of course, Regenerates’ talents always work no matter the time of day.

  “Mathematics: how big is infinity? Infinity comes in different sizes. The infinity of counting numbers zero and up is smaller than the infinity of all whole numbers from negative infinity to positive infinity. There are an infinite number of numbers between 0 and 1. There are also infinities made up of infinities.

  “Mythology: what is the Loch Ness Monster? The Loch Ness Monster is a mythical water dragon that lives in Loch Ness Lake in Scotland. Its first supposed sighting was in 1933. Though there is no evidence that it does not exist, scientists believe it is unlikely since no magical creatures have ever been recorded outside the Amazon or Indonesia.

  “Physics: how do fusion reactors work? Fusion is when two light element atoms are smashed together with enough force for them to create a heavier element. Fusion power plants create extremely high pressures and temperatures, and magicles increase this exponentially so that we can maintain the power necessary to keep them running.

  “Psychology: does photographic memory exist? There have been multiple studies on the subject, but none have conclusively proven it is real. In one study, when given a photograph to look at for five seconds and then tested a week later, the subjects were not able to 100% accurately describe what was in the image. This test and many like it have been replicated over the years, all with similar results.

  “And a bonus question from Steven. My little sister is annoying me. How can I turn her into a lizard? I’m sorry, Steven, but polymorphing is not possible. It only happens in fantasy stories. Your sister is a human and cannot be turned into any other kind of animal using magic or technology.”

  I laughed as the video switched back to the speaker. “Vote now for the questions you would like answered in more detail. Twenty-four hours after we upload the video, we will pick the three topics with the most votes and make videos dedicated to each of the questions this week! And be sure to leave your questions in the comments section so we know what else you want to learn next week!”

  I scrolled down to the voting box. I was highly interested in the astronomy one because I knew there were exceptions to that brief explanation about magic and magnetic fields and I wanted to know what they had to say about it. I voted for the photographic memory because I was curious about the types of tests they used. And… I considered. Cats are always entertaining, and it would be fun to see a three minute video about tiny balls of cuteness. I submitted my vote and the box switched to show the vote count of each topic. Alchemy was near the top, as well as physics with their fusion reactors, and I was happy to see psychology was up there. Astronomy hovered in the middle, but there was still plenty of time for it to gather more support. And of course, the cats were at the top.

  Just for giggles, I threw in the question “Is time travel real?” in the comments, and was notified “time travel” was already a term submitted. I scrolled down to see my question already posted, along with a couple hundred up-votes. I added my vote to the list and checked out the other questions in the comments sections. They covered all sorts of topics that weren’t even touched this time, such as economics, government, and, unsurprisingly, Yedrimor. I spotted one about ancient languages and dropped my vote on that as well.

  I watched a couple covers of songs I enjoyed, a video on the family tree of language, and five minutes of a livestream of kittens playing in a rescue home before I finally gave in to my anxiety. I opened Chatterbox again, took a deep breath, and clicked the link from Mikael.

  I know I did you wrong

  And I wish I could do better

  I know that I'm a wreck

  And I wish I could be better

  I felt my chest tighten. I knew the song. It made me sad when he sent ones like this, about how negatively he thought about himself. He had the lowest opinion about himself and his abilities of anyone I'd met. I tried hard to convince him of the good I saw in him, but he never really seemed to believe me.

  Ooohhhh, if I was someone else

  Ooohhhh, if I was someone new

  I sighed and closed the video. I couldn't stand listening to that right now.

  Me-Kay-L was on Chatterbox, but hadn't said anything yet. I sent him a message.

  Yo dude, how's it going?

  I had to pretend everything was ok. If I tried to talk about what happened, he would brush it away as "boring feelings", which would just piss me off again and probably end with us not talking for another week or two.

  Sup dude? He replied.