The problem with rewinding time is that it cannot be un-rewound. The process cannot be undone. Events cannot be restored after they get deleted. The only way to get them back is to live through the same choices, hoping that no butterflies flutter their wings in the meantime.
Life went on as usual, without anyone being aware of the effect of the butterfly just yet. It was unclear whether Aubrey had seen the video or not, for she did not mention its existence to anyone, nor did her behavior deviate by one bit from her usual snappiness. Had she and Albert interacted more on a day-to-day basis, perhaps something would have come out. Albert knew of what happened and was bound to be overly sensitive to even the smallest change in the way the girl looked at him. But he didn’t. And so, life went on.
The current daily challenge was called patience training. Albert was not very keen on doing it now, or ever for that matter, but he knew that unless he completed it no more daily quests would come to take its place. It was not a good thought to think. The only thing he could do was procrastinate. He was one of those people who could be called serial procrastinators in the past, always waiting until the last possible moment before getting things done, only starting a job when the pressure and the anxiety that came from an approaching deadline became too much to handle. And he had been good at it. Not once had his assignments turned out bad, or his grades been below expectations.
But he always knew in his heart that he could have done more and better had he not procrastinated. And every time he swore it would be the last. This time he thought he could be different.
Perhaps it was because it was magic we were talking about, and not something he truly did not feel like doing. His college course was not at all what he expected it to be, and the level of effort that was required of him to pass classes was not sustainable with his disinterest for the subjects. Perhaps there were other reasons too, and he secretly hoped that he could gain access to the learning skill before it was exams season.
Putting the matter aside, he decided to do the quest now rather than later, skipping the indefinite amount of time that he would have inevitably spent obsessing over the fact that the had to do it. The system was as happy as it always was to transport him away.
Unfortunately for Albert, it was during the time he was away in the quest space that something finally happened with the video on Aubrey’s phone. What ended up happening was out of any possible planning or expectation, and indeed would have surprised Albert a lot if he was in the real world to witness the event as it unfolded. He wasn’t, instead spending the next ten hours in forced bullet time – plus some rewinding – inside the quest space to complete the challenge. While he spent north of a hundred subjective hours doing who knows what, however, Marc was very much active in the material plane of the universe.
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He was scrolling through TikTok when he saw the video for the first time. He almost scrolled past it in usual TikTok doomscroll fashion, when his brain registered that something was not right and aborted the scrolling action about to be performed. He squinted, while a thin veil of sweat appeared on his forehead. There it was, in full cropped vertical grandeur: the video of someone hidden behind the camera allegedly creating a fireball and wreaking havoc in a small café in town. Ending with “say hello to alternate you.”
There were no visible faces, thank god. They were either cropped out of the picture or blurred away, but the location was unmistakably the place where he and friends had their afternoon snack the other day. What the fuck did Albert do there?
He remembered Albert mentioning that he wanted to come clean to Aubrey and Colin about the whole magic matter, but he eventually decided against it. It looked like the ‘reason’ was not born of reasoning or intuition but of experience.
Marc decided not to ask himself how the video ended up on Aubrey’s phone, instead taking stock of what he could measure. She had uploaded the video on her personal account on TikTok and TikTok only, with the captions and hashtags hinting at it being an experiment in CGI and video editing. It was not very viral yet, but it was gathering a few thousands likes and it was bound to reach the algorithm sooner or later, thanks to the catchy tune and the clever montage. It looked like she was indeed skilled at editing, but the main content of the video had not been born of computer generated imagery and he knew it well.
This was a video recorded on her phone in a universe that then got rewound away when something went wrong. Now it was online, on the internet, uploaded on the number one social network in the world. Why would Aubrey do something like this?
Risk… assess risk… beyond whatever motives Aubrey might have had, it was important to assess the possible consequences of the video being posted online. It was too late to take it back for sure, and confronting Aubrey about it was bound to make matters worse in the way only an admission of guilt could rival. But perhaps it was not the problem Marc’s subconscious was making it out to be as a first reaction.
Unless the CIA or some other agency went to pay a visit to Aubrey’s house. It was impossible, right? They could never expose themselves like this. Right.
He could already feel his body stop sweating and cool down a bit. After all, he could see that it was not a clever use of After Effects and that it was actual magic only because he had seen the fireballs in action himself. The others had not. Nor did anyone else in the world. And the feds were too dumb to even notice anyway. Or did they? What was the probability that enough other people had magic that the presence of a video on the internet would trigger a possibly nefarious scenario?
He better hop on 4chan and other forums. A lot of seemingly bogus conspiracies were suddenly looking much more plausible than they had been mere moments ago. If there was any trace of another instance of magic escaping secrecy and coming into the public eye, then he could study what happened later and extrapolate. Meanwhile he would keep the video under scrutiny and study how it was doing in the algorithm.
Three hours later it occurred to him that perhaps he should warn Albert.
Unreachable.
Shit.
Was something wrong? Had something happened to him?
He better go at his house immediately.