I leaned up against the wall and sighed heavily. Things had been crazy recently. Too crazy. I felt like any time I was moving, I was running as fast as I could, into whatever trouble or from whatever trouble happened to be coming at me, and whenever I wasn't, I should have been.

I straightened up, almost involuntarily at AEGIS approach. She fixed me with a skeptical glare, augmented by a menacing push of her glasses up her nose, and I gave her my most disarming smile.

"Yeah, not buying it," she proclaimed.

At least that gave me the permission to slump back down again.

"What's the matter?" she asked.

"Just...life. Everything. All this insane shit with Dragon and people dying and almost dying--"

I stopped. She looked worried. More than I wanted.

"--are...all fine! I'm sure it'll work out."

"Told you, I'm not buying it. Talk to me, Athan, I'm here to help you."

I weighed my options. On one hand, I needed the help. Things were a little abnormally, impressively shit right now, and I felt like I was drowning in it. But on the other, there wasn't much she could do but listen to my baggage. Listen and worry, and then my problems would be creating problems of their own.

I was just about to say something when the wall lurched from under my hand, and I fell sideways. I got as far as thinking what the heck was that? Before AEGIS grabbed me by the arms and ripped me out of where I was slumped.

Which kinda sorta hurt the hell out of my shoulders. I was about to start yelling at her in confusion when instead, I saw something which made me far, far too confused to yell.

It was a crater. Or, more specifically, it was standing in the middle of a new crater put in our hotel room, ominously smoking and seemingly indifferent to the room deposit we'd just been fucked out of.

At the moment, I was indifferent as well, because of what it was, or at least, what it appeared to be.

Because it was me.

The other me looked around cooly, way cooler than I thought I looked when doing the same, and I wasn't quite sure what exactly he was doing to make it seem so. Certainly there wasn't much to turning your head this way or that, but he...or I?...had got it down pat. Maybe it was his little bit of manly stubble, or the sharp angles of his jawline that I was sure I didn't quite have. Or maybe it was the cool jacket. I didn't know, but I was still pretty sure I was jealous.

Which honestly, was a weird emotion to be feeling at seeing yourself suddenly blow up a part of your hotel room. It was all still sinking in.

He looked down at me, and I saw my own brown-green eyes in his head. "Hey," he said, in a voice I recognized from hearing my own recorded.

"Hey?" I replied.

"Looks like I made it," he muttered, scratching his hair in a familiar gesture. "Sorry for the mess."

He took a step forward and froze, as AEGIS raised a knee to chin level, her leg tensed threateningly.

"Who the hell are you?" she asked.

"I'm Athan, obviously."

"No, he's Athan." She jerked her thumb at me. "I don't know who you are, but you should know, I'm not a big fan of multiple copies of me running around, and I'm not sure I'm quite decided on multiple of him."

"Easy," he said, raising his hands like that would make him less threatening. If he was me, he could manifest blades right inside her. But...if he was me, he wouldn't do that. So maybe it did make him less threatening? "I promise, I am him. Just--"

He snapped into a dramatic pose that I thought looked cool. AEGIS didn't seem to agree by how her brandished leg twitched at his movement.

"I'm from the future," he said, his voice low and cool.

She didn't even blink. "Nope. Get out."

"What. I am!"

"Not buying it. No such thing as time travel. Physics forbids it."

"No seriously. I was just messing around but I am here for a reason. I have important information--"

"No. This is a trick, or you're a clone, or an illusion, or there's a code-X or something--"

"Okay, I'm from another dimension. That works, right?" he asked.

She thought it over for a second. "Maybe. There can be parallel dimensions."

"And mine is more advanced through time than this one. Hence, I'm from the future."

"From your future," she clarified. I sat up and stared, mystified at the two of them.

"From the future. With vital information."

"No you don't," she argued. "You have information vital in your universe. For all we know, the application of that information in this universe is completely disastrous."

"This universe is the same as mine!" he shouted. "Look, I remember that exact outfit. I had those sneakers he's wearing."

"Yeah? So? Do you remember a time-traveller showing up in your hotel room and telling you something?"

"No--"

"Then our universes are different aren't they? You realize that your very existence here threatens to change not just what you intended to alter, but possibly everything because of chaos theory? You're the damn butterfly flapping his wings and setting off monsoons in this reality, buddy."

"Just let me--"

"And what's more," AEGIS crossed her arms, "how do you even know that passing off this information would have the effects you desired anyway? Are you some kind of world-simulating supercomputer who can ascertain how every action ripples out and effects every other thing?"

I blinked. "I think Mage worked like that."

"Well he sure as shit ain't Mage, is he?"

"I just have some information to pass on, it's really--"

"Really what? Really harmless? I doubt that, if you'd dimension hop all the way here just to convey it. Which means it's hugely significant, and therefore really dangerous."

"I'd kinda like to hear it," I said.

"I'm sure," she glanced at me. "But you do realize how dangerous information like that can be? Whether we believe this guy is from a future similar to our own or not, just having information from him, heck, just interacting with him puts us at enormous risk."

"No it doesn't," he argued.

"Oh? So why do you want to give us this information so badly?" She cocked her head challengingly.

"To save us...to save him, that is, from something horrible, of course. Information that could prevent a catastrophe."

"So you're saying that your actions are going to affect the timeline."

"Yes."

"Well first off, why do you care?"

He stared at her, his brow creasing. "Um, because I'm obviously trying to avert a huge catastrophe for us?"

"Except that anything that changes here won't affect you, you realize. Since you're from a different, parallel timeline."

His brow continued to crease, threatening to swallow his eyebrows. "I just said that to get you to listen. Which you're still not doing, I might add."

"Oh. So you're not then. But you stated that in your experience in this scenario, in this hotel room, you did not have a time-traveler bust in on you and scorch your walls, and almost kill you?"

"I did not...wait, almost kill you?"

"That's right, you almost landed on Athan with your teleporty explosion bullshit."

"Oh my God, I almost killed myself." He swayed backwards and took a seat against the door, mirroring me almost exactly.

"Yeah, no," AEGIS fumed. "It's like you're not even listening. You realize that because you sequence of events would be continuing from your existence, where you did not have a time-traveller bust up your hotel, your future is not going to spontaneously change, just because you tell your 'past' self something to avoid it, right?"

His gaze wavered slightly. "No? If I tell you, it will never happen, and so it won't have happened to me."

She shook her head. "And how's that? You affect us in this room, at this moment, and what, you expect that change to propagate through magical time waves or something and suddenly change all time from now on? You realize that'd require a concept of meta-time, wouldn't you?"

"Meta-time?"

"Time that keeps track of time itself. If you're telling the truth that you are a time-traveller -- which you're not -- then that would mean all timelines aren't in a row, they're all parallel and accessible to each other. Causality as we know it doesn't exist anymore, because something doesn't have to be in the past to affect the future. You can't just change the past and expect the future to be something else."

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"Why not? That's how the future works."

"That's how the future works without time travel in the picture. If what you believe is true, then you yourself can't be here, because you're an instance of the future causing events in the past. Once that happens, causality breaks down."

"This is hurting my head," he complained.

"That's because you're wrong, and I really think you should leave, whatever you are."

He seemed to stiffen. "No, I'm here for a reason. I will deliver the information, and I will save us from a horrible fate."

"Out of curiosity, where do you think you'll be returning to?" she asked.

"From…" he stopped and eyed her warily. "From when I left."

"And presumably, if you pass on your info, to a better place than when you left? A world which didn't suffer this tragedy you speak of?" He nodded. "So then you must believe in branching timelines."

"Sure. Like, by changing this, we're branching into a better future."

"Well what about the future you left behind? Now there's a whole universe of people who used to be there with you, and to them, you just left them forever."

"No I didn't. I'm coming back."

"Except you said yourself, you're coming to a different, branched timeline. They saw you off and will never see you come back. You'll be in a different future, sippin' pina coladas and yucking it up, while they mourn you."

"That's fucked up. Why are you saying this?"

"Because!" she yelled. "You're trying to fuck with time, you dumbass! Why do you think I keep telling you to leave? Why do you think I keep saying you shouldn't tell us this future-secret bullshit?"

"Or you could just let him say it and then we decide ourselves what to do with it," I muttered.

"Seriously, Athan? Seriously? This guy looks exactly likes you, acts exactly like you, probably has the same stupid lack of understanding about how time travel works that you do, showed up in our hotel room, apparently by magic, and you just want to believe him?"

"Well...yeah. That all seems like pretty convincing evidence that he's...I dunno, close to us at least? Like whether he's a time-traveller or from another dimension or whatever, if he knows that much about me and is that much like me, I should hear him out, right?"

She shook her finger. "Couldn't be more wrong. You ever consider that of all the sources of knowledge in the world, this is the most potentially dangerous? You know how people get mentally ill, Athan? People hear voices, or feel strange compulsions, and they do it?"

"...yes?" I answered, not sure why we were on this train all the sudden.

"If you started hearing voices...not Saga's obviously, would you be all gung-ho to do what they said?"

"No, obviously. They're just voices."

"And yet, somehow, people with psychotic hallucinations do all the time. Any idea why?"

"Because...they're stupid?"

"Because they trust the source, dummy. And it's not very nice to call sick people stupid. They believe the voices, even when they're illogical, even when it's absolutely insane, because the source of those weird thoughts or compulsions is them. It's not any more alien or dismissable than craving a burger. You don't wonder where that craving came from or scrutinize its intentions. It came from you, maybe you do it, maybe you don't, but you certainly don't question it's credibility."

"I'm so lost what this has to do with anything."

"What this has to do--" she said, wheeling back around to my doppelganger. "Is that if you listen to this guy, precisely because you're so close to him, his words are a lot more dangerous than 'let's just hear him out and decide later' status. It's pretty clear to me that you're all ready to trust this guy, and that means he could say something completely illogical and dangerous, and you'd be all for it, just because you trust the source. Even if it is sick and wrong, because you think it came from 'you'."

"You're insane," he said.

"No, I'm paranoid. Part of my parameters to deal effectively with Exhumans. And this kind of paranormal bullshit is right up my alley."

"You do sound kind of insane," I agreed.

"Believe me, I have a perfectly valid reason for being so," she shrugged. "It's all about skewing his probability of success."

"What's probability got to do with it?" he asked.

"What's probability got to do with time travel?" she echoed, sounding stupefied. "Holy shit, you really must be Athan. No offense," she added, over her shoulder.

"Uh, none taken. And obviously I know exactly what you're talking about but maybe explain it to him."

She rolled her eyes, before pushing her glasses up in front of them. "The Novikov self-consistency principle deals with closed timelines and paradoxes that can arise in them. And it discusses probabilities quite a bit, specifically in how paradoxes are resolved."

"Paradoxes like...killing your own grandfather kinds of things?" I asked.

"I thought you said you knew this already," she grinned.

"Paradoxes like killing your own grandfather kinds of things," I explained to my mirror.

"Nobody's killing their grandfather here," he said.

"Yeah. But a paradox can happen out of anything. Let's say you tell Athan your secret here, and as a result, he has a great future--"

"Which he will," he argued.

"--and consequently sees no need to go back in time and warn himself not to do something. Suddenly, he's not there to tell himself how to have a nice future, is he?"

He opened his mouth and closed it several times.

"Now you said that this didn't happen to you, which means, heh, you're screwed, buddy. There's no happy timeline for you, no matter what happens here. But let's say you're lying, which I think is very possible--"

"Why would I lie?"

"Because it's the easiest way to resolve the paradox, obviously. Not that last one, but the ontological paradox which comes about if it turns out you're actually coming here because you're supposed to, because that's the consistency in the timeline."

"I have literally no idea what…" I said. "Um. He has literally no idea what you're talking about."

"Oh no, it's fine," he said. "We can both be completely lost."

She sighed. "Say that Athan's aware of the paradox I described, so even if he has a great life, he decides to do this whole time-travel bit anyway. For starters, he'd need to act like an idiot because that's how you've been acting, and he'd want to do it just the same way you did, so that nothing would 'change'," she scoffed. "Not that it'd be possible."

"Except--"

"But the thing is, he doesn't have anything to go on, does he? He doesn't know what future he's avoiding, he's just going through the motions, because in his past, another version of himself did the same thing to him. Told him something, which he acted on, which he went back and time and told himself. So the question is...where'd that information come from? And how do you know it does a damn thing? There's no proof that acting on it changes anything, because Athan can't and won't act on it, because that's not how the future resolves, because it already hasn't."

"I am so, so fucking lost," he moaned.

"So the easiest solution is, you lie. You say it's important, and say you weren't paid a visit by yourself and there's this horrible parallel history, and viola, everything's fixed. And that brings us back to probabilities, see? You'll find that when there's a paradox, it gets hashed out by probabilities of paradox-causing things to drop to zero. And very unlikely things which avoid paradoxes suddenly become very, very probable." She grinned. "So do you get what I'm doing yet?"

"I am not sure I get anything anymore," he bleated. "Just let me say what I want to, please?"

"I am never going to look at a clock again," I agreed.

"I'm making it more and more statistically unlikely that we, of this timeline, hear or act on your whatever," she said, her eyes narrowed and devious. "Because the lower the probability on our end of this whole time-thing succeeding, the higher alternative probabilities grow. You ever think about rubbing a lamp and making a wish with a genie and all the ways it could go wrong?"

"Why are there more metaphors? Why can't you be done?"

"Well as the probability for your desired outcome becomes more and more unlikely, the 'genie' starts to look at alternative ways to complete your wish. To resolve the paradox. Ways you didn't expect, the evil, nasty genies that pervert your wishes to interpret them literally but horrifically."

"I'm so confused. Are you the genie in this metaphor?"

"No. Time travel is. The self-consistency principle is. Paradoxes must be resolved, and if I won't let them resolve in the simplest possible way, something else is eventually going to bend or break. Say, can you think of anyone or anything in this scenario which, if spontaneously removed, might fix all this time-travel bullshit?"

"You?" He scoffed.

"Ooh, so close. But see, Athan would never time-travel back to now if it meant killing me."

"And...not him...since that'd just make a paradox of him not being able to time-travel. So then uh," he looked around nervously.

"Hey you got it. Good job," she grinned with malevolence. "Kinda nervous? Kinda wondering if this evil, perverting, time-resolving, wish-granting genie is just gonna send a very-improbable-but-absolutely-plausible meteorite to smash out your brains?"

"Um, why would I travel back in time just to get smashed with a meteorite, though?" I asked.

"Obviously because you had to." She shrugged.

"It kinda...doesn't seem that way to me. He hasn't done anything. He's just kinda sat there and hasn't accomplished much of anything except now developing a new sense of paranoia it looks like."

"Paranoia is good, helps deal with Exhumans," she smiled back at me. "And if he is really a time-traveller and really does die in a tragic, improbable way, I guess you can take solace that whatever else you're preventing by coming back and doing this is an even worse paradox that you're resolving."

"Am I...am I really going to die?" he asked. Did I really sweat that much? I thought I tended to face death pretty badass stoically, but he was looking less cool and more like a boiled hot dog over there.

"Who knows?" AEGIS said with devastating indifference. "Probably the only way to be safe is to get the hell out of here before you cause a paradox that needs to be resolved.

He fidgeted nervously, and then almost jumped when his alarm went off on his mobile.

"Gah!" he shouted, wrestling it out of his pocket. "Gah! I'm supposed to be done by now!"

"Oh? You have a time limit? That's strange for a time traveller to have," she said, pressing a finger to her lips thoughtfully.

"Look, will you just--will you let me say what I came here to say or not?"

"Pretty sure I made that clear--"

She stopped when I stood and put a hand on her shoulder.

"AEGIS, I know you warned me, and believe me, I don't understand the risks, even a little bit. Maybe if you spent the next few months with a chalkboard and a time machine and like...two-thousand notes to pin up on the walls and connect with hanging bits of red string, I might still have no idea what all you said meant."

"Maybe a week or two, it's not really that bad," she argued.

"But I want to hear it. Whether he's me or not, or from the future, or whatever. If it wasn't me, if it was anyone in the universe, if they spent this much effort and sat through that much painful, time-wasting bullshit, I'd have to respect them enough to hear what they said."

"It wasn't time-wasting bullshit," she pouted.

"It was, and you know it. We've done nothing but sit here and listen to insane theories for most of an hour now. I can't believe anyone would willingly suffer through this. It just sounded like a pile of conflicting theories and impossible-to-prove shit which makes no sense, heaped up to the ceiling until we drowned in it."

"Yes, thank you," he sighed. "And that's almost exactly my message--"

Her leg flicked forward, the tips of her toes an inch from his throat.

"A very probable way of fixing our paradox is for your windpipe to be crushed," she said, her voice devoid of emotion and dangerous. "Don't forget that."

He swallowed hard and said nothing. Which was exactly the right thing to say, probably.

I pulled her back and removed the threat of spontaneous death.

"Let's just hear him out, please?"

She sighed enormously. "No, I really think this is a bad idea."

"I'll tell you what. We'll hear it, and...and in the future, when it comes to acting on it, I'll always consult with you. That way I can't be swayed by the source. You seem to fear and hate this guy as much as...well, as much as I've got nothing against him, really."

"I've always considered myself exceptionally unexceptional," he said.

"Yeah, me too."

AEGIS bit her lip and pulled at her hair. "I don't just want to say no...I don't want to tell you how to live but...he could be anything Athan. Consider how dangerous that is. He could be any kind of Exhuman, or even if he is telling the truth, or believes it--"

"I know." I squeezed her shoulder. "But let's hear it anyway."

She held firm for a few more seconds before nodding and stepping back, letting me stand before him. His gaze flashed between the two of us, nervous but excited.

"Really?" he asked.

AEGIS sighed enormously. "Don't remind me. Say what you need and be gone."

He stood up, dusted himself off, smiling and disbelieving, almost. AEGIS tensed as he reached into a pocket, but he just drew out a scrap of paper and handed it to me. I looked down at it, and almost missed him taking a few steps back, before he disappeared with another singeing blast which further darkened the crater he'd come in before.

"Should I…" I glanced at AEGIS before unfolding the note. I knew her answer of course, and just took a few breaths before reading it aloud, her electric-yellow eyes following along.

DON'T THROW TIME TRAVEL SUBPLOTS IN A STORY UNLESS YOU'RE PREPARED FOR THE THOUSANDS OF WRINKLES IT ADDS.

"That's...it?" I asked. Frustrated, I turned the paper over, wondering if there was more. Somehow, there was.

DON'T READ WEB SERIALS ON APRIL FOOLS.

I looked at her. She looked at me. Both of us were as puzzled as could be.

"What the hell does that mean?" I asked.

"I have no idea," she said. "But I think it means that this entire exchange was nothing but an enormous waste of time."

"Ours?"

She shrugged. "Somebody's."