“Time is self-righting. You change something, it will do it’s very best to preserve the same outcome that you already saw. Go back to save someone from a fire and you might find they get hit by the fire truck or shot by a passer-by and the paper reports things the exact same way. Kill your own grandfather and you’ll come back and find out you were really adopted all along. Why does it work like that? I don’t know, but it does, for everyone, except for me,” Murphy explained.
The bar woman just stared at him.
Behind Murphy, sunlight streamed in at a low angle through full length windows. The rays highlighted the different grains in wooden bar top. If he’d turned around Murphy would have been privilege to a mountaintop view that opened up almost the entirety of the Greenstone Valley right out to the sparkling south-eastern sea. But Murphy did not turn around. He had seen this view over a thousand times before.
“Now you might be thinking what if you go back and save your grandfather, now not grandfather, after killing him, well, he’ll be alive but you’ll still be adopted. You see some things you can’t fix, and one must be very careful what they change. Maybe you go back a third time and you kill your new grandfather to try and fix your first mistake but then it turns out your father was adopted or maybe you were confused for awhile there and now your family is really very worried about your sanity. Maybe they think you should spend some time in an asylum. As a general rule, changing the past should only ever be done very subtly. Of course, if you’re me, it doesn’t matter. Why? Probably because I never return to the future. Then again, I met a woman once, she went back in time to save her child from a kidnapping and just stayed there. Took her own child and ran. You see where this is going don’t you? Turns out she was the kidnapper all along.” Murphy grinned and took another long slow sip of his drink.
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“What if you kill your past self?” Either the bartender was intrigued or she was just humouring her only customer. There were others in the bar but they weren’t ordering, most were here for dinner and already had their food. It was possible the police presence outside had scared off the regular clientele. The sort of class that frequented the bar at Quartz Ridge probably didn’t like the idea of bloated bodies being pulled from a swamp only a few hundred metres from where they were eating. Murphy didn’t mind one way or another.
“Ah. Well, I dunno. I’ve never met anyone who’s done it. Depending on the type of time travel done, sometimes you are your past self. I’m always my past self though and if I kill myself, I just wake up further in the past. There is a certain point, if I go back far enough, I forget things. I forget what I can do. And then I have to grow up again, and sometimes I remember, but I think, a lot of it I don’t. I go too far back and everything is entirely new again. And the scariest thing. I can’t always control when I’ll end up.”
“Why are you telling me all this?”
“Because soon, you won’t remember it.” Murphy gazed out the window at the setting sun. “None of you will.”
There was silence for awhile and then the bar woman asked, almost as if she had not heard a word he’d said, "Look, did you want another drink or not?" Perhaps she was used to crazy rambles from her regular patrons and this sounded like just another.
Anyone else might have stopped there. The drinks here were expensive after all, but the money Murphy paid with would be gone tomorrow anyway and the view was to die for. With one last glance at the slowly disappearing sun Murphy replied. "I suppose we still have time."
The End of Volume 2
Volume 3 Continues This Thursday Usual Time