“If you could have a super power, what super power would it be?” Tilly looked around the group of friends, awaiting their answers. It was a boring afternoon, and on boring afternoons their go-to pastime was always a hypothetical question.
“Being invisible I think,” Avi replied without hesitation. “When I want to be, I mean. I’d turn it off for day to day stuff.” Tilly bristled at his reply. “You would. Pervert.” She looked to Noel. “What about you?”
Noel thought for a moment. “Let’s hear yours first, before I decide.”
“Alright, but you can’t steal mine. I want to control time. That way I can make these boring afternoons go faster.” Tilly was confident in her answer. “Now you have to go.”
Noel’s eyes lit up. He again paused for a moment, as though he were mentally composing his reply. “Well, see, I’ve thought about this before. It sounds really cool but have you ever really considered it? Time is relative.” At this, both Tilly and Avi rolled their eyes. They knew they were in for another long ramble down a garden path that they were only half interested in following. Noel knew their level of commitment to following him on these trains of thought, but he continued anyway. “It’s all about time dilation. You’d create this bubble where, to the outside world, things seem to move faster. But you’re still inside the bubble. You still have to move forward at the same pace as time around you, so the afternoon will still seem unending to you.”
“Just like your explanation of how time works,” Ari interrupted. Tilly snorted.
“Hush. See, I think you’re on the right path, just going in the wrong direction. What if instead, you could rewind time? Did you ever play Prince of Persia?” They both replied no. “It’s okay, neither have I. But the game has this mechanic in it. Some kind of magic knife that lets you rewind time. Not a lot, just a couple of seconds. Enough to retry that jump to the next platform, that you couldn’t reach the first time. Enough to dodge the sword that just came swinging down on you. That sort of thing.”
“I think I follow. You could do a lot with that. You say the wrong thing to your girlfriend, and then you get to take it back before she breaks up with you.” This was a dig at Noel. Tilly knew that he had recently been dumped over a very stupid thing he had said to her best friend, and while she cared about Noel a lot, she was not above reminding him of how dumb he had been.
Noel flinched, but continued. “Yeah, exactly. But it goes beyond that. Maybe you discover you have this trick, and you can only rewind time a little. A few seconds. But you practice, and you practice. Retaking little moments of time. And you get better at it. Maybe you get up to 30 seconds of time. A full minute. Maybe eventually you’re at like seven minutes. You could change an entire course of your life, with the right seven minutes.”
“Oh lord.” Another eye roll.
“No really. Think about the moment you die.”
“I try not to.”
“Hush Tilly. You’re about to die. You’re at that final moment, that final breath. But you can do something no one else can. At the moment you take that breath, you can rewind the last seven minutes. Over and over again. You can live the last seven minutes of your life for an eternity. An eternity to figure out how to prevent this very moment. Using your pre-destined immortality, to figure out how to make yourself immortal.”
“That uh… sounds kind of paradoxical, doesn’t it?”
“That’s the thing. If you figure it out, you kind of break time. You could spend entire years in just those seven minutes. And that’s where time kind of falls apart. That bubble I mentioned earlier. It bursts, and you’re never trapped in it again. You just… exist out of time. You don’t die. You don’t age. You just move forward. Years go by. Decades go by. Friends fade away. Loved ones die. You make new friends. Fall in love with new people. And they die too. The immortal’s curse. It sounds all so melodramatic I know.”
“Wouldn’t the world catch up with you though? People are going to start noticing that you’re not dying. You’d have to move around a lot.”
“Exactly. For a long while it would be fine. But then the modern era appears, people get tracked, their mark on history grows. So you have to move around. Change names. Leave friends. Leave loved ones. Eventually you’re rewinding time just to duck out of a room, so you don’t appear in that group photo.”
“Yeah, that sounds pretty depressing. No thank you.”
Noel continued. He always continued. “It would be so easy to get detached from other people, because eventually you’d have no choice but to detach from them. They die, and you don’t. You yell at someone, just to vent your anger. And then you’ve cooled off, and you can undo it all. Eventually you would get bored of people. Maybe too disconnected. Maybe you want to hit someone. Maybe you want to stab someone. Just to see what it feels like. To feel the knife sink in, to watch the color fade away, to see their last breath. And then with a thought, they’re alive again. They never even know you have that knife. It becomes just another secret you carry with you. Through your life, you make more friends, because you have to just to get by. But you can never tell them everything you know, everything you’ve done, everything you can do. And you know all along that they too will disappear some day.”
“Jesus, Noel. Maybe you’ve thought about this too much.”
“I told you I’ve thought about this.” Noel looked at his watch. “It feels good to tell someone though.”
Tilly glared at him. “Oh fuck you. Don’t pretend like you’re some sort of magical time wiz–”
“If you could have a super power, what super power would it be?” Tilly looked around the group of friends, awaiting their answers. It was a boring afternoon, and on boring afternoons their go-to pastime was always a hypothetical question.
“Being invisible I think,” Avi replied without hesitation. “When I want to be, I mean. I’d turn it off for day to day stuff.” Tilly bristled at his reply. “You would. Pervert.” She looked to Noel. “What about you?”
Noel thought for a moment. “Let’s hear yours first, before I decide.”
“Alright, but you can’t steal mine. I want to control time. That way I can make these boring afternoons go faster.” Tilly was confident in her answer, but Noel interrupted before she could ask what he power he would want. “Fuck that, I’d rather be able to fly. Flying sounds way cooler, plus it probably burns a lot of calories. That’s why superheroes always have like zero body fat.”
