First Date

 

She sat opposite him at a small neighbourhood pizza restaurant, their friends a table or two over to give them some privacy, but not too much.

“I’ve seen your future” she said, testing the waters. Her friends didn’t seem to be able hear her and he didn’t look surprised.

She waited for the response. It didn’t arrive. “You’re supposed to say you’ve seen mine too” she muttered under her breath. She reached for a piece of jewellery around her neck.

He didn’t know what it was for, but he made a quick guess. “No, wait. I’m still me. I’m not a broken echo or a false jump.”

She looked puzzled. “But, I saw how this was supposed to go. You were supposed to say you’ve seen my future, we trade stories and just walk through the dating process for appearances.”

“Oh really?” he said “I suppose I agreed to this at some point?”

She continued to look confused. “Yes, well, not directly, but I saw the diagram. You gave me access to your computer files.”

He paused. He didn’t want to say yes, or no – he could tell she was on a knife’s edge of reacting badly.

“But I haven’t seen you.” he said finally.

“Yes you have” she started, “but just out of order.”

“That’s your perspective of events,” he said plainly. “I’m sure if you scan me you’ll see there’s no jumps from my end.”

“But that’s impossible, you were there. It was you and you did jump then.”

“I’m not saying it wasn’t, but there’s got to be a particular start for my jumps, and I don’t think this is the right one.”

She sat back, deflated, her world flipping upside down. “But your machine...”

“....went to you.” he answered.

She slowly came around to her new perspective. “So you’ve been... guessing?”

“Mostly, yes.”

“So the person I know is...?”

“Presumably me if we do go ahead with things, but at the same time, not. Tonight is obviously different, and so will every other day. I’d say it’s 80% correct, generally speaking, but that 20% of not being connected to my linear time could.... skew things.”

“So we have to do everything over again?” her voice was louder than she intended. Her friends noticed something was up.

He sighed. “I guess that’s all the time we have today.”

“What?” she said.

“Your.. our friends. Don’t you think they already know about the Time Travel?”

She hadn’t given it much thought, but it made sense. They had been to other first dates, but didn’t mention as much, but no sense having chaperones if they didn’t cover all the angles. It was why she didn’t reach out to him remotely. She didn’t want things on the public record. Which wasn’t entirely true either.

The friends came over and joined the two. The conversation shifted, there was the unspoken secret in the air, but nobody wanted to jump in with how much they knew and when.

He laughed at it all. “I’m a bit tougher to anticipate when it’s not just a two prompt answer AI isn’t it?”

That seemed to cut the tension. The future trips she was on had to have a number of variables fudged, and his place in it was one of them.

One friend spoke up. “I’m not sure it’s wise to...”

He quickly jumped in. “I haven’t said anything serious, and unless you explain and confirm it, I don’t really know, now do I?”

The friends did a look between each other and realized they’d have to bring their A game, and not just react.

The same one spoke again. “Right, I’ll assume he’s said he hasn’t seen the .. a ... future yet.”

He nodded. “So this is a blank slate rather than a hit the gates kind of test.”

“It means you won’t remember this either.” She said having heard what that phrase meant before. Happy that they had pulled him out of time correctly, but they had failed his test again.

“Have you figured out when I want to be pulled from yet?” he said, choosing his words carefully.

Her friends figured he wanted to hit the ground running, be in a situation and just go with the flow. The flow is what kept the clone running. This time they tweaked things to make it a little more open ended.

“You don’t. You want us to come to you.”

“Exactly.” he faded out instead of jumping away.