I pulled myself together, brewed another cup of coffee since my first was now taking a trip to the wastewater treatment plant, and began the task of recalling as much as I could of the previous night. I had grown convinced that if I didn’t mirror my former future self’s actions perfectly, at least the actions that I saw, then there would be no hope of saving eternity. Fortunately, my interaction with myself was very brief: just a simple approach, a scream, and a quick retreat before my past self could even process what had happened.
I remembered specifically that there was quite a long line at Henry's HyperChicken™ Hut, and when I saw myself, I had only been waiting about five minutes, so there were probably still a dozen people in front of me. Unfortunately, I couldn’t quite pinpoint the exact timeframe since I didn’t actually purchase anything during my shopping trip and therefore didn’t get a receipt.
Still, I could tell from my Time-Ex™ 3000’s history menu that I appeared at the Bazaar’s entrance plaza at 5:14 pm, and I knew it took me roughly ten minutes to walk to Art™, where I attempted to purchase my Banksy replica replica. Assuming it took me about 25 minutes to find a sales associate, locate the piece, and then learn about the sad state of the paper shredder, that would put me at about 5:40 pm. With a five minute walk to the food court from there, I comfortably guessed that I’d make my appearance at Henry’s around 5:45, and I would finally meet myself around 5:50.
With so much approximation involved, I decided it would be best to probably arrive a little early, though I obviously couldn’t arrive too early, or I’d risk running into myself in the entrance plaza again, and that would compound this problem significantly. I mean, if one encounter is enough to tear apart the universe, I didn’t dare to consider the ramifications of two encounters.
In the end, I decided upon arriving at 5:30 pm, assuming that my Time-Ex™ 3000 would let me. From what I understood of the constraints placed on these watches, it should have sounded a small alarm and popped up with a warning, refusing to allow me to travel somewhere so close to where I already was in TimeSpace™. Instead, the delightfully dissonant tritone chime simply beeped once, twice, and thrice before resolving as the nuclear core of the Time-Ex™ gathered enough energy for a jump through TimeSpace™.
The sound of the final chime followed me as I hurtled through a personal wormhole, landing comfortably in front of the Bazaar.
While a trip through TimeSpace™ is never exactly comfortable, it had been some time since my stomach emptied on arrival. Alas, I suspect that my morning anxiety compounded with the standard nausea and caused me to once again wretch my coffee all over the pavement. Fortunately, the entrance plaza was designed with first time travelers in mind, so they had cleaners on staff to take care of the mess. I apologized profusely, assuring the automaton that this never happens to me, but they just smiled their preprogrammed smile and told me it was no trouble. I’m not sure if I believed them, but I didn’t have time to help clean up.
I darted into the massive complex and wound my way to the Section R17 food court, tracing steps that felt all too familiar today. Spotting Henry’s HyperChicken™ Hut in the same corner as it was when I was here later today, I found it simple to hide amongst the crowd. And so I waited.
And I waited.
And waited.
I checked the time, as it felt like I had been waiting for some time, and I realized with some dismay that I hadn’t checked the time when I arrived, so I might have just arrived too late, and I’d have to start all over while trying to avoid TWO versions of myself in his Gods-forsaken place, but no. The time read 5:40, so I still had 15 agonizing minutes to wait. Waiting to end the world. Or save it. I didn’t know, and I’d given up on caring about what happened. I just needed it to be over with.
So I waited.
And waited.
And waited.
Until a cold panic slithered slowly down my back and through my limbs, tickling like ice injected ice directly into the spine. The food court was so cavernous that thousands of people milled about constantly, and even though I thought I knew where I would appear, I quickly dreaded that I might simply miss myself entirely due to the size of the crowd. I checked my watch once more. It was 5:55, and my stomach lurched.
“How could I be late?” I nearly screamed in panic. “That doesn’t make any sense!”
Right, of course it didn’t.
“I was just estimating,” I reminded myself. “I was just guessing, and I don’t know how long I wandered, but I can’t have missed it. If I missed it, the world would be gone, remember?”
And so I waited.
And waited.
And waited.
I tried to reassure myself that I knew I had stood in the line at Henry’s for probably five minutes before I’d been approached by my present self, so I knew that I had to show up there soon. But why was I taking so long? It was already past 6:00, and my projections had put our meeting (my meeting?) at 5:50, but I was late, and that was… hard.
But it could have been worse.
At exactly 6:03 pm EST, I saw myself, clear as day through the thick of the crowd.