Future Perfect Tense

Some time and one emergency fire extinguisher later, we had adjourned to my kitchen. Nicky apparently still knew where everything was, and so by the time I had put out the blaze and done the immediately necessary cleaning to make sure nothing was permanently damaged, he had prepared tea. 

Just the right kind too - which was no small feat given the collection of assorted teas that I owned. I always joked that tea was the mother of invention, and had a particular favorite for nearly every mood or occasion. And he remembered. He remembered that when an experiment had failed, leaving me unhappy and stressed, I liked jasmine tea to calm down and recenter. So he had a cup of it waiting for me.

That adorably kind and thoughtful jerk.

“Thank you,” I said.

He smiled slightly and nodded, like it was just to be expected.

As I blew on the tea to cool it down, I looked him over again. It had been, what, three months since I last saw him? And that was more of his choice than mine. I never expected him to change so much in such a short timespan. It was like he really was trying to be someone entirely different than before. 

...And I liked who he was before. I missed my friend. I missed the slightly awkward, far-too-kind boy that I knew, who was totally clumsy and useless in the workshop, but endlessly positive and encouraging. I never needed someone to hand me wrenches or check my math on my new ideas. I needed someone who knew how to pick me back up after a difficult failure, who could encourage me to keep giving it my all. I needed someone who could convince me that my work was worth doing, and direct me into projects that would actually help people. His absence, more than anything, was why my workshop was full of aborted attempts at useless projects.

But I missed him outside of that, too. I missed movie nights together, sharing a blanket on the couch as we laughed together at some bad sci-fi film. I missed going out to eat at some run-down diner, where I’d expound at length on scattered scientific topics and he’d listen, somehow finding my rambling interesting. We had been really close once. And then, of course, I had fucked it up.

But I still felt like I could still see the old him buried underneath whatever new person this was now, too. He was dressed better, and clearly trying to put forward a different image, but… something in the way that his smile wavered when I looked at him made me think that there was something else under the surface.

This is why I was a bad friend. I should have been happy for him. I should have trusted in what he was telling me and how he was presenting himself, but because I wanted him to be someone different, I just couldn’t. I couldn’t let go of him. Even now, after he had made it clear where we stood, I was still daydreaming about the past, stuck in visions of us as kids, him following me around like a puppy dog.

I really was the worst.

“So,” I said, staring down into my cup of tea, “what did you want to talk about? You contacted me again for a reason.”

“Right.” He looked momentarily uneasy. “I need your help. I want to use the Decision Vision.”

“What?” I said, more sharply than I wanted. “But… I thought…”

One of his hands moved up to his head, in that one gesture of running his hands through his hair that he always did when he was bothered but wanted to play it off as nothing. But then, as he touched his shorter hair, he grimaced and his hand dropped back to his lap.

“I need answers,” he said plainly. “And I figured you’d still have it.”

A flash of guilt shot through me. Nicky was kind enough to leave the rest unsaid, and not mention our last conversation, when he had asked me to get rid of it. Yeah, I still had it.

The Decision Vision was both my greatest creation and worst mistake. It was the culmination of years of work on temporal probability. It all started one evening when I was eating pancakes with Nicky and rambling about parallel universe theory and he had offhandedly asked a question that really crystalised the whole concept in my head. I had practically dragged him back to my workshop to put it all together, and before we knew it, we had a machine that completely overturned all common knowledge about time and space.

Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t, like, a time machine. It just let you see a future. Emphasis on the ‘a.’ By providing a baseline divergence point, some kind of decision or universal fact that was different, it would allow a person to briefly see a vision of what existence would be like under those circumstances. 

And by ‘person,’ I meant ‘Nicky.’ That was the funniest thing about the whole project. I had gotten him to extensively help me in setting it up and testing it, and inadvertently I’d somehow managed to tune the whole system to him specifically as a reference point. It worked perfectly - but only if he was the one using it, and with visions getting more clear and helpful the closer the topic was to his own life experience.

Which made it a remarkable invention, but oddly useless on any larger scale. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t seem to generalize the technology or get it to work on myself or anyone else. So it was a novelty, a fun ‘what-if’ machine for my best friend. At least, until things went wrong.

I still sort of blamed the Decision Vision, though I kind of knew it wasn’t the machine’s fault. That was just an excuse so I didn’t have to blame the real person responsible: myself.

We started testing the machine by playing around with simple what-ifs to make sure the machine worked, and then veered into silly suggestions just for fun. And then, one day, right before we planned to start more robust testing, Nicky was no longer interested in it. It was as if something had changed, overnight. Before I knew what was happening, Nicky started to drift away. His constant presence in the workshop at my side, dwindled to him showing up once every few days, then once a week, then even more rarely.

That’s when I made the really huge mistake. Because I was terrified about losing him, I told him something that I really shouldn’t have. This was the guy who had stuck with me through everything, through my parents being divorced, through me dropping out of college. He’s the first person that I was actually able to come out to about being a lesbian, and he held me as I cried and told me it was okay and that someone out there would love me back.

That’s maybe what made it so bitterly ironic when I told him I was hopelessly in love with him. Maybe he thought it was just a cruel joke, or me being way too clingy while he was trying to establish some independence. I don’t know. Maybe my feelings were that, just overreactions from panicking about losing my best friend. Maybe. But no matter their source, I couldn’t help but feel them regardless. 

I just felt like I needed him in my life more than anything else. And the night that I told him that was the last time I saw him for three months.

But enough reminiscing. I forced myself back into the present moment, forced myself to look at Nicky with a steady expression. He was patiently awaiting my answer.

“What do you need to ask?”

“Look… just let me put it in. You don’t have to know.”

I shook my head. “I’ll help you. I’ll let you use the machine. But in return you have to tell me what you’re asking.”

Now his eyes skittered away from my gaze as he chewed on his lip. Finally, he spoke.

“Someone asked me out.”

“Oh.”

“Two someones, in fact.”

Something twisted in my stomach. I tried to be cheerful, make it a joke. “Oh, look at Mr. Popular over here!”

He flinched. “N-no, I just— I’m not sure how to deal with it. I’m not sure what the correct choice is.”

“Shouldn’t that tell you plenty already?”

He let out a sigh. “No. Because I know that sometimes I pass up things that would be good for me just because I’m scared to put myself out there. Someone smart told me that once.”

“I see,” I said, feeling my face grow warm. “Well, okay. Yeah. I owe you that much.” 

He looked up at me. “No, you don’t owe me anything, I just thought—” 

“Shh. Come on. Let’s go see your futures.”

...Even if some dark, disgusting part of me was secretly hoping that both of them turned out to be terrible.