Free Extra Life by Derek Nikitas Page A

the world—me here, and another person there. Two bodies, wholly divided. But how could I be me if I wasn’t who I was anymore?
    “This is phenomenal,” Connie finally said.
    “But why did you tell him to come over here?”
    “Because—because that’s what we do—we walk to school,” he argued. But he wasn’t even convincing himself. I could virtually see the multiple bad outcomes springing in his head.
    Connie leapt to his computer and spread his fingers across the keys. The guy had a certified superpower for speed typing. In a flash, a website came up full of charts and graphs, with a twinkling star background. He scrolled through it all way too fast for a mental mortal like me.
    “Crappity crap,” he said. “There’s also the grandfather paradox to consider.”
    “Like ‘I’m My Own Grandpa?’” I asked.
    “No—well, maybe. I should’ve considered this before I called the other you, but there’s a theory that, if you were to actually travel back in time, then you definitely shouldn’t have any interaction with yourself.”
    “What could it do, cause a nuclear explosion?”
    “Probably not. Hopefully not. But if you alter events from your past, the future you come from won’t exist anymore. The memories in your head won’t be possible. Any little thing can cause a butterfly effect.”
    “Marty McFly disappears from his own family photo.”
    “Yes, like Spaceman from Pluto , except the divergence you’d cause would be way too complex to fix, and every fix would create more compounded divergences…”
    “So I’m screwed already, is what you’re telling me.”
    “You need to lay low, big time ,” he explained. “And I have to act just like I did yesterday. I have to pretend like you didn’t show up naked at my house this morning. I mean your yesterday.”
    “Connie, what’s going to happen to me?”
    He bit his lower lip, dropped his eyes. “I don’t know. But listen, tell me everything that happened between us in your yesterday, everything you and I said, and I’ll make sure things all turn out exactly the same. And if the Other Russ doesn’t know, he won’t do anything different, right?”
    “Yeah,” I said, unconvinced. And I would’ve rather swallowed tacks than tell Connie the Chronicle of Russ’s Worst Day Ever . Especially the part where my total assholery gave him a panic attack and put him in an ambulance. I couldn’t imagine deliberately shoving him into that blender again. It had to be some kind of international human rights violation.
    “You’re right,” Connie said, even though I hadn’t actually said anything. “I’m already compromised. How can I be natural if my whole frame of reference for reality has been changed? Time travel ! Right here, in my world, my life. I’m never going to be the old me again. I mean, unless this is your craziest April Fool’s ever.”
    “I wish.” We were a couple weeks too late for that. I tried to think through what other random chaos butterfly wings I might’ve set in motion. The people who saw me running in the buff down the street? They’d head off to work and talk about the downtown streaker instead of stock prices or whatever, and somebody would drop the ball and get fired and—and what about that maintenance worker? After catching me inside the fence, would he now remember to lock the gate—and, if so, how was the Other Me going to get in, and would Other Me also receive the take the leap text at 6:59?
    This was worse than mentally folding those blueprint boxes on aptitude tests.
    So I said, “Just, um, do what I tell you. I mean do what he tells you. The other one. Russ 2.0. He’ll guide you. Don’t over-think it.”
    “Russ 2.0? He’s not a software application, Russ.”
    “You don’t know that.”
    Connie wrenched at his hair so much it styled into an Einstein. Maintaining a sense of control was bad enough for him on a regular day. This could drive him nuts—or maybe, if his obsessive