Chapter 76: Book 2 Chapter 6.1: Butterfly Affected

Freddy Frizzle handled the capacitor with the utmost care. Had any robots been available, he would’ve entrusted the delicate component to their unshaking mechanical grip rather than his decidedly less stable hands. But he made do with what he had, and so far he had done well. He only had one more capacitor to lay in place before his new quantum computer was complete.

Or so he thought. The universe, specifically Derek, had other ideas. The amateur looper barged into Freddy’s workshop with a loud shout, causing the skittish scientist to nearly jump out of his shoes. His panicked tremor caused the delicate computer component to slip out of his hands, and though he desperately tried to catch it, it crashed into the ground and shattered. He restrained a cry of frustration. Parts were replaceable, after all.

“Yo, Frizz-man!” Derek shouted. “We need to grab your anti-matter isolator real quick, it’s cool if we borrow it right?”

“What? No it is not!” Freddy snapped back. “That device is incredibly expensive and difficult to operate safely!”

“Well, I mean, we kind of need it,” Derek said. “Harley sent me to grab it.”

Freddy finished sweeping up his shattered capacitor and let out a heavy sigh. Harley had proven herself a courteous and reliable steward of valuable scientific implements in the past -on top of Freddy’s infatuation with her. But Harley wasn’t here to passively woo him; it was only Derek, with whom Freddy was significantly less enthralled. While the fuzzy scientist had a longstanding friendship with most of the loopers, Derek was more interested in exploiting that relationship than participating in it.

“Tell her to text me, and I guess,” Freddy said.

“I’m kind of in a hurry so let’s just skip that part,” Derek said. He grabbed the hourglass-shaped device and tucked it under his arm. Freddy let out a yelp of distress and then rushed to put himself between Derek and the door.

“Stop, you can’t just take that!”

“You’d let Harley take it, and Harley sent me to get it,” Derek said. “I’m just cutting out the middle man. Speaking of, you’re in the middle, man.”

Derek reached up and pushed Freddy aside. After nearly stumbling, Freddy regained his balance and latched on to the antimatter isolator.

“Look, Derek, I barely get away with lending Harley all that stuff, and the professors all like her! You’re a freshman, they don’t know you, I- I- we could both get in serious trouble if you just take stuff!”

“Listen, don’t worry about it, nobody’s even going to remember any of this. Actually, you won’t remember any of this either, so..”

Derek gave Freddy a light kick in the leg, and the pain caused Freddy to stumble and lose his grip on the antimatter condenser yet again. He did not let the pain deter him from responsible scientific practices, though, and was soon doing his best to impede the increasingly exasperated Derek yet again.

“Look, dude, just give up, we’re in a time loop anyway,” Derek snapped.

“A time- what?’

Freddy stepped back for a moment as the enormity of the statement hit him.

“Yeah, a time loop. Every day the school blows up or everybody’s bones get five inches longer or something weird like that,” Derek said. “And then time loops back to that morning and me and Harley and the rest of the guys got to stop that thing from happening the second time around because we’re the only ones that remember.”

Freddy’s green eyes raced back and forth as he recalled dozens of seemingly inexplicable incidents, suddenly rendered explicable. When he applied the framework of temporal recursion, suddenly all the pieces started to fall together.

“So this is the first loop, and you’ll just forget everything that happened and it’ll be like I never borrowed this thing in the first place.”

“But...if you have to actively interfere with the progression of events, doesn’t that imply all of us are just repeating the exact same decision and actions we made on the first ‘loop’?”

“Yeah, that’s pretty much how it goes,” Derek said. “Now can I take this thing or what?”

Freddy stared blankly at nothing before shrugging with a manic giggle.

“Haha, sure, why not? Why not? Why fucking not? None of this matters!”

“That’s the spirit,” Derek said. “See you on the other side, Frizz.”

Derek gave a lazy salute and wandered away, with the antimatter isolator carefully tucked under his arm. Freddy wandered back into the depths of his workshop, surrounded by some of the most advanced technology on the planet. With the technology at his fingertips, Freddy Frizzle could shred atoms, bend space, even turn Newton’s Laws of Motion on their head. But stuck in this meaningless, doomed timeline, he couldn’t make any decision, or take any action, that mattered.

Freddy’s eye started to twitch.

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“Alright, there you go,” Vell said. “That should be enough anti-ice cream for everyone.”

After elaborately jury-rigging the antimatter isolator to a common ice cream maker, Harley and Vell had managed to make enough anti-ice cream for all the Antimatter Dimension entities who had been displaced into the prime matter plane of existence. Placated by the infinitely hot treats, the Antimatter entities were much more cooperative with Lee and Kim’s effort to herd them into the portal back to their own layer of existence. Eventually the last ethereal being disappeared, and Lee swiftly shut the portal behind them.

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“Thank goodness that’s done with,” Lee said. “Is there any anti-ice cream left?”

“No, but we could make more,” Vell said. “If that were a good idea, which it’s not.”

“No, but I kinda understand the temptation,” Harley said. “Those little ghosty bastards did make it look good.”

“Matter anti-matter reactions: On contact, all involved particles would either briefly combine into a combined form referred to as protonium, or else destroy each other in a burst of conflicting energies,” Kim said matter-of-factly. “Neither seems like a good way to go.”

“Yeah, I’ll stick to vanilla,” Hawke said.

“Maybe we can get some protonium sprinkles,” Harley joked.

“We should definitely get some ice cream now, though,” Vell said. All present, except for Derek, nodded in agreement.

“I got other things to do,” Derek said. He waved them off and slinked away towards his own unseen objectives

“Okay, more ice cream for us,” Hawke said. “And I need a hell of a lot of ice cream.”

“That you do, bud,” Harley said. “Good job keeping it together with the antimatter entities, by the way. You only screamed a little when you noticed their skin was a window to a nightmarish alternate reality where everything we know is twisted and malformed.”

“Don’t remind me,” Hawke whimpered, as he marched towards the dining hall a little faster. He was first in line to purchase his dessert, with the rest of the group filing through the line, and back to their usual table, over time. Kim sat down last, and waited for a moment, letting everyone else start eating before she gave her cone a single, hesitant lick. She almost immediately recoiled from the frozen treat.

“What’s the matter, you get the wrong flavor or something?”

“No, it’s just -it’s very cold,” Kim said.

“That’s...the point,” Vell said. “It’s ice cream. Have you never had ice cream before?”

“No. Extreme temperatures are generally considered an unpleasant sensation,” Kim said. “Vell, you said you dislike the cold. Why do you enjoy eating this?”

“Because, I, uh, like the sweetness more than I dislike the cold, I guess,” Vell said. “So it’s worth it.”

“I see,” Kim said, as her brow furrowed. She gave the ice cream another hesitant lick, and seemed more amenable to the icy texture. While she dug into her vanilla cone, Harley worked on her scoops of strawberry and made conversation between mouthfuls.

“You know, not that I’m complaining,” Harley said. “But it’s kind of weird that we’re all alive.”

“Don’t jinx us,” Hawke demanded. “Or at least do it after I’m done with my ice cream.”

“It’s just sort of odd, you know,” Harley said. “Usually at least one of us bites the dust..”

“Odd, but not impossible,” Lee said. “We should make the most of it. Perhaps take to the beach.”

“I’ve never been swimming,” Kim said. “That would be nice.”

“Never?”

“Not once,” Kim said. “Do you know how to swim, Vell?”

“Of course. I’ll teach you how.”

They started making eyes at each other, and everyone else started to look away. Hawke cut off their strange flirtations before they started.

“You know, I’m actually a qualified swim instructor,” he said. “Not to knock Vell, but I could probably-”

Hawke cut himself off when he saw the withering glare shot in his direction from both Vell and Kim.

“So as I was saying,” Kim began. “Vell-”

“Vell!”

Kim let out a grunt of frustration as a scrawny young man dashed in their direction. The veteran loopers recognized Luke, though Hawke and Kim had yet to be introduced to Vell’s former roommate.

“Oh hey, Luke,” Vell said. “You two didn’t get to meet the other day, Luke, this is-”

“No time to meet your girlfriend, Vell,” Luke snapped. “You guys got to help, Freddy’s gone mad.”

“Freddy?” Harley scoffed. “Is he like, asking out a girl, or-”

“He’s trying to build an electroweak force synthesis device!”

“Right. That...sounds bad…” Hawke said. He had the innate vibe of terror, but he couldn’t quite understand why. Neither did anyone else.

“Yes, for the sake of discussion, Luke dear, what exactly would that do?”

“Tuned to appropriate the appropriate power? It would negate the strong nuclear force.”

The table stared at him as one.

“No physicists here, huh?” Luke said. “Okay. The strong nuclear force is like the glue that holds subatomic particles together. The electroweak interaction is pretty complex, but for our purposes it’s basically the acetone that dissolves the glue that holds the atoms together. Freddy’s sort of trying to melt the universe.”

“What the fu- Why?”

“I don’t know, he was ranting about endurantism and the illusion of free will,” Luke said. “He sounded completely insane.”

“Insane by normal standards or by our standards?”

“By our standards,” Luke said.

“Oh that’s bad,” Harley mumbled.

“And during these rants did he mention time a lot?” Lee asked.

“Yes.”

“Wonderful. If you’ll excuse us, Luke, we do need to have a chat with a friend of ours,” Lee said. “Do try and keep Freddy distracted. We just need to confirm something first.”

“Okay. That’s a plan, sure, I’ll just...distract him.”

“Good luck, we’ll be there soon,” Lee said.

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Harley all but knocked the door off it’s hinges as she barreled through.

“Derek!”

The man in question scrambled to shuffle around the papers on his desk, clearly in an attempt to hide something. Vell filed that suspicious behavior away to be reviewed later. They had a very pressing matter to handle right now.

“What- why, what’re you guys doing here?”

“Did you tell Freddy about the time loops?”

The angry faces staring down at him made it clear to Derek that he had, perhaps, done something, wrong. He decided on his course of action very quickly.

“No.”

“Derek! Lee knows a truth spell and I know how to kick you in the balls,” Harley said. “Last chance. Did you tell Freddy about the loops?”

Derek weighed his options. While a truth spell was a difficult undertaking that was very unlikely to succeed, Harley kicking him in the nuts was both very easy and, from the look on her face, very likely.

“Okay, okay, yeah, I did,” Derek said. “He was being stubborn about his antimatter whatever thingy and I thought it would get him to give it up faster.”

“And did you completely forget what we told you about Butterfly Effect Psychosis?”

There were only three major rules to life in the loops, and the most important was to never let a non-looper know about the time loops. The idea that they were trapped in a time loop they had no control over invariably drove even the most mentally stable people completely insane.

“No,” Derek lied. He had very much forgotten. “I mean, what, Freddy’s going to be a bit loopy for the next couple hours?”

“Oh yeah, no big deal, Freddy’s just a wee bit off his rocker,” Harley said mockingly. “Except for that tiny little detail where he has access to all the world’s most advanced and dangerous scientific equipment and is now trying to melt the universe!”

“What the fuck?”

“You made him crazy, now he’s doing crazy shit,” Harley said. “Now we got to go fix it!”

“Why? I mean, yeah, getting melted or whatever would suck, but it’s still got a time loop built in, right?”

“Matter, energy, and time are intertwined in ways we can’t understand,” Lee explained. “Maybe the time loop would correct Freddy’s efforts, maybe it wouldn’t. I, personally, am not willing to take that risk.”

“Yeah, I also like existing,” Hawke said. “I don’t know what having my subatomic particles drift apart would be like, but I’m willing to guess: unpleasant.”

“A decent assumption. Let’s get this done with,” Lee said.

“Come on, Derek, we got your mess to clean up,” Harley commanded.