Page 110 of One More Chance
"And you remember how you died in that life?"
He winced as if I'd struck him. Then he nodded.
"And you woke up here, in the past, but you retained all of those memories?"
"Twelve years' worth of memories," he said as we entered the breakroom.
"And those memories actually come true, just like you've lived them once already?"
"Almost always."
"And you don't call that time travel?"
"No."
"And why the fuck not?"
"Because," he said matter-of-factly, "my body died and I imagine Sloane cremated me, as were my final wishes. It was only my consciousness that woke up in this reality. My body did not 'travel through time' as you put it."
Frustrated, I shouted, "Then what the fuck do you call it, Charlie?"
He was silent as he moved about the breakroom, putting a pod in a fancy new capsule coffee machine, before he selected something with multiple shots of espresso. I sat at the tiny table and waited. Eventually, coffee in hand, he sat down across from me.
"What do I call it? Limbo? Hell? A parallel world? An alternate dimension? A mass hallucination? A communal dream vision bestowed upon us by an unknown and unknowable higher power? A glitch in the simulation," he shrugged. "Who knows? I don't, which means you sure as hell don't."
"Why do you say that?"
"Because you are an idiot, and I am not."
He said we are alone, so there won't be any witnesses if I strangle him to death here in the breakroom.
I practiced my deep breathing before I said, "Well, I might be an idiot, but I figured you out."
Charlie nodded. "That is true. I was not planning on telling you, but it seems that miracles do happen and you managed to piece it together on your own."
I ignored the insult and asked, "How long have you known we were… the same?"
That wry smile returned to his face before he said, "As soon as I met you, that night you and Sloane brought Rufus here."
"Bullshit."
Charlie laughed and shrugged. "Well, think about it, Levi. My consciousness had been awake in this version of reality for over a year by that point. Nearly everything that I remembered from my first reality was the same, unless it was something that I directly impacted or changed. Ergo…?"
He spoke to me as if he were a teacher coaxing answers out of a student. To my annoyance, given our current circumstance, that wasn't too far off the mark.
I stood up to go make my own damned coffee and said, "When we showed up here with Rufus, that was a thing that you didn't recall from your previous life… because it never happened in your previous life."
"I don't think of it as my previous life, but other than that? Yes."
I tried to process the implications of what this could mean, the how and why of it all, but one thing leapt out at me. "You said you had twelve years' worth of memories and that you woke up in this life over a year ago?"
He nodded.
"It was twelve years for me as well," I said as I popped a coffee capsule in the machine. "I died almost a year after you did."
"Huh," he took a sip of his coffee. "Interesting. How'd you die?"
"Car crash, not important. Why twelve years? What does that mean?"
