Origin Point

Simon clicked the Initiate button on the app. Nothing happened.

“Is it running?” Victor asked.

“The light on the drive is green,” Simon replied, “and the software says it’s operational.”

“Looks like you lost your bet, Si,” Spencer said, dispirited. “We will have to send the numbers back ourselves, once they’re announced, then our past will change.”

“Maybe,” Simon said. “Or the multiverse theory is correct and another reality reaps the benefits while we go on as we were, penniless and miserable.” Spencer and Victor looked at one another with a shared melancholy, Simon had a terrible bedside manner. “Hang on a second, I’ll just check something.”

He brought up a file explorer window for the external drive. He checked the ‘Received’ folder and found a twenty-byte simple text file named ‘lottery.txt’. Simon opened the file, and the notepad application appeared on-screen. The text area contained six two digit numbers.

06 11 22 34 42 44

“How did that get there?” Simon pondered aloud. “I coded a pop-up notification for when we’ve received data, or at least, I thought I had.”

“Well, you can worry about that later, right now we have a ticket to buy,” Victor said, his mood instantly elevated.

They all looked at each other.

“It worked,” Spencer said, verbalising the leading thought on each of their minds.

“It worked,” Simon said. He became almost unrecognisable to Spencer and Victor, displaying a level of delight they had never before seen on his face.

“It worked!” Victor said and began jumping up and down on the spot with a childlike glee. He leapt onto Spencer’s bed and continued to jump. Spencer squealed and joined Victor on the bed; they all laughed and bounced together. Outside the room, Vicky listened, looking surprised and disgusted.

“We already have some fascinating information about how space-time works,” Simon said once their initial outburst was over. “The message did come through instantaneously, as we theorised, we didn’t have to wait until tomorrow’s lottery numbers were announced and send them back here. It’s a causal loop, which brings your bootstrap paradox into play, Victor.”

“Yeah,” Victor replied. “If we didn’t send these numbers back to ourselves, who did? Do we still need to do it, or are they from a version of us in a reality that has been replaced? If we don’t, would the numbers still stay in place on the drive?”

“I’d say they would,” Simon said. “Time could be like a whiteboard, you can draw a picture of a cat, erase it and draw a dog in its place, but once you do, you can’t bring back the drawing of a cat. You can try and recreate it, but it won’t be the exact same image. I think the numbers are the dog. Anything else would be paradoxical.”

“I guess so,” Victor said after a moment trying to get his head around the suggested paradox.

“We’ve raised more questions for ourselves than we’ve answered,” Spencer admitted. “There’s still a possibility that a timeline exists where we didn’t receive the numbers, the miserable, penniless reality that Simon had to bring to our attention. Or has that timeline been erased and replaced by the one we’re currently in?”

“You’re right, Spence,” Simon said. “We’re back to theories we have no way of proving.”

“Let’s put a pin in those questions for now and go get that winning ticket,” Spencer said, breaking their brief regression into non-elation.

“We can do that from here,” Victor said. “They sell them online.”

“I think I’d like a physical ticket that we can put in a frame,” Spencer replied. “This is going the be the beginning of something bigger than all of us.”

“Good point,” Victor smiled. “Let’s get in the car.”

Victor stepped away from the lottery counter and held the ticket up for the others to see.

“Give it to me, I want to touch it,” Spencer asked.

“If it weren’t coming from you, I’d have had a lot of fun with what you just said.” Victor gave her the soon to be winning ticket, she stared at it and grinned, then started another jig, hopping from foot to foot. A passing woman gave her a bewildered look, visibly confused as to why anyone would be so pleased with a pre-draw lottery ticket.

“Okay, who’s keeping it safe until tomorrow?” Victor asked. “It’s either me or you, Spencer. If we give it to Simon, it will be accidentally lost, shredded or burned within minutes.”

“Can’t argue with that,” Simon admitted.

“Someone has to sign the back too. Who’s getting the honour there? It will be on the ticket permanently.” Victor said.

“Let’s draw straws,” Spencer said. “I’ll look in my bag for something we can use.”

A few minutes later, she held out her fist, three strings protruded from between her thumb and forefinger and dangled down the back of her hand.

“Okay, so the one with the black marker on the tip is the winner.”

She held the fist out to Victor, her other hand wrapped around it, keeping the contents fully covered and out of sight. Victor picked a string and pulled upward until the newly unwrapped tampon squeezed out from within Spencer’s hands. The trio checked the cotton cylinder.

“No mark. Simon?” She offered the remaining strings to him.

He selected a strand and pulled out the attached tampon. There was a definite black mark on the rounded end opposite the cord. Passing shoppers were once again given the opportunity to be perplexed, this time by the sight of a chubby adult male whooping and swinging a tampon in the air.

“I’m just happy that you found the black marker,” Victor said, the first marker to emerge from the bag had been red.

Victor picked up a pen from the lottery desk and passed it to Simon. Spencer handed him the ticket, and he carefully signed the back.

“Phew,” he said, “I was worried I might have signed the wrong name.”

“How? Who’s name would you have signed?” Victor asked, with a confused laugh.

“I don’t know, I’m just nervous. Want to draw again for who gets to keep a hold of it?”

“Nah, that’s fine, give it to Spencer. We can keep it with the machine once we’re back at hers, anyway.”

“Okay. Now we just wait for tomorrow’s draw, then once it’s official a winning ticket, we call the number on the back to get it verified. I’ve been reading up on it, they give you a call back the day after, then send someone round to your house to deal with the transfer. I presume they’ll be with us on Monday.”

“We’re probably the first people to actually make plans for that before the draw,” Victor said.

“I don’t know, there are some crazy people out there. Crazy and optimistic. Some people can take the Law of Attraction way too literally.” Spencer said.

“We’re bending the universe to our will right now unless our future selves are playing a really unfunny prank on us. The Law of Attraction is no longer purely philosophical.”

“Slow down, Victor,” Spencer said. “You have plenty of time to develop a God complex.”

“For I am transformed! I have left the mortal plane behind me! In truth, I have risen above the mantle of godhood!” Victor said with maniacal glee, followed by the obligatory muahahas.

“Okay, Titan, simmer down.”

Simon handed the ticket to Spencer, and she folded it into her purse, which she placed in her bag.

“Alright, now that’s all sorted, let’s get back to that wine,” Spencer said.

The trio had resettled in the living room of Spencer’s flat and partaken in a celebratory drink or two, of which they were now feeling the effects. Spencer and Victor had melted into the sofa while Simon lay back in a reclining chair by Victor’s side. Simon was equally tipsy, despite only having a few sips from his champagne glass. Vicky was in her bedroom, so they were trying to talk quietly about their plans for the winnings.

“Well, renovation of the warehouse is a priority, since it’s going to be our base of operations,” Simon said. “Then, once our wages are paid, everything else should be poured back into the drive project.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Victor said. “Fixing the warehouse won’t be cheap, especially since we need to expedite the work, but our wages will be negligible. How much will we have left? Our prototypes might be expensive to produce.”

“Well, the jackpot is an eight point eight million roll-over, but we don’t know how many winners there’ll be, so we can’t finalise budget. Maybe we should have sent that information back from the future.” Spencer said.

“We could still do it,” Victor suggested.

“Well, yeah we could, but what difference would it make? The other winners have most likely already bought their tickets, and even if they haven’t, it’s not like we could force them to choose losing numbers. I’m sure we can wait a day before we have to set out a financial plan.” Spencer said.

“Right, we can’t — and probably shouldn’t — cheat anyone out of their win, but we can add an extra winner. If we buy another ticket, our share will increase. Plus we get to test the drive again, and that’s fun.” Victor said.

“Isn’t that getting greedy? We’re still cheating someone out of a portion of their win.” Spencer asked.

“In for a penny, in for a pound,” Victor replied. “Besides, what are they going to do with their share? Squander it on extravagances? Ours will be used for the betterment of the human race. Even in the unlikely event that they give their entire win to charity, what we have planned could eventually render those charities redundant anyway.”

“Okay,” Spencer said resignedly, knowing any argument from her wouldn’t win out in the end.

“I’ve made a note of the time,” Simon said. “If we’re set on sending that message, it should already be on the drive.”

“We sure are,” Victor said. “Let’s do this.”

With a slight alcohol-induced wobble, Victor detached himself from the sofa and headed to Spencer’s bedroom. Once there, he used the trackpad on the laptop to open the Received folder and, sure enough, he found a new file with the name winners.txt. Victor opened the file with a double-click, and the notepad once again appeared on-screen.

There are two winners, including ourselves.

Victor performed a double fist pump and mimed a yes as Spencer and Simon entered the room then read the message. They joined his celebration, Spencer trying to appear more nonchalant about it. This meant a win of over four million for them.

“Okay, what if we sent this message back to this afternoon?” Victor asked. “It took a few seconds to find the numbers because the pop-up failed, so we won’t notice anything amiss when there are extra files. What do you think will happen to our present if we get this information early?”

“I presume that this conversation will never have happened,” Simon said, “and we’d be back in the living room, having never had a reason to come here in the first place.”

“We also won’t have learnt anything,” Spencer said. “For experimental purposes, it will be a wasted exercise.”

“That’s something we’ll have to change for future messages,” Simon said. “Maybe some kind of versioning system so we can tell how many timelines we’ve created. It can’t be automated as the computer will be no better than we are at differentiating one timeline from another, so we’ll have to agree on a format for manual input.”

“In the meantime, we could add a postscript to our new message, letting our past selves know what’s new. You know what would be interesting? Can the drive handle sending videos back yet?” Spencer asked.

“The entangled photons send information faster than the speed of light, so I should think so,” Simon replied. “The only limitation is on the physical hard disks and how quickly they can write. They’re solid state, so they’re fast but not as fast as the photons. The video will appear on the drive slightly after the new text file, and hopefully before we find the numbers.”

“Okay, so if we make a video message about the change to the timeline, we can send it back to ourselves, and we’ll have a video diary from a reality that no longer exists. There are some cool experimental applications after all.”

“Excellent,” Simon said, calling up the laptops webcam software.

After they had made their video, Simon selected it, along with a file named winners.txt and chose a destination time that was one second after they had received the lottery.txt file. He clicked the on-screen button marked ‘Send’.