Page 28 of The Déjà Glitch

“Nice to meet you,” she said with a smile. They shook hands and his grip was cool and comforting when he placed his other hand atop their clasp. The instant warmth Gemma felt toward him made her wonder if they had shaken hands before and she didn’t remember.

The thought reminded her that she wasn’t only beingintroduced to Jack’s family friend but was in fact there to meet him for an explanation of a wildly implausible situation.

“Have we met before?” she asked, directing the question at Jack.

Dr. Woods smiled at her before turning to Jack for an answer as well.

“No. This is the first time,” Jack said.

“Ah, well then! It is a true pleasure to meet you, Gemma,” Dr. Woods said with another squeeze of her hand.

She realized like a kick to the head that Dr. Woods bought into it. Jack hadn’t only brought her there for a theoretical explanation; he’d brought her there because Dr. Woods was on his side.

“You believe him, don’t you?” she said with no attempt to hide her own disbelief at the fact.

“Completely,” he said with as much conviction as Jack.

Gemma looked around the room at all the precise instruments, the stacks of printed research, the intimidating equations. It was entirely incongruent with what she was hearing.

“But you’re a scientist.”

Dr. Woods chuckled. His bushy brows rose and gave his face an easy, open expression. “But what is science if not studying the unbelievable until we find enough evidence to believe in it?”

The profound statement burst like a little bomb in Gemma’s mind. She glanced at Jack.

He shrugged one shoulder and nodded.

“And that’s what you think all this is?” Gemma asked Dr. Woods. “Evidence?”

“Indeed.” He used his large hands to gently guide her to a stool at the workbench. He moved with such fluid motion, Gemma wondered if he used to be a dancer. “When Jack called me this morning to tell me he had woken in the same day he had been living—how many times is it now, Jack?”

Jack folded his arms and stroked his chin, looking like he might not want to confess the number. “One hundred and forty-seven by my count.”

Gemma was glad she had sat down.

One hundred and forty-seven times?She did quick math to know that was almost five months.

Her head spun.

Dr. Woods carried on as if it were no big deal that they had been running in place for so long. “Right. One hundred and forty-seven times. The first thing I asked was how many times we had had the conversation that we were having at that moment.” He glanced at Jack. “One hundred and thirty, he told me. One hundred and thirty times he had called me to tell me it was the same day he had lived before.”

“It took me about two weeks to realize I needed help,” Jack chimed in. He picked up one of the devices on the workbench. Something narrow with spindled arms that looked like a skinny spider.

Gemma was gaping at Dr. Woods. “And you believed him right from the start?”

He held out a hand signaling Jack to answer again because of course he would not remember, given that his memory was erased each time the day started over.

“He did,” Jack confirmed. “If only everyone were so easy to convince.” He shot her a playful smirk.

Gemma smirked back, if only halfheartedly. She had to admit, an authority like Dr. Woods was a solid point in the win column for Jack. But there was still a chance he was just a kooky old man Jack had put up to the ruse.

Gemma folded her arms and arched a brow. “Okay, then. Explain it to me. Give me evidence to believe.”

Dr. Woods’s face lit up with a smile. He gently touched her shoulder to spin her stool to face the whiteboard before he purposefully walked across the room, his lab coat billowing out behind him. He used his sleeve to clear a streak in the jumble of equations without thought. Gemma wondered if he had them all memorized. He uncapped a green marker and drew a line across the blank space.

“Time is only linear because that is how we perceive it. And we’ve built our world around that understanding. We have schedules and routines. We live and die by time, literally. We can’t go back, only forward. We think of it like a track that is fixed, in place and unchangeable, and each of us joins it and leaves it when our life, the life we are conscious of, starts and ends.” He drew tiny tick marks along the line. Then he turned around and held out his hands like he was about to do a trick. “But time is a convention. We made it up.”

He strode back across the room and lifted one of the spinning objects off the workbench. The small purple globe the size of a softball rotated inside a set of gold axes attached to a metal ring surrounding it all. It stood on a small pedestal. “Because our perception is limited by our own invention,” he said, and flicked one axis to set it spinning one way, “we cannot say without doubt that ‘forward’ is the only direction time flows.” He flicked the other axis to sendit rotating in the opposite direction. The globe inside spun in a third direction, creating a beautiful blur of precise movement. He handed it to her, and she felt the pull of the object spinning in all directions at once but doing so in balanced harmony.

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