Time Bunny

I don't think I can properly explain this whole mess without explaining about my mom, and about how I was born. My mother is a metahuman, and she has two powers. She can make copies of herself, and she (and her copies) can shapeshift into any human or mostly-human form. You would think she'd become some kind of superspy or superhero or something else with "super" in it, but she's a writer, and doesn't like to fight. Most days she wakes up way too early, drinks a lot of tea, and spends the rest of the day alternately writing and napping.

Some metahumans have this thing about how their powers should only be used for the common good, but my mom just uses her powers whenever she feels like it. When I was in elementary school she'd have one of her copies walk me to and from school, and if she was pressed for time she'd send a second copy to buy groceries.

The thing about her is that she's not very good with people. She loves me a lot, and she has a bunch of really good friends, but if you force her to spend too much time around people, you'll see her get more and more irritable, until she locks herself in her bedroom and curls up into a ball for half the day. That's why growing up I spent a lot of time with my "aunts" and "uncles," some of whom were almost as much parents to me as she was. No matter how much she loves me, she needs breaks now and then. Sometimes I wish she would spend more time with me, but I've come to recognize the warning signs and back off in order to have better times with her when we come back together.

I'm explaining all of that because it'll help you understand why it is that I don't have a father in any conventional sense. My mom has never had a boyfriend at all (though I suspect she had a girlfriend at one point), and as far as I know never had any one-night stands or anything like that. She also didn't get artificial insemination, and I look too much like her to have been adopted.

It's embarrassing to say, but when she was younger she had no compunctions about using her powers for, shall we say, recreational purposes. (I suspect she still does that when I'm not around.) She can use her powers to have one of her copies be pretty much any kind of partner she wants. Normally she's very careful about using protection and stuff, but apparently one time, about 14 years ago, she messed up, and I was her happy accident. As a result, all of my genetic material came from her, though I haven't yet been able to get her to tell me what my "father" copy was like.

The metahuman ability to make copies of yourself usually involves creating some kind of energy projection, and the ability to change your shape is usually a biological thing. In mom's case, both seem to be some kind of specialized reality distortion power, like she's temporarily bending the world into a shape that includes another one of her. Having that potential redoubled may have something to do with why I'm not only a mutant, but have the power to travel through time. Mom hadn't seemed as surprised by that as everyone else, though it took a while for me to figure out why.

You might be wondering why someone as introverted as her would've gone through with the pregnancy and raising me. A couple years ago I was wondering about that too, and one day when I was particularly pissed off at her (that doesn't happen often, but it does happen) I asked her just that. Without saying a word, she took an old lock box down from a shelf by her computer desk, opened it, and handed me a note from inside.

The note was from her, from 14 years ago. It said, "I don't know if you're really who I think you are, or if you can do what I think you can do, but if I'm right, you'll get this note, and you'll be able to come visit me. Please come to the roof of the science building at my high school at 4:30 p.m. on April 14th, 2011. There's something very important I have to ask you."

She watched me carefully as I read the note. My stomach felt uncomfortable as I folded the note up, stuck it in my pocket, and made the time jump. I had gotten it right—my ability is very precise—but I still wasn't used to the disorientation of suddenly being in another time and place. I swayed, regained my balance, and looked up to see a younger version of my mom, looking up at me, startled.

"You came," she breathed. She came closer. "Thank you."

"What did you want to know?"

She looked down and put her right palm against her belly. "I just found out that I'm pregnant. What I really need to know is, is this… is this going to be you?"

This was directly at the heart of what I had been so angry about a moment ago (from my perspective). She looked vulnerable, and she looked like she didn't like herself all that much, but I decided to twist the knife a little. "What would you do if I said no?"

She took a deep, shuddering breath. "I really don't know."

"Would you put the kid up for adoption? Or get an abortion? I'm sure it's not too—"

"I don't know!" she cried. She wiped her eyes and sniffled. "I don't know what to do."

It wasn't the first time I'd said something that hurt her, but I don't think I've ever seen her look quite so helpless. "And what if I say yes?"

She took a few steps closer, and put a slightly damp hand against my cheek. Her lower lip quivered, but she smiled. "Then seeing you now, like this, and like the other day, beautiful and brave, shows me that if I try to do this I won't completely screw it up. Maybe I'm pathetic for needing it, but it would give me the strength to go through with this."

I looked at her as she quivered, as her eyes glistened with tears, and I hugged her without really thinking about it. She hugged me back, tightly, and started crying in earnest.

When I got back, she was flipping through old photos on her computer, pictures of the two of us. "Does that answer your question?" she asked hopefully.

"Um, yeah," I managed. "Does this mean that I'm going to visit you again a couple days before that?"

"You're going to save my life," she said evenly. "Twice."

I hugged her, and then rubbed my head. One thing I've learned since I started time traveling is that causality is actually really complicated and messy. (Mom uses the phrase "wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey," because parents are apparently required by law to say dorky things now and then.) My ability to time travel was responsible for me even being born, about three times over, though mom told me I should wait a while before I took care of saving her life, and do it when I had more training and such.

Anyway, that brings us to an event that I call the "Lunch Time War" in my head, and something along the lines of "that time when Derek was a total asshole and we almost broke the universe" out loud. As it turns out, I'm not the only time travelling metahuman out there. The thing is, the other one is a boy named Derek, and his mom actually has the same powers as my mom. The difference is that Jessica (or "Medusa" as they call her in the press) completely embraced the superspy stuff. The two of them went to the same school, and from what I can tell, Jessica was kind of hoping for them to be rivals (partly just so she could get mom to be the maid of honor at her wedding), but mom was never really the type to have rivalries. I'm not really sure how it all worked out, but I think she found out that my mom had given birth to a time traveler and decided she should try to duplicate it.

There's a thing you can do in time travel that my mom calls the Bill & Ted Maneuver (after a dumb 80s movie), where you decide that later on you'll time travel to set something up in the past to give you an advantage in the present. If that sounds confusing, well, you're not used to time travel, which is probably a good thing. If I forget my house keys and my mom isn't home, I just decide that later on I'm going to travel back in time and stick the keys under the doormat. When I lift of the doormat in the present, there are the keys where I'm going to leave them. And yes, causality can get a bit weird when you do that, but the universe can handle small stuff.

Anyway, I suspect Jessica basically used the Bill & Ted Maneuver to make sure her child would be a time traveler. On the one hand, my mom kind of did the same thing, really, but on the other hand, when she did it, it was more of a "now I know I can go through with childbirth" thing, not a "now I know you'll be useful to me" kind of thing. Jessica wanted to have access to the advantages of a loyal time traveler, but I don't know that she was all that into actually raising a child.

I met Derek for the first time (sort of) on our first school day at Ouroboros Academy, a relatively new school for metahumans. It had been my idea to go there. Mom had had mixed feelings about it, but I figured I needed proper training to avoid accidentally ripping the whole cosmos apart. And although it was a boarding school, it was only a couple hours away from home, rather than on the other side of the country. (Seriously, why is so much metahuman stuff concentrated on the east coast? Metahumans are pretty evenly distributed among the general population, which means there are a ton in California.)

Mom dropped me off at the main entrance to the campus, and, as I'd insisted, she just pulled up to the entrance and let me take care of the rest. Maybe I'm more like her than people realize, but I think I need some time away from her too. So, we hugged like usual, and I started off towards the dorm where I'd be staying, Anderton Hall.

The school was barely ten years old, and the buildings were still new and shiny. Anderton was a small all-girls dorm, a two-story building with a living tree growing in the entrance hall. My room was on the second floor, so I lugged my stuff up a flight of stairs. This wasn't easy, considering my stuff probably weighed twice as much as I did.

My roommate was already there. She turned out to be a Mexican-American girl named Natalie Lopez, though she'd already settled on Nemesis as her superhero name. Apparently she could fly and shoot lightning out of her eyes.

Once all that had tumbled out, she said, "What's your name?"

"Um, Alexis Clayton."

The room was quiet for a moment. "And what are your powers?"

"Oh, um, I can teleport." We had decided that my ability to time travel should be kept secret for the time being. At the time we were of the impression that I was the only time-travelling metahuman in the world, and although we were wrong about that, time travelers are still very rare. I can actually teleport most anywhere on the planet as long as I have at least a good mental image of it, but arriving at the exact same time as I left is hard for me. I've gotten into the habit of briefly time traveling somewhere else, and then jumping back to my "teleport" destination in the present.

"That's awesome! You're in good shape for someone who doesn't have to walk anywhere."

I have a slender build, and while the self-defense classes I've taken have helped, I'm not in that much better shape compared to the skinny little girl who got winded easily that I used to be. Luckily (sort of) my power taxes my head rather than my body. "I, uh, I'm still learning to use it accurately, so I don't want to do it too much until I get better at it."

"Yeah, I guess I can't blame you. You should've seen me when I first started learning to fly!" The room lapsed into silence for a moment, until Natalie said, "Oh!" and startled me. "Sorry, but when I got here someone had left this letter for you."

The envelope did indeed say "Alexis" on the front. The problem was that it was in my own handwriting, which meant that it was from my future self.

"Is it bad?" asked Natalie. "You're making a face that looks like it's something bad."

I opened the envelope and found a note inside that simply said, "3rd palm tree outside, 6 p.m. –A." I folded it up again. "Sorry, I totally forgot, there's a thing I need to take care of. I'll be right back."

"Need any help?"

"Nope!" I replied with a faked smile as I slipped out the door.

When I got to the requisite palm tree, I found another me was leaning against it. Future me hadn't felt any need to intervene in my past before, though I'd always known something like this could come along at any time. She looked like she was a year or two older, but had the same white hair and red eyes. (Did I mention I'm a weird albino with bunny ears?) I didn't recognize the dress she was wearing, though I liked it.

"Hey," said Future Alexis. "Trouble tomorrow."

I sighed. "What kind?"

"There's another time traveler. His name's Derek, and he's obsessed with us. I think he wants to either marry us or kill us." She handed me the messenger bag she was carrying. When I looked inside I saw some kind of ray gun. "It's a tachyon disruptor. It's complicated, but basically it cancels out certain kinds of metahuman powers. If someone like us or Derek gets hit with one, they won't be able to time shift for a few minutes, and if you hit someone while they're shifting in, it can actually knock them back to where and when they started from."

I shouldered the bag and tried to take it all in. "Okay. So what should I do?"

"He's going to make his move at lunch time tomorrow. We've got some things prepared, but mostly you just need to make it through this."

"Haven't you already experienced this as me? Don't you know exactly what I should do?"

"Wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey."

There was a flash of light and a burst of sound as another me, maybe a year older than the first future me, shifted in. "Hi guys. You just got up to wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey?"

"Yes," I and the older but not as much older me groaned in unison.

The older me held out some kind of device, about the size of an old cell phone. "Tachyon shield. It'll keep the tachyon gun from affecting you, but you need to smash it afterwards to keep the timeline from getting too wonky."

I looked at the little black device and frowned. "We're really Bill & Ted-ing the shit out of this, aren't we? Why is it just now that this has come up?"

"Because we've been doing a good job of stopping him. Unfortunately, lunchtime tomorrow is when everything winds up hitting the fan, and we're actually not sure how it's going to turn out."

"How is that even possible?"

Both of my older selves shrugged.

"You do understand how terrifying that is, right?"

"We understand perfectly," said the middle me, and meant it. "Something big is going to happen, big enough that it's messing up our memories of it."

"Anyway," said the oldest me, "Use the toys we gave you, remember as much as you can for the Bill & Ted, and stop to pet the cat." She shifted out before I or the middle me could ask what she meant.

"Do I really have to do this? I mean, are the next few years of my life going to be all about this time war crap?"

She hugged me, which was oddly reassuring. "You'll have some time to prepare tomorrow. Oh, and one last thing: it's convenient for us to treat time as fixed in some ways, but I don't think it actually is. I'm starting to suspect that however improbable, we always have free will."

And then I was standing outside by myself. I stuffed the shield thing into the bag, and headed back to the room. Natalie had just about set up all of her stuff. "So what was that all about?"

"A friend of mine dropped off some stuff for me."

"What kind of stuff?"

I hate to keep harping on stuff I learned from my mom, but there's an awful lot of that. As much as she doesn't like doing the superspy stuff, circumstances forced her to learn some of it. She helped me come up with a lot of the tricks I do with my power (albeit while making me watch lots of cheesy old time travel movies), and taught me stuff about how to mess with people, control information, and generally bend a situation to my advantage. That's probably why the next thing I said was, "Tell you what, come with me to lunch tomorrow and you can find out."

Natalie grinned. "Ooh! Cryptic! I am so in!"

We ended up having dinner together at a Chinese place just off of campus. Technically we could've just gone to the cafeteria, but Natalie really wanted to celebrate starting at Ouroboros. She told me all about her family—which was extensive and actually from El Salvador—and the friends she'd left behind in Fresno (which she admitted to being glad to have escaped). I told her a bit about my mom, but mostly let her talk.

The next morning I had barely gotten out the door when another Alexis—this one the same age as me and wearing the same clothes—handed me an envelope. She said, "Just put it in your bag for now. You'll know what to do," and then vanished.

The summer heat still lingered enough to get the temperature past 70 degrees by the time I'd made it to my first class, which was English. I all but slept through it. My schedule called my second class "Directed Study," and when I got to the room I found myself alone with a middle-aged woman with glasses, dressed in a blouse and skirt. There were two sofas facing each other with a table in between.

She stood up and shook my hand. "Hello, you must be Alexis. I'm Monica Brantley."

"Uh, hi. So what am I doing here?"

"Basically, this is your time travel class. I'm a teleporter and an expert in dimensional physics, so I'm about the best you'll be able to get until we learn more about your abilities."

I sat down opposite her. "Okay. Do you have any idea if paradoxes can happen for real?"

"That's, er, an interesting question to throw out right off the bat. Since you're the only time traveler we know of, I was planning to do some very simple and careful experiments to test the limitations of that. Which reminds me." She reached into a pocket and pulled out an envelope.

Before she could say anything, I put it on the table and pulled the same envelope out of my backpack.

She took it, looked at it, then at me. "You already…?" She opened the envelope and read aloud, "'I don't really go in for theatrics. Let's get started for real.' Alexis, I—"

"Sorry. Future me gave it to me to hand back to you this morning. That's a Double Bill & Ted. Look, there's something more important going on."

Monica put the envelope and note down again. "You have my undivided attention."

"Last night future me showed up twice over and said that there's another time traveler, a boy named Derek, who's going to make my life hell, and everything is supposed to come to a head today at lunch time."

She took a deep breath. "We really don't know what we're dealing with here. But two time travelers, each manipulating events in an attempt to gain the upper hand over the other? If time travel can damage the structure of the cosmos, we're getting into some very dangerous territory."

I pulled out a notepad and wrote down, "Visit Monica's office to explain time war crap," and then the date and time, and put it away.

A future me appeared almost immediately. She was wearing a red T-shirt that overemphasized her/my eyes. "Hi, Monica."

Monica rubbed her temples. "Is this going to happen a lot?"

My future self thought about it for a moment, and then said, "Yes. And I'm very grateful for all the help you're going to provide."

"So, what do we do about this whole situation?"

Future Alexis pulled out a large sheet of paper and set it down on the table, covering up both envelopes. It looked like some kind of map, but I couldn't make heads or tails of it. "This is my attempt to map out what's gone on in our little time war. Red is me, blue is Derek. An X is where one of us cut off a course of action of the other."

There were a lot of Xs.

We all peered at the map.

"'Derek attempted to poison Monica,'" Monica read aloud. "'Replaced poison with something harmless.' Well, thank you for stopping the little bastard from killing me, but… what's this?"

Monica pointed at a big oval in the middle of the map, which had a big question mark and "Lunch Time War" scribbled below it. Dozens of lines pointed to and from it. Future me sighed. "Each line represents one instance of me or him coming into the event today or leaving it. But I've consulted with myself at several points in the timeline, and none of us can clearly remember what happened."

"That's not very reassuring," said Monica. "It suggests some kind of distortion or break. We could well expect the whole space-time continuum to unravel during this confrontation. It seems like you've already got causality shot to hell." She turned to me and added, "And you're being really quiet."

"I remember this part," said future me. "And there's nothing she could say that I don't already know."

"Then can we skip to the end of this conversation?" I asked.

She shrugged. "We aren't able to really come up with anything at this point. Either there's no solution, or we'll have to wing it and see what happens. Not fighting Derek isn't really an option, because without us to stop him he'll do a whole hell of a lot worse, and at this point we can't get near him in the past without him using time travel to stop us. The same goes for his mom, and we can't go back far enough in time to get any further back in his family tree, though fortunately neither can he."

We wound up spending the rest of the hour going around in circles, and didn't accomplish much besides filling Monica in on more of the details. I finally just headed out, and my cell phone rang just as I was out the door. It turned out to be Natalie. I knew this because her name and phone number had been entered into my phone at some point.

She sounded nervous. "Um, so, like, this girl who said she was you from two years in the future called me said I should stay away from the cafeteria today. She said some things that made me pretty sure she's either real or a really good spy, and either way I don't want to piss her off…"

"It's okay," I said in the kind of tone mom would've used. "I've got this."

"So is it really you from the future?"

I pulled out my notepad and wrote down, "Persuade Natalie that it's really me" and the time and date. I heard my own voice greet her, and then Natalie said, "Um, I guess I should go."

I dropped the proper version of Monica's note off with myself of that morning, and started towards the cafeteria. A lot of people seemed to be watching me, and one or two called my name and cheered. I was not liking how this was going.

When I was coming around the side of the music building to the path that would take me directly to the cafeteria, I spotted a cat. He was a rather ordinary mackerel tabby with a blue collar, and when I bent down a little and held out my hand, he came closer, sniffed at my hand, and then tried to rub the side of his head against my fingers. I scratched at the cat's head, and he started to purr.

A handsome middle-aged man in a black suit strode closer and smiled. "So that's where Spike got to. Good thing he didn't get far."

I carefully picked up the cat. "He's yours?"

The man nodded, and held out his hands. "Yes. He's still adjusting to this place, and tries to get out sometimes. I'm Daniel by the way. Daniel Redding."

"Alexis Clayton. Wait, you're the principal?"

He looked at me for a moment, then took the cat and smiled. "And you're Erin Clayton's daughter."

"Um, yeah."

"How is she?"

I never know how to answer that question. I shrugged. "Same as ever. I, uh, I'd better get going."

He nodded. "Of course. But stop by some time."

I knew that my future self had told me to stop to pet the cat, but I'd been expecting to duck under a death ray or something. I wandered off in a daze.

When I got to the quad outside the cafeteria, it was lined with spectators, but otherwise empty. I tried not to think too hard about how this had happened. A boy about my age with raven-black hair and intense ice-blue eyes glared at me.

I walked closer to him. "I guess you're Derek?"

He nodded. "About time you showed up, Alexis."

"Do we really have to do this? I mean, I don't know anything about you, much less want to be your enemy."

"It's already happened. All that remains is to fight this one final battle to see who is the greater time traveler."

Some people in the crowd cheered, and that's when I noticed that a bunch of them had signs praising one or the other of us, as though this was going to be some kind of pro-wrestling match or something.

"I'm really starting to hate time travel," I muttered.

Six copies of me materialized. "You don't know the half of it," said one of them.

Everything seemed to just happen at once. In an instant the quad was full of Alexises and Dereks, and more of us kept doing things from the crowd, the rooftops, or wherever. I saw tachyon disruptor blasts flying everywhere, and here and there more dangerous stuff, though the laser beams, slugthrowers, and so on always seemed to turn out to have been sabotaged.

I couldn't even properly take it in, and for a little while I just stood there. The original Derek stared at me.

An energy blast hit me in the side, but I just saw an unpleasantly bright shimmering flash across my vision.

"A tachyon shield," Derek growled. "Where did you get that?"

"Derek, please," said one of the other mes. "You don't have to do this. You don't have to be your mother's weapon. You can choose what you want to do with your life!"

He glared at each of us. "Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!"

I finally decided I'd had enough. I strode over to him, ducking here and there to avoid the worst of the melee, until we were only a few feet apart. "What the hell is the point of all this? Because it sure as hell wasn't my idea!"

Derek reached into his pocket and pulled out a gun. It wasn't some wacky gadgeteer energy weapon, just an ordinary pistol that shot lead bullets. He pointed it right at me, and I knew I had to start getting serious. I jumped back a few seconds to stand behind him, but another Derek was right in my way. I tried again from a few different angles, and he blocked me each time, until I pulled out my own tachyon disruptor and blasted him as he was materializing. It was from an odd angle, but I kicked the pistol out of his hand.

Then all hell broke loose again. The gun went off, and to my horror I saw another me clutching at a bleeding wound in her gut. But that wasn't the part where all hell broke loose.

The English language doesn't really include words to describe what I saw, because what I saw goes outside the realm of normal human experience. We had managed to break reality, and the air around us shimmered in a way that was nauseating and hurt your eyes to look at. I was panicking, and I and several other mes rushed over to the one that had been shot. The crowd was also panicking, and I saw people flying and shooting power blasts.

Three of my copies were cradling the one that had been shot, and one of the Dereks tapped me on the shoulder. With all the adrenaline pumping through me I was about ready to try to claw his face off, but the look on his face made me stop. When I looked up, I saw that the sky had torn itself open, and something dark and tentacled was reaching down. I'm not sure what color it was, because where the distortions in the air had made my head hurt, something about whatever was coming down from the sky filled me with a much deeper dread.

"Something's wrong," said an Alexis.

"We can't time shift at all," said another.

I saw one of the tentacles grab a flying metahuman. Suffice to say I will never, ever forget what I saw then, no matter how hard I tried. I wasn't the only one who saw either, and a chorus of screams rose up from the crowds. Some shameful part of me was very, very glad it wasn't Natalie up there. In the distance I heard some kind of machine powering up, and a beam of scintillating green struck the tentacle creature from somewhere on campus. That just seemed to make it grow bigger. It was already hard to see much else in the sky. I don't think it was actually a creature, not in any conventional sense. It was like oblivion itself had taken a solid form.

This was all because of us and our time travel crap. If there was just a way to stop us from having this dumb fight in the first place, none of it would have to happen. And if we were really lucky, no one would die.

I cleared my throat. "I have an idea, but I think I need to get away from that thing's influence to pull it off."

"Tachyon shield?" offered a couple of the Alexises in unison.

"Anyone still have theirs?" asked another.

A third handed hers to me.

"What are you doing?" asked Derek.

"I hope I'm fixing all this. Just let me do this one thing, and maybe everything will be okay." I turned on the shield, and shifted.

I found myself in the living room of my mom's house. My eight-year-old self was playing with legos. She looked up at me and goggled.

I held a finger to my lips and shushed her. Somehow or other she seemed to understand. I grabbed the phone, dialed, and handed it to my younger self.

When I got back to the present, there was no tentacle monster attacking the school, no mob of Alexises and Dereks. I was standing there a few feet away from the sole remaining Derek.

He spun around and pointed an accusing finger at me. "You did this! You changed the past! You changed who I am!"

My own memories were changing, and the past I'd had before was almost but not quite slipping away. The conflict between the two gave me a headache. But I remembered that when someone had picked up on the other end of that phone call, it turned out to be Jessica, which led to her coming over to have lunch with my mom. And I'd given Derek a hug because it seemed like the thing to do. I realized that instead of having just met today, I'd known him for about six years and considered him a friend.

"I made you become a better person," I managed.

"That's the worst part!"

"I thought you wanted to be closer to me."

Derek turned bright red and couldn't quite say anything for a bit. "Maybe we'll get married some day."

I made a mental note, and an older me—an adult this time—appeared just long enough to say, "Not a chance."

"That's cheating," he grumbled.

I jumped when a hand came down on my shoulder. A man—Mr. Redding—was standing over us. His other hand was on Derek's shoulder. "Kids, we are going to have a nice, long talk, and believe me, your parents are going to hear about this."