The Reverter

Section 212

The study room was a mini library with wooden bookshelves on all sides. A large oval table in the middle of the room had some books on it (that Mr Gulpreet and I had gone through several times). There were 4 chairs in total in the room, one occupied by Akriti—as I told you earlier—reading some classic novel. The other was occupied by Rohit, blissfully sleeping with his mouth wide open–we tried to close it several times–in front of a whiteboard with lots of calculations. And the remaining chairs were inhabited by Mr   Gulpreet and me.

It was almost 10 pm now, and we had come to some fascinating conclusions.

“Are you guys done?” Akriti asked, popping her head out of the book.

“Yes,” I said.

Akriti stood up and kept her book on the oval table.

“Then tell me about what you have been discussing for so long.”

I hadn't noticed Akriti being in the room until I noticed Rohit sleeping. Which was about 2 hours into our discussion. She must have been waiting for a long time now.

Our school ends at 3:00 pm and I reach home by 4:00 pm but we got down to at around 3:35 pm from the bus, and it then took us about 5 minutes to reach the clinic from where it took us about 45 minutes to Mr Gulpreet’s house, which means we started our discussion at about 5:30  pm (adding 10 minutes for our conversation with Akriti about her truth). So we had been discussing it for approximately 4 and a half hours!

“We should probably wake up Rohit,” Mr Gulpreet said.

Akriti went and shook Rohit, who jolted awake, snorting his drool up and then going into a coughing fit. He was fine after a few seconds.

“Sorry I fell asleep. Did you guys figure it out?” Rohit said, “Oh, hi Akriti!”

“Good morning sleepy pants,” Akriti said.

“Or should you say good night? It’s 10 now,” I said.

“Wait What? It’s 10 already? You should have woken me up sooner!”

“Yes, he’s right, and aren’t you all hungry?” Akriti said.

“Oh yeah, I'll quickly make something and we will discuss our findings over dinner. What do you say?” Mr Gulpreet asked.

We all nodded.

There wasn’t much time so Mr Gulpreet quickly made some of the tastiest chilli paneer and parathas I had ever eaten. It was made within half an hour with Akriti helping him as well, while I explained quantum mechanics to Rohit. He surprisingly understood things pretty well!

“My brain works very fast when I have just woken up,” he said.

After a while of eating, Akriti asked Mr Gulpreet to begin explaining our conclusions.

“So here it is,” said Mr Gulpreet, “As Anirudh said, What if the entire universe was a time crystal? What if the entire universe together periodically switched between low-energy and high-energy states? Like a bunch of whack-a-moles popping up and down, they seem to be randomly doing so, but we know that there is a pattern which repeats. What if the whole universe worked exactly like that? Like a computer program, what if it repeated its patterned high and low energy state shifts for each subatomic particle in the entire universe? Now we humans don’t completely understand the phenomenon of time crystals. And ‘Time Crystals’ is just a cool name given to something that has nothing to do with actual time travel, but considering that if the entire universe entered a time crystal-like state for a few cycles it’s fascinating how at the subatomic level it could mean that the whole universe went back in time like Anirudh, periodically.”