they had spontaneously traveled back in time.

     They didn’t know the how, why, or what, but ironically, they knew the when. Kaylee almost laughed aloud remembering the blank stares she’d received back in the drunk tank when she cried out – nearly tripping over her tongue in her eagerness – “The question isn’t where – it’s when!”

     “1977,” Mel had said.

     “Yeah,” Noah had added. “I thought we knew that.”

     The others took up various spots around the cramped, smokey room: Noah laid out on the bed, Mel sitting on the edge, Sofie on the floor, Kaylee on the miniscule desk, her ninety-something pounds doing no damage to the aged wood. They all had their own takes on the situation, Kaylee thought, but none of them had half the experience with time travel media as she did – and none of them were even remotely excited at the opportunities presented by this situation.

     This all felt strangely ordinary, Kaylee thought, leaning her cheeks in her hands. Not the cramped, faux wood room that reeked of cigarettes, and definitely not the brief look at the city she’d gotten on the way here – but her mind was more clear, more present, than she would have expected. She hadn’t once wondered if this was all a dream, or if she had stumbled into the Matrix. Then again, how often had she – and everyone else in 2015 – experienced this moment vicariously through the lens of fiction? She had watched Michael J. Fox yelling in surprise as he crashed into Old Man Peabody’s barn; she had laughed along with Future Bill and Ted’s explanation of their dubiously-cyclical timeline; she had read along with Stephen King’s first-person everyman protagonist as he swallowed his disbelief and accepted his mission to prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy. That may be the end result of pop culture and escapist fiction dominating the twenty-tens, she thought: everyone had become desensitized to the impossible.

     Oh, Kaylee thought, glancing at the redhead sitting against the wall, well below the ceiling of smoke. Was this an awkward silence? as opposed to a regular silence? Were they still worrying about the likelihood that the others had glimpsed an errant body part? Probably. That police-issue blanket had covered Kaylee from chin down, when she took up her spot on the drunk tank floor, but Mel was abnormally tall and Sofie had a heft to her that could lead to the errant nip slip while clothed only in a cotton sheet. Noah was hardly bigger than Kaylee, but the way he’d tied his blanket around his waist implied he didn’t mind showing off. Kaylee felt her face flush as she realized the others must have caught a glimpse of something – she had been the last to arrive – and that she had been too excited to worry.

     “You think they really bought that shit?” Mel asked. Kaylee couldn’t say how long they had sat in silence.

     “They believed what they wanted to,” Sofie replied. “We described generic criminals, and they decided they were Nazis.”

     “Why are they on the lookout for Nazis anyways?” Noah wondered aloud. “World War II ended, like, thirty years ago.”

     “There’s always Nazis,” Sofie told him. “You don’t have to be part of Hitler’s cabinet to be one – you just have to idealize them.”

     “The cops who found me were pretty damn close,” Mel said. “They didn’t go quite so far as dropping the N bomb, but they ate it up when I said I wasn’t where I was supposed to be.”

     Kaylee almost added that the first person she’d spoken to in 1977 had called her a “crazy chink,” but decided against it. She didn’t need the others to pry it out of her that she had run up to him in the park, fully naked, and asked with an artificially inflated sense of panic, “What year is it?” The man’s expression of disbelief and readiness to use a racial slur had dulled her spirits, but she found her excitement returning as she dug around in a public trashcan for a newspaper. Mar. 1, 1977. Just like Michael J. Fox.

     “So,” Noah said, rolling up off the bed. The retro clothes the cops had pulled out of the lost and found clashed with his surfer boy hair and attitude. “I guess we can figure out what’s going on now. We’re sure we all came from 2015?”

     “June fifteenth,” Sofie agreed. Kaylee hadn’t been able to get a read on her – not in the police station, or the disappointingly drab cafeteria they had stopped at – she was softspoken, sad-seeming, and the conservative blue dress and headband fit her in personality, if not in body type. “I just went to bed like normal. And I woke up here.”

     “It must’ve been the sixteenth for me,” Mel said. He had taken off the crumpled fedora the cops had found to cover his bleach-blond waves. “I wasn’t paying attention, but it was late late.”

     Mel’s assertion that he had been, quote, “coked out of [his] mind” at this alleged party had worried them all, but he wasn’t showing any residual effects, and the cops didn’t bother drug testing them after all. Not after their stories had matched up and the cops had recorded the definitive fact that they had been mugged and stripped by borderline Satanic criminals with piercings and tattoos.

     “Sounds like a good night,” Noah commented. “I guess I don’t remember falling asleep, but it was definitely the fifteenth. Kaylee?”

     “Wha – ?” She had been paying closer attention to the diagrams in her head than to the people in the hotel room. Even with Sofie’s orange hair and blue dress, everything in Kaylee’s immediate environment seemed to be brown or gray. “What was the question?”

     “Is your last memory the night of June fifteenth, 2015?” Noah asked.

     “Ah ha!” Kaylee cried, pointing an accusatory finger at him. “Now I know this isn’t some simulation to entrap me,” she said, “Cause if it was, you would’ve wanted me to volunteer that information! You wouldn’t’ve just given it to me!”

     Noah stared at her, then exchanged a look with Mel. Dang it, she thought, she had always wanted to do a double take like that. “So…it is?” Noah asked.

     “Yeah,” Kaylee said, sheepishly. “June fifteenth, that’s right.” She wondered for a moment if it actually was, but the image of the date on her phone above the dialogue box reading alarm set for three hours and six minutes from now was seared into her memory. “Technically sixteenth. It was after midnight.”

     “Okay.” Noah took a deep breath. “Okay, so…I guess that was my only question. Unless – this probably isn’t worth asking, but – no one has any idea how we got here, right?”

     “Yes,” Mel said, in the deadpan Kaylee had come to know as his standard, “I couldn’t drive home so I caught a lift with my friend Doctor Who.”

     Kaylee stopped herself before correcting him. “Who cares how we got here,” she said, “The important thing is – what kind of time travel are we dealing with?”

     Noah glanced at Sofie, but Sofie was spacing out.

     “What are our options?” Mel asked.

     “Well you got your good old-fashioned linear timelines,” Kaylee said, counting on her fingers and trying to tamp down her excitement, “Where you can go back and change the future. And sometimes you create a new branch timeline, but sometimes you really just change the future. Then you’ve got your cyclical timelines, where everything goes in a circle forever and forever and you can’t change anything cause you’ve already gone back and changed it an infinite number of times.” Then, off the guys’ blank expressions: “It’s like – Back to the Future is linear, and Terminator is cyclical. Except Terminator 2 is linear, but that’s a whole other thing.”

     “So…can we change things, or not?” Noah asked.

     “That’s the question,” Kaylee replied. “We could try to change something, like…killing Hitler.”

     “It’s 1977,” Noah said. “Hitler’s dead.”

     “I heard he’s alive in Argentina,” Mel commented.

     “It’s a hypothetical,” Kaylee said. “Okay, so we could kill John Lennon. Early. In a linear timeline, we could just walk up and shoot him. But in a cyclical timeline, something would always get in our way until – ” She paused. “When did John Lennon die?”

     “You mean when will John Lennon die,” Noah said. “1980.”

     “Right, so, if we’re in a cyclical timeline, then we could go out and try to kill him, but something would always get in our way. Like we would all die in an accident, or, we would keep missing him for three years. Then what’s his name would get there first – ”

     “Mark David Chapman,” Noah supplied.

     “Right. Him. He would get there first, or, we would somehow end up hiring him, which is what always would’ve happened.”

     “Cause…the universe would stop us?” Noah suggested. “Cause John Lennon’s not supposed to die early?”

     “No that’s the thing.” Kaylee sat forward on the desk, leaning on her knees. “No one’s up there making decisions – we wouldn’t be able to kill him before 1980 cause he didn’t die before 1980. Cause it’s cyclical.”

     Noah and Mel shared another glance, both looking confused. Was she being over the top weird? Kaylee wondered. Or was this actually pertinent?

     “In a cyclical timeline you can go back in time and save your own life,” Sofie said. “You can’t in a linear, cause you’d be dead.”

     “Right!” Kaylee cried. “See she gets it. How’d you know that?”

     Sofie didn’t look at her. “We went down a rabbit hole in Philosophy 101.”

     “Where’d you go to college again?” Mel asked.

     “It’s…tiny,” Sofie said. “You haven’t heard of it.”

     “Can’t be tinier than community college in Johnson County, Kansas,” Kaylee replied.

     “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that community college offers a time travel class,” Noah said.

     “Heeeeell no,” Kaylee shot back. “I learned about time travel all by myself. Why? Cause it’s fun. Same with parallel universe, but I don’t think that’s what we’re doing here.”

     “How long can we stay here?” Mel asked. “Just one night, right?”

     “Yeah,” Noah said grimly. “That cop was generous, but not too generous. Let’s just be thankful his son was killed by gangbangers.”

     “We should get out of here,” Mel suggested. “Maybe we’ll find someone else giving out charity, and worst case scenario, Sofie can panhandle for us.”

     “Why just me?” Sofie asked.

     “Cause no one in 1977 is gonna volunteer to help out a six-foot-two black guy,” Mel returned. “And that’s assuming I’m able to pull off straight long enough that they don’t beat me to death.”

     “That’s…dark,” Sofie offered.

     “Speaking of dark,” Kaylee jumped in, “I didn’t tell you about the third kind of time travel. This one’s real scary.”

     “The others weren’t scary?” Noah said.

     “This one’s, like, universe-destroying scary,” she said, smiling cheerily. “I’ve heard people call them dynamic timelines. It’s like a linear timeline cause you can go back and kill Hitler – but since Hitler is dead, your past-slash-future self will never decide to go back and kill him. So then he won’t be dead. So then you will decide to go back and kill him.”

     “Ad nauseum,” Mel commented.

     “It’s a paradox,” Noah said, only now seeming the proper amount of terrified.

     “Exactly,” Kaylee said. “But if you get into your shiny new time machine and go back to the Forties just to, I dunno, watch Citizen Kane in theaters, and while you’re there you happen to hit Hitler with your car, then there’s no paradox, and it’s like a linear timeline.”

     “What, cause it was an accident?” Mel asked.

     “Cause you didn’t go back in time with the intention of killing him,” Kaylee replied.

     “Now hold on,” Noah said, “That can’t be right. The other ones made sense, kind of, but why would the universe – or the timeline or whatever – care what you think? You said before, there’s no higher power up there making decisions.”

     “It doesn’t matter what you think, it only matters what you do,” Kaylee explained. “If you go back in time without planning to kill Hitler, Hitler getting erased won’t affect whether or not you eventually go back in time.”

     “But everything would be different,” Mel said. “If Hitler died before the War, the whole twentieth century would turn out differently.”

     “Right,” Kaylee admitted. “And maybe you wouldn’t have gotten your time machine in the first place, that’s the butterfly effect. I’m just saying that it’s possible for a dynamic timeline to work like a linear timeline. And after the second go-through, a linear timeline basically becomes cyclical.”

     Noah looked at Mel, then at Sofie. They all looked totally blank.

     “Anyone hungry?” he asked.

     “Yes,” Mel said, standing up and heading for the closet-sized bathroom. The others sat in silence, not making eye contact, as their new friend relieved himself mere inches away. None of them seemed to know the proper etiquette for such close quarters. Kaylee hadn’t even wondered about the sleeping situation.

     Sofie took a turn in the toilet closet after Mel. The door had hardly snapped shut when she let out a cry of shock and yanked it open again.

     “What is it?” Noah asked. They had all jumped to their feet.

     Sofie’s face was pure incomprehension. It was the first non-neutral face Kaylee had seen her make.

     “My freckles,” Sofie breathed. “They’re gone.”

     “Honey what?” Mel said.

     “You don’t have freckles,” Noah pointed out.

     “I did last night!” she shot back. “All over the place!”

     Now that she mentioned it, Sofie’s lack of freckles did seem incongruous with her red hair, green eyes, and general complexion. She did have a smattering on her chest and arms, Kaylee remembered from the drunk tank, but her face was clear.

     “Oh come on,” Noah said. “You’re telling me you had freckles and they just disappeared overnight?”

     “That’s impossible,” Mel added.

     “So is time travel,” Sofie shot back.

     “Touché,” Mel replied. That was about all anyone could say on this development.

      They left the hotel together, apparently forgetting that three of them had snuck in. The moment they left the foul, smoke-heavy atmosphere of the hotel, they were assaulted by the sounds and smells of a city so big and dense that Kaylee almost couldn’t tell she was in the wrong decade. The sheer compactness of her environment, and the far-off skyscrapers towering over this three-story neighborhood, were enough to distract her from the older-model cars that clogged the road mere inches away, or the less than subtle outfits of the pedestrians. When she had woken up fully naked in Central Park, her first thought had been time travel – but only because she had waited so long for something like this to happen.

     “Lead on, Mister Metropolitan,” Mel said.

     “That’s insulting,” Noah replied, but he led them off down the street.

     The day was warm for late winter in the Northeast, with a light breeze ruffling the trees that grew from sidewalk cages. The buildings they passed reached no higher than five stories, but they formed a continuous canyon wall unbroken by alleyways. Doors were boarded up, windows were barred, accordion cages were locked down over wider entryways.

     “These are all theaters now,” Noah said, pushing aside a pigeon with the side of his loafer. “I mean – you know what I mean. They must’ve gentrified the shit out of this place.”

     They walked in a tight group, squeezed between the unbroken brick wall and the cars screaming by on an endless loop. There were more pedestrians on the other side of the road, but a couple men pushed past the little group, apparently not noticing their ill-fitting, piecemeal clothes. Kaylee consciously noted for the first time that no one here had a smartphone: no one was staring at the screen in their hands as they walked, but they didn’t seem any less distracted.

     “It’s just like I imagined it,” Kaylee murmured. They passed a store plastered with aging posters, hundreds in all, reading Remember Watergate! Vote Carter.

     “What,” Sofie said, “The Seventies?”

     Kaylee hadn’t meant to be overheard. “New York,” she said. “But yeah, the Seventies too I guess. The clothes are a little less colorful than I thought.”

     “And the cars are boring,” Noah put in. “I’ve only seen like two classic muscle cars.”

     “It’s simulation,” Sofie said.

     “What?” They had emerged from the canyon of the neighborhood into an intersection, where cars blew past and laid on their horns. There were more people out here: small crowds of gray-looking businesspeople, more liberally dressed young adults, and a number of zombie-like wanderers Kaylee could only assume were homeless, if not addicted to something strong. Had she ever even seen a homeless person before? she wondered.

     Sofie glanced at Kaylee, as if she’d forgotten she had said anything. There was something disconnected about her, Kaylee thought, something that made her seem separated from reality. Or maybe she was just tripping about losing her freckles. “It’s simulation,” Sofie said again. “To us, the Seventies never existed, but now it does. And to everyone else, this is the ‘right’ year.”

     “What’s that have to do with simulation?” Kaylee asked. Mel and Noah had been caught up in their own conversation since leaving the hotel.

     A small crowd gathered around them on the corner, watching the cars scream by, all eyes focused on a little metal box across the street bearing the words don’t walk where its modern equivalent would have depicted an orange hand in LED.

     “It’s a simulation to us,” Sofie replied, apparently unbothered by the strangers around them. Kaylee was bothered, but only because they were all smoking. “Cause we don’t recognize this as the natural world. Or – year, really. Our perception of the Seventies is made up of all the pieces of culture that were significant enough to be remembered forty years later – and if we still see the ghosts of those pieces of culture in 2015, then they must have been pretty significant in 1977.”

     “Huh,” Kaylee said, trying to imply in that one syllable that she was very interested but had no idea what Sofie was talking about.

     “Maybe keep that stuff to yourself for now,” Mel commented.

     “Yeah I was gonna say,” Noah added.

     “I don’t think anyone cares,” Sofie said. “This is New York. Everyone’s weird, right?” She shot Noah an empty smile. “Speaking of which, where are we?”

     “In the Village,” Noah told her. “No idea why the cops took us here, they must’ve been way outside their district.”

     “Is the Village chill?” Sofie asked.

     “The chillest,” Noah visibly lied. “It’s a lot less cramped. Plus, it’s got the best music scene – and we’re in the best place and time to enjoy it.”

     The cars driving past skidded to a stop in unison, and almost instantly those driving perpendicular shot across the intersection. The don’t part of the don’t walk sign blinked off, and the time travelers found themselves swept across the sidewalk by the crowd.