Interstellar

He kicked again, and added his arms and it gave even more. At the same time he sloughed off more of his forward momentum.

He kept at it and slowed further, coming, at last, thankfully, to a stop. For the moment, all was finally calm—no more falling, no more motion at all—just floating in a strange space that seemed more familiar each moment. He had time to wonder if he was dead, or dreaming, or just stuck at the event horizon of the black hole, frozen in time, his mind playing out weird fantasies as it would for the rest of time.

Putting aside the possibilities that he was dead or dreaming—he couldn’t do anything if either was true—he reached out to the wall of the passage. If this was actually happening, then where the hell was he? How could a transdimensional space inside of a black hole be made of bricks?

But they didn’t look like bricks.. For one thing, they were thinner than most bricks, and not as dense. Each had two thick outer edges enclosing hundreds of much thinner lines, like paper…

Like books…

If you were on the wall side of a bookshelf. And from each book streamed a ghostly line of light, as if each book had left a trail. The light created a vast matrix around him, going off in all directions.

He pushed at one of the objects, and it shifted incrementally. He pushed harder, and then harder until finally it popped through and dropped out of sight.

Peering through the gap he saw her. She was ten and her hair was wet. She had a towel around her neck, and she was just turning, startled by the book falling.

“Murph?” he called. “Murph?”

But she didn’t react. She just stood there, gazing at the shelves, at the book on the floor, which he could no longer see. Then she came cautiously toward the shelf and bent down. When she came up she was holding a broken toy.

The lunar lander.

* * *

In the twilight, Murph turned the lander model in her hand, remembering, wondering. Outside, Getty was sounding more frantic. But she felt somehow, there was something here.

* * *

Cooper watched his ten-year-old daughter examine the broken model.

“Murph!” He tried again. “Murph!”

But she still didn’t hear him. She turned and left the room, and he knew where she was going—to the breakfast table, where he would chastise her for being unscientific and not taking care of “our stuff.”

Desperately, he looked around and realized that he was in something like a cube, and each wall of the cube looked into Murph’s room from a different angle, as if the room had been turned inside out, reversed, and put back together. And it wasn’t just the one room, the one bookshelf. He saw now the matrix of light held multiple iterations of the room, maybe infinite, tunnels and passages going in every direction, framed, held together by the light streaming from the books, the walls, the objects in the room.

It was disorienting, and he wished Romilly was there to explain to him what was going on. He had to be operating in more than three dimensions, but since his mind was only built to handle three—well, he figured it was doing its best.

He was still in free-fall. By floating around and using his thrusters, he could effectively move to each iteration of Murph’s room, so he pulled himself to the next one and punched out two more books.

Through the resulting gap he saw an empty bedroom. It didn’t stay empty for long, though. The door opened and—well—he walked in. His younger self, looking bothered about something. A moment later, Murph entered as well.

Cooper slammed into the books, kicked another out, furiously determined to get their attention.

* * *

Murph rubbed her hand across the old desk, remembering all those years ago when she had pushed it in front of the door, how angry and sad she had been. She reached for the chair, too, and tilted it back.

* * *

Cooper watched Murph put the chair on top of the desk, completing her barricade of the door. A moment later, he saw it move a little as someone—no, not someone, but him, the earlier him—began to nudge through.

“Just go,” Murph said. “If you’re leaving—just leave now.”

* * *

Cooper spun around to another wall, and saw his earlier self on the other side of the door.

“Don’t go, you idiot!” he yelled, as the other Cooper closed the door. Going to let Murph cool off. Precisely the wrong move. “Don’t leave your kids, you goddamn fool!” he shouted.

He began punching at the walls with everything in him, but not blindly. He knew what to do.

“S,” he said. “T…”

Murph was watching now. She didn’t look scared. She looked amazed, excited, interested.

“A,” he grunted. “Y.”

He stopped to catch his breath, then watched in frustration as his earlier self reached through the cracked door and around, to lift off the chair so he could push back the desk and enter the room.

“Stay, you idiot!” he yelled. “Tell him, Murph! Stay…”

He watched numbly as it played out, just like before. He gave her the watch. She hurled it across the room.

“Murph,” he pleaded. “Tell him again! Don’t let him leave…”