Interstellar

He broke down and began to cry, the sheer frustration of having to watch it all, and not be able to do anything. It was way too much to handle. Once again, he wondered if he was dead. If this was Hell.

Because it damn sure felt like it.

* * *

Murph picked up her old notebook and paged through it, stopping when she reached her Morse code interpretation of the gaps in the books.

Stay.

She looked up from the notebook back to the books, and felt something almost like a rush of wind go through her, as if some hidden place had suddenly been opened. She went to the shelves, and began pulling books out.

The smell of burning corn drifted up from downstairs, where the door stood open for her.

* * *

“Murph,” Cooper sobbed. “Don’t let me leave.”

But his earlier self turned, heading for the door.

“Stay!” he screamed, slamming the books with all of his might. One dropped, and the earlier Cooper turned. Looked at it…

And left.

Cooper put his head against the books, weeping.

* * *

Murph stared at the gaps she had made in the books, and then back at her notebook. Her throat tightened.

“Dad,” she said. “It was you. You were my ghost…”

Tears started, not from pain or anger or sadness, but from the greatest joy she had felt in many, many years. He hadn’t abandoned her. He had tried. He had been her ghost all along.

* * *

Cooper was still crying when he heard his name. He turned, but there was no one there, and he realized the voice had come from his radio. He also recognized the voice.

Tars.

“You survived,” Cooper said.

“Somewhere,” Tars agreed. “In their fifth dimension. They saved us.”

“Who’s ‘they’?” he asked. “And why would they help us?”

“I don’t know,” Tars admitted, “but they constructed this three-dimensional space inside their five-dimensional reality, to allow you to understand it.”

“It isn’t working!” Cooper exploded.

“Yes, it is,” Tars said. “You’ve seen that time here is represented as a physical dimension. You even worked out that you can exert a force across space-time.”

Cooper frowned, trying to understand. And then, suddenly, he did. The streams of light from the books were paths. Through time. Showing where each thing in Murph’s room had come from and where it was going. And the force he was exerting…

“Gravity,” he said. “To send a message…”

He looked around the infinite tunnels, the infinite Murphs, the lines from the books, the shelves, everything in the room going off as far as he could see in any and every direction.

“Gravity crosses the dimensions, including time,” he said.

When he pressed an icon on a control panel, it wasn’t the icon that made the ship move. It was just something that translated his intention to the mechanisms that could actually start the ship. Similarly, although it felt as if he was punching the books out with his fists and feet, in fact that was not possible. His physical body, this physical body was not—could not be—in the past.

But gravity could. Like Tars said, gravity cut across and through all of the dimensions. When he punched at one of them, what he was really doing was sending a pulse through space-time, a gravitic surge that was responsible for moving the books.

In other words, he was the source of a gravitational anomaly, and “they” had given him control of it in the most natural way possible—by making his sense of self, his sense of body, the controller. By giving images—icons—that he could understand and exert that force upon.

He realized suddenly that there might be a point to this. Something beyond watching himself make the biggest mistake of his life, over and over again. He just had to understand the tools he had been given, and determine what to do with them.

He pulled himself back to the wall and started counting books.

“You have the quantum data now,” Cooper said to Tars.

“I’m transmitting it on all wavelengths,” Tars confirmed, “but nothing’s getting out.”

“I can do it…” Cooper breathed.

He reached for one of the timelines—worldlines, really, he mused—and plucked at it. To his delight, a wave ran up the line, like a guitar string vibrating, affecting that book slightly, wherever and whenever it was.

“Such complicated data,” Tars said. “Sending it to a child…”

“Not just any child,” Cooper said.

* * *

Murph stood in the darkening room, looking at her notebook, puzzling at it. She knew there must be more now. An answer…

Her father had been here, as the ghost.

Where is he now?

“Murph!” Getty hollered, sounding more frantic than ever. “Come on!”

THIRTY-FOUR