Interstellar

Cooper saw Murph staring out the window, and knew his earlier self was driving away. Toward NASA, the Endurance—this.

“Even if you communicate it here,” Tars reasoned, “she wouldn’t recognize its significance for years…”

He began to become angry. After all the fear and frustration, the feelings that burned up through him provided a welcome change.

“Then figure something out!” he snapped. “Everybody on Earth is going to die!”

“Cooper,” Tars said, “They didn’t bring us here to change the past.”

Of course they didn’t. Cooper paused, calming himself. No, he couldn’t change the past. But there was something else… something about what Tars was saying.

They didn’t bring us here to change the past.

They…

“We brought ourselves here,” he said, and he pushed off, found another angle, saw the room in a slightly different moment. It was full of dust from the storm, the storm that had come upon them at the baseball game. Murph had left her window open…

“Tars,” he said, studying the dust. “Feed me the coordinates of NASA in binary.”

And with his fingers, he traced the pattern, the lines he had found after the dust storm—

* * *

She ran her finger along the windowsill and examined the dust on it, remembering the pattern on the floor that day, how happy she was that she had been vindicated, that her father believed her. Sort of. But he had never believed all of it. Only the part he wanted to believe, that part that said he had been chosen to go into space. The ghost he had discounted.

And yet he was the ghost. Both. Giving himself the coordinates that would lead him to NASA, but also telling himself to stay.

A contradiction. Like gravity itself.

She looked around the room, searching for something to reconcile it. This was her last shot. Tom would never let her in here again.

“Come on, Dad,” she pleaded. “Is there something else here?”

* * *

Cooper looked up from the pattern he was tracing.

“Don’t you see, Tars?” he said. “I brought myself here. We’re here to communicate with the three-dimensional world. We’re the bridge.”

He moved along to another version of the room. Murph was there, jumping up from the bed, grabbing the watch from where she had thrown it, running out the door…

* * *

Murph reached into the box and picked up the watch, thinking about the little moment of hope, the little experiment she and her father were going to do together, until she realized just how long he was going to be gone, that he didn’t even know if he was coming back. And then she had thrown it, rejected him and his damn attempt at “making things right.”

Then she had picked it up again. And kept it. And waited. And he hadn’t returned. They had never been able to compare them.

She put it on the bookshelf.

The second hand twitched.

* * *

Cooper pushed himself along the lines of the books, following their positions in time.

“I thought they chose me,” Cooper said. “They never chose me. They chose Murph.”

“For what?” Tars asked.

“To save the world!” Cooper replied.

He watched ten-year-old Murph come back into the room, crying her eyes out, holding the timepiece. It was hard to watch, but he did.

After a moment she put the watch on a shelf.

* * *

Murph sighed and put the box on the shelf. If there had ever been anything else here, it was gone now. She had to salvage what she could. And right now that meant saving Lois and Coop.

* * *

Cooper was “moving” fast now, following the room through space-time. Watching it go from being Murph’s bedroom, to abandoned, to glimpses of what might be a little boy, although he never got a clear view.

“‘They’d have access to infinite time, infinite space,” he told Tars, gesturing all around him. “But no way to find what they need. But I can find Murph and find a way to tell her—like I found this moment…”

“How?” Tars asked.

“Love, Tars,” he said. “Love, just like Brand said. That’s how we find things here.” Love, like gravity, which could move across time and dimensions.

Brand had been spot on.

“So what are we to do?” Tars asked.

Cooper looked down the time dimension. The books? No, and not the lander. But the watch, on the shelf, as far as he could see…

“The watch,” he realized. “That’s it. She’ll come back for it.”

“How do you know?” Tars asked.

And again he felt the certainty, a pull as strong as a black hole. Stronger—it was like the pull that had brought him here. That would bring Murph back, too.

“Because I gave it to her,” he said, excitement building. He scrutinized the watch for a moment. It would have to be simple, binary, or…

He had it.

“We use the second hand,” he told Tars. “Translate the data into Morse, and feed it to me.”