Interstellar

He grabbed the timeline that connected to the second hand in all of its iterations, and as the data came in he tugged it in time, long and short—dots and dashes.

“What if she never came back for it?” Tars asked.

“She will,” he insisted, as the second hand began flicking back and forth. “She will. I can feel it…”

* * *

Murph was turning to leave when Getty shouted—near hysterically—that Tom was coming. But still something held her. She went back to the box, knowing what she was going for, and pulled out the watch. Feeling it, then seeing it.

“Murph?” Getty yelled. “Murph!”

* * *

When she came tearing out of the house, Getty was holding a tire iron, watching an angry Tom climb from the truck, black with soot. Lois and Coop were watching, too, fearful looks on their faces.

But Murph ran straight for her brother.

“Tom,” she said. “He came back… he came back.”

Tom’s fierce expression tempered a bit toward puzzlement.

“Who?” he asked, gruffly, confusion wrestling with anger in his voice.

“Dad,” she told him. “It was him. He’s going to save us.”

Triumphantly she held up the watch—and its weirdly flickering second hand.

* * *

Murph looked at the equations she had just written, then back to the watch. She stood, gathering the pages, and hurried through the halls. In her haste she bumped into someone, and was absently aware that it was Getty, but she didn’t slow her pace.

She remembered her first time here, with her dad, how terrifying it had been, followed quickly by awe-inspiring. Now, after all these years, it was home.

She reached the launch bay, the gigantic cylindrical space station that had never been intended to fly, had been nothing more than busy work to keep everyone who knew the truth from curling up into a ball and staying that way.

She remembered the pride Professor Brand had showed in the thing, even though he believed it would never function.

She walked up to the railing, marveling at it, at the thousands of workers who were still on the job. Getty stepped up beside her, having followed, and he wore a curious look on his face.

Then she turned back to the enormous hollow, and shouted at the top of her lungs.

“Eu-RE-ka!”

She turned her grin on Getty.

“Well, it’s traditional,” she said. Then she threw her papers over the railing.

“Eureka!” she repeated, as the papers fluttered down and workers looked curiously at her.

Then she planted a kiss right on the lips of a very surprised and confused Dr. Getty.

* * *

Cooper gazed along the worldline of the watch, saw that it seemed to branch out infinitely.

“Did it work?” he asked Tars.

“I think it might have,” Tars replied.

“Why?” Cooper said, hopefully.

“Because the bulk beings are closing the tesseract,” Tars replied.

Cooper gazed again off into the distance and saw that something, at least, was happening. The lines were becoming sheets, becoming bulks, as the three-dimensional representation created for his only-human brain unraveled and returned to its full five-dimensional reality. It was like the universe was collapsing in on him, which he supposed in a sense it was.

“You don’t get it yet, Tars?” Cooper asked. “‘They’ aren’t beings—they’re us. Trying to help, just like I tried to help Murph…”

“People didn’t build this tesseract,” Tars said.

“Not yet,” Cooper replied. “But one day. Not you and I, but people—people who’ve evolved beyond the four dimensions that we know.”

As the expansion back into five dimensions came upon him, Cooper thought of Murph, and Tom—and hoped he had saved them. He thought he had, or at least played a part. There wasn’t much more that he could ask.

“What happens now?” he wondered aloud.

But then he was swept away, as if by a massive wave, like the Ranger back on Miller’s world. But that wave had only lifted and dropped him. No, this was more like a fast-moving river.

Or a riptide.

In the current, and beyond it, he saw stars and planets being born, dying, decaying into particles, then being born again, faster and faster—through space-time, above space-time, a piece of paper bending, a pen poking a hole through it…

Where was he going now? He was done, wasn’t he? He’d accomplished what he was meant to do—it was up to Murph now. And Brand.

He wondered where Brand was, how she was doing. He wished he could explain to her why he’d had to leave her alone.

Ahead he saw a glassy, golden distortion, and in it the Endurance, and for a split second he thought his wish had brought him to her—but then he saw that this Endurance was like new, undamaged, just entering the wormhole. He drifted through the bulkhead and saw Brand and Romilly there, both strapped in.

Brand, he thought, reaching toward her. In a way, he had gotten his wish. Could he communicate with her? Probably not, or at least nothing important, since this was the past, and she hadn’t known that any of this was going to happen.