One Hundred Sides

The door closed behind me as I entered my bedroom.

Not knowing what to do, I found myself on the chair. And of course, my unfit body felt as tired as I was mentally. The aches of muscles already began to annoy me, and to dispel them I stretched my shoulders.

Unintentionally, my hands came into contact with something.. hard. It rolled off the shelf and landed on the floor, then continued to roll until it hit the bottom of my chair. I couldn't be bothered to pick it up.

It was at that moment that an old man came into my room, and closed the door behind him. I just stared at the total stranger, who not only somehow got into the apartment, but also my room.

Almost (but not quite) creepy was the fact that underneath his salt-and-pepper beard, he was smiling.



Closing the door behind me, I return to my room. At my desk, I collapse onto the chair. I lean back, resting my feet on the desk so my body doesn't swivel on the chair's axle. I should feel relaxed, but I'm not. Tomorrow school begins.. again.. for the last time, and this is how I spend my last moments of relative freedom: bored.

I stretch almost horizontally outwards, and feel my hand knock something out of place. Behind me, there is the sound of something hard, with grooves, rolling across the wooden surface of the shelf.

Tensing. Eyes shut, and waiting for the inevitable... Tacktacktacktacktacktacktack - pause - and whatever-it-was hits the floor with a sharp thud, then it rolls.. and stops after it hits one of the legs of my chair.

The door suddenly opens, and a young man comes into my room.

Who-What. The. Fuck? I’ve never seen him before in my life, and the weirdo is just standing here - in my room. I just stare, stunned.

"Hi," he says, almost (almost) timidly, "I'm you from the future."

A nervous laugh fell out of my open jaw. It took me a couple of seconds, almost three, to register what he was claiming. Then instantly, I knew what I had to do, thinking of a word-

"Kangaroo," he says. "That's the word you thought - or rather - you are thinking of, just now."

A surge of adrenaline and amazement fills my body, which is something I never expected in a situation like this, despite all the time I've spent knocking knocking sci-fi movies for their bastardisation of their own mechanics. He looks at me, as if he's waiting for something.

"Holy shit," I say. I need to double-check. "What word am I thinking of now?"

"Raspberry," he says, on cue.

My eyes widen, "ffuck... JEE-sus..." I take in his appearance; his face looks alright, mature. His (...my?) sense of fashion definitely has changed. I can already feel my head swirling. "How.. old are you?"

"Twenty-seven," he says, letting out a breath. "Now that the first round of questions are done, I'm going to explain to you what's going on."

"Have you already experienced what I'm experiencing?"

He tenses, briefly. "Oh yea, I forgot I also asked that," he says, relaxing once again. "That's a yes, by the way."

His brown eyes look into mine with a confidence I didn't know I'd have, he continues: "I'm from the future and I'm here now, because when I was your age, I was also given a visit by... Me, I guess."

Yea, I can tell that his head's now swirling too.

"So you can understand that this is all part of a self-fulfilling loop," he states, arching his eyebrows and looking at me with a tad too much drama.

I look at him, and nod. "So we're part of an infinite cycle of cause and effect, for some reason?"

He smiles, and says "No. And yes. No just to the infinite part, but I am here for a reason.

"The First guy - that's with a capital F - was the first of all of us to travel back in time. He was much older than I am. What I'm telling you right now, and yes even this part, was what I was told by the Us that visited me, and the same goes for his visitor, and so on." He's doing the twirling gesture with his right hand that I always do when I say 'et cetera'. Huh.

"Anyway, point is, the First was like, in his nineties, and he somehow set things up so that all of Us come back and say these things to a younger self. There's something he wanted to try and change."

"What was it?" I ask, suddenly wary.

He looks at me sadly. "I can't tell you that, until you check what you rolled on that D100 that's underneath your chair."



"Under my chair?" I asked, surprised.

He was holding his breath, his face was so tense I couldn't see the wrinkled eyelids at which I had marveled just earlier.

"Go on," he encouraged with a gentle, yet wishful whisper.

I leaned to the side of my chair and saw the object of my earlier accident. It was a one-hundred-sided die I received years ago, at a birthday party. I remember being excited at imagining myself playing some sort of table-top role-playing game with a bunch of friends. Well, never had the chance.

"It's a 1."

His hopeful expression turned slightly sad, and disappointed, then resigned. "Ah... That's.. too bad," he says, breathing deeply with each pause. He smiled, this time with sadness.

I was confused. "Is something wrong?"



"It's an 18" I say, as I pull my gaze back up to my supposed future-self.

Future-me is completely slack-jawed, and his mouth is turning into an incredibly happy grin - almost ridiculously wide. Okay... I think his eyes are getting a bit teary too. Jeez, I'm going to grow up into a crybaby.

"So finally," he says between blinks of tears, "you're gonna be the one to do it."