Variation on a Theme, Book 7
Copyright© 2026 by Grey Wolf
Chapter 40: Anniversary and Annoyance
Wednesday, October 8, 1986
Penny left us a message letting us know that some bigwig was dragging their feet on approving the scripts. She hoped we would have them by tomorrow. That wasn’t much of a problem for us. People without the extemporaneous speaking skills we had might be bothered, but most of them would be fine, too. This wasn’t going to be complicated or hard to follow, even for ‘regular people.’
She asked us to familiarize ourselves with the questions, but to refrain from rehearsing any word-for-word answers. She also warned us that the questions might change. Retaking an answer a few times was preferable to trying to nail it on the first take. None of us would have a problem with that. All of us were, to some level, veterans of memorizing something and presenting it in a fluid manner that didn’t feel overly rehearsed, but that took a lot more practice than we would put into this.
I had the house nearly to myself for much of the evening. Besides Amy, everyone else was at one sort of meeting or another. After we’d finished our homework, we settled in the living room, snuggling.
“I love you,” Amy said as I held her, my arms putting a bit more pressure on her than I would with most girls.
“I love you,” I said, kissing her. “And I have a bit of a surprise for you.”
“You do?” she said, curiously.
“I’m glad we have this time to ourselves.”
“Oh?”
I pulled out a little box and gave it to her. She unwrapped it and pulled out a pair of earrings. I’d gotten lucky finding them. They were little rainbows, but in shades of gray from black to white.
“These ... they are ... oh, I love them!” she said, then kissed me. “They are precious!”
“One year ago, I asked a really interesting girl on a date,” I said. “It’s been quite the year. I love you very much, Amethyst Finch, and I’m very, very happy you said yes to that date.”
She sniffled, hugged me, and looked up. “I am just as happy. Perhaps more! I love you very much, Steve Marshall. And ... somehow ... this is perfectly appropriate to what I was thinking.”
“Tell me?”
She sighed and smiled. “I was thinking about time, and here you remind me of how things change.”
She paused, then added, “It is ... amusing. I am impatient. And curious. I wish to know the future. And you do know some of the future, yet not for us. I am glad you do not. Which means, I think, that I am also paradoxically glad I do not, either.”
“That is amusing,” I said, chuckling.
She shifted, looking up at me. “This is hard to phrase. I am curious. I do not want you to spoil anything for me. But you mentioned things from the future you thought of that you would wish to share with me, and I wonder what they might be.”
I smiled, still hugging her, and said, “There are a few movies. Before I say anything, I feel like I should say we have no way of knowing if these will come out. So far, I think movies are nearly the same. But that doesn’t mean something isn’t completely missing and I’m just forgetting it. One of us would probably notice, but what if that movie wasn’t in every universe?”
She nodded. “Something I also like, for the same reasons. Too much specificity seems bad.”
“Yeah. For one thing, we could cause something to not show up. Even if that stinks, it’s better that we can than that we can’t, I think.”
“Definitely!”
I squeezed her, then said, “That said ... one film — an entire category — I can share, I think, and not overly spoil things. The others ... well. I’ll start with them. There are several movies that apply. One is a high school black comedy. It’s the film Angie inadvertently used a line from when she revealed herself to me. Another is a modern fantasy. And the third ... um. I can’t describe it, because you would immediately recognize it.”
She chuckled. “May I guess?”
“By all means.”
“Then I would have to guess something involving Wednesday Addams.”
“Got it the first time,” I said, chuckling. “When speaking to you of her, before, it was like Batman. I have to remember you can’t know the versions I know. Wednesday herself isn’t as sharply different as Batman, though. The Batman of later films is the darker, more angst-filled ‘Dark Knight’ of the comics, not the more comic figure of the 1960s show. The Wednesdays are more similar, but not the same at all. You’ll like them, and I very much hope they happen.”
“I cannot wait! But I will,” she said, grinning.
“The category is fairly simple. Disney, finally, after decades, gets back to making princess movies. Some of them are really good.”
“My guess is that you mean ‘food for thought’ when you say ‘really good.’”
“It’s included. Also, simply entertaining. But yes, definitely food for thought,” I said.
“Then, yes, by all means! You know I have a weakness for ‘children’s films’ that are not simple.”
“We have movie dates for years,” I said, chuckling. “There’s more, but ... yeah. Spoiling things is bad. You deserve to see them without someone telling you what you’re about to see.”
“Knowing you are excited will matter, but you are good at hiding that,” she said, grinning. “Nearly every film we have seen together, you have seen, including the ones I would have thought you could not have seen. Yet I have never found myself suspicious that you know something you should not be able to know.”
“Honestly, it probably helped that I shouldn’t have been able to know. Angie and I would be easier to figure out if you knew it was even possible to do what we’ve done. What saves us is that no one thinks it’s possible, so far as we know. One of our more paranoid worries is that someone, somewhere, knows it’s possible. If they do, we probably look like candidates. As Angie and I have said to each other many times, we absolutely suck at keeping a low profile.”
Amy laughed loudly at that. When she settled, she said, “My goodness! Even as emphatic as you were, it is still an understatement! Yet ... perhaps even that would throw someone off the path. Surely you would have done better at it if you actually had something to hide, after all.”
“You would think so,” I said. “For us, I think it’s just ... if we have to make a choice between doing the right thing and making a fuss, or staying quiet, we always choose to do the right thing.”
“It may also be that you have made public your views — which could indeed be ... um...”
“We say ‘anachronistic.’ It’s a good word. It usually means the other way, temporally, but the dictionary definition allows it to work our way — something unusual now but normal in the future.”
“Useful!” she said.
“Let’s get back to that. You were saying?”
“You make your anachronistic views on social issues public, but you do not make your financial success public. By the time it’s public, you may be in a better position to defend yourself.”
“That’s a hope, yeah. Most extremely wealthy people have security and isolation by necessity. Sometimes also by choice, but money makes you a target. My friend Michael will — if history repeats — live in a giant house within an even more giant compound, complete with guest houses, guards, staff, and all of that. He didn’t necessarily want that, though I’m sure he was happy with it. But there were legitimate security concerns.”
“Or ‘will be’ those concerns,” she said, chuckling.
“Both? That’s actually something I wanted to get back to. English is lousy at this. For good reason, mind you! Very few people have the opportunity to refer to things from future decades in the past tense. Angie, Laura, and I do. They’re also in the future tense, of course. The future in our universe, the past for our other universes. But now, since it exists in our universe, I can legitimately say, ‘It was 1985 when I first saw “The Rocky Horror Picture Show”. Well after that, I saw it in 1984 with Jas, Ang, and Paige. So, the first time I saw it was with them, even though I’d already seen it.”
She made a face. “I am not yet used to that sort of phrasing. You are right! English is not suited to this. What you said makes sense only from a highly strange perspective. But this is what you said about your kids. To us, it might make sense to say you could not have seen it, since it would have been in the future. And you had not, in fact. You had seen another universe’s version of the same thing.”
“That is an interesting point. Even if they’re identical, they’re also fundamentally different. Twins, in a way, at least metaphorically. Sometimes identical, sometimes fraternal.”
“I can go with that,” she said, nodding. “From a practical standpoint, we would mostly go with what you said, though. The universe distinction only makes a difference when it does.”
“I’m very curious about the ‘Back to the Future’ sequels,” I said. “The Michael J. Fox of my first life probably hadn’t had a discussion of the potential impact on Marty of his time traveling. And that Robert Zemeckis had, but not at the point when I talked to them. I might change things. If so, I’ll take the blame.”
“Would you tell me what you said?”
“Basically: at the end, Marty finds himself back in 1985, safe and sound. He goes home, sleeps, then wakes up to find his father is successful and a newly published author. His mother and siblings are also better. Biff is worse off. Happy ending, everyone cheers, until the sequel setup where, apparently, things aren’t great. But if you dig into that, you have to wonder. Could Marty’s life have been the same? Would his rather different parents have taken the same vacations? Would Mr. Strickland treat him the same if his father was not a ‘slacker?’ Will Marty trip himself up — as he did with the truck, but worse — because he has no idea what ‘he’ did in the past? Or will he find himself remembering things he never did?”
She blinked a few times, then said, “That makes perfect sense! But I did not see it. That is your life, though. Naturally, you would see things most people would not.”
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