Textual Inverter

“Did you order this?” he called from the doorway.

“I didn’t order anything. Did you?”

“Can’t remember.”

Alex brought the package to the kitchen table to open it, plopping the rest of the mail onto a pre-existing pile that would surely only grow. Ava let him handle the sorting, her focus fixed on her computer.

“We’ve lost the scissors again,” Alex reported.

Ava fished it out of a nearby drawer and tossed it to him, barely allowing her focus to waver from the screen. “It lives here now.”

“Says you.”

After a false start, he managed to pry open the cardboard box. Nestled in packing material was a small device, sized to fit in the palm of a hand. It was mostly gold, or at least made of a gold-colored metal, with a bright red button on top. Ava glanced over and this time, she paused her game to stand up.

“Ooh, wait! I did order a new game controller. Is that it? No, that’s not it, it’s too small. What didja buy?”

“Not this, I’m sure.”

There was nothing else in the box: no manual, no Quick Start instructions. No batteries. No cables. Alex turned it over. There were no places to plug anything in. No seams, no fasteners. No inscriptions. No clues.

They inspected the writing on the box. No help there, either. The return address had gotten smudged in transit and was illegible.

“Veeeeeeery mysterious,” said Alex. “A button that does God knows what.”

“If it can’t be recharged and doesn’t take batteries, I expect it can’t do much of anything.”

“How logical of you. Counterpoint: Why would someone build something with a button that doesn’t… y’know, do stuff?”

“And why would they send it to us? With no explanation? That’s sinister,” said Ava, and waggled her eyebrows comically. “Better not press it.”

“Bah. Fortune favors the brave and I’m feeling lucky. I’m forging ahead.”

He pressed the button with his right thumb. There was a soft click, together with a FLASH. For a moment the room was exceedingly bright. It seemed to come from everywhere, like lightning without the thunder.

“Well I’m sure not risking it.”

There was a moment’s silence. It was Alex who had spoken.

“Uh,” said Ava. “You did press it.”

Alex stared at the button in his hand, and at his thumb. “Did I?”

“You just said, ‘fortune favors the brave’, like suckers do, and then you pressed it. It’s a bit late to change your mind.”

Alex looked as if he were trying to do algebra in his head. “Well, did I or didn’t I? Did you see a flash?”

“Oh, my God, I’m glad you asked that. I wasn’t sure if I had imagined it. So you did press it.”

“I guess?” Alex stared at the device in his hand, like a hawk watching a mouse. He placed his thumb gently, but deliberately, on the button.

“Well I’m definitely pressing it now.”

FLASH.

“No way in hell am I touching it until we figure out what it does.”

“Alex!” Ava actually raised her voice, something she rarely did. “What are you doing?”

Alex stood quietly, holding the button. He looked, now, as if he wanted to drop it on the floor. Ava was visibly losing patience.

“Oh just – give it to me!”

FLASH.

“Keep it away from me!”

Alex gaped at her. “Now you’re doing it!”

Ava’s mouth opened and closed a couple of times, but no words emerged. She eyed the device, still sitting quietly in Alex’s hand, with deep suspicion. Then she shook her head violently. “I don’t get this, I don’t get this.” She marched over to a chair and sat down.

“I definitely pressed it that time. What the hell, Ava?”

She shook her head again. “I can’t even. I hate it when things make no sense.” She was sitting in front of her computer again. She seemed, suddenly, to remember it was there. Out of habit, perhaps – or to distract herself from the unsolvable puzzle – she started her game back up. “You and that thing interrupted me,” she noted. “I was about to try to finish off this boss.”

Alex only half-listened. He walked over to stand behind her chair, glancing with mild interest at Ava's character on the screen, ducking and dodging the attacks of a much larger opponent. Alex still held the button. He took his eyes off the screen to stare at his own thumb.

“Oh crap, this guy handed me my ass – again.”

FLASH.

“I don’t believe it! I finally beat him.”

Another second passed, then Ava paused the game again. She turned in her chair to gape at Alex.

“What?” she cried. “What??”

Alex looked over her shoulder at the screen. It said “VICTORY” in large bold letters.

“What happened? Come on – what, exactly, happened just now? You thought you lost, and then you turned out to be wrong?”

“No! I definitely lost! I saw it.” Ava was staring at the screen again, and started tugging at her hair, a nervous habit that Alex rather liked. “He lobbed a grenade at me. I went left, and–” She stopped.

“And?”

“Hold up. That's wrong. I didn’t go left, I went right. Look, see, here I am on the right side of the arena. I dodged the grenade and I finished him off. But I remember that I went left, I remember that I got splatted. How can I remember it when it clearly didn’t happen that way?”

“And,” Alex added, “how can I remember you saying you lost, and then that you won?”

Ava looked at the button again. “I don’t know what that is, hon,” she said levelly, “but I really, truly, think you should get rid of it. This is scaring me now.”

Alex's eyes widened just slightly. For once, he committed himself to a choice without thinking – he turned and, in one motion, threw the device forcefully against the opposite wall, where it broke apart, accompanied by a –

FLASH.

It remained in his hand, perfectly intact.

This time, Ava actually shifted herself backward, away from Alex and the device. “No,” she said. “Just – no.”

Alex’s eyes scanned the floor. He was sure he’d seen pieces of the thing, landing on the carpet. There was nothing there, now.

“So it didn’t happen…” he muttered to himself.

“Alex. Alex, babe, please, get rid of that. I don’t like this.”

Alex glanced at her, then straightened up slightly.

He thought: I do not understand what this thing does.

FLASH.

He thought: I understand exactly what this does.

“Oh. Oh, Ava. I get it now. Oh my God.”

“What? Spill!”

“It’s – it reverses things.”

“What? How? What gets reversed?” Ava seemed ready to grab Alex and shake him. “I’m going crazy here, please, tell me what this is.”

“Okay, uh. Let me test the theory. Where’s a coin we can flip?”

This evolved into a side quest that took a couple minutes to resolve. They turned out to have differing ideas of where the loose change “lived”. They almost digressed into another argument, but consciously pulled themselves back on topic. Ava stood poised by the table, penny in hand.

“All right,” said Alex. “Toss it.”

Ava tossed. Alex watched it spin through the air.

It came up heads.

FLASH.

It came up tails.

“See?” said Alex, triumphantly. “See that?”

“I don’t know that I want to have seen it,” Ava said darkly. “But I did, I was watching for it.” She shook her head again, then had to brush the hair out of her face. “Alex, it doesn’t make sense. First, you can’t reverse stuff that already happened. That’s time travel, that’s impossible. And second, it’s just a button. I mean…”

“Right, it’s a button, so how can it know?”

“There are lots of things going on, all over the world! All over the universe! Even supposing” (and her voice heaped scorn on the word as she said it) “that it were a magic button, well, why would it reverse the coin toss, particularly? Why not something that happened in India? Or across the galaxy?”

“I, uh,” said Alex.

“There are no wires. Nothing to connect it to… to us.”

“I have a sort of theory about that,” Alex said. “Or a notion. But, you might not like it. It was sent to us.”

“But no wires! Why does it matter who presses the button?”

“Maybe it doesn’t. I press the button, and sometimes it changes something you did.”

“That’s still just the two of us. It affects something in here with us? Apart from everything else that's weird here, that is eerie.”

Alex looked down at the button again, then walked over to the window, and opened the curtains a bit. “I think it’s time for another test.”

They stood together at the window, looking out at the street. Not much was going on. A few kids, none older than eight, were in their driveway across the street, playing with a basketball, shooting hoops. The hoop was mounted over the garage door. One of the kids, a girl perhaps six years old, was horsing around. She took the ball and stood at the very end of the driveway, almost standing in the road. She faced away from the garage, her face a tiny portrait of concentration, and threw the ball backward, over her head.

Naturally, she missed the target, by quite a lot.

FLASH.

Against all odds, the ball sailed neatly through the basket.

“Did you see that?”

“I did,” said Ava. “And it happened, what, a couple hundred feet from us. It had nothing to do with us, apart from us watching.” She started tugging at her hair again. Alex set the button down on the windowsill in front of them. Across the street, the other kids were expressing their shock, calling the girl a natural, or dismissing it as crazy good luck. Even at this distance, her smug posture was easy to read. None of the children seemed aware that there had been an opposite outcome.

“All right. You said I wouldn’t like it, but tell me anyway. Tell me your idea.”

“It’ll sound crazy,” said Alex. “Just putting that out there from the jump."

He glanced at her, and paused to gauge her reaction. She just nodded at him to continue.

"Somehow, it's about us. The whole thing is about us. Even if you mailed the button to a stranger across the country, and they opened the box and pushed it, it would still reverse whatever just happened to us. We've been put on the spot."

"Meh. I don't like being put on the spot. It feels icky."

"I knew you wouldn't like it. Try this: Think about the fact that you don't know what the button does. Just hold that thought in your mind. Then press."

She fixed her eyes on the device, reached out her hand. She touched it with the tip of her index finger.

She thought: I cannot fathom why these weird things keep happening to us when we push the button.

FLASH.

She thought: The button reverses whatever we just experienced, because it is about us.

She blinked once. "Oh. Oh crap, really?"

He put his hands on her shoulders. They took a moment to hug, because sometimes one needs that.

"This must be what it's like to be Deadpool," she said, after a moment. "Not all the violent stuff, or the immortality. It's the knowing. Seeing behind the curtain."

"The fourth-wall breaks," said Alex.

"And I just want to take this moment to say," said Ava, tilting her face upward to direct her words to an arbitrary spot on the white-painted ceiling, "that this Cassandra crap is deeply unfair, dammit! You know who you are, jerk. There are no words."

Alex winced, as if this outburst might manifest a rain of frogs or the like.

"Goddamn Geppetto," said Ava.

"Maybe you mean Stromboli."

"The knowing," Ava went on, ignoring the correction. "That's tough. Deadpool plays it for jokes. But it must suck – right? To know, to understand completely, that you are a character in a comic book, or in a big ridiculous Hollywood movie stuffed with explosions and special effects. What does that even do to a person's self-image, their sense of self-worth? Their desire to have meaning in their life?"

"Dunno, hon."

"Well, I hadn't thought about it, but I sure am, now. I don't want to feel like someone's watching over my shoulder. Maybe many someones. And I don’t want some evil puppeteer, whatever his name is, getting to dictate my own life to me."

Alex stroked his chin, where a shadow of stubble could just be seen. "It isn't all bad, though," he said. "Deadpool actually uses that knowledge to his advantage. Sometimes he knows things he shouldn't. And this" – Alex gestured to the button – "this thing certainly has possibilities."

"Oh, no question. What couldn't we do with this? I mean, if we can reverse a coin toss, could we clean up at a roulette table? If we can reverse the outcome of some event we've merely witnessed from a distance, can we change the outcome of an election? What if we try to invent some fabulous new technology, and we fail? Can we reverse that, too?"

"That sounds like almost unlimited power."

"Pretty nearly unlimited, I'd say. And all yours for the low-low cost of surrendering all privacy, all chance of leading a normal life. We could be superheroes, I suppose, but I don't imagine most superheroes to be happy people, on the whole."

Alex looked at the button. The possibilities swam behind his eyes for a few moments. Then he dismissed them.

"Well? What would you like to do? Our audience awaits our next move."

Ava placed her hand on the side of his face, taking a moment to appreciate who he was. There were many out in the world, she knew, who wouldn't be able to resist grabbing an opportunity like this with both hands, regardless of her feelings in the matter. Alex was, instead, deferring to her. He trusted her judgment, and in return, she was confident in her own trust in him.

"Superheroes lead pretty dramatic lives," Ava said. "There's always another villain, another crisis. They're always getting dragged into another story, and they have no real say on when it all stops. Sometimes they try to retire, but they get sucked back in. They get killed, and that never sticks either. I'd rather be able to keep being myself. Wouldn't you? I like who we are."

He grinned back at her. "Yeah, me too."

She looked once more at the button sitting quietly, innocently, on the windowsill, as if it were raising invisible eyebrows and saying: "What, all this fuss over me?" She nodded at it.

"All right then," said Ava. She thought again about characters in stories, and how they never knew when their story would be over.

She thought: For all I know, our story might stretch on forever.

FLASH.

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