"Uh, about fifty thousand years before Christ."

"Is there anything for babies who aren't born?"

"Not that I'm aware of."

Nod.

"- Uh. If you wanted to like, eventually start over, with - I don't want to say 'the same baby', that encodes some assumptions we don't necessarily share, but one that is the same like - like identical twins are the same? Then I can do that. - uh, I might need the faery who summoned me, before I can do it, but in principle."

"I don't really -

- I guess it's really the same mistake I was making in a lot of other ways, I thought I knew enough about how the universe worked to be pretty sure what might happen and then it turned out there were a lot of things that I could be wrong about that I didn't even know were the kind of things a person could be wrong about, and actually I was doing something really different than what I thought I was doing. Not that I thought I was doing the right thing in the first place. And I still don't - I think maybe I just actually shouldn't do things - because I'm so very stupid, you see -"

"On the whole I'm actually really impressed with you? And the thing's not obligatory or anything at all, I just thought I'd mention."

"I'm glad you mentioned. I just - think maybe if I keep being this wrong about things then that's concerning about my prospects of figuring out anything important."

"I don't think 'not knowing very easy-to-miss faeries had all the properties they turn out to have' is a mistake that reflects on you much!"

"They were really nice at first."

"I guess that's how they get you."

"I had been told that faeries were terrible and dangerous, it's not like no one ever warned me."

"Well, believing everything you were ever told isn't quite the right answer either. I dunno what to tell you here."

"It's not anything you need to trouble yourself with anyway. You're very good, I'm not so stupid I'm confused about that, and probably when I've thought about it enough I'll figure out the rest of it too. There's a bit that feels important about - the thing you said about feeding people who don't work."

Wag wag.

Smile. Sigh.

She goes back to her room.

Cam checks the time his computer has advanced to.

He checks some clocks from home.

They have not advanced.

He can't pace. He makes dinner for himself and eats it pensively.

He turns on the hall light.

"What can we do for you?"

"I am now more confident it's time travel and I hate this fact so fucking much. Uh. Pretty much just thought you should be apprised of that."

"Because it means we can't let anything about your existence here...leak back into the human world?"

"Yep. And I know what they're going to get up to in the next thousand years! And it's going to feel like a million years!"

"Is it going to get up to something bad?"

"Lots of bad things. They get better. They get so much better. They have so much shit to get through first. And if I touch anything - in any way that turns out to matter - then maybe I'm never born, maybe the universe annihilates itself, who the fuck knows, but it is likely that what happens is not 'I get to re-run history except this time King Leopold doesn't cut off a bunch of Congolese people's hands and there isn't a Holocaust and Christopher Columbus does not get free rein to be such a monster and -'

- there's. There's about twenty billion faeries, yeah?"

"We think so, yeah."

"Well. Not gonna be that many humans for the, uh. Foreseeable future.

Also probably I can do whatever I want come 2180.

And Limbo's not that bad. They go to Limbo when they die.

Fuck."