Precognition

The last thing I remember before falling into the water was the tortured look on Jacob's face as he deperately tried to grab me. Before I knew it, I was 50 feet under and counting. I could tell I was going to drown soon; I never was the athletic type, and I could feel the cold seeping in. Before long, I'd be dead at the bottom of the lake. Wasn't too bad of a way to go, all things considered. My numbness was actually starting to feel comfortable...



"Hey bro, get it together! You're spacing out again!", said a familiar voice.
 I came to with a start. After getting my bearings straight, I realized that I was back home. Something had happened, and now I was alive again, safe and sound. But how?

My thoughts were cut short. "Seriously, get it together, grandpa wants us to go fishing today, so hurry up and get ready.", Jacob said, with an almost parental tone. "Alright, give me five minutes", I asked. After a second, Jacob left, visibly exasperated.


Alright, so it was obvious I had some sort of time rewinding power. Normally I would have assumed it was just a nightmare, but from the context of the situation and the discussion it was clear that I hadn't been asleep, but had had a temporary lapse of consciousness. What I didn't know was how this power worked. Maybe it was some sort of future sight? Either way, I wasn't feeling cold or wet at all, so that meant that only my memories were affected by the power, not the rest of my body. Perhaps it only triggered because I was on the verge of death? Maybe I couldn't consciously activate it?

To try and find out, I set up a simple test. I picked up one of the books from the table, and set it down neatly on the floor while marking the time on the clock. 6:24:36. I then tried to rewind time, trying to visualize the book being back on the table. Suddenly, it teleported onto the table, exactly where it had been. I looked at the clock, and the time was 6:24:27.

Now it started to make sense. I had sent my entire consciousness back in time into my earlier self which, from my perspective, achieved the same result as rewinding the universe to an earlier state. I could then act differently and affect the future through my actions, such as not picking up the book. This power would let me pull some neat tricks, but I'd have to get better with it if I wanted to start exploiting it.

After a bit of trial and error, I learned that I could not skip forward in time, or rewind to before Jacob came upstairs. I did learn how to slow time though. At first it was tricky, but I eventually got the hang of it. Basically, suppose for every second that passes, I skip back half a second in time. This way, a given amount of time takes twice as long to pass, even though I'm technically travelling through time at the same speed throughout. The only downside it the "jumpiness" of the slowing, since jumping back a half second every second makes everything jump around unpredictably. After a bit more practice, I smoothed it out by jumping back half a millisecond every millisecond. Now, the jumps weren't noticeable anymore due to their small size, and I now had a usable form of "bullet-time". By adjusting the jumps to back 0.8 milliseconds every millisecond, I was able to reduce the perceived passage of time to 20% of normal or even less. Now there'd be no chance of me falling overboard. Neat!

Looking up at the clock, I realized that three minutes had passed. I'd have to get ready and go downstairs soon. Picking up my gear, I started down the steps, and promptly tripped. No biggie, I'd just rewind and try again, this time in slow-mo. Couldn't be too hard, right? Turns out, it wasn't hard at all. The only issue was my gear blocking my view and throwing me off balance, so I elected to carry it one thing at a time down the stairs.

The rest of the day was mostly uneventful. We caught a few fish here and there, and nobody drowned. I even used my slow mo power to catch a few fish by hand, for fun. Gramps was visibly jealous about that, but I just laughed it off as dumb luck. At the end of the day, we went to an old lakeside restaurant and had a wonderful feast.

I wonder how easy it'll be once I go back to college.