Greg Keyes - Interstellar

And with his fingers, he traced the pattern, the lines he had found after the dust storm—

She ran her finger along the windowsill and examined the dust on it, remembering the pattern on the floor that day, how happy she was that she had been vindicated, that her father believed her. Sort of. But he had never believed all of it. Only the part he wanted to believe, that part that said he had been chosen to go into space. The ghost he had discounted.

And yet he was the ghost. Both. Giving himself the coordinates that would lead him to NASA, but also telling himself to stay.

A contradiction. Like gravity itself.

She looked around the room, searching for something to reconcile it. This was her last shot. Tom would never let her in here again.

“Come on, Dad,” she pleaded. “Is there something else here?”

Cooper looked up from the pattern he was tracing.

“Don’t you see, TARS?” he said. “I brought myself here. We’re here to communicate with the three-dimensional world. We’re the bridge.”

He moved along to another version of the room. Murph was there, jumping up from the bed, grabbing the watch from where she had thrown it, running out the door…

Murph reached into the box and picked up the watch, thinking about the little moment of hope, the little experiment she and her father were going to do together, until she realized just how long he was going to be gone, that he didn’t even know if he was coming back. And then she had thrown it, rejected him and his damn attempt at “making things right.”

Then she had picked it up again. And kept it. And waited. And he hadn’t returned. They had never been able to compare them.

She put it on the bookshelf.

The second hand twitched.

Cooper pushed himself along the lines of the books, following their positions in time.

“I thought they chose me,” Cooper said. “They never chose me. They chose Murph.”

“For what?” TARS asked.

“To save the world!” Cooper replied.

He watched ten-year-old Murph come back into the room, crying her eyes out, holding the timepiece. It was hard to watch, but he did.

After a moment she put the watch on a shelf.

Murph sighed and put the box on the shelf. If there had ever been anything else here, it was gone now. She had to salvage what she could. And right now that meant saving Lois and Coop.

Cooper was “moving” fast now, following the room through space-time. Watching it go from being Murph’s bedroom, to abandoned, to glimpses of what might be a little boy, although he never got a clear view.

“‘They’d have access to infinite time, infinite space,” he told TARS, gesturing all around him. “But no way to find what they need. But I can find Murph and find a way to tell her—like I found this moment…”

“How?” TARS asked.

“Love, TARS,” he said. “Love, just like Brand said. That’s how we find things here.” Love, like gravity, which could move across time and dimensions.

Brand had been spot on.

“So what are we to do?” TARS asked.

Cooper looked down the time dimension. The books? No, and not the lander. But the watch, on the shelf, as far as he could see…

“The watch,” he realized. “That’s it. She’ll come back for it.”

“How do you know?” TARS asked.

And again he felt the certainty, a pull as strong as a black hole. Stronger—it was like the pull that had brought him here. That would bring Murph back, too.

“Because I gave it to her,” he said, excitement building. He scrutinized the watch for a moment. It would have to be simple, binary, or…

He had it.

“We use the second hand,” he told TARS. “Translate the data into Morse, and feed it to me.”

He grabbed the timeline that connected to the second hand in all of its iterations, and as the data came in he tugged it in time, long and short—dots and dashes.

“What if she never came back for it?” TARS asked.

“She will,” he insisted, as the second hand began flicking back and forth. “She will. I can feel it…”

Murph was turning to leave when Getty shouted—near hysterically—that Tom was coming. But still something held her. She went back to the box, knowing what she was going for, and pulled out the watch. Feeling it, then seeing it.

“Murph?” Getty yelled. “Murph!”

When she came tearing out of the house, Getty was holding a tire iron, watching an angry Tom climb from the truck, black with soot. Lois and Coop were watching, too, fearful looks on their faces.

But Murph ran straight for her brother.

“Tom,” she said. “He came back… he came back.”

Tom’s fierce expression tempered a bit toward puzzlement.

“Who?” he asked, gruffly, confusion wrestling with anger in his voice.

“Dad,” she told him. “It was him. He’s going to save us.”

Triumphantly she held up the watch—and its weirdly flickering second hand.

Murph looked at the equations she had just written, then back to the watch. She stood, gathering the pages, and hurried through the halls. In her haste she bumped into someone, and was absently aware that it was Getty, but she didn’t slow her pace.

She remembered her first time here, with her dad, how terrifying it had been, followed quickly by awe-inspiring. Now, after all these years, it was home.

She reached the launch bay, the gigantic cylindrical space station that had never been intended to fly, had been nothing more than busy work to keep everyone who knew the truth from curling up into a ball and staying that way.

She remembered the pride Professor Brand had showed in the thing, even though he believed it would never function.

She walked up to the railing, marveling at it, at the thousands of workers who were still on the job. Getty stepped up beside her, having followed, and he wore a curious look on his face.

Then she turned back to the enormous hollow, and shouted at the top of her lungs.

“ Eu-RE-ka! ”

She turned her grin on Getty.

“Well, it’s traditional,” she said. Then she threw her papers over the railing.

“Eureka!” she repeated, as the papers fluttered down and workers looked curiously at her.

Then she planted a kiss right on the lips of a very surprised and confused Dr. Getty.

Cooper gazed along the worldline of the watch, saw that it seemed to branch out infinitely.

“Did it work?” he asked TARS.

“I think it might have,” TARS replied.

“Why?” Cooper said, hopefully.

“Because the bulk beings are closing the tesseract,” TARS replied.

Cooper gazed again off into the distance and saw that something, at least, was happening. The lines were becoming sheets, becoming bulks, as the three-dimensional representation created for his only-human brain unraveled and returned to its full five-dimensional reality. It was like the universe was collapsing in on him, which he supposed in a sense it was.

“You don’t get it yet, TARS?” Cooper asked. “‘They’ aren’t beings —they’re us . Trying to help, just like I tried to help Murph…”

“People didn’t build this tesseract,” TARS said.

“Not yet,” Cooper replied. “But one day. Not you and I, but people—people who’ve evolved beyond the four dimensions that we know.”

As the expansion back into five dimensions came upon him, Cooper thought of Murph, and Tom—and hoped he had saved them. He thought he had, or at least played a part. There wasn’t much more that he could ask.