Tales from the Universe
Moral Dilemma: If you could undo a mistake that caused real harm, but doing so would also erase relationships, wisdom, and good things that grew from its consequences, would refusing to change the past mean accepting responsibility—or protecting the person you became because of it?
Tovin ruined his brother’s life on a Tuesday.
This was unfair.
Tuesdays already had enough problems.
They were seventeen.
Twins.
Tovin was older by nine minutes and had mentioned this approximately six thousand times.
His brother, Pell, had recently been accepted into the Royal Academy of Engineering.
One scholarship.
Full tuition.
The letter sat on the kitchen table.
Their mother cried.
Their father opened wine.
Tovin smiled.
Then went outside and punched a tree.
He loved Pell.
This is important.
Jealousy becomes much easier to understand once people stop pretending it only grows where love is absent.
Tovin loved his brother.
He was also furious.
Pell had direction.
Tovin had none.
Pell was leaving.
Tovin was staying.
Everyone kept saying:
“You must be so proud.”
He was.
That was the worst part.
The night before Pell left, they drank.
Too much.
Tovin said:
“You’ll forget us.”
Pell laughed.
“No.”
“You will.”
“I’ll be home every summer.”
“You’ll make clever friends.”
“Hopefully.”
“You’ll become one of them.”
“One of who?”
“People who know what they’re doing.”
Pell smiled.
“You could come too someday.”
Tovin heard pity.
There wasn’t any.
He heard it anyway.
The argument grew.
Tovin said things designed to hurt.
Pell returned the favor.
Then Tovin said:
“You only got the scholarship because Father begged Master Henn.”
Pell stopped.
“What?”
It wasn’t true.
Tovin knew it wasn’t true.
But he had once heard Father ask Henn for advice about the application.
That was enough material to build a weapon.
“He arranged it.”
Pell stared.
“No.”
“Ask him.”
Pell did.
Their father was drunk.
Confused.
Offended.
He answered badly.
By morning Pell believed enough of the lie to refuse the scholarship.
“If I didn’t earn it, I don’t want it.”
Tovin could have corrected him.
Immediately.
He didn’t.
He thought:
I’ll tell him tomorrow.
Tomorrow became three days.
Then a week.
Then impossible.
Pell stayed.
Worked at the rail yard.
Married.
Had children.
Built small machines in his shed.
He seemed happy.
Mostly.
Tovin carried Tuesday for twenty-seven years.
Then he found the clock.
At an estate sale.
Tall.
Black wood.
Silver pendulum.
The seller said:
“Doesn’t keep time properly.”
Tovin bought it because it looked beautiful.
At midnight, it struck thirteen times.
Then the room changed.
Tovin was seventeen.
His brother sat across from him.
Wine between them.
“You’ll make clever friends,” Tovin heard himself say.
Pell smiled.
“Hopefully.”
Tovin nearly screamed.
Instead:
“You deserve the scholarship.”
Pell blinked.
“What?”
“You earned it.”
“Okay?”
“No matter what stupid thing I say tonight, remember that.”
Pell laughed.
“You’re drunk.”
“Yes.”
“Very.”
“Yes.”
Tovin began crying.
Pell stared.
“What is happening?”
Tovin hugged him.
The world snapped.
Tovin woke beside the clock.
Forty-four years old.
Different house.
Different bed.
Different wife.
He screamed.
A woman woke beside him.
“Tovin?”
He did not know her.
Her name was Sena.
Apparently they had been married twelve years.
They had one daughter.
Tovin had no memory of either.
His old wife, Mara, was married to someone else.
Their two sons did not exist.
Not dead.
Never born.
Tovin vomited.
Pell had attended the Academy.
Became an engineer.
Successful.
Famous, actually.
Designed bridges.
Never worked at the rail yard.
Never met the woman who had become his wife in the old life.
Their three children did not exist either.
Tovin found Pell.
Beautiful house.
Gray hair.
Expensive coat.
His brother embraced him.
“You look terrible.”
Tovin started crying.
Again.
Pell laughed.
“You’ve become very emotional lately.”
Tovin stared at him.
“Are you happy?”
“What?”
“Are you happy?”
Pell frowned.
“Mostly.”
The same answer.
Tovin returned to the clock.
“Take me back.”
The clock did not answer.
This was inconsiderate.
At midnight:
Thirteen strikes.
Tuesday.
Again.
This time Tovin let the lie happen.
Then corrected it the next morning.
Pell took the scholarship.
Different future.
Again.
No old children.
Again.
Different wife.
Different career.
Tovin experimented.
This is what humans call repeatedly damaging reality while hoping eventually to understand it.
He changed Tuesday twelve times.
In one life, Pell attended the Academy and died at twenty-three when a laboratory boiler exploded.
Tovin immediately went back.
In another, Pell became wealthy and miserable.
Another, poor and content.
Another, never married.
Another, had one daughter.
Another, moved overseas.
Every correction created a different world.
Tovin began trying to reconstruct the original.
He needed Pell to reject the scholarship.
But without the lie.
Maybe then everything else would remain.
He convinced Pell to stay for their mother’s health.
Wrong future.
He damaged the application.
Wrong future.
He persuaded Pell he hated engineering.
Very wrong future.
In that one Pell became an actor.
Nobody enjoyed this.
Then Tovin realized something terrible.
He wasn’t trying to correct his mistake anymore.
He was trying to recover his children.
The lie had led Pell to the rail yard.
The rail yard introduced Pell to Mara’s sister.
Their marriage led Mara to meet Tovin.
Tovin’s sons existed because of the lie.
So did Pell’s children.
Five people.
Entire lives.
Built downstream from one cruel sentence.
Tovin sat before the clock.
“What am I supposed to do?”
The clock ticked.
“Helpful.”
Tick.
He returned to Tuesday.
Again.
Pell sat across from him.
Young.
Alive.
Unformed.
Tovin looked at his brother and finally understood the obscenity of what he had been doing.
He kept treating this seventeen-year-old as a mechanism.
Say this.
Get future A.
Say that.
Get future B.
But Pell was not a lever.
He was a person standing at the beginning of his own life.
Tovin had been trying to manufacture the future he preferred.
So he told the truth.
All of it.
Not about the clock.
That would be ridiculous.
About himself.
“I’m jealous.”
Pell blinked.
“What?”
“I love you.”
“Are you dying?”
“No.”
“Then this is alarming.”
Tovin laughed.
Then cried.
Pell sighed.
“Again?”
“You leaving scares me.”
Pell became quiet.
“I feel like you’re becoming something and I’m not.”
“Tovin—”
“Don’t fix it.”
He breathed.
“I need to say it without turning it into something you did wrong.”
Pell listened.
Then Tovin said:
“You earned the scholarship.”
Pell nodded.
“And I want you to go.”
Pell looked surprised.
“Even if I hate that you’re going.”
Both truths sat there.
Neither canceled the other.
The clock struck.
Once.
Not thirteen.
Once.
The world changed.
Tovin woke at forty-four.
Alone.
Small apartment.
No wife.
No children.
He knew immediately.
Gone.
Again.
He curled on the floor.
He had chosen this.
That did not make grief smaller.
Pell had gone to the Academy.
He had become an engineer.
Not famous.
Good.
Married.
Two daughters.
Alive.
Happy.
Mostly.
Tovin had become a teacher.
Never married.
He had a dog named Emperor.
Emperor was extremely fat.
Tovin loved him immediately despite having no memory of him.
The clock remained.
Tovin could go back.
He knew how.
At midnight.
Turn the minute hand backward.
Thirteen strikes.
Tuesday.
His sons could exist again.
Pell’s old children too.
Mara.
The old kitchen.
Everything.
All he had to do was tell one lie.
At eleven fifty-eight, Tovin stood before the clock.
Hand on the dial.
He remembered his son’s face.
Then the other.
People who had existed.
People he loved.
Were they less real because they existed only in a discarded version of time?
Tovin didn’t know.
He never would.
Eleven fifty-nine.
His hand tightened.
Then he thought about Pell at seventeen.
Sitting across from him.
Trusting him.
The lie waiting in Tovin’s mouth.
To restore the children, Tovin would have to harm Pell deliberately.
Knowing exactly what would follow.
Was that different from the first time?
Yes.
Much worse.
Midnight.
Tovin let the clock strike twelve.
Nothing happened.
He collapsed against it.
Years passed.
He never used the clock again.
He also never destroyed it.
He couldn’t.
Some nights he stood before it.
Especially when lonely.
Especially when he dreamed about children nobody else remembered.
He would touch the wood.
Then walk away.
Not because the temptation disappeared.
Because it didn’t.
Pell visited often.
One evening they drank wine.
Dangerous tradition.
Pell said:
“Do you ever wonder what would’ve happened if I stayed?”
Tovin laughed so suddenly wine came out his nose.
Pell stared.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Why are you laughing?”
“You have no idea.”
Pell continued.
“I almost didn’t go, you know.”
“I know.”
“You were the reason.”
Tovin became still.
“What?”
“That conversation.”
Pell smiled.
“You told me you were jealous.”
Tovin looked down.
“I don’t remember much from that age, but I remember thinking: if you could be scared and still tell me to go, maybe I could be scared and still go.”
Tovin closed his eyes.
“Was it the right choice?” he asked.
Pell shrugged.
“For which version of me?”
Tovin stared.
Pell laughed.
“I’m serious. I could’ve stayed. Maybe I’d have loved that life too.”
Tovin’s throat tightened.
“You think so?”
“Of course.”
Pell drank.
“People act like there’s one correct life waiting for us and every decision either finds it or ruins it.”
He shook his head.
“Seems unlikely.”
After Pell left, Tovin stood before the clock.
For the first time, he understood something.
He had spent years asking which timeline was the right one.
There wasn’t one.
There were lives.
Possible lives.
Beautiful ones.
Terrible ones.
Ordinary ones.
Lives containing people he would love.
Lives containing people he would never meet.
No choice could preserve all of them.
He opened the clock.
Removed the mechanism.
Not destroyed.
Removed.
He placed it in a box.
On the box he wrote:
TUESDAY.
Nothing else.
When Tovin died, Pell’s eldest daughter found it.
She opened the box.
Inside was the strange clockwork.
And a letter.
It said:
You will eventually discover something you wish you had done differently.
Repair what can still be repaired.
Apologize where apology belongs.
Learn what the mistake has to teach you.
But be careful wishing to become the person who never made it.
You do not know who else you would have to erase.
She read it twice.
Then placed the mechanism back inside.
Somewhere, in a life nobody remembered, two boys had once called Tovin Father.
He had loved them.
That love remained inside the only person who could remember them.
It did not justify the lie that created them.
The lie did not make their lives meaningless.
Both things were true.
Tovin had finally stopped trying to make one of them disappear.
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