The Difference
"What difference does it make?" asked Rædis. He eased the back of the driver's seat of the car he and Traveler were currently in to a relaxed angle, stretched his long arms and readjusted his grip on the steering wheel. He was happy, comfortable and excited to arrive at their destination.
Traveler looked over at his friend a little surprised.
"Really? After all our adventures together, you're going to ask a question like that?" he asked.
Next to Rædis, among a mess of maps, sat Traveler. He held one against the dashboard before him, attempting to figure out how to get to where they needed to go from where they were.
The problem was that he wasn't entirely sure where they were.
The maps he was not using were stacked on his lap in a loose structure of zig-zag folds. Rædis took a tight corner fast enough to cause them to slide across the center console and onto the floor at his feet. Traveler would have been irritated by the maneuver but at that moment his mind made sense of their position thus allowing him to plan excactly the route he required.
"It's a perfectly reasonable question to have asked. What's the problem?" queried Rædis. Traveler was refolding the maps he didn't need. He didn't have the time to redo the tidy oragami in which they came in so he simply creased them closed against their seams resulting in a stack that was twice as thick as when he first obtained them. Upon tossing them into the back seat they nearly all sprung open again anyway. He ignored them and focused on his friend's question.
"You're referring to the last set of directions I gave you, yes?" he asked just to be clear.
"Yes." confirmed Rædis. "You said the last two exits would further us along to our destination even though neither would add to the length or time to our next navigational point yet you specifically told me to take the first exit and not the second so like...what difference does it make?" Rædis reiterated.
Traveler loved moments when he got to explain the inscrutable workings of higher dimensions to his friend. He took a sip from his can grape soda through a bent orange straw and began...
"Yes, while it is true either exit would have been satisfactory there were a few key factors in play."
Rædis turned the radio down as he got into Traveler's explanation. The man continued.
"One, and the most important being I had yet to work out the remainder of our route. Secondly, taking the other exit may have lead to a whole new set of circumstances that could have changed our plans for better or worse. Since we're off to have a blast I opted for the one exit over the other."
"Based on what?" Rædis asked, skillfully passing a slower sedan. There was a bored looking little kid in the back seat who watched their slick looking touring car pass with wide-eyed wonder. Rædis performed a brief light show for the kid with the car's ground effect lighting. The kid smiled and waved at him. Rædis gave the kid two friendly chirps of the car's horn, sped around the sedan and back into the proper cruising lane.
Traveler caught this brief little exchange and waved as well before answering.
"Based on my experience and finely honed temporal intuituon." Traveler said, definitively. Rædis considered this. He had come to trust his friend when it came to things like the interconectedness of time and space. He chuckled at him.
"So basically, changing direction changes everything. Anything could happen." he said, amused.
"Of course!" Traveler said as he traced the completed route to their destination with an expensive pen he helped himself to from the woman who rented them their car. "This works both ways, obviously, but I feel our current direction limits the amount of weirdness we are subject to on the way to where we're going."
Rædis' chuckle turned into a full-on laugh at this.
"It is because I know you that the potential for weirdness we are subject to is relatively high no matter which route or how much time we waste."
Traveler laughed across at his best friend but his eyes retained a serious look. They had a good sigh when their laughter had subsided.
"Ahhhh...if you understood time as well as I did you wouldn't talk about wasting it."
This was a quote from Lewis Carrol's 'Mad Hatter' that Traveler always wanted the chance to employ and eagerly jumped at the moment to do so when it finally presented itself.
Rædis searched for a witty retort but failed to find one. Smug with literary cleverness, the following thing he said was to tell Rædis to make the next left turn. Rædis did this then turned the music back up.