“Not with that theory of time travel, no. The method I know of would enable us to become our younger selves. We would send our consciousnesses back in time, and they would be transferred into the bodies of our younger selves. For example, then you’d have all your 29 year old mind and memories in the body of your 5 year old self. I’d have all of my 39 year old mind and memories in the body of my 15 year old self. It can be done, I can assure you. In fact, I can prove it. We’ll wait twenty minutes. Then you tell me some secret that I couldn’t possibly know now. Then I’ll come back in time those twenty minutes, and tell you in a few seconds time what I’ve learned from your 20 minutes into the future,” said Trudi.

“If you say so,” said Daniel.

“Now don’t say anything significant for the next twenty minutes, because it’ll be removed from your memory. In fact, from your perspective, you’ll never have said it, once I’ve time travelled. We need to spend the time doing something of no importance, so that it doesn’t matter when it’s undone,” said Trudi.

“We could play Snap with the pack of cards in that spare bedroom,” said Daniel.

He showed her into the room, and sat on one end of the bed and dealt the cards. She sat a meter away and prepared for the game. At times, when one of them snapped up a pile only less than a second ahead of the other one, their hands would make contact. She began to wonder what this sensation would be doing to him, and hoped the twenty minutes would soon be up.

He had almost emptied her of her entire deck of cards, when he looked at the clock on the bedside table, and said, “It’s been 19 minutes. We’d better get back out in the corridor, so that you can time travel.”

“We don’t have to. My mind will revert to wherever my body was twenty minutes ago. From your point of view as this timeline comes to an end, you won’t know anything. But your twenty minutes younger self in the next timeline should have some proof by then,” said Trudi.

When the allotted 20 minutes was up, she asked him, “So what’s your secret?”

“I wish I could have seen ‘Mountains Family’ when it was on,” said Daniel.

Trudi laughed.

“I could have guessed that. Tell me something that’s just about yourself, that I couldn’t possibly know yet,” said Trudi.

“When I was ten, my favourite cartoon super hero was the Sapphire Skyflyer,” said Daniel.

“Well there’s one I never saw,” said Trudi, “Okay, let me concentrate...”

She soon found herself back at the point when he had just said “If you say so.”

“I’m back from 20 minutes time,” she said, “We had a game of snap at your suggestion, to pass the time and then you told me your secret. Namely that your favourite cartoon character was the Sapphire Skyflyer, when you were ten.”