Calibrations

California 2006

When Figment opened his eyes, he was alone in a dark, sparsely decorated room. "What the fuck did you do to me, Ray?" he shouted, but all he could hear was the echo of his own voice. "Where am I? When am I?"

All of a sudden, the door opened, and a man with green eyes and dyed black hair walked in. Figment recognized him immediately. "Billie Joe Armstrong?" he said. "What are you doing here?"

"I'll answer all your questions," Billie said. "You're at the Watch Headquarters for questioning, which I believe Special Agent Toro already told you. It's still January 24, 2006, although it's a few hours later than it was when Ray captured you. He's going to get a nice pay raise for that, by the way. I might even make him a Senior Special Agent. Anyways, I asked Ray to send you forward a few hours, since I'm kind of busy today..."

"Seriously?" Figment said. "You made me skip over the last few hours just because you were busy?"

"Y'know, you should see my caseload," Billie said. "I really needed some time to catch up. Oh, and I'm here because I'm the Director of the Watch."

"That's...that's insane," Figment said.

No, not Figment. There was no need for a nickname, not in this place. Here, he was all alone. Here, he was just Gerard.

"Well, I'm really only in charge of the North American division, and I don't bother with anything outside of the late 20th and early 21st centuries," Billie said. "I'm a little too busy with Green Day for that." He approached Gerard and then took off his handcuffs. "I don't know why Ray bothered with these. I'm pretty sure you're not dangerous."

"I'm not," Gerard insisted. He still couldn't quite believe that Ray and Billie were both in the Watch. For all he knew, all of his friends could secretly be spying on him. "Is anyone else I know in the Watch?" he asked Billie, as if he would actually tell him the truth.

"I don't think so," Billie said.

"Is Ellen Page in the Watch?" Gerard asked. He was pretty sure that she was, but he just had to make sure.

"The kid from X-Men?" Billie said. "No, she's not." There was a brief period of awkward silence, and then Billie said, "So you're from 2019, huh? You've changed an awful lot, but I suppose thirteen years is a long time. Ooh, can you tell me what I'm doing in 2019?"

"You're working on your thirteenth album, and you're going on a tour with Fall Out Boy and Weezer next year," Gerard said. "Also, people still make jokes about waking Green Day up when September ends and you still get unnecessarily mad about it, you're way too nice to Billie Eilish just because you happen to have the same name as her, and you still think that you're more punk rock than you actually are."

"Yeah, that all sounds like me," Billie said. "Y'know, I remember when Green Day and My Chemical Romance went on tour last year. That was so much fun, wasn't it?"

Gerard thought back on that tour. For him, that had all happened a long time ago, but he did remember having a good time. "Yeah, it was," he said.

"It's a shame that we had to meet again like this," Billie said. "So what exactly are you doing here? And don't give that story about collecting customer data for Netflix, because both Ray and I know it's bullshit."

Gerard told him the truth, or at least most of it. "Frank died in a bus crash in 2016, and I'm trying to save him," he said. "I needed to talk to the version of me from this era to make sure that it doesn't happen."

"That's not going to work," Billie said. "Time is inevitable. If you succeed, then you would have felt the effects of your time travel all along. You would remember Frank surviving the crash. Therefore, there is no point in allowing you to travel, because you will inevitably fail." Billie paused to think, and then he said, "Or will you? You could be lying to me. Maybe Frank will survive the crash, or maybe the crash won't happen at all, and if Frank is only alive because of your intervention, then I have no choice but to let you go..."