THE LAST TUESDAY
================

Published: September 9, 2026

The TARDIS materialized in Rick Sanchez's garage at 2:14 on a Tuesday
afternoon.

This was unusual for several reasons.

First, the garage already contained a machine occupying approximately the
same physical location.

Second, that machine was currently holding open a portal to a universe
composed entirely of screaming mathematics.

Third, Rick had specifically installed a device designed to prevent
mysterious British people from appearing in his garage.

The blue police box pushed Rick's workbench six inches sideways and knocked
over a jar labeled DO NOT OPEN, MORTY.

Rick stared at it.

"Son of a bitch."

Morty looked up from his phone.

"Uh, Rick? Is that, like, a British phone booth?"

"It's a police box."

"What's the difference?"

"The difference is one makes phone calls and the other means somebody
incredibly annoying is about to explain something."

The door opened.

A tall figure stepped out wearing a battered coat, mismatched shoes, and the
expression of someone who had just discovered a fire in the library and was
mostly irritated about the books.

The Doctor looked around.

"Oh."

Rick folded his arms.

The Doctor looked at Rick.

"Oh, no."

Rick took a drink from his flask.

"Yeah. That's pretty much what I was gonna say."

The Doctor pointed toward the glowing machine in the corner.

"Turn that off."

Rick smiled.

"No."

"Rick," Morty whispered. "Maybe we should hear him out."

"Morty, never trust anybody who enters your house in a box with windows you
can't see through."

The Doctor glanced back at the TARDIS.

"That's remarkably hypocritical considering the portal gun in your pocket."

Rick stopped smiling.

The Doctor smiled instead.

"There it is."

"What?"

"The tiny moment when the clever man realizes somebody else is clever too."

Rick pulled out his portal gun.

"Okay, Mary Poppins, you've got about five seconds before I find out whether
that box floats."

The Doctor walked past him.

Rick fired.

A green portal opened beneath the Doctor's feet.

The Doctor dropped through it.

Morty gasped.

The Doctor immediately fell from the ceiling and landed beside the machine.

Rick stared at his portal gun.

The Doctor held up a small silver device.

"You really shouldn't leave your dimensional coordinates unsecured."

Rick looked genuinely offended.

"Did you just hack my portal gun with a flashlight?"

"Sonic screwdriver."

"That's worse."

The machine behind them began to hum.

The lights dimmed.

The garage disappeared.

For half a second, Morty saw everything.

Every version of the garage.

Every version of himself.

A Morty with a beard.

A Morty with no head.

A Morty who had become President.

A Morty who had apparently opened a successful chain of sandwich restaurants.

Then reality snapped back.

Morty screamed.

Rick didn't.

The Doctor did something much more concerning.

The Doctor became completely serious.

"What did you build?"

Rick glanced toward the machine.

"A probability compressor."

The Doctor stared.

"A what?"

"Universe gets too messy, infinite branches, infinite garbage. Every choice
makes another timeline. So I built a filter."

Morty slowly raised his hand.

"What does the filter do?"

Rick shrugged.

"Gets rid of statistically pointless timelines."

Silence.

The Doctor looked at Rick.

"You've been deleting universes."

"No. I've been preventing unnecessary ones."

"They contain people."

"They contain possibilities."

"They contain people."

Rick stepped forward.

"Oh, don't give me the speech. You fly around time fixing things constantly.
Every time you change history, somebody's future disappears."

"I don't decide that their lives are pointless!"

"No. You just decide your version is better."

That landed.

Morty watched the Doctor's expression change.

Rick saw it too.

For the first time, he looked pleased.

"Yeah," Rick said. "There it is. You know I'm right."

The Doctor looked toward the machine.

"No."

"No?"

"You're close enough to being right to make what you're doing much worse."

The probability compressor made a loud metallic CLUNK.

A red light illuminated.

Morty pointed.

"Rick, is that supposed to happen?"

"No."

The garage stretched sideways.

The refrigerator became twenty refrigerators, then one, then none.

Summer walked through the door.

"Hey, has anybody seen my..."

She vanished.

Morty screamed again.

"SUMMER?!"

Rick looked at the machine.

"Oh, crap."

The Doctor grabbed Rick by the shoulder.

"What did you use as the reference universe?"

Rick didn't answer.

"Rick."

"My universe."

The Doctor closed their eyes.

"You idiot."

"Hey!"

"You absolute colossal idiot!"

The Doctor ran to the TARDIS.

Rick followed.

Morty hesitated.

"Should I come?"

Both men shouted simultaneously.

"NO!"

Morty sat down.

"Okay."

Then Rick turned around.

"Actually, Morty, come on."

The Doctor sighed.

"Of course."

Inside the TARDIS, Rick stopped.

He looked upward.

He looked downward.

He walked around the console.

He opened a panel.

The Doctor slapped his hand away.

Rick opened another.

The Doctor slapped that hand too.

Rick grinned.

"Dimensionally recursive architecture."

"Yes."

"Artificial gravity independent of local spacetime."

"Yes."

"Non-Euclidean interior volume."

"Yes."

Rick leaned toward the Doctor.

"Compensating for something?"

The Doctor pulled a lever.

The TARDIS lurched violently.

Rick flew into a railing.

Morty laughed.

"Okay, I like this guy."

The central column began moving.

Outside the doors, Tuesday appeared.

Not Earth.

Tuesday.

Millions of Tuesdays floated like sheets of broken glass.

Tuesday where Morty stayed home from school.

Tuesday where Rick never built the compressor.

Tuesday where Earth was destroyed at breakfast.

Tuesday where humanity achieved world peace at 3:17 PM and ruined it by
dinner.

One by one they were going dark.

Morty stared.

"Those are all people?"

The Doctor nodded.

Rick looked away.

The Doctor noticed.

"Still possibilities?"

Rick said nothing.

A tiny fragment floated past them.

Inside it, an old woman watered flowers on an apartment balcony.

Another fragment vanished.

A child blew out birthday candles.

Gone.

Another.

A man sat beside a hospital bed holding someone's hand.

Gone.

Rick walked toward the console.

"Okay. How do we stop it?"

The Doctor looked at him.

"I thought they were statistically pointless."

Rick's jaw tightened.

"Yeah, well, congratulations. You won the morality contest. Do you want a
trophy or do you want to fix the universe?"

The Doctor smiled slightly.

"Now you're learning."

"Don't push it."

They worked.

And Morty watched two impossible minds collide.

Rick built things faster.

The Doctor understood them sooner.

Rick broke rules.

The Doctor knew why the rules existed.

Rick bypassed safeguards.

The Doctor secretly added new ones.

They argued over quantum topology, temporal recursion, whether mathematics
was discovered or invented, and whether Kentucky bourbon counted as an
antiseptic.

Finally the Doctor stopped.

"We can't restore them."

Morty's stomach dropped.

"What?"

"The compressor isn't destroying timelines."

Rick looked at the readings.

"It's merging them."

The Doctor nodded.

"Every Tuesday is being compressed into one Tuesday."

Morty stared through the doors.

"What's that mean?"

Rick slowly smiled.

"Oh."

The Doctor smiled too.

"Oh."

Morty hated when geniuses did that.

"What?!"

Rick pointed at the machine readings.

"We don't have to separate the universes."

The Doctor grabbed a lever.

"We make the compressor unable to choose."

Rick laughed.

"Schrodinger's Tuesday."

"Precisely!"

Rick started rewiring the console.

The Doctor froze.

"What are you doing?"

"Helping."

"You're connecting your machine to my TARDIS."

"Yeah."

"Without asking."

"Correct."

"Get out."

"After we save infinity."

"Then get out."

"Deal."

Morty looked between them.

"Uh, guys?"

They both shouted:

"NOT NOW, MORTY!"

Morty folded his arms.

"Oh, that's creepy."

Rick pushed a button.

The Doctor pulled a lever.

Somewhere in the multiverse, Tuesday exploded.

The garage returned.

Summer walked through the door.

"Hey, has anybody seen my charger?"

Morty ran over and hugged her.

"What the hell?"

"SUMMER!"

"Get off me!"

Rick checked the probability compressor.

Dead.

The Doctor stepped out of the TARDIS.

Rick looked at the smoking remains of his machine.

"So that's it?"

"That's it."

"All universes restored?"

"All Tuesdays restored."

Rick narrowed his eyes.

"That's an oddly specific distinction."

The Doctor headed toward the TARDIS.

Rick watched.

"You know we're basically the same person."

The Doctor stopped.

"No."

"Come on. Smartest person in the room. Dimension hopping. Complicated
relationship with consequences."

The Doctor turned around.

For once, there was no smile.

"That's exactly why we're not the same."

Rick's expression hardened.

The Doctor continued.

"You decided nothing matters because everything exists."

The Doctor opened the TARDIS door.

"I decided everything matters because it might not."

Rick stared at them.

The Doctor disappeared inside.

The doors closed.

The TARDIS began to fade.

Rick raised his flask toward it.

"Self-righteous asshole."

The TARDIS vanished.

Morty stood beside him.

"So... who was smarter?"

Rick took a drink.

"Me."

From nowhere, the Doctor's voice echoed through the garage.

"No, you aren't."

Rick slowly lowered the flask.

Morty started laughing.

Rick pointed at him.

"Not one word, Morty."

On the workbench, a tiny blue light blinked.

Rick picked it up.

Attached to it was a handwritten note.

I fixed your portal gun.

Below that:

You're welcome.

Rick immediately fired it.

A portal opened.

On the other side was a universe populated entirely by angry geese.

Thousands of them turned toward Rick.

Rick stared.

The geese charged.

"Son of a bitch."

END


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