I HAD TRIED EVERYTHING I COULD THINK OF to extend this overlap, my time in this version of a reality ticking towards its obliteration. My first thought brought an impossible notion to mind, and I gave it more time than it deserved. It merited no time at all as anything needing to be done to me or my machine in normal time sat way beyond my reach, my body suspended in the thick liquid of the chamber. 

We had the best medical and scientific minds Peter’s money could buy and were never able to extend the time my physical body could endure in a ‘jump’ to more than fifteen days. After such a journey, the toll on my health required extensive treatment which my personal ‘overlap cure’ actively fought. Despite the doctors’ stern counsel, my wounded soul needed the scotch to heal more than my body needed the medications. 

At risk of being forcibly refrained from my own invention, I deleted the logs after each jump. No one knew how many times I had jumped, and the passing years erased that number from my mind as well. The solution to extending this journey, you see, needed to be found within that overlap itself. And that became my obsession, robbing me of fully immersing myself in those last blissful years.

Like the dog with a big juicy bone in its mouth looking at its reflection in a pond, all I needed to do was reach down and open my mouth…

It may have been a mistake, bringing my daughter into my reality. By that, of course, I mean simply making her aware of the normal timeline and my journey into this overlap. I never considered how her young mind would comprehend learning her entire world existed in a fractured splinter of time that would end when I left. As for the emotional weight, I could never work that out and would typically leave things like that to Ellie. However, I never told my darling wife of the overlap or that what she believed to be reality was, in all practical terms, an illusion.

My family were characters in a book, brought to life by my selfish endeavors in a story no one would read besides its author. 

The positive result of confiding in the sharp mind of Sabrina came in her becoming my loyal lab assistant. She seemed as committed as me in extending my stay, prolonging the fantasy life greater and more impactful than any of my previous lives. Again, I did something I never thought I would and, under lesser circumstances, would never have considered. I shared the technology behind my machine.

Together, we labored for countless hours and the weeks stacked up to the height of two years, my final two years if I could not figure this out. The result of our work—beyond the bond that forged between us, which made contemplating leaving a daily torture—was a version of my machine, complete with a deprivation chamber. I must admit, with the assistance of a young mind uncluttered by hubris and preconception, this was the most advanced version of the machine I had ever made.

For the first time, I would attempt to enter an overlap from within an overlap.