MY DAUGHTER CAUGHT ON QUICKLY and understood the very nature of time travel and what a jump into an overlap meant. If successful, she would not have a second more with me, with her mother and brothers. Her life was on an unstoppable collision course with the void. No matter what happened when I submerged myself in my chamber, this reality would end when my true physical form awoke in normal time. 

Selfishness pricked at my conscience; the one Ellie insisted I had long before I would concede the point. All I had done for two years, the time I had pulled myself from Ellie and Georgie, gave them and Sabrina nothing. If I could successfully jump into a moment of this overlap—I chose to jump into the moment just before I entered the machine—I would get another fifteen years with a version of my family. My family here, the one I wished despairingly never to leave, would be left, nonetheless. 

Was recognition of my selfishness the strongest evidence I did indeed have a conscience?

To me, it would be like a thirty-year overlap. I would continue my experiences, my life, with this newly spawned version of my family. Pondering this new layer, an overlap within an overlap, I had already resolved to build the machine again in the next one, drilling three layers deep into the world I wanted to build, the reality I could grow old in and leave myself to rot in the real world. Forty-five years with the love of my life, and I would see my children grow, possibly have grandchildren, and die old and satisfied. 

The world of normal time, my true reality, would never gift me that.

After two years of working closely together, my Breanie knew me almost as well as Ellie did, and I had thought no one else would ever see me the way she had. When I entered myself in the next overlap, that version of my daughter would be the same, we would have the same shared memories of our partnership, the songs we sang together as we worked, and the joys of discovery in the wondrous crevasses that formed the relationship of father and daughter.

“Dad, you’ve checked and rechecked it, like, a hundred times already. It’s perfect.”

“Nothing is ever perfect,” I said to egg her on.

“I know you don’t believe that.” Her face glowed as she smiled. “For anything anyone does, sure, there is nothing close to perfection. What do you always say…? Adequate is too often the best we can hope for.” Her deepened voice mimicking my words brought laughter to my somber mood.

How her memory worked amazed me. Once, she reminded me of something I had said to her mother when she could not have been more than three. “And I am always right.”

After a hearty giggle, Sabrina said, “Of course, the brilliant Marcus Hollister is the one exception. You know, I looked up the word perfection in the dictionary once and all it had was your picture and a short bio of your work.”

Pointless to argue, I smiled warmly at my baby girl and clicked on the music player. To build on the now jovial mood, I played my and Ellie’s favorite song, More Than a Woman, by the Bee Gees. As always, Sabrina sang the mistaken words that never ceased to make me laugh, even though I knew they were coming and had heard her sing them too many times to count.

“For-legged woman… For-legged woman, two knees…”

The laughter filling the workshop around my massive machine with its attached liquid suspension chamber fueled my determination not to wake up in normal time. Whatever it would take, I needed to have the next fifteen years with my Breanie, her little brother, and Ellie.

Considering only my needs, my desires, my wants, I flipped the switch, bringing my invention to life. Its hum drowned out the music as the playlist streamed, I do not recall the song, it had become background noise. Watching with keen anticipation beaming from her little face, Sabrina offered an assuring nod, the final nudge to what I needed no prodding to do next.

That joyous moment of shared song with its misheard lyrics made a deep memory point I could track with the machine’s controls. Deep emotional memories were the best locking points for setting a time jump, the clearest and easiest to pinpoint through the void of spacetime. (You may have noted I refrained from calling my invention a time machine or saying things like, ‘the fabric of space and time.’ Trite cliché, all they are.)

To my family, I would be gone for two weeks before awakening to complete my time with them and return to my reality. For me, I would spend the next fifteen years—thirty if I am equally successful building my machine in the next overlap—with my family. This was more than I could have hoped for when I discovered the overlap all those years ago. 

After the crushing realization I could not save Ellie in our natural timeline, would never have her with me in the real world, getting to spend hours, then weeks, months, and eventually years together was a bittersweet blessing that haunted me like a curse. We made new memories, we lived and loved. And after each jump, I woke alone, grieving anew the latest loss of Ellie, of all the Ellies I left behind. Now I would fully live the life stolen from me under that misty streetlight, growing old with my dearest love, with our family.

To my daughter’s back, I rid myself of my clothes and stepped inside the chamber.