NOT TWO WEEKS, not even two minutes had passed before I saw my Breanie’s worried face slide into view as the chamber seal opened. My lungs filled like balloons, a mix of the thick liquid in which I floated and the air my body instinctively tried to gasp as I began to drown in two feet of water.

Only later would I consider how my poor little girl, riddled with panic and frightened beyond reason, had to pull my naked body from that machine. I convulsed and coughed, my body doing its best not to let itself die. No movements, actions, or thoughts came from my consciousness, only the subconscious and autonomic systems worked in cooperation with Sabrina’s efforts to save my life.

Of course, she saved only those last weeks we had together as I would have simply woken in the tank, ending her world sooner than needed. Ending her existence. We spent the hours that followed and much of the next days trying to understand what went wrong, why I did not lock onto that vivid memory and enter the second layer of the overlap. She kept equating the concept to an onion while I referred to an old film we enjoyed watching where people entered someone’s dream and could go into dreams within dreams, layer after layer.

As I explained it to her again and she nodded with her, Dad, you told me this already face, it hit me. Had I allowed a movie, excellent as it was, to cloud my judgement? Had I based my design of the machine here on a work of fiction rather than tested scientific theory and proven fact? To be sincere, I had been creating new theories and fighting known scientific facts the entire time I worked on my original machine in normal time. I applied that same hubris here.

Like a handful of sand, the tighter I squeezed the dream, the more its reality slipped through my fingers.

After a few days of tests and calibration checks, I did something I have never done, would never have imagined myself doing. I gave up. The obvious conclusion, the only conclusion to come to me, lay in how an overlap worked. However real this felt—and an overlap was indistinguishable from life, it was real life in another dimension of time—the memories being made were etched into my brain back in normal time, in the original chamber. No memories existed, no locking point to jump into, in an overlap.

Never did I step into the chamber again, not into this machine, in this overlap. It would not be my last jump from normal time, but later ones came out of necessity, as I was no longer willing to torture myself with devastating losses. Beyond the physical ailments my doctors warned me about for the muscle throbbing in my chest, my heart could not handle any further abuse.

A battle raged on in my daughter’s mind and heart, revealed only in the sadness covering her eyes like a glossy film, never in her words. I knew she wanted to help me make it work, to get those years I was desperate to have with her and Georgie and Ellie. She would sacrifice two of her last few weeks with me, leaving me in the tank, to give me that. Now the gratitude swelling in my heart raised its metaphoric fists and attacked the despair, ultimately losing to such a worthy opponent fighting on its ‘home turf.’