The Window

Discovery

The black square appeared at exactly 7:05 AM Pacific Time, visible from my window seat at 37,000 feet. From my window in the Embraer 175, it looked like a shadow on the hillside. Maybe it was nothing more than an optical illusion cast by the early morning sun across the Nevada desert. But shadows aren’t as precise as what I saw and the shape didn’t really change if it was overcast. It appeared in the same place for six consecutive Monday commutes between Boise and San Jose.

I started taking notes on my seventh sighting. GPS coordinates from my phone, photos through the airplane window, sketches of surrounding landmarks. Since my flight was often slightly off schedule, I could tell that the square vanished at 7:37 AM, as precisely as it had appeared. Whatever this was, it operated on a schedule more reliable than the airline.

After several months of observations, I used my accumulated vacation time to drive out there and investigate. The rental car from San Jose got me within fifteen miles of my target coordinates. From there, it was a brutal desert hike across broke terrain that would have challenged even my extensiv backpacking experience. But I found it, or rather the place where it should be; I would have to wait fro the proper time.

The hillside looked ordinary in the late afternoon: weathered sandstone, sparse vegetation, the kind of landscape that had remained unchanged for millennia. I pitched camp and waited.

At 7:05 AM, the desert exhaled. A deep WUMP sound echoed across the silence, and I turned to see an opening in the rock face: a perfect rectangle, eight feet tall by five feet wide, filled with absolute darkness. Not shadow. True darkness, the kind that seemed to devour my flashlight beam the moment it crossed the threshold.

I had to go in.

The Journey Between

The passage stretched thirty yards through smooth, cool walls that felt manufactured rather than natural. My footsteps echoed strangely, as if the sound was being absorbed and transformed. At the end, I found a room that was about ten feet square, with a doorway opposite where I entered.

The inner door felt different. Colder. When I touched its frame, my fingers tingled with an electric sensation that ran up my arm and settled and buzzed in my teeth. I checked my watch: 7:06 AM. Then I stepped through.

Another thirty-yard corridor, identical to the first. But when I emerged into daylight, something was wrong.

The desert air bit at my skin with an unfamiliar chill. My campsite, where I’d left it an hour earlier, was missing. There was no evidence of it.

My watch read 7:25 AM, but when I checked my phone for the date, my blood froze.

A month had passed. Thirty-one days had elapsed in the twenty minutes I’d spent walking through corridors.

Universe B

The long hike back to the road felt different this time. The landscape was familiar but not quite right, like viewing a photograph of my childhood home taken long after I had moved away. When I reached the spot where I’d parked, my rental car was gone.

I walked for hours before a trucker picked me up. He was heading to Pleasanton, which was close enough to San Jose to catch an Uber. I had never been in an electric truck before, and I assumed this was just some prototype from Silicon Valley. The service station where he dropped me off looked very odd, and there were no gas pumps. When I tried calling my wife, a stranger answered her number.

“I’m sorry,” the woman said, “but no one by that name lives here. You must have the wrong number.”

I needed internet access to figure out what had happened to my life. The Pleasanton library became my refuge. But the computers were unlike anything I’d ever seen. They were sleek curved panels with cameras that the librarian insisted would scan my biometrics for access.

“Just look into the camera,” he said, as if I were mentally impaired. “Come on man... Everyone knows how to use a terminal.”

The scanner couldn’t identify me. According to their databases, I didn’t exist.

I’d stumbled into a parallel universe where my life had taken a different path, or where I’d never been born at all. The technology was more advanced, biometric identification was universal; somewhere in this world’s history, the timeline had diverged from my own.

By now, the librarian had decided I needed help, and his attitude became much more pleasant. He told me where the bathrooms were and said they had coffee and donuts in the meeting room next to the checkout desk. He also promised he wouldn’t call anyone, and I didn’t ask him what that meant for fear of untoward complications. I leveraged the hospitality and ate 5 donuts while no-one watched me.

“Thank you,” I said as I left.

“Wow, I have only seen that in writing!” He said, and again I didn’t choose to ask questions.

The Rules

Getting back to the black door took two days of hitchhiking and hiking, but I made it by 7:00 AM. This time, I waited until exactly 7:25 before entering. This was the same moment I’d emerged during my first transit.

The return journey was what I had hoped for. When I stepped back into my original desert, my watch read 7:05 AM and my campsite was exactly as I’d left it. My rental car waited on the distant road, my wife answered when I called, and the date on my phone showed I’d traveled backward in time by exactly one day.

I’d discovered a temporal gateway with rules:

• Entry at 7:05 through the inner door led to what I called Universe B, thirty-one days in the future.

• Entry at 7:25 through the inner door from the other side led back to Universe A (my home), at the time I had left.

• The timing of passing through the inner door was crucial as it determined both destination and temporal displacement.

Over the following months, I mapped the phenomenon obsessively. Different entry times led to different parallel universes with varying temporal offsets. I found I could access dozens of alternate timelines, each with its own version of history. Not all of them seemed to be populated, and I chose not to venture far from my location for fear of running into a situation that trapped me. Observing with binoculars from higher on the hill side allowed me to see if LoveLock was there, 25 miles away. That was enough info at first.

Then the financial possibilities occurred to me. If I found myself in a universe that was similar enough to my own, but some time in the future, I could record several stock prices of companies I found to exist in both. I then watched their stock prices to see if there was a big different between the to times. Not all companies behaved well, but several did and I found a way to make a profit.

On my third return, the corridor seemed different from usual, as if the stone itself was denser. Halfway down, my hiking boot scraped against something hard. I bent and picked up what I thought was a pebble; it was not a stone like the walls, but metallic, smooth, with tiny hexagonal patterns etched across its surface.

The air vibrated faintly, a pressure behind my ears, and for an instant I thought I saw movement. Then, three figures, silhouettes in bulky suits, standing at the far end of the passage. I blinked, and the corridor was empty.

I pocketed the pebble, told myself the door was playing tricks on my eyes. But the metal was warm against my palm, humming with a rhythm that matched my pulse.

The Scheme

The plan was elegant in its simplicity. I would travel to various future timelines, memorize stock prices and sports outcomes, then return to my original time to place bets and make investments. With knowledge of future events, I could accumulate unlimited wealth.

It worked.

The first time I tried, my hands shook so badly I could hardly fill out the slip. A horse race at Golden Gate Fields on an unremarkable Tuesday afternoon, the kind of card gamblers ignored. But I’d memorized the results from future Universe A’s newspaper, right down to the track conditions.

The man behind the counter smirked as I laid down more money than I’d ever bet in my life. “Feeling lucky?”

“Yes, things have been going my way.”

I stood among the other bettors as the race unfolded. My chosen horse, Silver Horizon, started in the middle of the pack, and for a moment I thought I’d miscalculated. Then, exactly as I remembered reading, it surged on the backstretch, pulled clear in the final furlong, and crossed the finish line two lengths ahead.

The crowd shouted, groaned, tore up slips. I stood frozen until the numbers lit the board, confirming it. This was not chance, it was certainty.

At the payout window, the clerk raised his eyebrows as he counted out a stack of bills thick enough to make my heart pound. Walking back to my car, I laughed loud, manic, and in disbelief. The system worked.

Within six months, I’d turned my modest savings into millions. I’d learned to navigate between timelines with scientific precision, keeping detailed logs of entry times and their corresponding destinations. Each universe had its own version of events (some similar to mine, others drastically different) but financial markets followed patterns I could exploit.

The key was always returning to my original timeline at the precise moment I’d first left. The temporal mechanics seemed to prevent paradoxes by ensuring I never encountered myself, but I could still benefit from knowledge gained in other worlds.

I became obsessed with perfection. Every second mattered. I synchronized multiple timepieces, calculated entry windows down to millisecond precision, treated time travel like a science.

That obsession led to my downfall.

The Reckoning

My financial success lasted eighteen months before they found me.

I’d accumulated nearly fifty million dollars through careful temporal arbitrage, always returning to my original timeline at the precise moment I’d departed. But someone, somewhen, had been watching.

They appeared on a Tuesday morning as I emerged from the black door into Universe A, having just collected on another series of perfectly timed investments. Three figures in environmental suits, carrying devices that hummed with energy I didn’t recognize.

“Got him!” One said through a speaker. “Cross-timeline financial manipulation. You’re coming with us.”

I ran, but their technology made escape impossible. They felled me with a stun of some sort and dragged me through the door into the far future version of Universe B, where the desert had been replaced by gleaming structures that defied geometry. Their faces when they removed their helmets were human but subtly different, with enlarged craniums, eyes adapted for some difference I couldn’t discern.

“You’ve been disturbing the temporal substrate,” their leader explained, consulting his tablet. “Extracting matter and energy from parallel timelines creates quantum debt. Left unchecked, it would collapse entire reality chains.”

They were time police from Universe B’s distant future, the furthest point reachable at the 7:25 entry time. They’d been monitoring cross-timeline violations across millennia.

“Your punishment,” the leader said, “is temporal exile.”

They stripped me of my watch, my phone, all modern instruments. Then, as Universe B’s chronomters showed the precise moment, they shoved me back through the black door. I ran through the corridors, but they’d calculated perfectly—I missed the crucial timing window.

I emerged into Universe C.

The Cycles

Universe C became my laboratory and my prison.

That first night, I woke to thunder. It was wings. A shadow swept across the moonlight, vast and silent until the downdraft hit, smothering my campfire in a rush of ammonia-stinking air.

The creature landed beyond the ridge, talons gouging furrows into the sand, feathers glinting like obsidian blades. It moved with an economy of purpose, predatory and ancient, as if humanity had never interrupted evolution.

I pressed myself against the cold rock, every nerve screaming to run, but the desert offered nowhere to hide. I hoped that the dust and smoke from the snuffed fire would camouflage me as I laid on the ground. Only when it lifted again, a black storm on wings, did I breathe. The stars above seemed sharper, crueler, unblinking witnesses.

The next morning, I chipped a slab of sandstone into a flat face with a jagged rock, wedged it upright, and set a broken branch into its center. Each day I scored lines with a flint edge, learning how the sun bent differently in this world. Crude, exhausting work—but soon the shadows obeyed, giving me rhythm in a place where time itself wanted me lost.

Without humanity, the landscape stretched wild and untamed. I learned to survive among creatures that evolution had forgotten in my timeline. The massive birds that could carry off a grown man, predators with teeth like daggers, herds of beasts that shook the ground with their passage. Luckily, none of them seemed to fear a human, so capturing food wasn’t all that difficult. Water was hard to find, but the animals led me to some.

Months passed as I developed crude but functional chronometry, with several sundials and various sizes and shapes of gnomons. I tested entry times through systematic experimentation and documentation. It took two years to get back to Universe A.

But when I emerged, I discovered the horrifying truth: I no longer existed there. My timeline had been edited, my history erased. The temporal police hadn’t just punished me, they’d retroactively prevented my birth to stop the original violation.

I barely had time to process this before they appeared again, and the same three figures, now familiar. The cycle began anew.

Back to Universe B for judgment. Back to Universe C for exile. Back to primitive survival and patient calculation.

Each cycle, I grew older. My hair grayed, my hands became gnarled from crafting tools, my body bore scars from Universe C’s dangers. But I also grew smarter, more resourceful. I learned to build better timepieces, to hide from the temporal police longer, to navigate between realities with increasing skill.

Cycle after cycle. Decade after decade.

I became something unprecedented: a temporal nomad aging linearly while bouncing between static parallel universes. My personal timeline stretched across multiple realities, but I belonged to none of them.

The Final Transit

They caught me for the last time on a Thursday in Universe A, though by then the day of the week meant nothing. I was old. Ancient by the standards of any single timeline. My beard white as snow, my movements careful and deliberate. I didn’t know how old I actually was, but I knew I wouldn’t get much older.

I smiled when I saw them.

“Hello again,” I said to the lead officer, who hadn’t aged a day in the decades of our acquaintance.

“You’ve led us quite a chase,” he replied, and something in his voice had changed. Respect, perhaps, or admiration. “We’ve been monitoring your progress. Your temporal engineering with primitive tools… it’s been remarkable.”

“Are you here to send me back?”

“For the last time, yes.” He paused, studying the readings on his tablet. “Your biological timeline is approaching termination. This cycle will be your last.”

They didn’t strip my equipment this time. My crude sundials and star charts were worthless to them. They were the artifacts of a man who’d spent decades learning to measure eternity with sticks, stones, and shadows.

“Where will I die?” I asked as they prepared the transit coordinates.

“That,” the officer said gently, “is no longer our concern. You’ve become something beyond our jurisdiction. A temporal citizen of nowhere. The universe will decide.”

They pushed me through the door one last time. I walked the familiar corridors, passed through the inner door at whatever moment fate decreed, and emerged into — I don’t know where. Or when. The surrounding landscape shifted between realities, overlapping versions of the same desert from different universes. Time moved in strange directions. I felt my heart failing, my breath growing short.

But I laughed. And I smiled.

I die, not knowing when or where I was.

Epilogue

The black square appeared at exactly 7:05 AM Pacific Time, visible from my window seat at 35,000 feet. From the Boeing 737, it looked like a shadow on the hillside—nothing more than an optical illusion cast by the early morning sun across the Nevada desert.

I stared at it for several seconds, feeling an odd sense of déjà vu. Something about that perfect geometric shape called to me, promising answers to questions I hadn’t yet thought to ask.

Then I pulled down the window shade and closed my eyes.

Time to sleep…