A quantum computer dominates the living room. Papers are scattered on the floor, and a sea of gadgets blinks and beeps like buoys in a storm.

 

The damaged voice recorder sits on my mother’s desk; only a fraction of the message remains. Her voice, a sharp knife cutting through my heart, reopens the wound of her absence, yet I push play again.

 

"Day forty-two. I've made some progress with the time crystal embedded in Cronis. It can detect alternate frequencies but can only be accessed with ___.”

 

Pacing like a caged tiger, I raise my arms in despair and my swollen eyes to heaven. And I see it….

 

A small metal box mired in dust sits on a steel shelf cluttered with junk near the fifteen-foot ceiling.

 

Therein lies Cronis, and I hold it in my palm, a tiny device that resembles a watch’s crystal face. Next to it lies a slim black disk with a metallic edge — a nuclear battery. My forehead beads with sweat as I open the back of the device. I zoom in on the time crystal, a gem with a small hole. With trembling fingers, I insert the battery into the hole and seal Cronis.

 

I hold my breath and press a button on the left side. Coordinates, frequencies, and dates rise to the surface and shine through the dark fluid trapped in the Cronis reservoir. Mother’s notes state that the numbers correspond to different times within the same space. I sigh and turn the crown counterclockwise until it clicks once.

 

Cronis heats up in my hand, and a ghost of light scatters about the room and spreads beyond the windows and into the yard. My mother appears — like a hologram. I reach out to her, and my arms embrace nothingness.

 

“Ezra, I’ve programmed coordinates to stop here,” she says. “I can’t see or hear you — but listen carefully. Study my research. Keep the Cronis access time within the mansion and in hologram mode. As I explained in the recording, do not override the settings until the paradox is resolved. You’re a brilliant young man. Don’t be careless.”

 

The light fades, and she disappears. She was unaware of the glitch in her recording.

 

I’ve got to get out of here for a while.

 

I ride my bike down the hill to a small coffee shop.

 

In line, I watch the girl behind the counter. She reminds me of an angel. I guess some people look for angels or signs when they lose someone.

 

She raises her head, looks at me, and slides an espresso in my direction.

 

I laugh quietly. “How’d you know I want espresso?”

 

“It’s what you ordered last week.”

“You remember that, huh?”

 

“I’m Ginny.” She gives me a half smile. “You’re Ezra, right? Staying at the old mansion on the hill?”

I tilt my head, eyes squint. “How’d you know?”

 

“Coffee shop talk,” she says. “I’m sorry about your mom.”

 

I nod.

 

Back home, unable to sleep, I pore over my mother’s research, looking for the Cronis paradox in her notebooks and computer.

 

She had a theory that Cronis could access parallel universes. It looks like the paradox my mother worried about concerns parallel universes — not time travel to the past when confined to a particular space, like this mansion. I must be careful, but I can override some Cronis settings without a clash.

 

I continue to search her computer, looking for…

 

And there it is, the Cronis program, and I override the hologram settings.

 

This sounds morbid, but I have to talk to my mother and run to her bedroom.

 

I enter her date of death and bedroom coordinates. Cronis heats up in my hand, and my mother appears in bed, covered with layers of white blankets.

 

This is no hologram — I kneel, take her hand, and feel the coldness and frailty of her fingers. Her face is pale and thin. Machines around her are beeping, oxygen hissing. Voices in the other room must be the hospice team. I lean closer to her ear and whisper, “Mother, please wake up. Please look at me. Please talk to me.”

 

She opens her eyes slightly. “Ezra,” she whispers in a raspy voice. “I didn’t think you could get away from the university. I didn’t want you to see me like this.”

 

I hug her gently.

 

I hold Cronis up. “Let’s go back in time to when you aren’t sick and solve the paradox together — And maybe we can go to the future when cancer is curable.”

 

She opens her eyes wider. “You don’t know the consequences,” she whispers. “Cronis only attenuates the sun’s atomic radiation. It still accumulates. You’re not fully shielded from disintegration during transport. Go back before it’s too late.”

 

“I don’t want to leave you, Mother.”

 

"Please let me go," she says.

 

Cronis lasers are flashing red, warning of accumulating atomic radiation.

 

She closes her eyes.

 

I rest my head on her chest, listening to the faint sound of her heartbeat and the silence of her words. “I love you, Mom.”

 

The Cronis red lasers are gaining intensity, so I return to the present, leaving her in pain.

 

I’m still sitting on her bed and don't know what to do.

 

The doorbell chimes. I get up, move through the hall, down the winding staircase, into the foyer, and open the door.

 

The morning sun blinds me for a moment.

 

Ginny’s standing there, holding an espresso, looking like the future.