As James' car parked itself a block from the address, his mind considered his conflicted heart. Was he rushing to Martha because her mystery man held answers for which he'd spent millenia searching? Or was he rushing to Martha because... Because Martha...

Still more questions pestered as he stepped out. Did she bring James here to take him back? Even if that wasn't her intention, could he convince her? He pinched his eyes shut and shook the thought away. Focus!

An acceptable question was whether or not she'd actually found someone who knew how and why they were what they were. She's too smart to be fooled and I can't believe she'd lie to me, let alone dream this up, so... yeah. She must have.

At the apartment's entrance, he pressed the buzzer and the door clicked unlocked immediately. He climbed the creaking, wooden staircase to the second level where a door opened.

There, in the doorway, she stood. God, she looks horrible!

Not from a place of vanity, but rather, she looked beaten down by a life and a half of misery, her face sunken by gravity. Still the most beautiful person in the whole damn world...

"Hello," she said, her voice small and eyes uncertain.

"Hi," James answered. "I came as-"

Martha stepped forward and hugged him and James reciprocated without hesitation.  Once again, he felt whole and cured of malady. "I'm sorry," he whispered.

He felt her jaw clench and swallow against his chest. "Why?" she asked.

"I don't know. I guess for... not knowing? I..."

Then he saw the dead body lying on her couch. But... is that a dead body? It appeared lifeless and had the color of decay, but none of the odor. He released her and said, "You want to tell me about that?" then motioned to the couch.

"Oh... yeah. There he is. Take a look."

"You brought me all the way down here to look at a dead body?"

"Not dead." She motioned toward the stranger emphatically. "Take a look."

James walked to the stranger. She was right. He'd seen plenty of death and this was something different. Then he saw the blinking lights on the man's wrist. "What is that, some kind of wearable interface? How'd they make it so..." He reached to investigate but met the magnetic field. "The hell? What is this?"

"Been trying to figure that out for the last two hours." Martha recounted the stranger's arrival and everything he'd said to her. "Best guess," she added. "He's from the future."

"Come on," James said with knee jerk skepticism.

"What's the other explanation? Alien? Because this tech is nowhere near anything on this planet, or from this time. He looks pretty damn human to me. And his bioware – that's what he called it – looks to be a logical extension of our tel-implants."

Her reasoning was sound, but aliens and time travel? Too much fiction, not enough science. "And we're supposed to wake him up... how?"

"Not wake up. Re-animate. There's a button behind his ear."

"But the-"

"There's a gap in the field – kind of an Achilles' ear. Check it out. It's a trip."

James held his hand over the stranger's ear and felt the magnetic field flip like an invisible whirlpool, pulling instead of pushing. He drew back his hand and said, "Okay. That... helps your theory."

Seconds passed as Martha and James gaped at the stranger and then each other.

"Should we..." Martha began.

"Yes. We should," James finished.

Neither moved an inch.

"Do you... want me to..." Martha asked.

"No. No, I'll do it. It should be me," James said.

It had been so long. He'd been craving an answer since his first rebirth. It had been unbearable, lifetime after lifetime, until he'd given up and accepted the futility of the search. But here it was, potentially, floating in front of him. And James couldn't move.

Then he felt Martha's hand slide along his back and onto his shoulder. He turned to her and saw it in her eyes.

I'm here...

And she was. Whether she would cast him out again after all of this was over, he did not know. But she was here with him now. And that was enough.

James exhaled, stepped up to the stranger, and found the gap.

"He said to press and hold," Martha reminded.

James nodded and pressed the blinking red light behind the man's ear. He felt a click beneath the skin and the light turned green. "Did he say how long to-"

Suddenly, the man sat up gasping for air and pinching his eyes.

"Whoa there," James said. "Slow down, take a breath, easy now."

The stranger began to cough up more blood and Martha was quickly beside the couch with a towel to clear it from his chin. James stood to leave for the kitchen. "I'll get a glass of water."

"No water!" Martha and the stranger said in unison.

The stranger opened his eyes and flinched back when he saw James. "Oh my... Oh my God, it really is you," his voice scraped out.

"Yes," James said cautiously. "It is me. Have we met?"

"No, we have not," the stranger managed, still catching his breath and in visible pain. "But... I've known you for nearly all of your... existence, I suppose one would say. I've lost many nights' sleep considering the ramifications of your immortal plight... my role in it all... and what I might say were I ever-"

"Okay, get on with it," Martha interjected. "No pontification. No dramatic tension. You said if I brought him, you'd give us answers. So give."

"Fair enough, Miss Beckett," he said before pinching his eyes and shuddering suddenly. After a moment, he recovered and then began. "I am Dr Seamus Tanaka, former Minister of Sciences for the Northwest Quadrasphere, born August 5th... 2184."

Martha and James looked at each other. Her eyebrows raised. Called it.

Dr Tanaka continued. "It was my conception... well, of course I had the help of many brilliant minds along the way... but one could certainly make the argument..."

"Dr Tanaka?" Martha prodded impatiently.

He nodded solemnly. "I... am the man responsible for your immortality."

The words circled James' mind. Is it true? There was no motive for Dr Tanaka to lie. That means... James never had a face to put on this; no one to blame for the 260 lifetimes for which he'd been trapped. Until now...

He didn't know whether to strangle the man or fall to his knees and burst into tears. But before he had a chance to do either...

"You goddamn son of a bitch!" Martha lunged for Dr Tanaka, but James cut her off before she could thrash the confessor. She continued, her fury burning no less. "15,000 years you've kept him prisoner! Have you any fucking idea the anguish you put him through? What gives you the right?"

"I do not blame you, Miss Beckett," Dr Tanaka said, his hands raised reflexively. "I'm sure I deserve any punishment you'd wish upon me. If it is any consolation, I will be dead shortly – your time is slowly rejecting my matter. But it is in your best interest to hear what I have to say before then. Mr Quinn – and you as well Miss Beckett – deserve the truth."

Martha stopped struggling and looked at James. He nodded, then grabbed two chairs from her dining room on which they sat, opposite Dr Tanaka.

He thought for a moment, then looked at Martha. "You ask what gave me the right and my answer is nothing did. I had no right. But I did have a reason. The Earth I come from – the Earth that lies before you – is one of death and desolation. Catastrophic disruptions in its climate lead to global unrest, then to war, and finally a nuclear winter.

"My entire life has been spent underground. I had never seen the sun before today." A sad smile flashed briefly across his face before falling away. "Since leaving the surface, mankind has managed well enough – lucky to have mastered cold fusion before the end – and survived from generation to generation, for whatever that was worth. But the Earth is changing again. Its core is heating and expanding. Resulting tectonic shifts will eventually crush our infrastructure and put an end to humanity. Thus, the time for theoretical prudence had come to an end.

"By then, we'd made significant breakthroughs in shifting matter between universes of the same time. Volunteers, their consciousnesses monitored from out headquarters-"

"Wait, shifting matter... monitoring consciousness?" Martha interrupted. "How is that possible?"

"Miss Beckett, you have no idea how much I'd love to discuss quantum neurology with you, but I don't know how long I have and such details are inessential."

Martha nodded and Dr Tanaka continued. "As I was saying, our volunteers made the jump between universes of the same time with no measurable harm to their vital signs, unlike the fatal effects of phasing to an earlier time, as I currently exemplify. The only problem was that we were choosing from an infinite number of universes at random and, in every case, the Earth and mankind were no better off than where we stood.

"Many wished to abandon the effort and focus on cooling the Earth's core – a pointless, delusional endeavor to anyone with a quark of intelligence. But I held faith in mankind. I believed it was possible and that a universe existed where we withstood the worst of our nature. Or, if it didn't already exist, was it possible to... manifest such a universe?"

He looked at James and appeared to struggle to maintain eye contact. "That was the basis for Project Savior. We would send someone back to before the fall where they could find an unwitting soul on whose shoulders man's existence would rest.

"We wagered that someone growing up in the late 20th century and through the birth of the Silicon Age would be best equipped to head off the destruction. And so our volunteer – a good friend of mine – found a baby sleeping in a stroller at a park. I remember the grass was so green we thought our monitor was malfunctioning. And while your mother was distracted, he dropped a Hawking Anchor beneath your stroller and activated it when he was far enough away. Anything within one meter and one second of the anchor was locked to return to that point in space and time upon their death with their consciousness intact and recorded for our analysis.

"When you return, it is to the same universe you'd just left. But as soon as your memories from your previous life or lives lead you to behave the slightest bit differently, a new universe is born, superimposed over, yet independent of, previous universes. And so you continue on," he strained to make a circular motion with his hand to demonstrate. "Ending and beginning. Ending and beginning. Your lives curling over themselves again and again like the coils of an infinite spring.

"Our great hope was for you to accumulate enough skill, knowledge, and wisdom to affect enough technological and philosophical enlightenment to conceive a future for us, or a present to be precise, full of life and promise. So at the end of each of your lives, we'd continue to track that particular universe up to our present, hoping to find a viable home for our meager population. But thus far..."

"Thus far," James said. "I've let you down. I'm sorry. I... never realized-"

"Please. I wouldn't dream of accepting an apology from you, Mr Quinn," Dr Tanaka said before wincing in pain. "You've... actually come close a couple of times. In life 171 – I believe it was your first venture as President of the United States – you delayed the collapse a full century. Then, in life 253, Miss Beckett's scientific breakthroughs led to a full reversal of global warming. Sadly, a great war in the early 22nd century brought upon a global nuclear winter, all the same."

The deluge of information overwhelmed James. Still furious that someone had put him in this nightmare deliberately, there was an undeniable spark in his belly. For all his lives, he'd wondered if there was a point to his actions; begged the universe to give his existence meaning. And here it was.

But James never intended for any of his altruism to matter beyond his lifetime. When he'd cured disease, fought back climate change, or spread benevolence and prosperity across the globe, he'd assumed everything was wiped clean. He'd only meant to pass the time and pretend like his actions had permanent consequence – but it was only imaginary. I thought...

Then he remembered how tirelessly he'd worked; on the street, at the lab, in the White House... Even with Martha, his equal – my better – at his side, it hadn't been enough. Was Dr Tanaka's plan doomed to fail?

"So... when you saw I couldn't do it on my own," James said. "You brought in Martha to help?"

Dr Tanaka smiled sadly at Martha. "Not exactly."

Author's note:

So... Anything new to discuss?  Anyone want to rip apart the science in my science fiction (against Dr Tanaka's plea to ignore the details)?  

Thank you for reading!!!