One Hundred Years Later.

My daughter Nova sits across from me at a chess board while we both avoid the clock.

We haven't so much as glanced at it for hours, but somehow we both know exactly what time it is. She touches her rook. Doesn't move it. Removes her hand. She's thinking about saying something; eyes read the chess board squinting narrowly. Like the pieces are telling her something. But the game is only a distraction; only we're too distracted to play the game.

We're levitating in the living room in the penthouse. The living room hasn't ever changed, not in my lifetime, so far as I know, but then everything has changed, could have changed, possibly over and over in iterations, I think. Maybe the sofa was cerulean last time I sent Cristo back a hundred years, and only this time is it dark blue. Maybe there are no iterations and that throw pillow was always ugly granite with gold veins imitating stone in a mine but failing to capture any of the beauty in the way typical of most interior decorating.

Maybe it's the same throw pillow every time, or maybe I have the sense to buy a more appealing one sometimes.

Maybe the girl in front of me is always the same: scrawny, bookish, intense, elegant, sitting on the floor legs crossed letting the old man — though I'm forever as old as she is — have the couch, with the long skirt of her white dress hiding her knees and almost her ankles.

But maybe sometimes when I send him back and he kills her and I have to live with it for a century and then send him back again, maybe it takes its toll and she's a different woman.

Maybe I raise her angry sometimes and she shaves her head and refuses to play chess with me, or maybe in some of them she rebels and she hates me so much that she saves the world.

Or gets herself killed. Or saves the world and gets herself killed doing it.

It's only a theory, though, that there would be iterations. The experiment doesn't prove it. Maybe this is all there is. He died; that's done, maybe he saved the Potestas family, she'll ask what ever happened to him and I'll lie. I won't tell her we killed him. Maybe I'll tell her it was them.

She isn't making her move, she's chewing her lip and glaring death at the chess pieces.

I give up and say, "Should we look at the clock?"

Her teeth let her lip go and her eyes meet mine to glare death and destruction at me. Then she softens and says, "You look."

My heart tells me it's exactly midnight and every person not connected to the new star dial is dying all at the same second of old age, though it will take a few minutes, each one letting go, letting a century catch up with the body and then reaching peace with one last exhale like nature intended, the good old way.

I tell myself it isn't political massacre, it's only returning some souls to the natural course of things, and maybe they have it better than we do.

My heart tells me it's exactly midnight, to the second, media nox, end of second watch, but my head turns to the clock on the wall as if it's a holocaust scene I've been refusing to see for as long as I can hold out looking at its minute hand and hour hand, and then my eyes see that it was almost a whole hour ago, it already happened and I missed it.

I had looked the other way, toward the window, away from the clock for fifty-five minutes.

I stand and go to the window as if the city light will look any different, or maybe some people will have turned out the light, and will stare at a winter city that looks alive as ever, snow swirling, lights shimmering and moving, stars looking down as if each one is looking out for one of us.

Nothing changed, of course it didn't. The only difference is the top of Potestas Tower didn't free fall straight down out of the sky, plummeting to crumble on top of the building below, crushing the top floors; hundreds of rebels didn't drop dead downstairs below, dying the natural way or by being crushed, depending on the structural integrity of Potestas Tower when approximately eighty thousand pounds is dropped on it.

Hundreds of rebels must have died somewhere else.

The difference is my daughter Nova wasn't killed, didn't go down fighting, is not dead. And I'm standing here looking for the differences instead of clutching my heart on the floor of a free falling structure, alive to hate myself, and probably for some other purpose as well.

Nova comes over to look too. "What time is it?" she asks.

"Third watch," is all I say, I don't say it's fifty-five minutes past, we didn't see for fifty-five minutes. I don't look at her reaction, let her have it privately.

I hear steps on the hardwood floor behind us pad onto the rug behind us, muffled but I assume they stopped. Candra knows I don't want to look at her, but she always was selfish. I hear her hesitate. I glare at the city lights trying to fill my consciousness with them to block out all thought of her, but she persists, insists, comes to stand by my side.

"I'm sorry," says Candra, just like someone would say when you tell them a personal tragedy for which they of course have no personal responsibility. Or maybe she means this is her fault and she's sorry, so I almost say, "It's okay," but my throat stops and I bite my tongue, subconscious and conscious reaction in agreement. I try to put my arm around her, though. My hand like a rock at her waist and the arm limp to rebel, I try and mostly succeed to comfort her. She's a terrible person, but forever is a terribly long time to not change.

I think she thought she would change me. I would change. Instead she did, a little bit, but some things always stay the same and others can't be undone. She's crying, though. Not for the dead but because she feels sorry for herself because I'm mad at her, but she doesn't realize I've always been mad at her. Ten decades trying to preserve the future the way it happened before he told it to me, ten decades acting, who would have thought I could do that, acting, but at some point I started to mean it when I pretended to care about her. I put my arm around her and it gained strength as she cried for the dead, and I pulled the poor woman toward me. Nova glanced unasked questions. She'll never know why I'm so cold to my wife. I won't tell her it's because this is Candra's fault.

Forever is a terribly long time to not change. I consider when I call up Justin Marius to just try to just kill him.

My experiment failed. It was all an experiment and all it proved was that I wouldn't dare try to change the past at all; I devoted my life after all to keeping it the same, saving only myself. Let that murderous kid die in the past and keep everything else the same until this moment. For the first time in my life, I'm free to fight back, free from the past and the future, from the moment in time past which I couldn't change, wasn't allowed to change, a damn thing.

My fingers reach into the pocket in my pants that fits my gnomon perfectly. I have to call Justin and say . . . something.

I send my wife and my daughter out of the room, because I don't want them to go through what I have to.

His face appears in my living room, and it's the beginning of the end, though. He's outside on his tower's terrace. Aurora is with him. His wife, Aurora.

I expect the chill night air to enter my living room heated to keep the winter out, but it doesn't. I wonder if Aurora is pregnant. I consider just trying to just kill him, but I'm not even touching my gnomon anymore because there's no way to do that. I congratulate him, or something, I think I thank him, for, I suppose, we can start a family now too. I consider asking him for something, a reward, but what? To bring someone back? I'm important enough. Most people ask that. Forever is a long time to mourn someone. Who? My father? I could raise Ilan to be my kid. He'd have to like me this time. Cristo? For my daughter? In two decades or so he could be who he was again. She can ask for herself if she wants that. What do I know?

Justin tells me none of this would be possible without me. I'm such a good actor now. I could just try to just kill him now, when he says that, wouldn't it be worth it even if I died? No, there has to be a way. Not now, not yet. I do have forever to figure out how. He wishes me goodnight, and the link closes. I touch the gnomon and the instant before I know what I'm doing I'm standing on a dock on the bay in the middle of the night. The moon is a hair above the horizon and doubled in the water.

As far as I know Diana and Milana never moved away. Diana learned to be grateful for what she had, over the first half of the century, and over the second half, she became willing to sacrifice it to resist. She became the rebellion. Openly, so now there's no chance she made it. I abandoned her, and I'm sorry. I look out toward the city and her apartment complex and I couldn't save them. I could ask for them back. I don't know what the point would be. I could tamper again with the past, I could change something, there has to be more I could do. Make her listen to me. Save her. Get a second chance, or was it a third? If I'm wrong, they could be safe inside. They didn't particularly like me, but I could check if they're okay. They might be sleeping. They might have joined the other side after all, given in, just to survive. It's okay just to survive. Nova agrees with me. This iteration, at least.

But I know what I would find in there. In bed or on the couch. And it's not so bad, to die of old age, the natural course of things like in the good old days. If they knew, I don't know if they knew, they might have gotten into bed, pulled the covers over themselves, and as ten decades caught up with them, maybe they looked into each other's eyes and laughed at wrinkles they never thought they'd have, and maybe they're grateful to have wrinkles for a second. Two little old ladies who got a lot of extra breaths out of life, two beautiful little crones holding hands and enjoying the peaceful last heartbeats. At least they go together.

I didn't change enough, because I was a coward. It didn't work, I didn't save them, and there's a smug son of bitch on the other coast toasting the future over their withered old corpses. My experiment failed. It was all an experiment and all it proved was that I wouldn't dare change the past at all; I devoted my life after all to keeping it the same, saving only me, mine, my family. Let that murderous kid die in the past and keep everything else the same until this moment.

For the first time in my life, I'm free to resist, free from the moment before which I couldn't change, wasn't allowed to change, a damn thing, free from the future, the moment in time I had to wait for before I could change anything.

Because you cannot change the past, only the future. I have to find a way to change it.

The end.