Every Version of You

The window took Miranda Hamilton three years to build. She corrected anyone who called it a time machine. It wasn't, she'd say, tapping the coil array with one finger like a professor who stopped being patient.

A time machine implied travel. This was observation. A lens. A fold in the membrane between moments. Allowing a person to witness history without disturbing. No butterfly effect. Pure science.

Her dissertation committee approved the theoretical framework. Her advisor funded the equipment. The university bestowed a supply closet in the basement of the physics building. Miranda converted it into a lab that smelled of petrichore.

She called it The Aperture.

The first time it worked, she saw a French wheat field.

She sat on the floor and cried for twenty minutes. The beauty touched her heart. Then Miranda wrote fourteen pages of observations. The light more gold than modern sunlight. She calibrated the date to within a decade of Van Gogh in 1880s. It delivered. This was a private joy.

The next two months, she refined the calibration. Targeting specific coordinates across time. The Aperture was tuned to place, not person. She had the mathematics to prove it.

In October, she turned it on and found a boy's bedroom.

CLINICAL NOTES — APERTURE PROJECT, TEST 7

Location target: 44.2°N / 122.1°W.

Date range: indeterminate. Estimated mid-to-late 20th century based on material culture.

Anomaly: residential interior. Child occupant, ~7 years, male. Significant emotional distress. Assessment: miscalibration. Will re-examine coordinates.

She should have closed the window.

Instead she watched him. He was wedged against the headboard with his knees pulled to his chest. Eyes fixed on the space below the bed with the concentrated terror of someone who knew, absolutely knew, that looking away would be fatal.

“You're okay,” she said.

The words came out before she could stop them. Her instincts were to soothe a frightened child.

He went still. Then he looked directly at her. As though he could see her clearly.

“You can hear me?” she asked.

“You're the angel lady,” he said.

She blinked. “The — what?”

“I've seen you before.” He pointed at the Aperture. “You smell like rain & then I see you.”

Under the bed, something shifted.

Miranda talked him through it exactly how she had talked her younger sister through nightmares. One step at a time. Deep breath. Name three things you hear. Two you can feel. The little boy followed her instructions with the focused gravity of a child accustomed to solving problems alone.

“Good job,” she said.

“Will you come back?”

“I'll check in,” she said. It wasn't a lie. She knew kids & he needed sleep now.

She didn't think about it for nine days as she asisted freshman office hours. When she turned the Aperture on again, the bedroom was different. Older. A desk covered in papers. Posters papered the walls. A teen sat on the edge of the bed.

A sick falling moment engulfed Miranda, as she realized what nine days meant on her side.

He was sixteen. Same jaw. Same careful eyes, he'd grown up.

He looked toward the Aperture immediately.

“You came back,” he said. Relief washed over his face.

“You remember me,” she said.

“You were gone for nine years.”

She sat down on her lab stool. “I was gone for nine days.”

He absorbed this with the speed. “So your time moves differently.” he said.

“Apparently.”

He pointed at the shimmer in the corner of his room. A seam beside the wardrobe that appeared to breathe. “It's getting bigger,” he said.

“You've been dealing with this alone.”

“My parents think I'm..” He paused. Chose precision over bitterness. “They found me a doctor.”

“Did it help?”

“No.”

She looked at him. A boy who survived nine years carrying a supernatural entity growing in the space one should feel safe.

“You're not wrong,” she said. “I do see that fracture shimmer near your closet.”

They chatted for over two hours. She asked him what he's reading. What the door looked like on his side. If he'd written down. He told her everything. The accumulated notes he painstakingly curated from his observations.

When she reached for the calibration dial, he blurted, “Come back sooner this time.”

“I'll try,” she said.

She returned in four days. He was twenty-two.

It got harder to think of him as a subject.

He was a physics student now. Enrolled in Xavier Pacifica University. A competitive program, with serious researchers. Quietly, he was writing papers on folklore and liminal space. His professors didn't know what to do with them. Miranda read them through the Aperture and found herself taking notes. His stories were fascinating.

He also shared his theories about her. The window. He was right about almost everything.

“Publish this,” she told him.

“They'll laugh.”

“Publish it anyway.”

He looked at her with curiosity. “You keep saying things like,” he said. “Like you know what happens.”

“I don't,” she said. Honestly. “I just happened to know you're not wrong.”

Office hours were packed with students during prep for finals. Miranda returned in eleven days. He was thirty-one. He had lines at the corners of his eyes. A manuscript on his desk and a coffee cup with a ring stain. He looked up the moment the Aperture opened.

The shimmer in the corner had grown. It breathed. It moved.

“It's getting worse,” she said.

“I know.”

“We need to close whatever it is, seal it up.”

“I know.” He leaned back in his chair. “I wrote a book about it. The taxonomy. If we can name the component elements…”

“Naming gives structure,” she said.

“Structure gives leverage,” he finished.

They looked at each other across the membrane. In the silence after that sentence, she figured out what her heart always knew. She was the last to know.

“I'm coming through,” she said. “If it is even possible”, she whispered.

The smell hit her first. Coffee, then old books. The thrust of rain against the window. The air had weight.

He stood two feet away.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” he said.

He crossed the distance. She let him embrace her.

They worked together to close the breathing door. His taxonomy, her equations, recalibrations, that eventually led to withdrawing the creature's claim on this time & space.

It took about four hours. When it was done, the shimmer evaporated. The room was simply a room. They sat on the floor with cold coffees and his manuscript spread between them. Their conversation bounced from quantum mechanics, to space theory, to a debate over pineapple on pizza.

“I need to go back,” she said. “My dissertation. I left my equipment running.”

“I figured,” he said.

She stood. Crossed to the Aperture, still open. She put her hand through. Fine. She was tethered. She stepped through then turned around, “Come with me,” she said.

He looked at the opening.

He reached through.

His hand stopped.

As if the wall were a pane of glass.

They both stared at his palm.

She grabbed his wrist with both hands and pulled. Her hands found nothing. He was there and not-there at the membrane's edge. Present on his side. Absent on hers.

“No,” she shouted. “Wait. “ She adjusted her dials, recalculated, tried again.

His hand stopped.

Every time.

“Let me try, from your side.” She pushed herself forward & slammed into a solid form. It refused her. Crossing back over was impossible. “That's not… it's not fair —” she cried.

“No,” he agreed. “It's not.”

She was still crying when they pressed their foreheads together across the membrane.

“Go,” he said. “You'll lose the window integrity.”

“I don't care about my research.”

“Yes you do. It's yours.” A pause. “Go do the work. It matters.”

The Aperture closed.

Her notes on the desk: Child occupant, ~7 years, male. Significant distress. Assessment: miscalibration. They were so recent.

She sat on the floor and cried.

After an hour of tears, she reached up and turned the calibration dial.

The Aperture opened on a field she didn't recognize. She adjusted. A street corner, 1950s, a woman in a yellow coat. Again. An empty room. A harbor, grey morning. She recalibrated from the beginning, re-entered every variable from eleven sessions of notes. The Aperture opened on everything except him. She tried for six hours.

The emptiness in her heart terrified her. She had to know. His life. Was he okay?

She found his paper first.

Liminal Dimensional Theory and the Permeability of Temporal Membrane States. By Solan Vasquez, published in a small folklore-adjacent physics journal fifty five years ago. She read the full paper in forty minutes and found herself nodding at things she hadn't yet thought to write.

Her advisor cited it. In the paper that redirected the department's research focus. In the funding application that created the program she was enrolled in now.

Miranda raced toward the library. She found the books next. A series. Fiction, technically. The seams were visible, the monsters were real. Taxonomy was meticulous. The dimensional logic was precise.

She ordered all three from PLU's bookstore online. Then, not entirely sure why, she walked to the physics building. She walked this corridor hundreds of times. Her lab, the department board, past the framed photos of notable alumni and visiting researchers. She never stopped to read…

He was laughing at something off-camera. Early thirties. The lines at the corners of his hazel eyes. The same careful jaw she had pressed her forehead against an hour ago.

The plaque ~

Solan Vasquez. Liminal Theory: The Pandaemonium Papers. Visiting Research Fellow. “Instrumental in the development of temporal membrane research here at PLU.”

She walked past him every day for the last five years.

She gently placed her hand against the photograph. Stood there, in the corridor with people milling around her. She closed the loop.

Understandung flooded her as tears flowed. She built the thing that found him. He studied because of her. His paper reached her advisor's desk and turned the research that built her program and her window and her coordinates back toward him. Every step moved in this direction. Destined.

The books arrived the following day.

She took it back to the lab, sat in the petrichore quiet with cold coffee, and opened it. It fell open to the dedication page.

For the woman in the window, who believed me first.

She pressed the page flat against her chest. Then turned, looked at the Aperture, dark and still, its coil array barely warm.

She started recalibrating.

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My Creativity is fueled by tea. Lots of tea.

Written through tears for Bradley Ramsey Pandamonium Prompts. My intention for this story was not what arrived on the paper. Miranda Hamilton took over….