I hauled his unconscious body across a maintenance path behind the park and stashed him in an unmarked utility van I boosted an hour before the approach. Just in case.

  He wasn’t heavy. Maybe because I’d already carried his weight for years.

  The rig was three blocks out, hidden in an old freight depot, masked in local interference and parked under a false identity that said I was delivering antique hover tools to a rich widow. No one checked. No one ever checked.

  Inside the depot, the world smelled of rust and dignity lost decades ago. I kicked open the side bay and yanked the rig’s loading platform down. The gel chamber inside shimmered faintly, waiting for the next sorry soul to ride the filament back into the void.

  I dropped him onto the platform. He groaned.

  I strapped him in. Neural cuffs, biometric latches, pulse dampeners. All illegal. All necessary.

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

  I stood over him as the rig powered up, timeline instability crackling like dry leaves in a microwave. My hand hovered over the panel, tracking the destabilization curve.

  This was it. The window was closing. The thread fraying. No more resets.

  I keyed in the jump coordinates, home, or what was left of it. Timeline 9-Delta. A place where my debts still had names.

  The jump began to charge. The hum deepened.

  I looked at the cuffs. Looked at his sleeping face.

  Didn’t flinch. Didn’t second-guess.

  I turned back to the console.

  Time to go.

  There’s a point in every jump where the echo of yourself lags behind.

  The body moves forward.

  The mind keeps up.

  But something else...

  call it the soul if you're feeling poetic,

  or the narrative thread if you're me..

  drags its feet. Too stubborn to follow the rewrite.

  Eventually, it catches up.

  But by then, you’re already somewhere else.

  Someone else.

  That was the moment I stopped being the only version of me in the room.

  After that, everything got fractured.

  After that, it wasn’t just my story anymore.