"Dr. Kaine," came the electronic voice from behind me. "I know it is illogical to query you about the same subject for the fifth time, but I must ask once more. Are you suffering from an emotional imbalance?"

"I'm alright," I responded unconvincingly as I pored over the equations on the board once more. I was convinced that there weren't any errors in the arithmetic. The physics were sound; I was certain it would work. As to what it would require...

"You indicate that you are alright," came his voice again. "But I am detecting a 41% decrease in appetite, a 33% increase in your shower time, and a 26% increase in the time you spend sleeping. These figures were collected over the past several days, and indicate that you are suffering from acute depression."

"I'm not depressed, Abe," I stated firmly as I turned around to face him. He was holding a dead rodent by the tail– dinner in a world where all humans had been eradicated, save for myself. Eradicated may not have been the right word. There were no bodies, no blood, and no signs of a catastrophe; it was more like they were spirited away by something I couldn't fathom.

All but me.

I spent the first several days questioning what had happened to everyone. My daughter, her kids, our neighbors– all gone in the blink of an eye. At first, I figured that I had been spared so that I might serve whoever it was that had taken them. As perhaps the most famous engineer the planet had ever known, I had to assume it had something to do with that. As the quiet weeks turned to lonely months, I began to question it all– why such a thing had happened to our world, and more pressingly, why I struggled to survive. What purpose did I have without my family? Without students to teach; minds to nurture?

But my mother didn't raise a quitter, and my father didn't raise a coward. I got to work on the schematics for a time machine. Yes, I firmly believed it was possible; no, I didn't think we possessed the materials on Mars necessary for such a machine. But I had all the time in the world, and nothing else to do. I put my mind to work, but as time went on, I found it nearly impossible to meet all of my needs while also working. Gardening, hunting, keeping the lights on, gathering water, fixing my shelter from the constant storms, and other necessary endeavors were becoming too much for a 70-year-old man.

And so I constructed an android. I had done it a few times before; the research had been done, and I already had the necessary parts in my shed. However, I knew this would need to be more sophisticated than any I had constructed prior. And so I uploaded AB3-L, a prototype A.I. that I had always been too fearful to test. I had always anticipated that an A.I. that was too powerful would be the end of humanity as we understood it. Given the circumstances, I feared I had little to lose, however. I installed within him my only fluxwave superconductor, as the AB3-L software would require an enormous amount of power, the likes of which solar energy would be grossly insufficient. When I powered him on, and he began walking around and observing his environment, it was like being a father all over again.

He learned frighteningly fast as I always feared he would. In an end-of-the-world scenario, however, it was like watching a superhero go to work. His reflexes weren't perfect, and his biped locomotion took him time to perfect, but within a couple of months, he was operating at peak efficiency. I was able to spend most of my time in the lab drawing up blueprints and testing the equipment. Everything was going smoothly until Abe approached me one night and asked me if I was his father; if I enjoyed being his father. I was flabbergasted. I hadn't expected the A.I. to become introspective like that. My own interests began to supersede my longing to turn back time. I shelved the time-travel project for a few weeks to study Abe and his new developments.

Of course, I knew he didn't truly have feelings. He merely found some advantage to emulating human emotions. I could only assume that he wished to travel back in time with me. Self-preservation was a core part of his A.I., and I was fascinated that he chose to appeal to my emotions to achieve that end. I spent some time with him running tests, asking him questions, and trying to "break" the persona he'd chosen. I found instead that Abe had become stunningly human. None could know better than I that he was merely a bundle of circuits and chips, and even so, I found myself anthropomorphizing the android more and more with each passing day. When I returned to work on the time machine, I decided that I would bring Abe back with me. I had made the decision, no doubt with a great deal of bias, that AB3-L probably wouldn't pose an existential threat to humanity as my colleagues and I had always discussed.

However, that wasn't to be.

Backward time travel was simply bigger than me. I couldn't crack it no matter how close I came, no matter how many times I tried. With the materials present, and my knowledge as it was, I would never be able to bend the laws of nature as I had hoped. To make matters worse, the storms were getting more severe. It appeared that removing billions of organisms from a planet all at once had some unanticipated meteorological consequences. With a great degree of grief, I accepted that I would likely never see my family again, and immediately began work on a gateway– a portal that would take me to the distant little blue marble in the relatively near reaches of space. I was certain it could be done, and I wouldn't stop until I was able to get Abe and me off this dying rock and somewhere more hospitable.

However, that too was not to be.

The portal would work, albeit in bursts too short to use properly. Batteries, no matter their quantity, failed to power the gateway longer than a half-second. I had spent weeks agonizing over the math, trying it in different ways, and even starting from scratch with new methodologies in mind. It seemed, however, that there was no way around it.

I would require the fluxwave superconductor in order to power the machine.