"T-minus forty seconds," the mission controller counted. Dox released her mother from their tight embrace, the two of them holding themselves as much as each other. Her mother assisted her in sealing the canister, then she strapped herself in.

"We're doing the right thing," her mother said, voice breaking against the tears. "I just wish it didn't have to be me."

Dox put her hand against the window. Their hands met against the glass, mirrored one another, one final gesture. Mother, daughter: they were only whole together; broken, apart. The machine whined to life, the temporal rift tearing open, washing the room in an unnatural glow.

"Me too, mom. I love me," she answered, choking tears.

Her mother sobbed, laughed.

"You vain bitch," her mother said, voice cracking with a bittersweet smile. "I love me, too."

---

Dox gagged, frantically clawing at the straps of her helmet, at the controls of the canister keypad. Air. She needed fresh air. The air in the canister tasted stale and foul, bitter and carbolic. She tapped the controls, then banged furiously, until the canister finally opened. She gasped, coughed, gasped again, relishing the stale stink of the hot, muggy lab she had arrived in.

In a frenetic rush, Dox tore herself free of the straps and buckles, ripping the safety helmet from her chronosuit. Long, sweaty hair scythed through the darkness, throwing a glittering blade of sweaty droplets into the night as she threw her head back. She felt cooked, and trapped, and buzzing with a peculiar manic energy that she attributed to the time travel. She dropped the helmet, unzipped the chronosuit, steam rolling from her skin as she bared herself to the past.

Also there in the laboratory, still working long after everyone else had left for the evening, sat the soon-to-be-famous Herbert Wells. Grad student, former physics dropout, current engineering TA. He blinked--slowly, stupidly--at the three meter capsule which had just materialized. In his hands was a cup; on the floor immediately below this cup, was most of the tea he had just finished making, forgotten.

Staring at Dox as she stepped out of the time travel canister and peeled off her chronosuit, as the attractive woman from elsewhen stripped to the skin before him, the young man could perhaps be forgiven for forgetting his tea.

---

"Dox," he grinned, lopsided and roguish. "You keep telling me to fuck off, but you know I'm going to keep asking. There's got to be a story behind a name like that."

She pinched him, then nibbled his neck to distract him.

"Fuck off, Herbert."

He squirmed, then submitted. They sighed together, breathing each other.

The pair lay in bed, wrapped around one another, languid and lewd. The scent of sex hung heavy in the room. On the floor were their clothes, discarded hurriedly, as they often were. On each wall, there were corkboards and whiteboards, decorated with the arcane mathematics of time travel, as they often were.

Herbert Wells was the man who was going to invent time travel. The answer had fallen into his lap, fait accompli; now he just had to reverse engineer the question. He had to figure out how, someday, he would send himself the love of his life.

Dox had clearly proven it was possible, by arriving. All Herbert had to do was figure out how to get from the now to the then, or perhaps from the then to the now. To reach the moment he could send her back to him. For months, they had worked on little else. His previous life as an anonymous engineering student was over.

Of course, the canister had initially been confiscated by very nervous men with very important titles and other men with very heavy weapons. But it turned out that the canister, and its control system, was programmed entirely in Herbert's own proprietary coding language that he had, until recently, been in the process of quietly inventing as part of his thesis. That, and the confusing but insistent testimony of Dox, was enough to sway at least a few important opinions on the nature of the impossible. Realizing the potential implications, the university--and eventually the government--had decided to shower him with grant money, assistants, lab space.

They wanted for nothing. They worked at their leisure. Herbert and Dox were perhaps the two most important people on the planet. They were permitted everything but to leave. Being scientists, they only blinked owlishly at the bars of their gilded cage, shrugged, then went right back to working like bees and screwing like rats.

After all, Szilard and Oppenheimer, Seaborg and Fuchs had spent the whole of the Manhattan Project in a similar situatuon. And from their own de facto prison, those great minds had changed the world forever. Besides, it was nice to have someone sent around to do the laundry for them.

"Dox?" he said, mildly surprised at his own boldness.

"Mmm?" she purred.

"I love you," he admitted.

---

I can't do this, he realized. It's beyond me.

They lay in bed, and he listened to Dox softly snore in the dark. For weeks they had stalled, making no progress. He had gone back, checked his work, checked again.

Mass traveling backwards in time acted as antimatter. Time travel wasn't enough. He also had to solve for containment, for conversion, prevent annihilation long enough for matter to arrive and begin moving concurrent with local time. It was a problem orders of magnitude more complex than simply describing the function of chronal displacement. They spent months tearing apart the canister Dox had arrived in, scouring it for secrets, but results eluded them. The answers didn't match the questions.

The answers were right there. They already knew the result. Therefore, they--he--had to be asking the wrong questions. The right questions haunted his dreams, tantalizing, dancing just out of reach.

He thought he heard Dox whisper something, there in the dark, in the quiet of their bed.

"Hm?" he tried, afraid of waking her.

To his surprise, she rolled over. With a tenderness he didn't understand, a need he couldn't comprehend, a sorrow he couldn't soothe, she climbed on top of him. They fit together, felt right together, and always had. But this time, her closeness felt less like love, and more like goodbye.

---

"Dox? What's--what are you doing?" he asked, baffled.

"I'm giving you an answer, while I steal your work and leave you," she explained.

Her movements were rushed, hands shaking, even as her face was a careful mask. She deliberately forced herself to continue stacking papers, all their work together, into a briefcase. Tears stained only a few of the pages.

"A-an answer?"

"You asked my name, remember? Back before you got me pregnant."

"You're... pregnant!?" he managed, voice strained to breaking.

"Her name is--will be--Paradox. Paradox Wells," she explained, touching her stomach. "In the future, I'll nickname her Dox. She will be the very first time traveler."

Stunned, he couldn't think. Couldn't process. All he could manage was a weak protest.

"You can't... I mean, they won't let you leave," he said.

Dox paused, stole one last heartsick look at him, and then snapped her briefcase closed.

"They already did. My mother told me how she escaped," she sighed. "Goodbye, Herbert."

He stared, horrified. His coffee cup slipped from limp fingers, thumping against the carpet, spilling at his feet. Dr. Herbert Wells sputtered, impotent and indignant, at the love of his life, unable or unwilling to stop her as she softly brushed her hand across his cheek. She leaned forward, kissed him tenderly, and slipped through the bars of their gilded cage.

---

Broken love. Shattered life. The ruins of a man's heart lay scattered around the lab. A tattered man worked obsessively in the wreckage of a disassembled containment canister.

It would take years. Decades, maybe. A thousand years, even. However long it took, he would finish. He would master time. He would find her. He would have his answers. He would win her back.

He would unravel time itself, he would find the woman he loved. He would find his daughter. He would stop her. He would violate causality, unravel paradox. He would move heaven and earth, shake the very foundations of reality.

His hands shook, his fingers ached, his eyes burned. She had broken more than just his heart. But she had been, then. And she would be again, soon. He just had to figure out how to reach her.