The loop

The end and the beginning

"James, listen to me. I want you to know that I love you. No matter what happens to me, I always will. I am recording this in case anything happens to me. Do not dwell on me. You have to move on. Do it for me." 

This was the last thing James mother, Rosalie, recorded. James received it a few seconds before the car exploded. 

James mother died in a car accident the 15th February, in 2014. A car violently crashed into hers. She recorded the video on her phone, the car burning, blood streaming in her eyes. She sent the video to James before both cars violently exploded, killing both car drivers. James did not understand this. He couldn't cope with the fact that just yesterday, his mother was here, making him breakfast, and now she did not exist anymore. She was dead. How could he let that happen? Why wasn't he there for her? 

He had to do something. Anything. He couldn't just let it be. He thought about options. Time travel seemed the only way. He was sure there could be some way to do it. For hundreds of years, physicists had tried, even theoretically, to figure it out. They had failed. James wouldn't give up, though. He would spend every second of his life working on that project. He would succeed, he assured himself.

James was a physicist himself. One of the brightest in America, to say the least. He had done research on quantum manipulation and theoretical ideas. He was 19, with gleaming brown eyes and dark hair. He had an idea on how to time travel, theoretically. Originally, time travel's major problem was its  multiple paradoxes. First of all, Edward N. Lorenz, an American meteorologist, stated in the butterfly effect paradox, that a small change done in the past could majorly effect the present. Secondly, Robert Heinlein's wrote in the bootstrap paradox, that if a person travels back in time to change something, it would mean that the present would be changed, and there would be no reason that the time travel travels back in time in the first place. These paradoxes were hard to understand, but James had a theory. He believed that when a person travels back in time, it would create a new timeline, like an alternate world, and all the actions done by time traveler would affect that alternate timeline. 

He worked on this project for 4 years and 55 days, and in 2019, he had spent well over 2.5 million dollars on his project, making him almost homeless, but he thought it was worth it. He had designed a small black spheric object with the possibility to go back in time, or forward, and the desired amount of time. 

"Test 1 of the time travel object I have not yet named. I am going to travel one day before my mother died. Warp in 3, 2..." 

"Don't do it" 

A dark figure had appeared in the doorway of James' study.

"Who are you?" asked James.

"My name is Connor. You sent me here to tell you that you..." , Connor did not have time to finish his sentence, because he had disappeared.