The Chronos Effect
Chapter Sixteen: The Anchor
Mrs. Chen made dinner that night like everything was normal. Pot roast with potatoes and carrots, the kind of comfort food my own mother used to make when I was sick as a kid.
I couldn't eat more than three bites.
"You feeling okay, Damian?" Mr. Chen asked, noticing my untouched plate.
"Just nervous. Big day tomorrow."
"What's tomorrow?" Mrs. Chen asked.
Amy and I exchanged glances. We hadn't told her parents anything—not about the time loops, not about the meeting, not about what I was about to do.
"Job interview," Amy lied smoothly. "For a research position at Tulane."
"Oh, that's wonderful!" Mrs. Chen beamed. "I knew someone would snatch you up right away, Dr. Torres."
The title felt wrong now. Dr. Torres was supposed to be someone respectable, someone who contributed to society through legitimate research. Not someone about to become a living container for temporal debt.
After dinner, Amy and I went upstairs. We sat on her twin bed in silence, both of us staring at the wall covered in boy band posters from her teenage years.
"Do you remember the first time you came to my parents' house?" Amy asked suddenly.
"Your mom made lasagna. Your dad interrogated me about my career plans for two hours."
"You were so nervous you spilled red wine on their white carpet."
"And your mom pretended not to notice while your dad definitely noticed."
Amy smiled despite everything. "I knew then that you were it for me."
"Because I spilled wine?"
"Because you didn't run away when my family was overwhelming. You just... stayed. Even when it was uncomfortable." She took my hand. "Promise me you'll do that tomorrow. No matter how uncomfortable it gets."
"I promise."
"And promise me you'll come back. That whatever happens during the transfer, you'll fight your way back to me."
"Amy—"
"Promise me, Damian."
I looked at her sitting there in her childhood bedroom, in the house where she'd grown up, and I realized this might be the last normal moment we ever had. Tomorrow I'd be different. Changed. Carrying weight that might fundamentally alter who I was.
"I promise," I said. "I'll always find my way back to you."
We lay down together, neither of us sleeping. At 11:15, Amy's phone buzzed. Text from Dr. Vasquez.
*Ready when you are. Come alone if possible.*
Amy read the message over my shoulder. "I'm coming with you."
"She said alone."
"I don't care what she said. You're not doing this without me there."
I could have argued. Could have pointed out that watching might make it harder for her. But the truth was, I didn't want to face this alone.
"Okay."
We drove to the university in Amy's Honda, through streets that looked surreal in the late-night emptiness. Every traffic light felt like it was taking too long. Every block felt like miles.
"Talk to me," Amy said when we stopped at a red light. "Tell me what you're thinking."
"I'm thinking that six weeks ago, my biggest worry was my thesis defense. Now I'm about to become a human anchor for temporal fractures across multiple realities."
"Besides that."
"I'm thinking about Sofia."
Amy's breath caught. "Our daughter?"
"If the other Amy was right, if we're having a girl, if her name is Sofia..." I looked at Amy in the glow of the dashboard lights. "I'm thinking about what kind of father I'm going to be after this. What kind of man."
"You're going to be the same man you've always been. Just with more to carry."
"What if I can't handle it?"
"Then we'll figure it out. Together." She reached over and squeezed my hand. "That's what marriage is, right? Carrying each other's weight when one person gets too tired?"
The light turned green. We drove the rest of the way in silence.
Dr. Vasquez had set up her equipment in the same laboratory where I'd defended my thesis earlier that day. The conference room had been transformed into something that looked like a mix between a medical facility and a science fiction movie set.
The temporal stabilizer sat in the center of the room, connected to what looked like a thousand wires and sensors. Dr. Vasquez was making last-minute adjustments, her face drawn with exhaustion and worry.
"You came," she said when she saw us.
"Did you think I wouldn't?"
"I was hoping you'd change your mind. Find another solution." She set down her tools and looked at me directly. "Damian, once we start this process, there's no going back. Are you absolutely sure?"
I thought about the other Amy, carrying temporal debt for thirty years in a timeline that had collapsed into chaos. I thought about Sarah and Marcus and Father Tom and Keisha, all of them vulnerable to the fractures spreading further. I thought about the baby growing inside Amy, who deserved a stable reality to be born into.
"I'm sure."
"Okay. Then we should begin." Dr. Vasquez handed me a hospital gown. "You'll need to change. The sensors work better with direct skin contact."
I changed in the bathroom down the hall, my hands shaking so badly I could barely tie the gown closed. When I came back, Marcus, Sarah, Father Tom, and Keisha were there, all of them looking nervous and grateful and guilty all at once.
"We wanted to be here," Sarah said. "To witness what you're doing for us."
"You don't have to stay."
"Yes, we do." Marcus stepped forward. "I was angry earlier. Blamed you for everything. But the truth is, I would have done the same thing if I'd had the chance to save my sister."
He looked at Amy, and something passed between them—a wordless conversation only siblings could have.
"Thank you," Amy said quietly. "For being here. For him."
Dr. Vasquez had me lie down on a table in the center of the room. She started attaching sensors to my temples, my chest, my wrists.
"These will monitor your vital signs during the transfer," she explained. "If anything goes wrong—if your heart rate becomes erratic or your brain activity spikes too high—I'm pulling you out immediately."
"What happens if you pull me out?"
"The transfer fails. The fractures continue spreading. We're back to square one."
"Then don't pull me out."
"Damian—"
"I mean it. No matter what the readings say, you let the process complete."
Dr. Vasquez opened her mouth to argue, then closed it. "You're asking me to potentially watch you die."
"I'm asking you to make sure this works."
She nodded reluctantly and continued preparing the equipment.
Amy stood beside the table, holding my hand so tightly I could feel her pulse through her palm. Her face was pale, her eyes wide with fear.
"I love you," she whispered.
"I love you too."
"When this is over, when you wake up, the first thing I'm going to do is kiss you. And then I'm going to yell at you for scaring me."
"In that order?"
"Definitely in that order."
Dr. Vasquez finished the final calibrations. "Everyone needs to step back. When the transfer begins, there will be temporal energy discharge. It's not dangerous, but it might be... unsettling to watch."
The others moved to the edges of the room. Amy stayed right beside me until Dr. Vasquez gently guided her back.
"Ready?" Dr. Vasquez asked.
I wasn't. I'd never be ready for this. But I nodded anyway.
She activated the device.
At first, nothing happened. The machine hummed quietly, the sensors beeped steadily, and I lay there feeling foolish in a hospital gown covered in wires.
Then the pain started.
It began as pressure behind my eyes, like the worst migraine I'd ever experienced multiplied by a thousand. Then it spread—through my skull, down my spine, into every nerve ending in my body.
I heard Amy scream my name, but her voice sounded distant, distorted.
And then I wasn't in the laboratory anymore.
I was everywhere at once.
I was in my apartment, watching the truck crash through the wall. I was on Highway 61, holding Amy's dying body in the rain. I was at Murphy's Bar, slashing Robert Hendricks' tires. I was in the hospital, learning Amy was pregnant. I was defending my thesis. I was proposing. I was dying. I was living. I was making choices and watching them ripple outward through time like stones dropped in still water.
Every loop I'd made, every change I'd attempted, every consequence I'd created—all of it poured into my consciousness simultaneously.
I saw Amy's mother dying on the bus. I saw Marcus taking three bullets to the chest. I saw the school bus exploding on Tchoupitoulas Street. I saw realities fracturing and healing and fracturing again.
I saw the other Amy, younger, watching me disappear as I looped back for the fifty-seventh time. I saw our daughter Sofia, crying because Daddy wasn't there again. I saw the city collapsing into temporal chaos, buildings existing in multiple states simultaneously, people aging and de-aging and ceasing to exist altogether.
I saw it all, and I understood.
This was the weight. The debt. The price of breaking reality to save one person you loved.
Every death I'd prevented had to go somewhere. Every change I'd made had consequences that spread like cracks in ice. And now all of those consequences, all of those would-be deaths and could-have-beens, were being compressed into my consciousness.
I was carrying them all.
And it was killing me.
I could feel my body convulsing on the table, heard monitors beeping frantically, heard Amy crying and Dr. Vasquez shouting numbers I didn't understand.
But I couldn't stop. Wouldn't stop. Because if I stopped, Amy's mother would die. Marcus would die. Dozens of strangers would die. Reality would fracture again and again until there was nothing left to fracture.
So I held on.
I held on through the pain, through the sensation of my consciousness being torn apart and reassembled, through the weight of all those deaths pressing down on me like a physical force.
I held on because I'd promised Amy I would come back to her.
I held on because Sofia deserved a father who was present, even if that father carried impossible weight.
I held on because sometimes love means choosing to suffer so others don't have to.
The transfer felt like it lasted hours, but according to the monitors, it was only forty-seven minutes. Forty-seven minutes of experiencing every possible timeline simultaneously, of carrying the weight of choices made and unmade.
When it finally ended, when the machine powered down and the temporal energy discharged in a wave that made everyone in the room stagger, I opened my eyes.
The laboratory ceiling looked different somehow. Sharper. Like I could see the individual molecules in the acoustic tiles, could trace their movement through time and space.
"Damian?" Amy's face appeared above me, tear-streaked and terrified. "Can you hear me?"
I tried to speak, but my voice came out as a croak. "Kiss first. Then yelling. You promised."
She laughed and cried at the same time, leaning down to kiss me softly. "You idiot. Your heart stopped twice. Twice. Dr. Vasquez had to—"
"I'm okay."
"You're not okay. You just carried forty-seven minutes of temporal debt through your consciousness. How could you possibly be okay?"
I sat up slowly, my body feeling like I'd been hit by that truck all over again. The sensors peeled away from my skin, leaving red marks. Dr. Vasquez was frantically checking readings, her face pale.
"It worked," she breathed. "The fractures are stabilizing. The temporal debt is consolidating." She looked at me with something like awe. "You did it, Damian. You actually did it."
I could feel it—the weight. It sat in my mind like a second consciousness, a constant awareness of all the timelines that could have been but weren't. I could sense the anchor points, could feel the fractures sealing themselves as the debt consolidated into me.
It was like wearing a backpack filled with rocks that I could never take off. Heavy but bearable. Present but not overwhelming.
"How do you feel?" Sarah asked.
"Different. Like I'm seeing everything through a filter I didn't know was there."
"The temporal awareness?" Marcus asked.
"It's still there. But it's... controlled now. Contained." I looked at each of them. "You're safe. All of you. The fractures can't spread to you anymore."
Father Tom made the sign of the cross. "Thank God. Thank you, Damian."
Keisha wiped her eyes. "I don't know how to repay this."
"You don't need to repay anything. Just... live. Live the lives you have without fear of looping back."
They left one by one, each of them stopping to shake my hand or hug me or just look at me with gratitude they couldn't express in words.
When they were gone, it was just me, Amy, and Dr. Vasquez in the laboratory.
"What now?" I asked.
"Now you rest," Dr. Vasquez said. "Your body has been through tremendous trauma. You'll need time to adjust to carrying the temporal debt."
"How much time?"
"I don't know. You're the first person to ever do this successfully. We're in uncharted territory."
Amy helped me get dressed, her hands gentle on my battered body. We walked out of the laboratory into the pre-dawn darkness, the city just starting to wake up around us.
"I can feel it," I said as we drove home. "Every choice that was made. Every consequence that spread out. It's all there, sitting in the back of my mind like a weight I can't put down."
"Can you handle it?"
"I don't know yet. Ask me again in a week."
"I'll ask you every day for the rest of our lives if I have to." Amy reached over and took my hand. "You're not carrying this alone, remember? Whatever you feel, whatever weight you're carrying, we carry it together."
We pulled into her parents' driveway just as the sun was starting to rise, painting the sky in shades of pink and orange. A new day. A new reality. A new life where I was something more and less than human.
Mrs. Chen was already awake, making breakfast in the kitchen. The smell of coffee and bacon drifted through the house, normal and comforting and completely at odds with what had just happened.
"There you two are," she called out. "I was starting to worry. How did the interview go?"
Amy and I looked at each other, and something passed between us—an understanding that we'd spend the rest of our lives hiding this truth from the people who loved us.
"It went well," I said. "Really well."
"I knew it would." Mrs. Chen set a plate of pancakes in front of me. "Eat. You look like you've been through hell."
If only she knew.
I ate the pancakes while Amy told her mother sanitized stories about my job prospects and our wedding plans. Normal conversations about normal things, as if I wasn't sitting there carrying the weight of multiple timelines in my head.
But I was here. I was alive. Amy was alive. Our baby was safe inside her, growing steadily toward a future that was stable now, sealed against fractures.
And if the price of that stability was carrying temporal debt for the rest of my life, then it was a price I was willing to pay.
Later, in Amy's childhood bedroom, I lay down and immediately fell into the deepest sleep I'd had in weeks.
I dreamed of Sofia, our daughter, though I'd never met her. She had Amy's eyes and my stubborn chin, and in the dream, she asked me why I looked so tired all the time.
"Because I carry heavy things," I told her. "So you don't have to."
She smiled and hugged me, and even in the dream, even carrying all that weight, I felt lighter somehow.
When I woke up, Amy was asleep beside me, her hand resting on her stomach. I put my hand over hers and felt the future taking shape beneath our palms.
Normal. Different. Weighted.
But ours.
And that was enough.