He built the machine because she was dying. He found the cure in the future and kept going, because he could not bring himself to face the moment he had to go back. Five hundred million years later, at the end of everything, a monument built by a civilization long departed tells him returning to the past is impossible. He argues. It gives him the cure anyway. He goes back. The universe does not end. It branches.

His wife lives in one timeline. He carries the memory of both. Inspired by H.G. Wells's 1895 classic.