---November 16, 2137, 06:10:03---

  The stubble on Adam’s chin was a coarse, foreign landscape. He scraped a hand over it, the rasping sound loud in the sterile silence of the briefing room. Sleep had been a stranger for over a day, and the fatigue settled deep in his bones, making the cold, ferrocrete table feel like an anchor. He sat opposite the tall, confident man, Dr. Maxwell, whose calm was an insult to the chaos roaring in Adam’s head.

  “So my parents,” Adam began, his voice rough, “their marriage caused the end of the world?”

  Dr. Maxwell shook his head, a gesture of mild correction. “It’s not nearly so romantic, Mr. Walker. An almost infinite set of decisions and variables could have been manipulated to fix the inevitable outcome.” He paused, removing his glasses and polishing the lenses with methodical precision. “Adam, I hate to be blunt, but we did not have the slightest concern about you. Or your mother. Or your father. None of you were but a rounding error in a much grander calculus.”

  The words landed like stones. Adam flinched, a scoff escaping his lips—a brittle shield against the cold. “If it wasn’t about erasing me, then why did everyone here work so hard to make sure my mother fell in love with…him?” He couldn’t force the name out. It was a poison on his tongue.

  Maxwell replaced his spectacles, the gesture final. “Frankly, your mother’s love life was irrelevant.” He rose from his chair, his movements fluid and economical, and began to pace slowly along the edge of the frosted glass wall. “At least, not in the first several attempts. In fact, they did not end up together at all in any of the early alternate streams.”

  “Then how did Evie exist and not me in those realities?” Adam pressed, leaning forward.

  “She didn’t,” Maxwell said, his back to him.

  Adam’s mind raced. “Then why did Evie never see another version of me? Neither of us did.”

  “Because you were never born in those realities, either.” Maxwell turned, his gaze pinning Adam to his chair. “Your mother, in a great many iterations of what we tried, never married. Never had any children. Didn’t meet your father.”

  “What did she do instead?” Adam asked, his voice barely a whisper.

  Maxwell stopped pacing and folded his arms. “She worked for me. As she did in the very first iteration. The one that bore you into this world.”

  “Here? In Temporal Command?”

  A nod. “That’s right. In fact, she was one of my best agents. A very hard-working young woman. Reminded me very much of…” His voice trailed off, a flicker of something unreadable in his eyes. “...well, someone else.”

  “My mother wasn’t an agent,” Adam protested, shaking his head. “She stayed home. She had to. I was—” He stopped, the pieces clicking into place with horrifying clarity. “Wait. The first time through… there were no voices in my head, were there?”

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  Dr. Maxwell didn’t answer. He simply held Adam’s gaze and gave a slow, deliberate shake of his head. It wasn't an answer; it was a confirmation. A death sentence for a life that had never been real.

  “So my mother wasn’t forced to stay home with a broken son,” Adam said, the words tasting bitter. “She was free…”

  “...to keep working for me.” Maxwell finished for him, his tone softening almost imperceptibly. “She even works for us right now. For one of our shell companies. She just doesn’t know it is connected with all of this.” His hands spread out toward the lab on the other side of the glass wall.

  Adam slumped back in his chair, the fight draining out of him. “And my father,” he breathed, connecting the final, devastating dot. “He never got frustrated with me… he didn’t… die… did he?”

  “No,” Maxwell said, his gaze dropping to the floor. “Not the way you remember. Not until much later. And for a much different reason.”

  “Were we… happy?”

  Maxwell sighed, a deep, heavy sound. “Yes. And no. It’s hard to be truly happy when the world is crumbling apart all around you, Mr. Walker.”

  “But nothing was falling apart in my—”

  “Because in the version of your reality that you experienced,” Maxwell cut in, his voice sharp again, “your father died when you were fourteen years old. His premature death somehow delayed the second collapse in a way we are still trying to understand. The effects of a butterfly’s wings are greater than you can possibly imagine, Adam.” He took a step closer to the table. “The butterfly in your world was the later timeline connections you had with Evie. That connection continuously changed your reality with each new stream we produced.”

  Adam’s mind raced, but one question pushed through the noise. “But Evie wasn’t until later. If it wasn’t about her, why did the first change to my family ever need to happen?”

  “Because we traced the root cause back to one event. To this very year. To this very month. November 2137. It was the precise moment in time that a lowly logistics manager, working at a boring company, decided his life was no longer worth living.”

  “Cameron Vaughn,” Adam said, the name finally leaving his lips. “Evie’s dad.”

  “Yes. Cameron Vaughn.” Maxwell nodded. “A man who did nothing extraordinary except for one thing. He never would have made the catastrophic mistake his replacement was destined to make. One that led to an epidemic. One which, twenty years later, would come back to ruin all of civilization. One that would cause your father’s death. And yours.”

  The weight of it pressed down on Adam. “Why couldn’t you have just sent someone back to correct that one mistake? Wouldn’t that have been easier?”

  “It would have,” Maxwell conceded, “if we had known exactly which mistake led to the end result. But when a bad employee screws up horrifically, they sometimes hide what they did. He destroyed all the records, making it impossible for us to reconstruct the exact moment and method of the root cause.”

  “So the easier solution…” Adam started, already knowing the answer.

  “...was to try saving a man who was, at least, reliably competent at his job,” Maxwell confirmed. “And your mother was the agent who volunteered to save him from his despair.”

  A blank look settled on Adam’s face. He stared at the polished surface of the table. “And now he’s dead.”

  Maxwell leaned forward, placing his hands flat on the table, his voice dropping to a near-whisper. “We didn’t have him killed, Adam. We simply… allowed the original timeline to reassert itself. Your mother's mission was a temporary patch. A successful one. But all patches fail eventually. The man who was meant to die in 2137… died in 2137. The mission is complete.”