On the eve of the presentation of his greatest experiment Jacob Dillon is a nervous man. The problem is that his magnificent machine, that creates a wormhole in space, doesn’t work. Sure it could open a wormhole; he had done that several times. Only two days ago he had opened a small wormhole in his lab in New York. He just couldn’t make the hole in space stay open for any measurable time.
Dozens of excited investors crowded into a small lab in San Francisco with dreams of riches that this machine could make for them. With promises of cheap energy applications and teleportation the investors have already dumped millions into the wormhole. Jacob is in deep.
After a quick and fumbled speech Jacob throws the switch that turns on the machine. The room fills with an array of dazzling lights and a satisfying humming noise. There is a pop and all the lights go out; not just the machine’s lights, not even just the lights in the lab. The lights go out for several city blocks.
Later that evening two police officers find Jacob in the bar of the hotel were he is staying. “Oh great”, he says to the officers, “I was wondering when you would get here. First the investors threaten to sue me and now you’ve come to arrest me.”
One of the officers approaches Jacob and explains that they were not there to arrest him. He informs Jacob that earlier that evening his wife had been murdered in their New York apartment. “She was shot by an intruder,” he says. Jacob is devastated. Everything in his life has been taken from him in one night.
A desperate man, Jacob spends the next several years lying, cheating, and stealing from those around him, searching for the answers to finish his machine. If he can create a stable wormhole he might be able to travel back, between wormholes, like doorways in time, and save his wife.
He would have to travel back to the wormhole that he opened two days before the San Francisco fiasco. That would give him enough time to stop his wife’s killer.
The day arrives when Jacob is ready. He starts up the machine, steps into the wormhole, and is gone.
What he finds on the other side of the doorway creates a loop in time for Jacob from which there seems no escape.