He looked at the tablet, and saw the numbers scrolling by, faster with each passing second. The program should auto kill both the gravity well and the electrostatic shell the moment the clock timed out, but what would happen after?

There was no going back now.

He’d been sitting in the time machine for about five minutes, and Ellis was concerned about Peggy coming home. He didn’t know if she’d be able to see him. He should already be moving interdimensionally, but since he could still see the garage—as distorted as it was—he imagined she might be able to see a ghostly, unmoving image of him, still caught in the instant he pressed the button. Once he reached a certain threshold he imagined he would vanish in a burst of light like the starship Enterprise.

How long will that take? I need to go.

As if on demand, there was a jolt and a sound like a freight train. Everything went bright blue and then white. When the sound stopped, he felt as if he were free-falling. He might have screamed, but he never heard it. His mind focused on to just one thought.

So this is what it’s like to die.

Ellis wasn’t sure if he had lost consciousness or if the term consciousness even applied. He was certain the human mind, whether built from evolution or the will of God, wasn’t designed to handle what he’d just done. Human perception of reality could only bend so far. There were limits to comprehension, and without reference points his trip through the world of looking-glass physics remained nothing more than a blur.

Even the duration was hard to judge. So much of human understanding depended on the surrounding environment that even time lost meaning in its absence. If he’d thought about it sooner, he might have counted his breaths or tapped a finger to an internal beat like a clock, but such thoughts were far too reasonable for what he had experienced. Ellis wasn’t an astronaut trained to react to the abnormal with calm indifference. Dropping the tablet, he gripped the armrests of the chair, gritted his teeth, and prayed while years streamed past in the form of sheering light and tearing thoughts.

Ellis believed in the Bible and the Methodist God, not that he’d read the book or had a personal come-to meeting with the Almighty, as his mother had liked to put it. Such things didn’t matter. He hadn’t visited France or read Les Misérables,either, but he was pretty certain Paris was out there. He’d gone to church with Peggy regularly when Isley was alive, less so after, hardly at all in the last decade.

Like with Peggy, he and God had grown apart, yet there was something about riding a bolt of electricity and two hundred solar masses through a twisted reality that got him to make the call. God, he imagined, got a lot of late-night drunk dialings. Aw shit, God, I need your help. I really fucked up this time—damn. I’m sorry I swore just then—fuck, I did it again!

Ellis found it strange that he hadn’t prayed for his life before that. A death sentence should have provoked it, but Ellis had gone to visit Warren at a bar instead of a priest in a church after getting the news. He figured God knew his situation already. What a lousy job that must be, listening to the daily sob stories of everyone on earth. All of them begging not to die or for the life of a loved one, as if everyone didn’t know the deal. Still, no matter how much he loathed the idea, fear overrode pride, and at that moment Ellis was terrified. All he had left was God, and for the first time in years he prayed.

Sound was the first thing to come back, a buzz that grew to a ring that hurt Ellis’s ears. He dug his fingers into the cushioned velour, sucked air through his teeth, eyes squeezed shut. Finally, a booming crack like thunder exploded, and he felt a final jerk.

Then silence.

The vibrations stopped too. The aftermath left him numb, similar to how he felt after shutting off a car engine following a long stint behind the wheel. He opened his eyes. He didn’t know what to expect—a hellish landscape of obliterated ruins, a megalopolis of towers and lights with flying cars screaming by, or the pearly gates and St. Peter shaking his head and sounding like Foghorn Leghorn stammering, “I say—I say—I say you’re early, boy.” What he saw instead surprised him, though it shouldn’t have.

He saw the milk crates.

They were still there. He likely would have died if they hadn’t been, although they looked odd now—warped the way his garage had looked just before things went white. He wondered if time was still bending and it took a moment to realize the plastic had just melted some. All the crates were fused, squeezed down, and listing to one side. They were also smoking. It smelled as if he were back in his high school shop class making polymer paperweights. Beyond the crates he could tell everything had changed. He wasn’t in his garage anymore. He was outside. A breeze brushed past, carrying away much of the smoke with it. He could hear the rustle of leaves, a soft soothing sound.

The trip was over. He’d done it, though exactly what itwas, he had yet to determine. He popped the seatbelt and pushed on the milk crates, which all moved as one now that they’d been fused. He was forced to kick several times. When he crawled out, Ellis, who was wearing a flannel shirt, jeans, and a sweater, realized he was overdressed for the climate.

All of the woods Ellis had ever been in were young-growth patches, usually of birches or maples. In school he’d been taught that all the trees in Michigan had been clear-cut back in the nineteenth century—most forests had. Trees were a commodity farmed like corn and cows, and outside of some national parks, few Americans had ever seen old-growth forests. Once, his father had taken him camping up north near Grayling— thathad been a forest—massive groves of eastern white pine, creating an endless series of trunks standing solemnly in a bed of ferns. Ellis had imagined that the trees went on forever and had been frightened he might get lost in that real-life version of Where the Wild Things Are. Still, the trees hadn’t been very big, and there had been a systematic spacing of their placement.

Stepping out of the milk crates, Ellis realized the piney woods of northern Michigan had been an overgrown vacant lot compared to where he now stood. He felt insect-small as all around trees of unfathomable height soared into the darkness of a leafy canopy, the same way skyscrapers faded into low clouds. Brooding on hunches of gnarled roots the size of Volkswagens, the goliath trees were spread out, the undergrowth sparse and stunted—mostly moss and ferns. He popped into the right spot. Twenty feet to his left and he would have literally been one with nature. The reentry algorithm was supposed to shift the final location to avoid preexisting objects, but then again the GPS in Ellis’s car once took him to a lake that it said was a gas station. Whether the calculation worked or he just got lucky, the result was appreciated.

The air was filled with a damp mist that a pale moonlight couldn’t penetrate but instead illuminated, providing a soft-hazed light. Velvet moss blanketed the ground, making pillows out of shattered logs and boulders. Vines drooped in lazy loops, leaves gathered in crevasses, and ivy climbed. In the distance, he heard squawks and peeps he didn’t recognize, cutting through the familiar chirps of crickets.

I’m Luke Skywalker crashed on Dagobah.

For a long moment, Ellis just stood still, staring out into the haze, breathing in the thick moisture. What happened? Did I screw up? Am I back in time? Are there dinosaurs?Everywhere he looked resembled one of those dioramas in a natural history museum that often showed a triceratops fending off a Tyrannosaurus rex. Hot and humid, too, like a rain forest, but that could also describe July in Detroit.