Sweat dripped from my brow as I waited for a clump of cells suspended in a tank to show the first signs of a heartbeat. The flat line on the monitor jumped into the familiar peak and valley, then pulsed again, and again. My chest felt filled with elation as the beat settled into a regular rhythm. Not wasting any time to admire the miracle of life, I swiveled around to gaze into the Magic Mirror.

Working the quirky and intricate controls, I managed to set the device to show me this house five years in the future. On the screen, a child toddled into my arms and we headed out the door. The sequence followed us to a nearby park, where, apparently, the clone was socializing with the other children. Excellent, I thought. It cannot execute its purpose without charisma to charm the masses.

As I fiddled with the Magic Mirror, the world’s wealthiest and most influential people met in private conference rooms and shadowy, upscale restaurants around the world to discuss current events and ensure everything worked out to their favor. Corruption spread like a plague, but so did something else. Nanobots leaped from hand to hand and came to live and replicate, undetected, in every new host’s brain.

Back on the Magic Mirror, I watched my clone develop. I saw myself reading to it from library books in the evenings. Wonderful, I thought. It cannot realize my plans without role models to follow. In one sequence, I dropped the clone off at an afterschool art class and it came home to show me the painting it made, which we framed and hung in the living room. Perfect, I purred to myself. Even with the instructions I will leave, it will need a creative and resourceful mind to deal with the challenges inevitable to any attempt at world domination.

I gleefully fast-forwarded to watch my plot come to fruition. As the clone entered manhood, girls became a facet of many sequences. I suppose that’s a natural side effect of the characteristics necessary for its role, I told myself. Then, I saw myself embracing the sobbing clone and comforting it after a breakup. As I watched it rest its head on my shoulder, an unexpected tear came to my eye. Wiping it away, I hurried past the following decade or so.

Sitting in a tent surrounded by jungle and dressed in a military uniform, the clone read a letter and clutched it to its chest. My breath caught in my throat. What if he gets hurt?

I immediately admonished myself for personifying it. If it dies at that age, it’ll be too late to make another one. I’ll have to freeze a few embryos and somehow find the resources to raise a few backups along the way.

When the clone returned from its deployment, I saw it stoop to pick up a child while a joyful young woman looked on. This can only be a distraction, I worried. How could I let this happen? Do I die young?

In another sequence, the sight of my aging self dispelled my fear, although at first I did not understand why I, like the clone, stooped to pick up its child and proceeded to play with it, to no apparent end. Frustrated, I turned my attention away from the Magic Mirror back to the clump of cells and its little heartbeat. As warmth spread into my chest, I felt tears running down my face. An invasive thought entered my head. What am I going to name you?

Looking into the Magic Mirror once more, I selected the year my nanobots were set to infect 100% of the upper class. The middle-aged clone didn’t activate them as he was meant to, and greedy minds remained free to do their damage. Strangely, my elderly self didn’t seem to care. Rolling back to the sequences of myself playing with my grandchildren, I wondered how to save my scheme from failure, or if I really even wanted to.

Months later, I moved baby Lex from the tank to the incubator and he screamed his little lungs out, like babies do. Leaning against the glass, I reminded myself that the Magic Mirror only showed me what may be, and that he could still put aside these distractions to become the charismatic, compassionate leader the world needed. However, as I raised him to be that, every sequence the Magic Mirror showed me came to pass. With the birth of my first grandchild, I forgot all about the corruption that had once motivated me to achieve the impossible. I died with Lex, my daughter-in-law, and four beautiful grandchildren by the side of my bed.

Twenty years later, the youngest grandchild stumbled upon the notebooks from her enigmatic grandfather’s youth while helping her parents clean the attic. Hoping to uncover some of the mystery, she eagerly read through them, shock deepening with the turn of every page. Opening the news app on her phone, she watched an all-too-familiar story of everyday greed and corruption unfold and thought to herself, the nanobots are still out there.

It's time for extreme measures as I stepped on the circular platform. The ground lit up slowly as it charged.

"Me, a father?" I scoffed.

My EQ is about as low on the scale as it can get and then some. Tell me how to make a time machine from scratch and I will tell you. I break physics for breakfast but...I don't know the simplest things when it comes to raising a child. If I want this child to grow up properly, I will have to cheat a little. What the child doesn't know won't hurt him right? I know at least that much and know matter what people think of me there is one thing I'm not, a failure. I will succeed and so will my son.

Flash!

20 years later...

I opened my eyes and jumped in surprise at the person front of me. It looked like a younger version of me when I was twenty. Hmm, but he has his mother's eye's.

" Uhh. Dad?"

I couldn't speak. What do I even say? He caught me red handed.

I waved awkwardly, "hi, son." I said simply.

My kid looked me up and down. Then laughed.

" I get it, this is just like you." He said mockingly as he stared me right in the eye.

"How so?" I asked curiously.

"you came here before I was born to see how I turned out."

"You are correct, so tell me how did I do?"

My kid shook his head. "Wouldn't that not only ruin the timeline I'm in but also spoil things for you? Part of the fun of being a parent is growing up with the kid. Why ruin the surprise on how I turned out?

"Bu—"

"No buts dad. Turn back and don't worry. I came out just fine. After all, Im the son of the greatest inventor earth has ever had. That's all you need to know right?" He smiled confidently.

Me and my son shared a moment of silence. Yeah, looks like it turned out alright. I couldn't help but smile in relief. Even if other people only see me as a emotionless bastard. At least my son turned out alright.

" Alright, I've seen enough. Send me back son." I said proudly.

"Sure thing. " I watched my son set up the time machine to go back to my original timeline as if he was familiar with it as much as the back of his hand. He really is my son.

As the machine was charging up I spoke.

" I'm proud of you son."

My son looked up from the monitor Into my eyes.

" I'm glad, but father."

"Yes?"

" Try not to screw up what you have with Mom. Give her the attention she deserves. Your inventions can wait."

" Alright, I promise."

Flash!

A few moments passed before the son pressed an invisible button on his shirt and suddenly turned into a much older version of the guy that just left. He sighed. I hope this works. The man thought back to the son he never got to raise as he left the lab slowly and turned off the lights.

Back to present day...

I have returned. I sat down on the floor where I stood. This time travel business gives me a serious case of nausea. I'll have to take note and fix that later.

" Honey! Dinners ready!"

My son's warning went through my head again. I have a promise to keep.

" Be right there!"

I smiled contently as I made my way up. I'm excited for the future.

I was a genius, so they said. They deemed it both a blessing and a shortcoming.

"Sure, she can construct a death ray from scratch," they murdered when my back was turned, "but what of love? Surely, his brain draws all the blood from his heart!"

And I set about to prove them wrong, only to find them right. In all I did, it was about reputation. I didn't even love him. I couldn't even look him in the eyes. After 12 days, I was struggling to maintain my denial. After two months, that ship had long sailed.

I found myself feeling sick at the prospect of taking care of a child. But the alternative... all those people who said I was a one trick pony... I couldn't stand to give them the satisfaction of being right. I had to prove that I could be both an intelligent, successful woman and a caring mother. Simultaneously.

Except I knew I couldn't. Not yet.

As a scientist, I knew a thing or two about the scientific method. And I knew I needed to collect data before formulating any kind of hypothesis about this experiment. I revamped my old time machine, cringing inwardly at the irony that I could construct a machine that breached the fundamental laws of physics, but couldn't comprehend basic human nature. Maybe all those doubters who called me a robot were right about... but giving up on myself was not an option. I could not - would not - allow my imposter syndrome to rule my life. I had to prove to everyone and myself that I could do this. I just needed a little help from the smartest person I knew: me.

The first thing I noticed about my lab in the future was how clean it was. I could barely find the time to clean it as a full-time scientist. How could I manage this with a child in the mix? I saw a tired and shrivelled version of myself bent over a stretcher, working on what appeared to be a tube filled with wires. "Excuse me..." 'I' jumped and almost dropped her screwdriver. "Who... what... it's nothing!" She threw a sheet over her construction before turning to see me. "Oh thank God," She sighed, running her hands through her greyed hair, "I thought it was... well... anyone, really." I moved towards the stretcher. Pulling back the blanket, I discovered what appeared to be a 12-year-old girl. Except it wasn't. It was very much robotic, evidenced only by the open panel on her chest that spewed wires across her synthetic flesh. "What...?" I couldn't quite formulate the words. "Oh, that's Victoria. It's her birthday today, so I'm giving her an upgrade. Puberty and all that." Her words offered little in the way of explanations. "But... she's... what happened to...?" I gestured in the general vicinity of my womb. Her face twitched and her eyes clouded. "It... she..." her breath staggered a bit, "didn't work out." And she regaled me with her story: how she worked her heart out to prepare to be a perfect mother; how she renovated a room in her house into a nursery and built robotic toys for her future baby to play with, seven months early; how she felt a pang in her stomach area and discovered a patch of brownish-red blood staining her underwear; how she carried on pretending to be pregnant after the miscarriage, even to the point of building a mechanical baby, to fool the people around her and herself into thinking that yes, she could do this. Yes, she wasn't a failure. I looked at the girl and then back at my miserable future self. "And did it work?" She closed her eyes and rolled up her sleeves, showing me her scarred wrists. "I just wish," she croaked, "that someone had told me it was okay to not be motherly and personable. That it didn't define me. That it doesn't define you." And we hugged and mourned Victoria, as nobody had thought or dared to since her silent passing.

And I went back home none the wiser on how to raise a child, but more comfortable in myself than I had been for many years.

PART 1

“Well, gosh.” I run my fingers through my unruly mop of brown hair. I never thought I would be dusting off my old time machine again. Back in 2016, I swore that I would never touch it again after I spent nine months trying to ensure the pigeon became domesticated, as originally intended in history. I learned my lesson about playing around with time. But that was different. I was younger. Immature. I thought I could toy around in the past without affecting the present, and boy was it hard to fix.

This is totally different though. Changing the past is wrong and unnatural, with so many unintended consequences. But surely there can’t be any harm in fiddling around with things that haven’t even happened yet. I don’t believe in fate or destiny or anything of the sort. So I don’t think a little peek into what is only one potential future will do any harm. And its for such a good cause.

As I plug my old time machine box into the wall, i can’t help but wonder at the unlikely sequence of events that led me to drag it out of storage. For thirty five years, I existed on this planet without a single friend to call my own. My own parents disowned me and threw me to the curb the day that I turned eighteen because they couldn’t handle the smell of my experiments any longer. Yet I was not discouraged by their lack of faith in my abilities, and I went on to have a successful, albeit lonely, career.

I invented the cure to cancer in dogs, I helped to manufacture the first robot that can cook a 5-star meal, and I worked on the brain chips that half of all Americans now have implanted, among many other fabulous inventions. Despite my success as a scientist, it was not until my mid thirties that I ever attracted the attention of a single woman. And what a woman she was.

Two years later, here I am, beyond all odds about to become a father… and I am absolutely terrified! None of my work has ever been so complex as raising an entire human being. So I thought to myself… why not cheat the system just a bit. I’ll just take a tiny glimpse into the future to foresee any mistakes that I might make as a dad, and then come back all the more prepared for being a proper father.

The old time machine box beeps to life, at long last, and I am jolted from my thoughts. Well, I sure designed this thing simply enough. All I need is a date to travel to and a place or person to appear by. When I’ve seen enough, a press of a button on the small remote will bring me right back to the moment I left. It’s really rather ingenious.

After a brief pause for thought, I figure fifteen years should be enough time to see how I’ve been doing. Now who to travel to…. My wife, I suppose. That should be a safe bet. She shouldn’t be too afraid to see me. After all, I did tell her about my past adventures with time travel, although she may be a bit annoyed that I didn’t throw out the console like I promised. Nevertheless, she should have some great insight into how things are going with our child, and once I return she’ll never live a future where she finds out that I time traveled. That’s all squared away then. 3…2…1…. POOF

The first thing I notice is that I’m in a different bedroom than I’m used to. Gosh, I suppose we’ve moved in the last fifteen years, so that’s to be expected. And my wife and I- Woah!! I guess I haven’t lost my passion in all of these years. Do I…. Interrupt?

I don’t have to ponder the situation for long because my wife notices my presence.

“AHHHHHH!”

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