When I built my time machine I thought I could finally fix everything. I would go back into my personal history, redoing as much of my lifespan as it took until I found the perfect sequence of perfect days. Any number of loops was worth it if I could find the sequence of events that would make them stay. But they always left me, no matter what actions I took, no matter how many times I fired up my machine and hopped back for another go.

Bereft, I abandoned my own time period and took to wandering. I visited Japan in the 1920s, France in the 1400s, and many other far-flung places and eras besides. Then, in a London inn in 1752, I dreamed of a shining city which had streets that hurt my eyes. I saw the people who lived there, happy and perfected, from every world and time I could imagine. One of them looked right at me and smiled, and I knew the dream was true. My only thought when I woke was to make my way there immediately. But no matter how I searched the past and future, that perfect city was nowhere to be found.

It galled me. By this time I had long since experienced my life countless times over, to the point where my destitution and ruin was just one of many outcomes to me. I had nothing left to see in this world. But my machine could not break through this world and see the other possibilities still to be offered elsewhere. The set of possible timelines I could visit remained confined to the history of the world I had been born in.

Building my time machine had taken nearly a decade of obsessive tinkering and planning. It took me an order of magnitude more than that before I could upgrade it to access all the possibilities of all the worlds that were or would ever be. And with that, I entered the multiverse.

It is useless to talk of the passing of years when you can traverse that span at will. For many repair cycles of my time machine, I explored the multiverse and lost myself to its delights. Why chase a dream of utopia when a myriad of real pleasures lay open to me for the taking?

But the city found me again.

Chronoberg was a legend among the time travelers who had reached the multiverse. Where everyone who had ever lived was subject to time, moving ever forward into the dark tunnel of the future, the architects who built Chronoberg saw time as their plaything and tool. They paved their streets with it. Most importantly, it was the one place out of all the endless possibilities offered by the past and future that our machines could not reach. We only had those tantalizing little hints at the city's existence, a million tiny anachronisms scattered across just as many timelines. Dangled before us like bait on a string, some travelers whispered.

Except I had more than that. I had help, but I had no idea where it came from. The plans were simply on my desk one day. One last modification to my time machine: simple, but so counterintuitive that I would never have thought to try it on my own. Even seeing the diagrams and calculations that proved its veracity, I doubted it would work.

But I followed the plans exactly. And this time, my machine didn't jump forwards or backwards in my own world's history, nor sideways into the histories of other worlds. It went in a completely new direction, one that I had no name for. I found myself outside a shining gate. The happy city lay just beyond, its streets glinting with frozen time.

I would have to drop off those last plans at my own desk someday, I decided.

I stepped through. Here, I knew, there was time enough at last.