Rebirth20 min read
Seven Loops to Save Me
ButterPicks15 views
They all restarted but me.
I know this because Hayden marched into my dorm and blurted it out like a verdict.
"You, Johanna Jackson, are going to be dumped tomorrow," she said, eyes wide, like she had swallowed a secret too sharp for her throat.
The next morning my boyfriend of three years walked out and snarled, "Someone else stuck up for you? I'm done." He left with a bruise on his face and an accusation that landed like a slap.
Hayden kept talking. "We came back, Jo. We rewound. We have seven days to fix your future."
I stared at her. "Do I look like I asked for rewinds and time travel lessons?"
She smiled like someone who had swallowed shame. "You died at thirty-two. You jumped from the roof on your birthday."
I laughed until I choked. "Impossible. I'm Johanna Jackson. I win programming contests. I don't jump."
"We're not lying." Hayden lifted both hands, earnest and ridiculous. "We tried everything. We siphoned money to your parents, we followed you, we even—"
She recited a string of failed rescues like a laundry list. "We failed. Someone else kept restarting. The voice told us: you can only go back if you save Johanna."
"Then why didn't you come sooner?" I asked. "Why didn't one of you stop me?"
She looked like someone who had carried a stone and suddenly knew the size of it. "Because the loop doesn't work like that. Sometimes only one of us shows up. Sometimes it's random. We've repeated this a bunch of times."
"This is ridiculous." I closed my laptop. Finals, contests, a promised freelance payout that would set me up for years—everything felt like a map my hands had been reading wrong.
Hayden sniffed. "We have seven days. We only get seven. We came to warn you."
1
I am Johanna Jackson, a computer science senior from a modest family. I like coffee at midnight, software with clean APIs, and the steady click of keys. I have been crowned programming champion at campus contests twice. I do not believe in prophecies.
"Tell me how many of you have come back," I demanded.
"It depends," Hayden said. "The first was me. Then sometimes others. This time it's Cruz."
The boy at the table looked up, cheeks pink. Cruz Danielsson sat straight, as if some part of him were already in uniform. He was a sports senior from next building over—fast, loud, scraped-knee honest.
"We tracked small things," Cruz said. "A weather change. A canceled practice. These happen when the loop opens."
"You're saying," I said, "someone's been saving me and failing."
"We kept failing." Hayden tapped the table like it was a heart monitor. "One time we even tried to lock you down. You slipped away every time."
"Why me?" I asked. "Why now?"
Hayden's answer was simple and terrible. "Because you vanished a week after graduation and never came back. You stopped contacting everyone. Ten years later you died."
I slapped a hand on the table. "I would never—"
"People change," Cruz said softly. "Maybe you did. Or something happened that made you leave."
"Then show me proof," I said. "If you are so sure, prove it."
Hayden's phone chimed. "Three things," she said. "Tonight an esports dorm will cheer. The programming contest will postpone. And fifteen minutes from now my ex will call me, begging to come back." She grinned like she had a loaded gun.
We waited and the world did what she promised. The three coincidences snapped into place in my chest like a line catching a falling ladder. I believed.
2
"How many times?" I asked later that night, when the air smelled like rain.
"This is the fifth loop for me," Hayden said. "I tried everything. The second loop we tried to detain you. We failed because of an ambulance. The third loop we tried to buy your future. We sent you money. It didn't stop you."
"You sent money?" I faintly heard my own voice. "How much?"
"Around fifty thousand," Cruz said without shame. "We thought money would fix whatever was pulling you away."
"I would have cashed it and still walked," I said. "Something else is tied to the choice."
Hayden rubbed her temples. "We followed patterns. People related to you kept changing. The junior—Hadlee—had a weird predictive streak on the court. Tristan, our senior, had made a robot years ahead of time. One of them said he had time travel the first time he saw the design. It gets weirder."
Tristan Douglas was a senior who designed drones and odd control systems. He looked like the kind of brain that could burn small suns.
"We know now that everyone who shows up is connected to your future," Hayden said. "If we win, we leave the loop. If we lose, someone else gets a chance, or the loop keeps spinning."
"Someone else?"
"Yes," Hayden said. "Sometimes a cop shows up. Sometimes a sports kid. Sometimes a junior influencer."
A silence grew like ice.
3
On the campus day when the loop opened for me, the dining hall was chaos. "Is this seat taken?" I asked a kid in a military training tshirt.
He blushed and moved his tray. At the opposite table sat a gray-hooded guy with a single silver ear stud and a playlist turned low. He looked like trouble that listened to its own playlist.
Hayden elbowed me. "That's Cruz," she hissed.
I shook the hoodie guy's arm as if to wake him. "Hey. I'm Johanna. I was at the contest last year."
No answer. He didn't even blink. Hayden seized his phone, typed insanely fast and her face went electric.
"That's the one," she whispered. "He must be the loop person."
Ten minutes later a thunderclap rolled across the campus and the guard duty for afternoon training was canceled. Cruz's face went white, then delighted.
"How do you know?" I asked.
"Because it's five loops now and patterns repeat," Hayden said. "Sometimes the tiniest weather shift shows up."
I wasn't sure whether to be terrified or to laugh. I had a program to finish—a private contract that would set me financially free for years. That was the node all my future plans hung on. That and graduation. That and sleep.
4
We met Cruz formally in the early afternoon at the old courtyard. He had the round rookie look, nervous but fierce.
"You're Johanna?" he said.
"Yes."
He blinked. "You look... familiar."
"I look like myself," I said, trying to keep it light.
"Do you feel anything weird?" Cruz asked.
"Not really. I write code, I solve problems."
He sat down. "I have the feeling I saw you get into a police car once. Like in a memory that wasn't mine."
I stopped. "What?"
Cruz's frown deepened. "It was the day before graduation. You were talking to a cop and you got into his car."
"Why would I get into a cop's car?" I asked out loud. My throat tightened. "Did something happen to me that day?"
No one had an answer. We started connecting dots. The meeting was interrupted by the arrival of a tall man in a plain shirt with the easy walk of someone who had been trained to carry both keys and calm. He introduced himself.
"Hi. I'm Cedric Cobb," he said. "City narcotics. I'm here to ask about a payment system. Johanna, is that... your program?"
"You read my mind," I said before thinking, and my cheeks went hot.
Cedric's eyes measured me with a sort of warm, grave kindness. "I saw your IP on an uplink," he said. "There are some questions."
5
Cedric's story was a new layer. He did not believe in loops at first. He believed in ledgers, in entry logs and server traces. He explained a nest of crimes we had half-identified in another life.
"You made a payment system," he said. "It was robust. It would be perfect for legitimate commerce. But a drug ring used a similar system to move product and money across borders."
I felt my stomach drop. "You think someone used my code?"
"It used your architecture," Cedric said softly. "Not exactly your code, but enough similarity to link to the same ideas."
"He used me," I whispered. "But I didn't knowingly help criminals."
Cedric nodded. "I brought you in once, in another timeline. You helped us track them. We thought we caught their leader, a man named Coleman Craig. We did catch him in a raid. But the man at the top turned out—later—to be a former undercover agent. He became worse than the people he chased."
Tristan, Hayden, Hadlee, Cruz—they listened. The scale of things shifted. We were not only trying to prevent my death. We were trying to stop a machine that turned young people into disposable cargo.
"Why didn't you come to us?" I asked Cedric. "If you knew..."
He looked at me like someone who had known my face for years. "Because tracks are delicate. Because revealing you early could expose you. Because I wanted to spare you."
"From what?" I demanded.
He smiled that small, crooked smile. "From being dragged into a war you didn't sign up for. From dying for other people's sins."
6
Hayden had the posture of someone who had read 3,000 pages of conspiracy forums. "We tried to pay you to stay," she said. "We tried to keep you in place. You slipped away. Every time this pattern repeated, someone else woke up. We were all trying to rescue you."
"Rescue?" I felt hollow. "From what exactly, Hayden? From being a useful cog in some scheme?"
She swallowed. "From a choice you make. Or a trap. We can't tell which."
Cruz's jaw tightened. "I saw you get into a car the time I witnessed something. An undercover op. A bust. Then the records went cold. You vanish after that."
I started to piece it: the payment system; the outreach from a small foreign e-commerce platform; the late-night testing I'd been doing between classes; the email with a bland, urgent subject line from a stranger offering in dollars what the school couldn't.
"Three days," Cedric said. "You had three days before graduation when I would've seized your machine in the file archives and started tracing. I took that step in the timeline where we almost caught them."
"Then what prevented you?" Tristan asked.
Cedric's face shadowed. "An ambush on the raid. A firefight. Men died. My friend, a younger officer, was killed. I had to take someone off the net to save others. We closed ranks. Someone slipped away into the shadows."
We all sat with the silence between us.
7
It became obvious: if this payment system—call it SecurePay—hit the wrong hands, it could become a payment backbone for a worldwide trafficking ring. If I avoided delivery, maybe the ring would still find a way. If I delivered, maybe I would be the thread they used.
"Then we need to make it deliverable in a way that helps," Hayden said. "We need Johanna to send a version that has a trace in it—something we can follow."
"That means leaving a bug," Cedric said. "A harmless, trackable vulnerability. You can do that, Johanna."
I thought of my code like a baby I'd written between midnight oil and worry. "I can. But it's risky. If I'm wrong, they will notice and come for me."
"We will be by your side," Cedric promised. There was something in his voice that made my heart loosen in a place I'd forgotten it could.
8
On schedule I finalized the last test. Hayden and Hadlee kept watch at my dorm window. Tristan connected from his lab. Cruz paced like he could outwalk fate. Cedric sat in a police van out front with a secure line.
"Half an hour," I said. "If anything goes wrong, abort."
"Do it," Tristan said. "You're the best."
I sent the build. I felt my chest hollow as the upload bar crawled: 12%... 45%... 99%.
Then a new IP popped into the console.
"You idiot," a message flashed in the terminal from an account with a brittle laugh. "Play with your toys and see who pays."
Cedric went white. "They're probing. Someone saw the signature."
I leaned forward. "Then track them."
Information flowed. Cedric's team began to trace. They were good. They had mapped ghosts. After tense minutes the trace placed the attacker in a ring of proxy servers, then narrowed it down to an ISP node near a long-forgotten warehouse.
"That's where they staged their labs," Cedric said. "We will move."
9
They did. It was fast, brutal, and clean by the end. A coordinated raid, units sweeping a cluster of warehouses. A man named Coleman Craig—what we thought was the boss—was arrested, but something in Cedric's jaw tightened.
"It isn't over," he said when the news broke. "Coleman was playing parts of this like a screen actor. He had handlers."
As the agencies dug, they found encrypted accounts, offshore wallets, and a name that didn't belong to the criminal scene: Carrick Bowling—a name that had been in the police files as an undercover long before. Carrick had vanished. Everyone who knew him believed he'd been killed on an earlier op. Yet evidence suggested he had used his knowledge to build a far more dangerous empire.
"I think Carrick staged his own death," Cedric said. "He got fed into the system and resurfaced as someone worse. He can be anywhere."
10
Everything accelerated. We learned how the trafficking operation disguised shipments as art supplies, as medical devices, as components for agriculture. Art shows, Hayden's dream earlier, could be a laundering mechanism. A painting bought with dirty coin could wash millions.
"Hayden," I whispered. "You, of all people, are the perfect cover."
She laughed, then didn't. "I told you I'd exhibited! I told you I'd curate. But I never imagined them using me."
Cruz's face fell. "I... I think I know the kid who promoted some weird midnight sales somewhere. I recognized a logo in a post."
Tristan's drone company—years from now—had clients that included an overseas outfit that matched shipping logs.
"It is all threaded together," Cedric said. "We need to bait him."
11
Bait, it turned out, was an easy word for a difficult thing. Carrick was a gambler with a taste for spectacle. If he had a weakness it was that he could not resist a challenge that stroked his ego.
"We'll create a drop," Cedric said. "An art sale with a prize. He'll come. And when he does, we expose him."
Hayden's eyes had a light. "If we plant an item at my future show—something he thinks will ruin him—he'll move to stop it. He will take bait."
"You sure?" Cruz asked. "We're asking a girl to risk being the bait."
Hayden bristled. "I passed death in a loop. I choose my own risk."
I didn't want Hayden to take that on. "No," I said. "I'll be the bait."
Everyone froze. "Johanna," Tristan said softly. "You code the lure. You make it smell like money."
"Don't be ridiculous," Hayden hissed. "You can't do that to yourself."
"I will," I whispered. "I can't be a number anymore. If the loop is because of my death, then maybe my choices are the torque. This is on me."
Cedric closed his eyes. "If you do this, we do it with careful planning. We get every resource."
12
We staged a plan. Hayden would advertise a fake art curation—an exhibit of a dead painter's unseen works. We would seed a painting, a high-value piece that would have meaning to Carrick. We would make it impossible to ignore.
Cruz, Tristan, and Hadlee created a web of false buyers and backups. Cedric fed in police logistics and undercover eyes. I wrote a version of SecurePay with a traceable backdoor, disguised and elegant.
"Remember," Cedric said. "Public exposure is part of the operation. He will react. When he does, we must let him reveal himself."
"Let him reveal himself then," I said. The bare sentence felt like a hinge opening.
13
The day came cold and high, with rain washing the city’s sins clean for the moment. We had a rooftop plan. Hayden's fake exhibit pulled a crowd of curious collectors, students, and a few nervous underworld clients who smelled opportunity where they shouldn't.
"You're sure this is safe?" Hadlee asked, voice high.
"As safe as it gets," Cedric said. He offered me a thermos. "Drink."
I took it like swallowing courage. Tristan hovered with a box of drones as backup. Cruz stood near the stairs like a sentinel. Hadlee kept her phone on a loop.
The painting—an abstract with a hideous face—hung under dim lights.
"Now we wait," Cedric said.
The crowd whispered. A car idled down the street. A man stepped from it with a swagger like a baying challenge. He had a long scar from cheek to jaw. He carried a folded chair like a weapon. The air tasted like wire.
Carrick Bowling smiled when he saw the painting. He licked his lips as if seeing a meal he favored.
"You shouldn't have done this," he said, voice deep and casual like a man who thought thunder was his applause.
14
"Everyone back," Cedric said quietly.
Carrick pushed forward. "So this is where they'd sell my shame. Where the ghost of a dead man sells his images. Funny."
Hayden stepped in front of the painting. "Leave it alone."
Carrick laughed. "Is this the one that ties me back to the undercover case? The painting that proves I'm still mortal?"
He pulled out his phone and began a live stream. "Look," he said to his unseen audience. "A little show. Let's see who applauds."
"Carrick!" someone shouted. It was a local journalist who had been tipped about the show. He started filming.
Then Carrick did something he thought he controlled. He called a name in the crowd. "Where is he? Where's the cop who took my badge? Where's the shadow who ruined my life?"
A murmur. Cedric stepped forward, calm and cold. "Carrick Bowling," he said, not a plea. "You're under arrest for trafficking, murder, and multiple counts of corruption."
The crowd went electric. Phones raised like a tide.
Carrick's face changed through five acts: amusement, incredulity, denial, rage, and then final breakdown. "You can't do this!" he roared. "I was the law!"
"Not anymore," Cedric said.
15
What followed was the public punishment they had spent loops carving toward.
Carrick's arrest was not an ambush or a quiet slip into a cell. We dragged him into the center of the crowd, the gallery lights painting him like a villain in a play, and we made sure the world watched.
"You betrayed your badge," Cedric said to the crowd, as they streamed and recorded. "You wore law to hide your crimes."
Carrick's mouth tried to form a defense. "You—you're lying!" he snapped. "I sacrificed. I did the job."
"You sacrificed people," Hayden said, voice steady. "You ruined lives here. You murdered those who trusted you."
Carrick's eyes flicked to Hayden, then to me. "You little—" He lunged at the painting, tore the canvas. Security grabbed his arms; the crowd gasped. A dozen phones recorded his rage.
"Look at him!" Someone in the crowd shouted. "The cop who turned traitor!"
Carrick began to babble, a slip into confession under the pressure. His voice cracked in front of cameras that would replay it.
"I did what had to be done! The boss—Coleman—he set us up! I killed to protect my family, to get out! They didn't care—"
From smugness to pleading, Carrick's tone collapsed. He clawed at the hands restraining him. "No—no, you don't understand! If you know what I lost—"
"Everyone lost because of you!" Hayden shouted. "My friend almost died because of your greed."
The crowd began to jeer. Some applauded Cedric. "Bring back their names!" someone demanded. People shouted for the victims. News feeds spiked.
Carrick's denial crumbled as threads of evidence were presented by Cedric in public: accounts, transfers, chat logs. Each revealed another villainy. He tried to turn the story, but the crowd had phones, witnesses, and now the justice of a social spotlight.
He begged, a thin sound. "I'm not the boss! I didn't— I was—" Tears came and then dried on his face. He saw the camera lenses and realized he had been trapped in his own show.
"Shame," a woman behind me said. "He lived pretending to be our shield."
His stoicism cracked into a mess. He looked like someone whose mask had been ripped in front of a stadium. People recorded him crying, pleading, then laughing hysterically. His face was changing too fast for me to watch.
The police escorted him away while a hundred hands recorded his fall from pedestal. The crowd followed like a tide, some angry, some relieved, some hungry for sight. It was spectacle and consequence braided tight.
For a long time after, clips of Carrick's unraveling ran across channels. He tried to reclaim his narrative in the jail, but the public meant every lie had a hard mirror.
16
Even in the middle of that exposure there was another immediate wound. We still had to save Hayden.
"They took her before the gallery," Cruz said, frantic. "A van. They were quick."
Cedric slammed his palm on the hood of his car. "We have a trace. Abandoned road just outside the industrial ring."
We piled into cars and drove. The world blurred. I felt the old familiar hollow of the loop pressing at my bones. The memories of other deaths flashed like lightning—and in every one Hayden had been worse for the wear.
At the warehouse we found her alive, bruised and furious, but alive. Carrick's henchmen had been scattered by the raid. Cedric's team surrounded the place, and they brought Hayden out wrapped in a blanket and crying and swearing like a bandit.
"Don't ever do that again," I said, hugging her like my ribs would break.
"Shut up," she said, voice half laugh and half sob. "You idiot. You almost made me die in a loop just to catch a bastard."
It was a small, tender thing: friends holding each other while the police took a criminal away.
17
After Carrick's arrest, things were messy and public. The news ate every confession up. Evidence surfaced about how he had staged his death to crawl into power. He had been part of a hunt for criminals once, and then he had let the worst parts attach.
"It's not over," Cedric said. "There are many pockets. But seeing him undone is a big part."
"That public breakdown," Hayden said, eyes dull. "It felt like revenge that couldn't be taken back."
The day after, I sat in a cheap diner, my hands staining the cup with the letters "Jo" on it. Cedric sat across, exhausted but certain.
"You saved my team," he said. "You saved a lot of people."
I looked at him and remembered a rooftop, a moment with a gun, the way he had pulled me into his arms, and how the world had folded into a pause.
"Why did you come back, Cedric?" I asked. "Why join a loop that isn't yours?"
He smiled, a quick flick. "Because someone told me to. Because I heard you crashed that code and I wanted to meet the coder who could make the world break and fix it again."
We sat in silence, not the empty silence of strangers, but the quiet that settles between people who have seen each other through flames.
18
But loops are tricky. Even with Carrick under lock, evidence had to be cleaned, accusations sorted, more men rounded. We thought the worst was over.
It wasn't.
One night, a message came on my phone as I sat alone in Cedric's living room. A stranger's text: "You think you know him. You think he is finished."
It was a single line with a picture. A picture of a rooftop. My breath stopped. I knew that rooftop. The memory of a step and a scream and a gap like a month had crashed into my brain. I had died there in a timeline. The message was a promise that things could never just settle.
"We have to be ready," Cedric said. "You did the right thing by making the system traceable. But men like Carrick—no, like his old alias—he gambled and lost and will gamble again if given the chance."
"Then we'll keep watching," I said. My voice didn't tremble. I had been broken and stitched together so many times that the edges didn't cut as sharp.
19
Weeks passed. There were awards and debriefs and an awkward press conference where I sat next to Cedric like a civilian and a secret partner.
"Johanna Jackson created a traceable payment system," a reporter said. "Isn't that reckless?"
"It was a choice," Cedric answered. "She chose to use her talent to build a backdoor for justice. We guided and we protected, but the courage came from her."
My chest warmed like sunlight. People thanked us. Hayden cried on stage and then laughed at herself for it. Cruz signed up for the police academy a few weeks later.
One night Cedric and I walked along a river after the press had gone. He had his hands in his pockets like a man who might tuck his courage away.
"You were supposed to die," he said quietly. "In another loop, I lost you the same way. I promised myself I would not fail again."
"You said that before," I said. "You said you'd protect me."
"I did this time," he said, staring at the water. "But the thing about loops—there's always a residue. You don't just unmake a timeline. You soil a pattern. People remember. People miscalculate."
I looked at Cedric. He had traces of a life of service in the little scars on his hands. "Do you think the loop is over?"
He shrugged. "Doesn't matter. We keep making the right choices. If the world gives us more chances, we take them."
I laughed, soft and tired. "I still want to finish my contest submission."
"You will," he said. "And then some. Maybe open a company. Maybe run for something."
"Not now," I said. "For now, help me finish TF10."
He blinked. "TF10?"
My mouth formed a grin. "My favorite lip color. A ridiculous detail. The little things matter."
He squeezed my hand. "I remember. You told me once as a joke."
20
Months later, everything quieted like a tide. Carrick's trial made headlines. His public breakdown, the videos of his pleading, of his choke of anger—those all became part of his punishment.
But there was one lasting scene I didn't expect. The world liked spectacle, and the world loved seeing villains fall in a public square.
During Carrick's hearing, families of victims gathered with signs. Hayden stood with a placard that read "Artists Live. Justice Lives." The courtroom spilled over with cameras. People murmured.
When Carrick was brought in, he met faces he had seen as evidence in his mirror. He tried to speak, but the room answered with the sound of witnesses, a lullaby of truths.
He took on five stages of reaction in disdainful order: arrogant sneer, deluded denial, panic, aggressive bluster, and finally, raw collapse. Every reaction unfolded under floodlights.
At the climax, when the judge read the verdict and the weights of evidence were too heavy for even his bravado, Carrick looked at me and made one final attempt to twist the story. He accused a figure who had been dead in the file—an old undercover—of setting him up. He claimed he had been forced into it. His voice rose, then broke.
"You made me into the villain," he spat, eyes wide.
The crowd hissed, a noise like surf. Hayden stood, tall and furious. She spoke with a voice that carried: "You ruined a generation's futures for money and thrill," she said. "You thought we would forget. We didn't. We remember the faces you broke."
And then the punishment became theatrical: families came forward with talismans—the photos of the lost, the bracelets, the notebooks. One by one they spoke the names of the victims, slow and deliberate. Carrick's eyes softened as if he could feel the scale of the people he'd stepped on. He couldn't cry it away; the public could not be stupefied anymore.
They escorted him out. The cameras ate the moment and distributed it. For a long time every mention of his name came with images of the courtroom, his plea Mr. Bowling, the faces of the people he had used.
It was a punishment of a thousand small exposures. They had been furious at the man who had been promised a badge of honor and had used it to harm. The world watched him fall, and he became a study in how power corrodes.
21
After the noise faded, I still had a list of things to fix: my thesis, my contest code, my relationships. I had found in the loops a new sense of urgency. My life was no longer abstract.
"Cedric?" I asked one evening as we shared a late-night pizza.
"Yeah?"
"Would you—" I paused. "Would you like to stand by me in the next fight?"
He tapped his fingers on the box. "I have a lot of standing to do. But I'd like to," he said, then more softly, "and I'd like to see where your TF10 takes you."
It was not a proposal of vows, but it felt like a domestic promise. A promise between an officer and a coder in the messy modern age. I liked the steadiness of it.
22
The public punishment changed Carrick in the most blunt way: his empire collapsed, people who had hidden behind his name were forced to step forward, and slowly the network splintered. The fast lanes for dirty money closed. That did not heal everything. There were still families who would never be whole.
But there was a seed of healing. Hayden's art exhibition became a platform for victims' voices. Tristan pivoted his drone firm to humanitarian deliveries. Cruz enrolled at the academy. Hadlee became a careful content creator, pulling down suspicious clients. I sat down and finished my SecurePay, this time with built-in oversight.
One night, late, Cedric and I sat on the rooftop where the loop had once snapped me. He wrapped his jacket around my shoulders, warm and familiar.
"Do you regret any of this?" he asked.
I thought of the many loops where I died without meaning. I thought of Hayden’s face when she burst into my dorm and refused to let the loop swallow us. "No," I said. "Not anymore. If rewriting the past is how we kept each other alive, then I'm glad."
He leaned forward. "Promise you'll never jump again."
I almost told the old loop's secret—how sometimes choices are a stubborn bell that rings twice—but instead I smiled. "I promise. No more jumping."
He laughed, relieved, and kissed my forehead like a benediction.
23
There was one more scene the loop demanded and, at last, delivered: a small ceremony in the gallery where the painting that had been the pivot of so much violence hung now with a placard about justice and remembrance. Hayden had arranged it. Families wept quietly, but some of them also smiled for the stubborn little shows of solidarity the world could still offer.
"Look," Hayden said softly, as we stood with the survivors, "we kept going back because we couldn't bear the thought of you not being in our lives."
I took her hand and felt that old loop fall into a new rhythm. "You saved me," I said.
"No," she said. "You saved all of us."
24
In the end, Carrick Bowling's public undoing lasted for weeks in social feeds, courtroom clips, and late-night discussions. He had played his cards and lost. Public scorn does not replace justice, but it is visible. He faced charges and then a trial that peeled apart the lies like layers of bad code. He tried to bargain, to blame, to reframe. The court did not let him.
At one hearing a woman who had lost a brother stepped forward with a photograph and read his name aloud. Cameras were rolling. Carrick watched his own unraveling—his face moved through fury, denial, entreaty, and finally exhaustion. His shoulders slumped under the weight of a thousand recorded testimonies.
He begged for remorse, then tried to negotiate his plea, but the judge asked families to speak. Each voice landed like a small verdict, tears and steadiness sitting side by side. Carrick's final collapse, captured on video and replayed everywhere, made him an object lesson rather than a legend. That was part of the crowd's revenge—they wanted to make sure a man in power felt the full weight of public sight. He did.
25
We were not heroes, just a messy group who stumbled into a larger picture and chose to walk through it together. The loops left a lacquer on our minds, a habit of vigilance. I rebuilt my life with slow labor: graduation, my code company, a small team that wanted to write software that made the world slightly harder for criminals.
Cedric stayed in narcotics. Hayden curated exhibits that were honest and brave. Tristan built drones for rescue missions. Cruz made the academy his discipline. Hadlee taught content creators how to vet offers. Security systems got smarter, and I taught a few classes.
Sometimes at night I would open my laptop and find the old code sitting there—the version I sent with the backdoor. I kept a copy hidden away, not as a weapon, but as a map of the time I almost died and the way people kept coming back to save me.
On an ordinary morning years later, my cup still read "Jo." I put on TF10 and smiled. Cedric poured me coffee and sat down by the river with me. He touched my hand, and there was no need for promises.
"I remember," he said softly. "A little thing matters."
"What?"
"The cup," he said. "And that stupid lipstick."
I laughed. "TF10 forever."
He kissed the back of my hand. "You saved us. We saved you. The loops finally broke."
I looked out at the city, at the smear of sunlight on the river. "We changed one another," I said. "That’s the only kind of time travel that matters."
We sat there, tasting a future that felt like new code—clean, bug-fixed, and built to go forward.
The End
— Thank you for reading —