Across the boundaries of the universe, and with them the precepts of their select world, the handpicked number increased. The device was minute and intricate. Several lifetimes seemed to be disappearing in a whim. Passing across the room meant blasting past the molecules through the wall. In my search, I was dwelling in the continually diligent observation. Carefully, I crafted the way it ought to be. I walked across each room, splashing into the wall each room, each version of my home I walked through. Universe after universe, I continued on the steady path until I could discover the one... the correct one. Every version of the home, the home I had known for so long. But it was not the place that I sought in their perfect version but the elements. Sometimes, the house was drastically different. Other times, it was gone altogether.

The abode, once comprised of love and the delicacy of marriage, had been torn asunder. While I now paced through worlds that continually alternated with my footsteps, I masked myself with the dark cloak of my jacket. There were an infinity of worlds, but I looked for the subtleties as I searched them over, walking time after time over the same place, filling the same footprints, but it never was the same causal product.

I had killed him. This did not bother me. Everything in life possessed a value based on its rarity. Yet in a multiverse where there are infinitely many versions of a person already in supply, what is the direness one version lost? And in his death, I gained a device that could puncture the barriers of dimension and time. As far as the origin world knew, that man was me. His flesh might have been recognized as different had his distinctions not been eaten up in the furious perdition that had taken up the house. Well, I thought, still looking for the perfect version in my invisible crusade, the family has slumped into an irreconcilable residue, and now the one thing that had bound them is also in ruin. In severe pathos, I had relinquished myself to a chair within my house, waiting, watching until the most intimate moment before the home would have swallowed me entirely. Yet in that time I had made sense of the device, and in doing so, I had escaped to begin again.

My life in that universe was done, finished. I was going to a new place, a place to start over. Many of the closer universes had a minimal amount of a few differences, based upon past deviations. But the farther away I went from the original universe, the sooner I could find deviations of various provenances. Different things had changed, with absolutely no correlation. I could see now why that man from the other universe could become skilled enough to build such a device; I had taken quite strongly to appropriating the knowledge of how the multiverse operated. One of these plains of existence had been labeled as the new home. It was a world where neither her nor I had been born. In this world, we would set back up our home... that is, when I found the precisely incepted lady that would love me forever. While I had been traveling across, I would now need to travel back. Certain arrangements needed to be made if this Zero World was to become a starting point.

It had been ten years in my origin world since she perforated the bond that we had pledged ourselves to. Observing time pass gradually, I saw my children mature without a father, and I witnessed as they fell apart and depreciated their inherent value until there was nothing left but a couple of drug-addicted deadbeats. Concentrated alone in my hands was a rag drenched in chloroform. The transition was to be subtle with overtones of temporal alteration. For days, I watched Gabriella as she carried out her daily activities. This would be the one for me. I would take her to the Zero World: a world where the spark of electricity did not escape the outlet and consume our home. Here was an earlier version of this love, this glorious beauty. Over her, I had been a literal translation of the poems by so many lyricists... for it was by her impulse that I had quite truly become quite insane with love.
She was twenty years younger at this point in the alternate universe. Finding it this way, I did not perceive that in fact she would meet and love me for several weeks to come, according to the confined chronology of the universe.

The hard exterior incontrovertible firmness exuded in my extended hand clasping the rag around her face, ending with her slump to the ground. From the thick gloves, I wiped off every remaining ounce of the chemical as I prepared to take her away. This would have to be perfectly staged if it was to work.

That was the beauty of the situation—the dynamic of Gabriella and the two of our darling children, different because of their origin, would be infused into an ultimately incomparable version of reality—and I reveled in the fact.

The chance of conceiving the same children twice was devastatingly unlikely. So, in a massive orchestration with which I now worked, I would reintroduce my select version of our son and daughter into this Zero World. Here, they would be adopted. But I had to reassess that the first thing was first, and I had to change. A deviant version of myself was my next victim. He was a mugger and fool, much more aggressive than the version of myself that had invented this universe hopper. With a proper mystification, I had convinced him to play the part. I was not the kidnapper—this near doppelganger was. He wore the gloves and the coat and awaited my entrance. He stood over her until she awoke. And when his still ignorant schemer held his gun across the form of my beloved, I entered in perfect time to blast him dead in a fast gun action, all to be witnessed by Gabriella.

In time, she fell in love with her hero. Oh, if only it was true that love was innate and people were destined for a certain love. It would mean every single universe contained the same happy ending, simply in a variety of techniques. With the passage of time came our marriage. (Due to the effects of the time travel asset of the device, I had in fact been converted into a socially acceptable age for our marriage.) We adopted the two young children with no known past, a boy and a girl, about four years old each in age. In detailed fabrication, I explained my past to them. Every time a complication arose, I had an explanation. At times, I was heated when life worked in my opposition. Each version these elements, my loved ones, complemented one another. All of the parallels met in this Zero World.

Things grew more settled when years progressed. Gabriella, that dear wife of mine, had been an orphan in her own universe. In some way, her lack of love in her own universe made her even more beautiful, and to an exponential degree she was so much more loving. In the Zero World, she had made me see a psychiatrist for my issues. Here, she simply was clinging to me. Sadly, my ire was not sated with that. I had built the perfect universe around me, and like the apple-picker roaming his orchards, I had selected the most succulent fruit, and they were malleable enough to comply with my demands. Time after time, I tampered with so many worlds, leaving these universes with mysteries they would never be able to solve. Although I required so much sacrifice from so many worlds, it lately appeared to me that it might have been in vain.

Sitting in bed, Gabriella asleep, I felt an irritating sensation cross my skin. I itched at this as the infuriating feeling grew. Where did it originate? In so many instances, the equivocal wailing of my epidermis drew from me such frustration. Subconsciously, when I looked around, when I observed this world around me, in some way I was so disrupted by the sensation that it did not in fact feel like my home. At the graveyard, Gabriella and I had taken the children to see the plot of her parents. They had been entombed, to my convenience, and would never be able to witness to this girl that they were never able to procreate. Under this vocation, I had taken many oaths, only to myself. Upon the occasion that my children were acting in repugnant ways I would respond with hostility and vociferous shouting.

The only thing missing in my perfect world... was a better me.

These extradited family members brought me profound pleasure; when I was in unison with these vastly ornamented souls, I could hear the metal tuners of my heart in delicate symphony, the likes of which had in the past been exposed by their ornate presence in my failed universe. On this plain, I had purchased the home we were destined for from the children, unfamiliar, as they were unborn to me, of the elderly couple that had owned this sanctuary. The device was oviform that had made my escape from that world, and while I held it in my hands, I contemplated the greatest subjects of meditation through which ease might be achieved. If either by some side-effect of this island dimension's presence or by a plague-some psychosis brought on by the minute machine, this dis-ease that constantly grounded itself into my epidermis was to be somehow thrown off so soon as I repealed its origin.

I had chosen the children on a basis of their foreshadowed brilliance, concerning any number of things this device had allowed me to preview. They were there, but at night, when I crept from my bed to check on them, I pondered what it might take to elicit that response. Not only the literal presence did I examine in these midnight walks, but also, I took the opportunity to embellish upon my gray eminence, thereby taking a flight to the future to see what good I had done that day in making this absolutely the greatest world imaginable. It was not the outlook as prospective as I expected.

The measureless universes provided so little consolation to me. Once at several points, I had killed myself. In essence, did I have that authority over myself? In such the occasion I did actually find that happenstance had provided such a perfect, immaculate world, free from any emptiness in spirit, I could not delight in that with my obligation to my artificial chronology. To the times that I witnessed myself giving harsh expostulations to my family, I continually fell at the sense of my hearts empty palpitations. At other times, I marched into another universe. This was a lonely one where the contemporarily aged version of myself failed to love genuinely. From one section of infinity to another, I had found universes where Romans ruled North America with triceratops fighting in their coliseums. But the most astonishing was to see the world where, in the memory of the quotation for love and loss, I had never loved at all.

Trying, instance after instance, to evoke this in my character, I was helpless but to fail and to see Gabriella storm from the room when I initiated the heartfelt quandary. The congenital factors always played in when so ever I began some discrepancy. Though these congenital factors arose not within them, but with me. The deepest of sorrows encroached upon my heart when I discovered what I had to do. I loved her so much, and I had loved her. Maybe it was time for someone else to love her.

"I will change," I sweetly begged her conscience, knowing what my original version of Gabriella would say.

"I believe you can," she said out of her translated goodness. She was so different from the original.

Through every miniature, subtle vicissitude, I would be a better man. The lonely man who had been wondering about in search for his romance would, with proper cause, become the man that I should have been for her. Observing behind my invisible curtain, I wondered about how I could do it. "Will the chloroform suffice?" I asked myself through the air that did not pass my vocalization to his ear. What it was that made me incline towards conveying these senses of dissatisfaction, I did not know. I had already made the alterations I had seen fit. But did I need to consecrate his ignorance to the issue entirely?

Sliding a pair of dark glasses onto my face, I stepped into his world. The silver little egg in my hand, I patted his shoulder and he turned around with a start. "What are you doing in here?"

"I've come to offer you a chance at something," I said.

"What?" he asked.

"Love and a family, of course. It is what you have always desired. Take it, and you can be free." I handed him the device.

"Why would you do this for me?"

"Your kindness and goodness," I said, "proceeds you." Continuing, I explained to him the most intricate detail of the preset life. For the most part, he knew of it, with thanks to my interference in his life. Sweeping off the dust of my pity as I handed him the egg-like machine, I prepared myself to sacrifice all control and all hope of personal paradise. He grasped it, and he laid his thumb on the tip of the end. This meant letting go. It killed me to think of it. Once the light erupted, this conviction lapsed and I leapt at his arm, flying with him into the Zero World.

He and I stood in my bedroo- his bedroom. His bedroom, now. The creak of the door made him turn his eyes, and he listened to hear Gabriella's voice come pouring out. Snatching the device, I became invisible again, directly and precisely so that she would enter to see only him. Perhaps I could not live my life, but I could make it beautiful behind the shadows. Perhaps I would not partake in Heaven, but I would watch from Hades. Cessation poured over the irritation. The two would be one, and they would be at peace at last. Lifting my hand, I placed it on the surface. Turning only for a moment, I looked to see these happy, graced people, while I walked through the wall.