Asimov’s, September/October 2026
Mira is heading into the subway on an ordinary morning when a stranger tells her she is going to be murdered today, and that he intends to watch it happen. The man, Noah, explains that he is trapped in a time loop with her, reliving the same day two hundred and forty-seven times in a desperate attempt to save her life. He proves his claim with details only Mira could know, including a childhood secret about a stolen watch, and produces a page of garbled equations he says she once taught him. Mira, who secretly works on quantum arrays for a company called Future Tense, recognizes the math immediately and believes him without hesitation.
Over coffee, Noah explains their routine: he spends alternating days investigating her murder and trying to prevent it, keeping meticulous notes in a battered notebook. He has learned she orders breakfast tea and English breakfast in a random split, that he has fallen in love with her over the loop’s endless repetitions and always falls out of it once the day resets, and that despite hundreds of attempts, she is always killed. He hands her a recorder to capture the day’s events for his future self. As they walk the city together, Mira survives a knife attack by running, then narrowly escapes a shooting, growing increasingly certain that Noah is hiding something about the nature of her deaths.
She wakes from an explosion to find herself rescued by two coworkers, Rissa and Marco, who reveal that the time loop was engineered deliberately: a machine Mira privately calls “the loopinator” was meant to let a select group of “loopers” spend endless days solving humanity’s existential problems. Instead, the awareness of the loop attached itself randomly to ordinary people like Rissa, Marco, and Noah, none of whom are the intended problem-solvers, and many of whom eventually try to kill Mira once they realize she controls the machine. This conversation is cut short by another explosion.
Noah revives her again, and his manner has hardened. He admits to deceiving her at the start of every loop because honesty never works, and confesses that he has killed her collaborators seventeen times and been killed by them fifty-seven times. He leads her into the machine’s control room, revealing that his real goal was never to solve her murder but to force her to shut the loop down entirely, even though doing so would doom humanity to whatever catastrophe the loop was built to avert. Mira realizes she must have deliberately scattered the loop-awareness among strangers herself, likely because previous “loopers” had lost heart and tried to end things prematurely. She offers instead to erase Noah’s memory of the loop and transfer his awareness to someone else, but as she reaches for the controls, he stabs himself rather than let her act, believing that if he dies leaving her alone and grieving, she might finally end it.
Alone with his body, Mira nearly gives in to despair, but ultimately resets the loop’s parameters so that she alone retains her memory going forward. As the day begins to fold back on itself once more, she resolves not to break, even as Noah’s triumphant, knowing smile lingers in her mind.
Leah Cypess is the author of the middle grade series Sisters Ever After, the early chapter book series Miriam’s Magical Creature Files, and the middle grade book Future Me Saves The World (And Ruins My Life). Leah has also written four young adult fantasy novels and numerous works of short fiction. She is a four-time Nebula Award finalist and a World Fantasy Award finalist. You can learn more about her and her writing at www.leahcypess.com.