Summary of The Doorkeepers by A.T. Greenblatt
Uncanny #68, January/February 2026
Wenda works as a Doorkeeper for Infinite Possibilities, Inc., a company that sells tickets to time loops—preserved snapshots of the future created by a genius named Jason who was trying to change his girlfriend Anita’s mind about the ethics of time travel. Wenda and her four colleagues—Pip, Dominic, Ting, and Mattis—shepherd visitors through massive ornate Doors into various days between 2029 and 2034, warning them: “You can explore anything you want behind this Door, but you can’t change anything and you can’t take anything back with you.” The visitors never listen.
The story opens with Wenda crying vodka-infused tears into Pip’s shoulder for the third Sunday night in a row—their version of Friday since they work Tuesday through Saturday. She’s been a mess lately, and her colleagues are worried. The job itself is soul-crushing: they spend their shifts experiencing the same handful of days over and over while dealing with greedy opportunists trying to exploit the future for stock tips or lottery numbers. Each Door is labeled with a Powerball number—”one part joke, one part warning” about the futility of trying to game the system.
Key Plot Points
- Wenda is haunted by something she saw behind Door 2034 about her own future—she’ll die of cancer like her mother did, despite regular checkups
- The time loops suffer from the “Aquarium Effect”—every time someone visits, it changes what actually happens, making the preserved futures increasingly unreliable
- Jason and Anita appear in every loop, their relationship deteriorating as they argue about the ethics and consequences of time travel
- Jason’s mother, Mrs. Lim (CEO of Infinite Possibilities), visits the loops to watch her dead son—he committed suicide years ago when the despair of creating worse futures became too much
- The Doorkeepers were all former waitstaff who received massive tips from Jason, recruited because he believed he had a positive effect on their lives
Wenda’s friends stage interventions throughout the week, each trying to help her in different ways. Dominic drags her to a rooftop bar in the 2029 loop where a grassroots disaster relief initiative is holding their first outreach event, showing her that not everything in the future is worse. Ting takes her through the 2033 loop, betting on visitor behavior and trying to get her to laugh at the absurdity of their job. Mattis brings everyone to a karaoke bar fundraiser in 2031 for his birthday, creating a moment of joy and freedom where they can forget about cycles and consequences.
But the interventions don’t work—not at first. Wenda remains paralyzed by what she knows is coming. She calls in sick, hides under her covers, and can barely function. Her bedroom walls are plastered with photographs from when she was pursuing a photography career, an “inspiration board” that her mother encouraged before cancer took her. Now the muses have abandoned Wenda, and she can’t even muster creativity to make lunch.
Everything changes when the time loops start collapsing. Door 2029 shuts down mid-loop, then Door 2030. Pip, who was a math major before becoming a bartender to pay student loans, discovers Jason’s secret documentation in storage and theorizes that the loops are failing. She reveals that her own mother is still alive in the loops, and every day it takes everything she has not to call her. Both she and Wenda are in the “Dead Mom Cancer Club,” both tempted by the loops to reconnect with what they’ve lost.
Mrs. Lim announces that Infinite Possibilities is closing. The Doorkeepers are out of jobs. That Sunday, they go to their bar one last time for a lackluster, sorry farewell. But Wenda isn’t done. She sneaks back to the warehouse and enters the forbidden Door 2034—the one where she originally saw her death—even though the loops are unstable and no one knows she’s there. The Door snaps shut behind her, trapping her.
Inside the 2034 loop, the hotel is wrecked by water damage and full of displaced people escaping riots. Wenda encounters Jason and Anita during their final meeting—the last time they’ll see each other before Jason builds the full-scale loops and eventually takes his own life. When Jason mistakes her for a waitress and asks if she’d want a snapshot of the future, she tells him it’s a dumb idea. After he storms off, Wenda sits with Anita and tells her everything: how Jason built the loops anyway, how the Aquarium Effect made things worse, how he died in despair, how his mother turned it into a business.
Anita is devastated but not entirely surprised—she suspected Jason created other loops years ago but hoped otherwise. When Wenda asks why things never get better, Anita explains that the future doesn’t care about better or worse—it’s simply probability and decisions. The problem is that people make bad decisions when they see something they don’t want: they distract themselves or become paralyzed instead of facing it. Anita admits she did this too by not confronting Jason about the loops earlier.
Wenda protests that the present is terrible, worse than the loop they’re sitting in. But Anita corrects her: “That can change.” She reminds Wenda that “probability is not certainty” and “the present is not the future yet.” The conversation transforms Wenda’s understanding. She realizes there are still things she could add to her inspiration board, calls she’s been dreading that she could make. The other Doorkeepers were right all along—even knowing the probable future, she still has choices to make in the present. The story ends with Wenda understanding that facing the future, however terrible, is better than being paralyzed by it, and that sometimes the point of seeing what’s coming isn’t to change it but to learn how to live with it.