This unexpected journey full of secrets, heartache, and hope, considers the consequences of time travel and attempting to alter the past. Addicted to time jumping, Marcus lived and relived his life when he discovered the overlap. In what he called normal time, Marcus lived alone, sheltering himself from the world. Living with grief and regret.
Nearing his end, wealthy 'time travel' inventor, Marcus Hollister, wished to tell his story. A recluse after his beloved wife, Ellie, tragically died, no one knew much about one of the most famous people on earth. The creation of his chamber had spawned an international business called Vacations in Time. Around the world, clients flocked into stores to relive moments of their lives. Without warning, the business closed its doors, never sending another client on an adventure in time.
Some fifteen years later, the elderly recluse tells his story to a 'nobody' reporter named Jessica Matthews. Details of the multitrillion dollar business built on his invention and the horrifying reasons he shut it down are uncovered. With questionable motives for selecting her for his first and only interview, Marcus reveals to Jessica secrets previously known only to himself. Some secrets would have been better kept buried.
While all time travel stories are unique, few can really grab your attention, never let go and resonate with you and leave you with a sense of some kind of renewal. As a widely read and written subject, it comes down to how something is written and, not so much, what is written. Just like, it is not what you say that is important, but how you say it. In this way, we appreciate the writer’s craftsmanship in penning such an intriguing tale of loss, love, and grief.
Such thrill, such suspense from a science fiction novel is to be savoured. Overlap: The Lives of a Former Time Jumper was written by N Joseph Glass. It is about a man named Marcus Hollister who was pushed by the loss of his dear wife Ellie to build a time travel machine.
In the opening scene of the novel, we see a young couple by the name of Ellie and Marcus Hollister on their way home from a restaurant in the ‘’least posh part of town.’’ When all of a sudden, they are ambushed by robbers seemingly out of nowhere and are stripped of their prized possessions. However, a gun, as if by mistake, goes off and kills Marcuse’s dear Ellie and the robbers scurry off into the night.
Until this dreadful night, this ‘’least posh part of town’’ was the safest. However, the rug was pulled from under their feet. It was at that moment where Marcus made up his mind. He was going to build a time machine in order to reunite himself with his dear wife. On this fateful night, a mad scientist was born.
Years later, he sits across from Jessica Matthews. A young upcoming reporter with brilliant reporting skills won his heart, or was it the eerily striking resemblance to his dead wife ? Besides her looks, Jessica Matthew’s conversationalist skills won her the chance to interview the man who shunned and turned down any media interviews for years and shut himself off from the world.
Marcus Hollister was now ready to tell the world his life story, or at least parts that were not in the media. Stories only he could tell, as if on trial or under trial, he was ready to tell his side of the story unfiltered and undiluted. After years of hiding behind the shadows, it was as if the guilt and shame had driven him out into the open. It was as if he was turning himself in. Through the interview and memoir, he would later leave for the public to decide if he was friend or foe, hero or villain. The public was the jury, and he was the accused, he would leave it up to them to decide if he really deserved to be exalted or dishonoured.
Did the good he gave to many outweigh the bad that followed? Having never left his house for leisure or religion, this was, in a certain sense, his confession. The confession of his sins before he left the world, he relishes this moment because of a variety of reasons. For years, he had been a ‘’recluse’’ and had closed himself off from the world. On the outside, he was a multi-millionaire and an accomplished scientist, on the inside, only he knew the demons he battled.
While he was a hero for everyone, he toed the fine line between hero and villain. Feelings of guilt over what his inventions helped spawn were not always so favourable. And so there he was in his chesterfield with drink in hand going back and forth with Miss Jessica Matthews relaying the foundations or events that had set him and Peter’s business in motion.
Peter and Marcus met at university and tossed business ideas around until one stuck. Their first project was, ‘’Subsidized by the depths of Peter’s trust fund and made a simple AI-based network routing system that transformed existing data connections to instantaneous synchronous flow channels making possible the growth of the metaverse and its successor, Transcend.’’
While Peter provided the necessary funds, Marcus was the brains behind the operation. Peter mostly focused on the marketing side of things, sweet-talking investors was his strong suit. We could say it was a passion, but he was driven by the monetary gain and fame, while Marcus was driven by the sheer will to reunite with his love.
The creations that Marcus deemed failures were taken by Peter and rolled out into production. Where there is a will, there’s a way, it seems. Peter, rather than tossing out what Marcus thought were failures, repackaged them for the world, and marketed them in such a way that found them rich soon after.
Though they failed to create the versions of time travel they wanted, they developed Transcend, a virtual reality built on memories and not on time travel. It allows people to relive their memories in a virtual augmented environment and the AI can take all the information provided and build a memory.
They would go onto create Vacations in time, this time there was no virtual reality, everything was real, and they could send people back in time not to experience a memory but to relive that moment. They could even choose to do something differently at that moment, but it would not change anything in the future. It is in this little detail that Marcus saw his failure.
While he could go back in time and do things differently, it did not change anything once he got back to his own time, meaning he never got to unite with Ellie in the present. Instead, he went back in the chamber as many times as he wanted to meet her.
Though Marcus pretty much lived his life as a vegetable in ‘real life’ he spawned new worlds and lives in the chamber each time he went. The more he went in, the more he discovered the limits his body and mind could take before it got dangerously hazardous for his health. His constant yearning for Ellie made him addicted to the chamber, he went back each time and even had a family with her in his other lives and went on holiday destinations she wanted.
It was only befitting that, like the machine’s inventor and creator, his customers would be equally intrigued. Also, driven by unhealthy feelings, they began to practice more nefarious things with the machine. While Marcus used the machine to cure his loneliness, his customers used it to feed their nefarious obsessions and others to plan pre-meditated murders and crimes.
The Military would use the time chambers for military training and war practice, which often involved thermonuclear weapons which obliterated most life on earth. Only when inevitable global devastation was undeniable did they seek an alternative.
It was in this way that Marcus saved the planet and had the world enjoy a nuclear-free planet. Or had he? Insanity is the act of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, according to Albert Einstein. Henry Shorter was a healthy man, judging by the constant use of the time chamber that only the rich could only afford to abuse now and then. His trips in the overlaps were always short, which prompted Marcus and his team to probe a bit. Only to find out that the man was trying to find the best way in which to kill himself. Marcus tried to get him help in the form of paying for his therapy, to no avail. He only ended up succeeding in his efforts to end his life in the present. Overwhelmed with feelings of guilt, he flew to see his wife in order to console and share in her grief, but only succumbed to sins of the flesh. Not Marcuse’s proudest moment, he felt he betrayed himself and Ellie.
His other unnamed female client used the time chamber to replay the outcomes of a mass murder. Each time she went in the chamber,she would always try to ‘’rack up’’ the body count. She also ended up succeeding in real life and took her own life.
Other cases were that of a jilted lover named Adam Solomon, whose whirlwind romance with an office employee was the envy of all. Perfect in every way until the day his love broke up with him, suddenly. Having access to the chambers as an employee, he began to use the chambers for a brutal pre-meditated murder. At first, Adam convinced Marcus that he was using the chamber as a coping mechanism after the break-up and reliving his memories with his ex-girlfriend Lanisha. As was now Marcuse’s hobby, he monitored his travels and noticed he was brutally murdering her in each one of his overlaps. He finally succeeded even after Marcus tried to stop him because he had anticipated that since he was always the only one left in the building he must have tried to stop him and was ready for him.
The final straw or nail in the coffin that made Marcus shut down the program was Ash Hamilton, a sex offender who used the chamber to find male child victims to molest. What makes the crime more heinous is that his lawyers try to justify his use of the chamber as a precautionary and preventive method, as he didn’t harm any real boy in real life. They try to justify him fulfilling his unhealthy sexual urges in the time chamber as harmless, which would have held had it not been discovered that in each of his trips he tried to perfect ways in which he lured his victims and to swear them to secrecy.
They say life is a game, but who is the real winner? What did Marcus really gain when he treated life like a video game in which he went into a new world and gained new life but always left a loser? There’s nothing more painful than waking up from a good dream and only realizing it was a dream, and nothing more dreadful than being awake in a nightmarish situation and realizing it’s not a dream. This is how Marcuse’s life can be summed up, the lives he lived were in some sense a little fabrication of reality which tore at the seams and didn’t always last.
While his mundane miserable life felt like an eternity in hell. Marcus defied the laws of physics and tried to play God, but soon later found out it was overwhelming for one ordinary man. The weight of one world is one thing, but he had the weight of so many worlds on his shoulders, the weight of the ‘’façade’’ worlds that were created by his chambers and that of the lives of the people his machine ruined.
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