As he stepped into the early morning sunlight, Daniel Williams also stepped one hundred years into the future. He squinted through eyes still accustomed to the gloom of the underground complex. Everything looked the same as it had yesterday and the day before.

The Permian Basin was still a dried out, prehistoric seabed whose former inhabitants had turned into black, Texas crude oil millions of years ago. A barren land where thorny weeds struggled to survive. The harsh climate had forced their roots deep into the hard caliche soil that had sat for centuries under the same West Texas sun that the Pueblo Indians had used to bake adobe mud bricks. Daniel Williams shielded his eyes, searching for any sign of change, but even the sky seemed to feather off to the same dirty shade of tan where it touched the horizon. Everything looked the same – except for the tall Saguaro cactus standing across the highway; it hadn't been there that morning.

The silent cactus raised a spiny arm in greeting as it pointed another down the edge of the crumbling highway whose faded blacktop showed no signs of tire marks.

Daniel shivered and rubbed his arms against the fleeting chill of morning. The day was young and brisk, but a few hours of sunshine would soon alleviate that. He waved back to the friendly Saguaro and decided to take its advice.

The sun bleached asphalt stretched out in front of the time traveler as he followed the westerly road toward the city of Newtown – or at least where Newtown used to be. He wondered just how far into the future he had come, and he thought about the steps that he'd already taken, the steps that had brought him to … wherever he was.

The long walk gave him plenty of time to reflect. The past six months had been full of demands. The Timeslip Project, Chief Todd's unreasonable proposal, and then the tragic affair with Christina. He hadn’t thought of her, or allowed himself to think of her, for a long time. That was another memory that deserved to stay buried. Her demands had been the hardest of all. He still wanted to blame her for the accident, for pushing the issue of commitment, and for running out on him. But he couldn't. He had pushed her away. He tried to convince himself that all that was far behind him now, buried in the past. He now walked in a different time, freed from the past-present to explore this future-present. Only he wasn’t sure whether he was here to explore a different future, or to run away from his own.