Oh, how he doesn't want to. It can't possibly do any good. But it's true, an eleven year old child can't recreate his deadly machine. And they're determined. They'll never let it go.

(Lying isn't an option. No, they deserve better than that, even though no one who could have told them differently remembers a thing.)

Very well.

At the time, I had already designed and built a machine that could give us information about other timelines. Very simple things, temperature, presence of light, sound.

The next version of it was more ambitious. Too much so. I can't tell you what went wrong or how it is I didn't die outright, nor why no one remembers I existed. I only know that it was flawed somehow, it malfunctioned, and I ceased to be.