As Jon made his way back home he was hit with an overwhelming sense of Deja Vu. Everything he saw, it was like he'd seen it before....
He didn't pass out, though. He waited for Karyn, who was going to come a little later so they could discuss the stone together. And of course one of his first wishes was "I wish I knew why I had such a strong feeling of Deja Vu."
The stone flashed, Karyn and Jon looked away, and Jon's jaw dropped.
"Well? What did you find out?" Karyn asked.
"Wow!" said Jon.
"Jon?"
"It's a time loop, Karyn. We get the stone, we live our lives, we wish that we could live it again only a little different, and we're back here. That's why I remember I've been here before."
"Are you okay?" asked Karyn, concerned. "And you sound different. Smarter..."
"I'm fine, Karyn. It's not smarter. It's more experienced. Last time around the loop, you wished for all the deja vu memories from the previous loops to go away. So I only have memories of the last loop, instead of the last thousands of loops. But since it's only one loop, I can handle it. Keep it in my memory."
"I don't get it," said Karyn. "We can't do a time loop, can we? The stone has a range. If we did a time loop, we'd be looping back everywhere in range of the stone. You'd have a circle of land that's fifty years farther back than everywhere else in the world."
"I think," said Jon, "that there was some kind of astrological alignment. It happens in thirty years and we did a ritual that enhances the range of the stone. So we really did turn back everything, but the stone's range is now back to normal."
Jon stood up and walked around. "It's amazing," he said. "I know everything that happened here in the past fifty years last time around the loop. I moved out of here, we got married..."
"Really? I mean to each other?"
"Really! And Mom planted a pear tree out there, and when we were visiting, Petra tried to climb it and... Oh, shit."
"Jon? What's wrong?"
"Petra! Our daughter. It was after we stopped using the stone regularly. You had pregnancy complications, and we used the stone to fix them so we ended up naming her Petra... But that's not the problem. We turned back time! Our daughter doesn't exist any more! Our grandchildren don't exist any more either!"
Karyn found it hard to imagine having children at her age, let alone grandchildren, and she wasn't quite sure that made sense anyway. "Look, Jon, if it really is a time loop, won't they be born again anyway?"
"No, Karyn. If our child's conceived with a fraction of a second difference, she'll have different DNA. We could fix that with the stone, but she'll also have different experiences, and the different experiences will make her a different person. She won't be the same person we erased. And this isn't the first time either. Thousands of loops! I don't remember them, but I do know what happened, because the stone told me." Jon began to sob. "Thousands of different children of ours we killed, not to mention grandchildren, nieces and nephews... for that matter every other human being on the planet under the age of fifty. And that's not all. Because each loop is different, there are some people who just never existed because one of the differences is that they're missing. Like my sisters and brothers, and I've had a lot." Tears dripped down Jon's cheek.
"What can we do?"
"I don't know, Karyn, but..." He held up the stone and said "I wish that before we considered looping time again, we'd remember that something like that can happen." Then he put it away. "There were loops where we made mistakes. Where I ended up stuck as a pair of panties, or a hooker... but of all the mistakes we could make, this may be the worst."
