The Third Law of Infinity Travel by Sam Pisciotta
Utopia Science Fiction Magazine | June 2026
Sesha steals a cut daisy from a vase sitting beside the fireplace. Devon glares at her over the rim of his reading glasses, then checks to see if the desk clerk has noticed her theft. He hasn’t. She winks and smiles.
Behind her, snow gathers at the windows’ corners, softening the room’s light. The smells of breakfast eggs and French roast coffee waft from the hotel’s café. Outside, a shovel scrapes ice from the sidewalk. Devon crosses the lobby to kiss her goodbye, a peck on the cheek.
“The taxi’s waiting,” he says. “I have to go.”
She touches his sleeve to hold him an instant longer before handing him the flower.
This is a memory trapped between mirrors, an image infinitely reflected back onto itself. It’s a specific moment in time, a winter morning in Denver, and it’s the last time Devon sees Sesha.
Falling snow, a smile, a kiss, a summer flower out of time — these are all he has left of her. He was able to collect and save them only because, on that morning, he wasn’t bound by the first law governing infinity travel: The distance between two people is infinite.
The thing nearly everyone takes for granted is that the effects of infinity are insignificant in the primary event we call reality; the fabric of the universe holds tight in the here and now. But as one travels through infinity, through the endless iterations of a moment, the warp and weave of spacetime begin to fray.
When traveling through infinity, Zeno’s paradox is an important but sad concept to comprehend. Devon stands across the lobby from Sesha. He walks towards her, but before he can reach her, he must first travel half the distance between them. From there, he must travel half the remaining distance. Half that again and again and again. Proceeding in this manner, Devon will always have half a distance to travel and he can never reach Sesha. He remains frozen at the edge of her smile, just beyond her touch. But on that morning, living the primary event, he moved close enough to take the flower from her hand.
Devon left the flower on the seat of the taxi when he arrived at the university. The mathematics department was across the quad and the grounds hadn’t yet been cleared of snow. Clouds of breath huffed into the chill morning air as he trudged through the fresh powder. His heartbeat throbbed in his ears, strong and steady like a metronome measuring the time and distance increasing between him and Sesha.
She was to meet her old college roommate that morning, coffee and breakfast in the art district where her friend now worked. She would spend the rest of the morning shopping until she and Devon could meet for lunch after his meeting with colleagues. Later that afternoon, they would fly home together. Of course, she would never make their lunch or the flight. And she would miss the rest of the years they had planned together.
He would remain locked in the tragedy: Sesha smiles and hands him the daisy. Their paths diverge. He moves across a snowy quad away from her. She moves to a corner where a stranger, an unexpected snag in the fabric of spacetime, confronts her for money. They both panic, and the warp and weave begin to pull apart. A knife. A struggle. Sesha dies on the way to the hospital. The snow falls. I’m going to be late, he says. A daisy plucked from a vase, and Devon is left holding a rushed and careless goodbye.
That moment altered the vector of his life and drove him to find a way back to her. Spurred on (and sometimes shunned) by colleagues in his own university’s mathematics department, Devon worked through the equations that would help him understand the nature of infinity and its applications within string theory. After a second Ph.D. in quantum mechanics, he focused his work on the second law governing infinity travel: With infinite attempts, anything is possible.
The infinite monkey theorem describes countless monkeys pecking away on countless keyboards in a limitless stream of time; eventually, one primate will perfectly copy Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. Tap-tap-tap — yesterday is but today’s memory, and tomorrow is today’s dream.
The mechanism he uses for infinity travel is a sensory deprivation tank with spore-infused air. He had found a forgotten paper on the psychoactive properties of an ancient spore unearthed at the Mesopotamian ruin Eridu. He understood that the mind, the seat of intent, would provide the gateway into infinity travel. A mind bathed in these particular spores is able to utilize quantum vibrations to access hyper-dimensionality and revisit, again and again, a single moment in time.
Think of it like this, fingers lightly grasp a single pearl on a necklace. As the necklace pulls through the hand, the fingers bump along one pearl at a time, bead after bead, through an infinite string of pearls. That’s the normal movement through time. If instead those fingers grip and release the same pearl over and over through an infinite number of grips, that’s infinity travel. Here’s the problem and the reason time travel alone can’t work: each individual moment has an infinite range of possibilities. Revisiting a particular moment will not guarantee an identical experience. In fact, it’s more likely that one won’t have the same experience twice, but the second law, explained by the infinite monkey theorem, tells Devon that with infinite attempts he can reproduce a lost text and find his wife standing in the hotel lobby just as before.
The first time Devon entered the chamber and traveled through infinity, returning to that moment in the hotel’s lobby, he searched for Sesha. Passing through infinite iterations, he failed to find her. But when he returned to his own instance of reality, he found a single daisy floating in the tank beside him. Had he come close to her? Encouraged, he refined the process.
Now Devon enters the tank, inhales the spores, and gazes into the dark unknown. Just like that, he’s back inside the hotel lobby in Denver. Snow falls behind the window. Flames crackle in the fireplace. And something else — the shadow of every instance looming behind a veil of infinite dimensionality, but none contain Sesha.
Think of Hilbert’s paradox: there are infinite rooms in this hotel and an infinite number of guests to occupy them. Hilbert asks the question, what would happen in such a hotel if one more guest showed up? Could he find a room for the night, find shelter from the storm? Hilbert solves the problem by asking each guest in the infinite hotel to move up a room, n + 1. The guest in the first room moves to the second; the guest in the second room moves to the third, and so on into infinity. In this way, the new guest can move into the first room, now open and waiting.
On a beam of light, Devon passes through the infinite lobbies of that Denver hotel, each filled with moments that do not contain Sesha. That’s when he discovers the third law governing infinity travel: There’s always room for one more.
Devon shifts each moment: n+1. This moment moves to the next, and the moment after that moves one ahead, and so on and so forth. In this fashion, he makes room for the here and now. The first moment opens, and Sesha steps inside.
She stands near the fireplace, daisy in hand, smiling in the morning light that angles through windows laced with snow, and the light softens her smile, and the snow drifts past the glass like falling ash, and the fire sputters while infinite rooms expand like an accordion within the infinite distance between them. Devon closes half the distance and half again. Sesha smiles and offers the daisy. He reaches out to take it. Love only requires that he refuse to let go, that he refuse to check out of the infinite hotel. “I want to stay here with you,” he says.
Sesha smiles, and Devon falls into her arms. Outside the snow drifts onto the earth and a shovel scrapes ice from the sidewalk. Devon falls into her arms. The room smells of morning eggs and brewed coffee. Devon falls into her arms. If a flower can be brought back, perhaps something can be left behind. The snow falls around them, and Devon falls into her arms, and this time, he chooses to stay.
END
Originally published in the June 2026 issue of Utopia Science Fiction Magazine.
Sam W. Pisciotta is a writer and visual artist. Find his short fiction in Cosmic Horror Monthly, Lightspeed, Asimov’s, Nightmare, PodCastle, and other publications. He is a graduate of the Odyssey writing program (2023) and a member of Clarion’s 2026 Novel Writing Workshop. He has an M.A. in Literary Studies from the University of Colorado. Powered on morning coffee and late-night tea, Sam splits his time between Colorado and New York. Connect at www.silo34.comand @silo34 on Instagram, and @swpisciotta on Bluesky Social.
