He sent the simulation back into the dark of the machine, opened a code file, and searched for the phrase “Here you are,” his code marker, the words he always used to note the last place he’d been in the code. And below it, the message he always left himself when he was about to stop working on the simulation for a while.

[...]

Over the years, he’d come to understand the message as a kind of rope line he was tossing to himself, a thought sent from the present day’s Ethan to the Ethan of the future: to the Ethan Levin who would always return from whatever impossible job schedule he was afraid of now, whatever bills he had to pay, dinner he’d left half eaten, girlfriend he’d just lost or found or fought with. Here you are. He returned to the idea in progress, to the thought continued across time. The panic over his work at Telligentsia fell away. The argument with Joanna about the trip fell away. Her traveling with Ostrick, her face before she disappeared down the Jetway—none of that existed. There he was: back in the code. The code he’d started when he was twenty-three, still had a father, and knew what he wanted to do with his life. From message to message, “Here you are” to “Here you are,” the moments Ethan spent working on his simulated world came together as they always did: sequential points along a solid line, the arc of a separate, private, parallel, unfinished life.