Chicken or Egg — Elise Abram

You can't hurry love. You also can't cultivate it over successive manipulations of the timeline. After inventing a time machine, Nigel and Daniel dance a tango through time as they vie for Paula's affections. Doctoral candidate Nigel Trumble and engineering student Daniel Posner develop the Arch, a machine that creates a portal letting them travel through time. To celebrate, they go to a campus pub where they meet Paula Carson, a lonely undergrad. She's charmed by Nigel at first, but then Daniel rushes in to sweep her off her feet. What's a socially awkward doctoral student with a time machine to do but go back in time to try to woo her back? Only this time, he has to figure out a way to keep Daniel out of the equation. Things are looking up for Nigel when Daniel takes an experimental leap through time only to develop a brain aneurysm, but when the university finds out his illness was caused by the Arch,they commandeer the project. The only way Nigel can take hold of the situation is to travel back in time, but each iteration only serves to complicate matters further. How many times will Nigel have to reset time before he wins Paula's affections? Given the way Paula changes with each iteration, will she want anything to do with either one of them when the truth comes out?