All You Puppets

It wasn't the conversation Claire Elsworth expected. Her ship departed with only her husband and daughter onboard. Claire had kissed them goodbye, and they vanished from time and space. Claire tapped her fingers, thinking the inconceivable.

The man from Interstellar Gateways rambled on, relentless in probing Claire. "Let me ask you...what is the most important thing in your life? Your leadership continues a legacy of service to humanity. But it also makes you the richest, most influential, and frankly, the most important person alive. But I think you could step aside, step away, even disappear, and your corporation would still be the driver in the universe." He stared at her, unblinking, waiting for her reaction.

Claire deflected, tossing her head and spiking back, "No matter, we thrive because the Tribes came together for all of us."

"Ah, perhaps," the man muttered. He licked his lips and looked sheepish, looking over his shoulder to see who was near. He leaned across the table and whispered, "How far would you go to find them? Would you even travel in time?"

And there it was, the impossible. Had her husband and daughter slipped into the past? And now they were asking her to leave it all behind, take a leap of faith into the past?

Claire couldn't have known the time loop began generations before. An anthropologist, a geneticist, an astrophysicist, and a slobbering bulldog searching for clues among skeletons and DNA. Evidence of people who were living outside of their own birth-timelines. Impossible genetic links of yet-unborn descendants becoming their own ancestors.

Who were all the puppets, living in a Mobius Strip of life and death, free will, fate, and predestination?