Contigo en el eter / Alone With You in the Ether

Chicago, sometime - Two people meet in the Art Institute by chance.

He is a doctoral student who manages his destructive thoughts with compulsive calculations about time travel; she is a bipolar counterfeit artist, undergoing court-ordered psychotherapy.

By the end of the story, these things will still be true.

But this is not a story about endings. For Regan, people are predictable and tedious, including and perhaps especially herself.

She copes with the dreariness of existence by living impulsively, imagining a new, alternate timeline being created in the wake of every rash decision.

To Aldo, the world feels disturbingly chaotic. He gets through his days by erecting a wall of routine: a backbeat of rules and formulas that keep him going.

Without them, the entire framework of his existence would collapse.

For Regan and Aldo, life has been a matter of resigning themselves to the blueprints of inevitability?until the two meet.

Could six conversations with a stranger be the variable that shakes up the entire simulation?