What if you didn’t need a machine to travel through time?
No dials to spin. No wormholes to slip through. Just silence. Stillness. And a mind unmoored from the present.
In Traceback, time travel doesn’t begin with a flash of light or the flip of a switch. It begins with a coma. A broken body. A brain that refuses to stay in its own century.
Rafi Ciprone-Hantz isn’t a scientist or an adventurer; he’s a young man who should be recovering in a hospital bed. But instead, he’s reliving lives that aren’t his. He feels memories that don’t belong to him. And becomes someone he’s never met.
So how is this possible?
That’s the question haunting Traceback. And the answer is as intimate as it is unsettling: the time machine is inside us.
A Different Kind of Time Travel
There are no paradoxes in Traceback. No time loops. No racing-the-clock finales. What David Benjamin offers is personal and powerful.
This isn’t about physically traveling backward. It’s about what happens when the mind collapses inward, unlocking layers buried deep in our cells, our ancestry, our collective memory. As neurologist Dr. Lucille Smith later suggests, the phenomenon Rafi is experiencing isn’t mystical, it’s neurological. Emotional. Possibly even genetic.
He’s not jumping through time. Time is waking up inside him.
A Brain Built to Remember More Than One Life
Dr. Smith calls it a “time machine.” Not the kind you’d build in a lab but one you carry in your skull. And in Traceback, it becomes clear that Rafi’s trauma hasn’t just damaged his brain, it’s opened it.
He begins experiencing the lives of others:
- A young woman in Vilnius, torn from love and thrown into chaos.
- A terrified immigrant boy on a death-filled voyage to America.
- A man trapped in a barn during the most violent storm in English history.
These aren’t dreams. They’re too sharp. Too real. And too emotionally precise to dismiss.
What Traceback dares to ask is this:
What if remembering isn’t always personal?
What if some memories don’t start with us at all?
If you look at the story closely, there’s a radical idea that lies beneath it, that trauma, memory, and identity are not confined to a single lifetime. That our bodies might hold onto echoes of those who came before us. Not metaphorically, but viscerally.
Rafi doesn’t know these people. But he feels them. Their love. Their fear. Their final breaths.
And running through all of it, quietly, is a single heirloom—the ring first introduced in the book’s haunting prologue. A ring inscribed with Hebrew words: Zachor. Ahavah. Zara Zerayim.
Remember. Love. Sow seeds for the future.
It’s not magic. But it never stops showing up.
It ties the stories together—just as surely as Rafi’s own unconscious mind does.
The Past Doesn’t Wait to Be Summoned
Where other novels race through time, Traceback lingers. The timeline doesn’t bend for spectacle but it bends for meaning. We’re not watching a man solve mysteries of history. We’re watching him become part of that history. And what makes it so devastating is that he can’t escape it.
He can only feel it. Endure it.
And hope it tells him something he doesn’t yet know about himself.
By the end, you’re not asking how it happened.
You’re asking something much more uncomfortable:
If this was possible for Rafi… is it possible for me?
Could our bodies, our minds, our nightmares be carrying something older?
A memory that was never ours but is still somehow… us?
Traceback doesn’t present time as a straight line or a looping spiral. It presents it as something else entirely:
A haunting.
A whisper.
A truth passed quietly from one life to the next.
The past is not past.
It never was.
And in Traceback, that realization is the beginning of everything.
