On an island in the North Sea lived a man. He lived there alone, on purpose. For as long as he could remember he would randomly jump backward and forward in time. Yes, time. It was usually a day or two either way. The longest jump was a week. It took him a long time to understand this about himself. He lived a tortured life until he found the island. The isolation helped him deal with his affliction.
Over the years he learned to predict when he was about to jump. Going forward or back had a particular feel to it. Backward was a tingle in his legs. Forward started as a slow migraine in his head. Eventually he worked out in his body what was causing the episodes. He worked and worked until he perfected a device that could hinder the jumps. This was an exciting development.
After testing it for a few weeks, he decided to leave the island. He arranged for a ship to pick him up. There he stood on the dock that Tuesday morning. The device he made was rather large. He hid it as well as he could in a very large green backpack. The ship arrived and he boarded. He never took the pack off. He slept in it. He ate in it. The passengers looked at him as queer at first, but soon he was just another North Sea oddity.
Late one evening, at about halfway to their destination the small ship was sideswiped by another larger ship. It was a horrific night. The screams turned to full on panic as both ships started to sink. The man stood motionless on the deck. His eyes welled up with tears as he disconnected the apparatus and dropped the back pack to the deck. Forward or back, it was a flip of the coin. Either way he would be dead again.