Dying 100 Times To Save My Wife

The plane blows up. The researcher wakes in his seat before takeoff with the explosion still in his ears, and it happens again, and again. Each pass through he gets a little further: he learns where the bomb is, he learns how long the wiring takes, he learns the passengers. His wife is on board and they are close enough to divorce that neither of them wants to sit near the other, and she is keeping something from him. So is the flight attendant. So is the passenger Zhou Tianhao. The person who put the device on the aircraft goes by Teacup Bear and is working with technology that does not exist yet, taken from a future the loop is a side effect of. Defusing the bomb saves the cabin for one run and changes nothing about the larger thing coming, so he starts using the resets to trace it backwards, spending whole loops on conversations with his wife rather than on the device. To draw out whoever inside the operation has been feeding Teacup Bear information, he arranges his own death and lets them believe it took.