The world after Rina was muted, like a television with the color turned down. Days bled into weeks, then months, then years, each one a hollow echo of the last. The vibrant city, once a place of shared laughter and stolen kisses, now felt like a landscape of ghosts. Every corner held a memory, every familiar street a stab of pain. The sun still shone, people still hurried about their lives, but it all felt… distant, irrelevant. My own life had narrowed to a single, burning point: to undo what had been done.
After the funeral, a small, heartbreakingly quiet affair, I found myself sifting through Rina's belongings. Her parents, lost in their own grief, had let me take a few boxes. Among her neatly organized notebooks and half-finished sketches, I found it – a worn folder labeled "Temporal Displacement Musings." My heart clenched. Rina had always been fascinated by the more theoretical, almost fantastical side of physics. We'd talked about it, laughed about it, never taking it too seriously. But looking at her meticulous notes, the complex equations, the scribbled diagrams, I saw a new depth to her curiosity.
One recurring sketch caught my eye: a strange, trumpet-shaped hose or pipe, often drawn next to calculations involving gravity and mass. It was just a doodle, perhaps, but it felt significant.
Her research wasn't just idle curiosity; it was a fledgling theory, a bold, almost audacious exploration of the possibility of traversing time. And in my despair, it became my lifeline. If time could be bent, could be navigated, then maybe… just maybe…
The following eleven years were a blur of obsessive work. I dropped out of university. Friends drifted away, unable to penetrate the wall of grief and fierce, silent determination I had built around myself. My small apartment transformed into a chaotic laboratory. Wires snaked across the floor, salvaged electronics hummed and sparked, and the smell of solder and ozone became my constant companion. The outside world became a peripheral annoyance – the need for groceries, the occasional bill to pay. My entire existence was poured into Rina's notes, expanding on them, testing them, willing them into reality.
There was one person who tried to pierce my self-imposed isolation: Mr. Tanaka. He was an older engineer, maybe around forty, who had a small workshop a few blocks from my apartment. He'd known Rina and me vaguely from the neighborhood, a kindly man who'd once fixed Rina's faulty laptop for free. When he heard what I was attempting – because news of my increasingly eccentric behavior had started to spread in hushed tones – he sought me out.
I remember him standing in the doorway of my cluttered apartment, his face etched with concern. The single bare bulb overhead cast harsh shadows, highlighting the mess of my lab, the dark circles under my eyes. "Kaito-kun," he'd said, his voice gentle but firm, "what you're trying to do… to control time… it's not right. Some things are meant to be. Grief is a heavy burden, but trying to erase the past… it can create far worse futures."
His words, meant kindly, felt like daggers. "What do you know about worse futures?" I'd snapped, my voice raw. "Nothing can be worse than this." He'd try to reason with me, talking about paradoxes, about the natural order of things. But I wouldn't listen. His well-meaning concern felt like an obstacle, an attempt to dissuade me from the only thing that gave my life meaning. He saw a man consumed by an impossible dream; I saw the only path back to Rina.
Strangely, amidst the grueling research and countless dead ends, help would arrive in unexpected ways. Notes. Scraps of paper, sometimes, with complex formulas or solutions to problems that had stumped me for weeks. They'd just… appear. Tucked into a textbook I hadn't opened in months, lying on my workbench when I was sure I'd cleared it the night before. Some were in a handwriting that was eerily similar to Rina's, others in a scrawled, hurried script I didn't recognize. I told myself it was my exhausted mind playing tricks, that I'd written them myself during a late-night fugue state and forgotten. But a small, desperate part of me clung to the idea that something, or someone, was guiding me.
The core of Rina's theory, and what became my obsession, revolved around creating a controlled, artificial black hole. Not the galaxy-swallowing kind, but something small, incredibly dense. The calculations were staggering. To bend spacetime enough, I needed to compress the mass of a small mountain into an object no larger than an inch. Then, another, even smaller singularity, introduced into the first, to increase its mass without expanding its gravitational reach, stretching its event horizon until it, theoretically, pierced the fabric of reality and opened a gateway into… elsewhere. A fifth dimension, Rina had hypothesized, a place outside our normal perception of space and time.
And to enter this gateway? That was where the capsules came in. I needed a vessel, a pod capable of shrinking itself and its occupant to pass through the one-inch aperture, yet simultaneously expanding its internal dimensions to protect the traveler from the crushing tidal forces. It sounded like science fiction, a madman's dream.
I built hundreds of prototypes. Small, sleek metallic ovoids. The early ones were crude, failing spectacularly. Some imploded under simulated pressure. Others simply… disintegrated. My tiny workshop saw more explosions and electrical fires than a stunt show. Each failure was a gut punch, a fresh wave of despair threatening to drown me. But then I'd look at Rina's photo, taped above my main console, her smile a silent encouragement, and I'd pick myself up and start again. The trumpet-shaped hose from her notes became a key design element for the energy conduits leading to the compression chamber.
Slowly, agonizingly, I made progress. The mysterious notes often provided the crucial breakthrough just when I was about to give up. The capsule designs became more refined, the energy systems more stable.
Then, one rainy Tuesday, when I was thirty-two years old, eleven years after Rina's death, it happened. Capsule Mark 73, one of the six remaining prototypes from a batch of over a hundred, sat in the heavily shielded testing chamber I'd painstakingly constructed in the reinforced basement of my building (a feat that involved a lot of discreet, late-night work and forged permits). The mountain-mass equivalent – a ludicrously dense amalgam of scavenged heavy metals and compressed materials – was ready.
My hands trembled as I initiated the sequence. The lights in my lab dimmed, the air crackled with energy. A low hum escalated into a deafening roar. On the monitor, I saw the target mass begin to glow, then distort, collapsing in on itself with impossible speed. A pinprick of absolute darkness appeared. Then, the second, smaller charge. The darkness stretched.
For a moment, nothing. Then, the sensors flared. A stable, one-inch rupture in spacetime.
My breath hitched. It was real. After all this time, all the sacrifice, all the madness… it was real. A wave of triumph, so potent it almost buckled my knees, washed over me, quickly followed by the crushing weight of what I was about to do.
The capsule, one of the six survivors of countless brutal trials, gleamed under the harsh lights. It was ready. And so, I hoped, was I.