Jack Marshall was an ordinary man with an extraordinary streak of bad luck. A freelance engineer in his early thirties, he spent his days tinkering with machines and dreaming of adventures he never had. Jack had always been fascinated by the unknown, a curiosity instilled in him during childhood when his father, a retired physicist, used to tell him bedtime stories about black holes and time travel.
Growing up, Jack wasn't the most conventional child. While other kids played sports or video games, Jack spent hours dismantling old radios and assembling them back together. By the time he was a teenager, his room resembled a miniature lab, complete with half-assembled gadgets, tools, and posters of Einstein and Tesla. His passion for engineering and physics led him to pursue a degree in mechanical engineering, but life had a way of steering him off course.
Jack's professional career was marked by instability. He bounced between jobs, unable to find a place where he felt he truly belonged. His innovative ideas often clashed with the rigid expectations of his employers, leaving him frustrated. Eventually, he decided to go freelance, working on small engineering projects for local businesses. It wasn't glamorous, but it gave him the freedom to work on his own inventions in his spare time.
His personal life wasn't much better. Jack had always struggled to form deep connections with people. His passion for science and his obsessive nature made him a bit of a loner. He had a few close friends, but romantic relationships eluded him. The one woman he had truly loved, Emily, left him after growing tired of competing with his experiments for attention. Her departure left a void that Jack tried to fill with work, though the ache of loneliness often crept in during quiet moments.
On the evening that would change his life, Jack was in his basement—a space that doubled as his workshop. The room was a chaotic mix of old machinery, blueprints, and scattered tools. In the center stood his latest project: an experimental electromagnetic device designed to create a stable energy field. Jack envisioned it as a potential breakthrough in renewable energy, though he hadn't quite figured out all the details yet.
The storm outside was ferocious, with thunder rumbling like a drumbeat and lightning illuminating the night sky. Jack barely noticed, lost in his work. He had been tweaking the device for weeks, adjusting the settings and running small tests. That night, he felt he was on the verge of a breakthrough. His hands moved with practiced precision, connecting wires and fine-tuning components. The hum of the machine filled the room, a sound that always brought him a sense of satisfaction.
As lightning struck a power line nearby, a sudden surge coursed through his makeshift device. Sparks flew, and the room filled with a blinding white light. Jack felt an intense pull, as if the very fabric of space and time was unraveling around him. His ears rang with an otherworldly hum, and his body felt weightless. Before he could comprehend what was happening, everything went black.
Unbeknownst to Jack, his device had achieved something far beyond his wildest dreams—or nightmares. In that moment of electrical overload, it had torn a hole in the fabric of time, sending him hurtling thousands of years into the past. As he lay unconscious, the storm outside raged on, oblivious to the fact that one man's life had just been irrevocably altered.
When Jack finally woke up, he would find himself in a world he could never have imagined—a world of ice and snow, of mammoths and survival, where his engineering skills and his unyielding spirit would be tested in ways he had never thought possible.