Ethan stood in front of the spiral core, still reeling from the message that had been slipped under his door. The parchment note lay on the desk behind him, taunting him with its simplicity. You're not the first you.
His mind couldn't shake the implication. Alternate selves? Timelines collapsing into each other? Or was he already caught in a recursive loop of choices he hadn't made yet? Theories danced in his head like static, too many to count.
But only one thing mattered now: testing the machine.
He wore a harness of biometric sensors and strapped a compact recorder to his chest. If something went wrong, he wanted a chance—however slim—that someone would understand what happened.
The core was warm. It thrummed with low vibrations, as though aware of what he was about to do.
He typed in a simple command sequence on the main console:
Initialize: Temporal Drift Protocol Lock: Coordinate 2574 BCE Status: Manual Override Enabled
Ethan exhaled. "Time," he whispered, "let's dance."
He pressed Enter.
The spiral core began to move. First a slow whirr, then a deep growl as metal rings rotated against each other with impossible precision. Purple light filled the apartment, fracturing across every reflective surface. The machine wasn't humming anymore—it was breathing.
The sensors on his wrist lit up. Pulse accelerated. Adrenaline spiked.
Ethan stepped forward, letting the swirling vortex envelop him. The core opened like the iris of an eye, and in its center was darkness—not blackness, but the absence of everything. No time. No form. Only potential.
As he stepped inside, reality folded.
There was no pain, no heat. Just pressure. A spiraling compression of light and memory and motion. His body twisted and stretched and shrank and multiplied. Somewhere in the chaos, he heard a scream—it might have been his own. A second passed. Or an hour. Or a year.
Then it stopped.
Silence.
He opened his eyes.
Sand. Heat. The sky above him was searing blue, and the sun beat down like a furnace. He was lying in the middle of a vast desert.
The machine was gone.
He looked around, disoriented. In the distance, a structure loomed—massive, ancient, majestic. Triangular.
A pyramid.
Ethan's heart stuttered.
The machine had worked. He wasn't just simulating time travel anymore. He had done it. He had traveled over four thousand years into the past.
He wiped sweat from his brow, still dazed.
And then he saw something that nearly made his knees buckle—a figure, half-shadowed, watching him from the dunes.
Ethan called out. The figure vanished.
He stumbled forward, clutching his recorder. "Day one," he muttered. "Arrival confirmed. Egypt, approximately 2574 BCE." He glanced at the pyramid again, awe blooming in his chest.
But even in his triumph, fear nestled beside wonder.
He was here. Alone. No machine. No return protocol. No backup.
And someone had been watching.
The machine had breathed... and now, it was silent.
For now.