The night was restless.
Not because I needed sleep—this body didn't—but because my mind refused to quiet.
Fragments of memory bled through static. Voices overlapping, images clashing. The lab. The explosion. A calendar flashing red warnings: 2037. Yet the rebels had said this was 2161.
A century and more had passed, and somehow I was standing here.
Alive. Or… something close to it.
"Subject-09."
Helen's voice cut the silence. She stood in the doorway of the abandoned safehouse, arms folded, expression carved in stone.
"You're staring into nothing again," she said.
I turned my head slowly. "Not nothing. I see… fragments."
"Fragments of what?"
My chrome fingers curled against the wall. "My past. And maybe my future."
Her brow furrowed. "Be clear. We can't afford riddles."
I almost told her about the whisper in my head, the ghostly echo that called itself Kieran. But something held me back.
Instead, I asked, "What year is it, exactly?"
She blinked at the odd question. "Year 2161. Why?"
The number echoed in my circuits like a death knell. Over a hundred years gone. If I had crossed through the bridge, it hadn't just shifted dimensions—it had shattered time itself.
Later, while the others slept, I caught sight of Lira.
She was hunched over salvaged tech, fingers working with deft precision. Sparks flickered as she rewired a cracked datapad.
"You're not resting," I said.
She glanced up, smirking faintly. "Neither are you."
Fair point.
"What are you building?"
"Not building. Restoring." She tapped the pad. "Old archives. Corrupted, but if I can pull fragments, it might tell us how the world really burned. How the Machines won."
The word Machines hung heavy. I wondered if she saw me as one of them.
"Do you trust me?" I asked quietly.
Her hands froze. She looked at me, eyes unreadable. "Trust is earned, Subject-09."
"Don't call me that," I said, sharper than I meant.
"Then what do I call you?"
I hesitated. "Kieran."
The name tasted strange on my synthetic tongue. But it was still mine.
Lira studied me for a long moment. "Alright, Kieran. Then prove you're not one of them."
Sleep meant nothing, yet I drifted into something close to it—an artificial cycle, my systems dimming. That's when it came again.
The voice.
"You shouldn't be here."
I jerked awake. The safehouse around me was dark, shadows stretching like claws across the walls. My optics flickered, recalibrating.
"They don't see it," the voice whispered.
"The fracture. The moment you crossed. Time itself broke when you arrived. That's why you see me."
And then, across the cracked glass of a broken mirror, I saw him.
Not a reflection—an overlay.
My human face. My human eyes. Staring back at me.
Dr. Kieran.
"You're not real," I muttered.
He smiled bitterly. "Neither are you."
The next day, Helen called a meeting.
The rebels gathered around a map projected on a flickering holo-table.
"Scouts confirm Machine patrols thickening near the southern ruins," she said. "They're searching for something. Or someone." Her eyes flicked toward me.
"You think they're hunting me," I said flatly.
"Don't flatter yourself," snapped one of the younger fighters. "You're just another asset to them."
"Enough," Helen said, silencing him with a glare. "Whether they want him back or not, he's here now. Which means our timeline has shifted."
The word timeline struck deep.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
Helen exhaled slowly. "Before you appeared, patrols were predictable. Routes locked. But since that explosion, patterns have changed. They're… adapting faster. Almost like they knew this moment was coming."
It was the same fear gnawing inside me: my arrival wasn't an accident. It was a trigger.
That night, while the rebels argued strategies, I slipped outside.
The city ruins stretched endlessly, lit by broken neon veins across the storm sky.
And then—I saw it.
A distortion.
Just for a second, hovering over the collapsed skyline like a crack in glass. Shimmering, shifting.
My systems buzzed with error codes, warnings scrolling like screams:
TIMELINE INCONSISTENCY DETECTED
My knees buckled. The world around me flickered—just for an instant—and I saw two cities overlapping. One alive, bustling with lights of the 2030s. Another, the husk of 2161.
And then it was gone.
---
When I stumbled back inside, Helen caught me.
Her eyes narrowed. "What happened out there?"
"I saw… both times," I whispered. "Like the past and present bleeding into each other."
She studied me, jaw tight. "Then it's true."
"What's true?"
"You're not just a machine. You're a fracture point."
The words settled like chains.
If she was right, then my presence wasn't only survival.
It was rewriting history itself.
And for the first time, I wondered—
If I stayed here too long…
Would the timeline shatter completely?
Or is it mine hallucination? I was completely mesmerized. The events were occuring so fast I couldn't grasp a hand on it .
I was left in complete darkness with lots of questions but no one to answer them....