The stench of rust and mildew surged into his nose as Claude, still dizzy, forced his eyes open. His body felt as if it had been taken apart and reassembled, every joint protesting the motion. Beneath him lay cold, unyielding concrete; above him, a corrugated iron roof streaked with water stains. This was no longer his tidy, orderly studio—it was a vast abandoned warehouse, piled high with rusting industrial scraps and obsolete machinery.
He sat up without the slightest trace of panic. Unlike the ordinary wanderers who might stumble lost through time, Claude carried within his mind an invisible treasury: the complete technical arsenal of the 21st century. What others saw as ruin, he saw as treasure.
His eyes swept the room, sharp and hungry. A smashed radio? To him, it was resistors and capacitors waiting to be reborn. A bulky old television? If its cathode-ray tube was intact, it could serve as the perfect display. A heap of discarded military gear? Inside, perhaps, lay the transistors and logic gates he craved.
Claude wasted no time. From a corner he fished out a screwdriver and a pair of pliers, and set off on his hunt. He moved like a man with supernatural insight, ignoring worthless scrap and heading straight for the parts that mattered. He measured the length of a cable by hand, listened to the faint buzz of a relay with his ear—guided by intuition sharp enough to tell him which components could still serve.
Soon he struck gold: an abandoned military oscilloscope. Its casing was battered and scratched, but the cathode-ray tube and several operational amplifiers inside were still intact. In 1968, this was a costly piece of laboratory equipment. In Claude's hands, it was the heart of a future game console.
Carefully, he removed the oscilloscope's display, salvaged transistors from the broken radio, and stripped a handful of copper wires from a pile of cables. From a discarded toy car, he even rescued two knobs—perfect for game controls.
One by one, he laid these treasures out on a half-clean wooden crate, as if arranging precious artifacts. On that makeshift workbench, components from different machines and eras lay side by side. In Claude's eyes, they were no longer cold, dead parts, but the foundation of a new age.
He ran his fingers across the cathode-ray tube, its glass surface glimmering faintly, and his lips curved into a confident smile.
"1968… your hardware may be primitive, but in my hands, it will become a masterpiece."
Without hesitation, he gripped the soldering iron and began wiring together the scavenged parts into the circuit diagram already imprinted in his mind. He knew then: his first game would be born here, in this damp, forgotten garage.