[RATING MA 15+]
The rain fell on Tokyo like static interference—thousands of invisible needles dissolving into concrete and glass. From the forty-third floor of the Institute for Irreversible Physics, the city looked like a circuit board drowning in liquid light.
Sekitanki Hankō suru hito pressed his forehead against the window, watching his reflection overlap with the world below. Seventeen years old. Junior lead researcher. The youngest person to ever hold the position. His face had been on magazine covers. His name appeared in academic journals that most people couldn't pronounce, let alone understand.
He felt nothing.
The glass was cold. He wished it were colder.
Behind him, the laboratory hummed with the white noise of expensive machines measuring things that didn't matter. Quantum fluctuation monitors. Tachyon interference arrays. Temporal distortion scanners that cost more than his parents' house—the house he hadn't visited in two years.
Had it been two years? Or three?
Time was funny like that. For someone who studied its fundamental structure, Sekitanki had lost track of his own. "Sekitanki-kun, you're still here?"
He didn't turn around. He recognized Dr. Yamamoto'S voice—concern wrapped in professional exhaustion. She was kind. She'd brought him coffee once, black with too much sugar, the way his mother used to make it before he stopped going home for breakfast.
"The data sets aren't complete," he said, his voice flat as dead air.
"It's three in the morning." "I know what time it is."
A pause. The kind that happens when someone realizes they can't reach you. "Get some rest. That's an order." Her footsteps receded down the hallway, each one a small defeat.
Sekitanki returned to his workstation. Seventeen monitors surrounded him in a semicircle, each displaying cascades of numbers that would look like nonsense to anyone else. To him, they were a language—the only language that had ever made sense.
He'd learned to read before he could tie his shoes. By nine, he was watching lectures on quantum mechanics while other kids played baseball in parks he never visited. By eleven, he'd written his first paper on temporal loop fragments, rejected by three journals before a professor in Berlin called it "disturbingly brilliant."
By thirteen, he'd stopped pretending he was like everyone else.
The memory surfaced unbidden: his father's birthday party. Relatives crowded around a table, laughing about things that didn't matter. His aunt had asked him about school. He'd started explaining quantum entanglement. Halfway through, he noticed everyone had stopped listening—their eyes glazed, smiles frozen, nodding without understanding.
That was when he realized it. The gulf between him and everyone else wasn't a gap. It was an ocean. And he was drowning on the wrong side of it. He'd left the party early. His mother had called after him. He hadn't looked back.
Why did I do that?
The thought arrived like an unwanted guest. Sekitanki shoved it aside and focused on the monitors. Numbers. Patterns. Things that behaved predictably. Things that didn't ask him why he was always alone.
His fingers moved across the keyboard—muscle memory transcending consciousness. He was hunting for something. He'd been hunting for years, though he couldn't explain what it was. A feeling. An absence. The shape of something that should be there but wasn't.
He dreamed about it sometimes. Standing in a place that predated language. Before cities, before humanity, before the first human thought had ever contaminated the silence. A place where time moved differently. Where he could—
The monitor flickered. Sekitanki's fingers froze. A spike. Minute. Almost imperceptible. But there, screaming in the data like a heartbeat in a corpse. His pulse—dormant for so long—suddenly thundered.
He leaned forward, eyes widening, hands trembling as they flew across the keyboard. He pulled up the temporal distortion scanner, isolated the quantum-tachyon interference patterns, and—Impossible. A stable ripple. A fixed temporal distortion.
A wound in time that wasn't healing.
For the first time in three years, Sekitanki felt alive. The sensation was so foreign it was almost painful—like blood rushing back into a limb that had fallen asleep. His world, usually rendered in muted grays, suddenly blazed with color so intense it hurt.
He stood up so fast his chair crashed backward. He didn't notice. He was already running. "Dr. Yamamoto!" His voice broke—from disuse, from sudden desperate hope. "Dr. Yamamoto, wake up! Everyone wake up!"
He sprinted down the corridor, his footsteps echoing off sterile walls. He burst into the residential wing where senior researchers slept during long projects. He pounded on doors.
"There's a stable ripple! A stable ripple!"
Doors opened. Faces appeared—confused, annoyed, half-asleep.
Dr. Yamamoto emerged in some pajama's, her expression hovering between concern and alarm. "Sekitanki, what—" "The temporal distortion scanner picked up a fixed interference pattern. It's not degrading. It's stable. Do you understand what that means?"
The senior physicist, Dr. Tanaka, stumbled out behind her, adjusting his glasses. "That's... that's not possible. Fixed temporal distortions collapse within nanoseconds. The energy required to—"
"It's there." Sekitanki grabbed his arm. The physical contact felt strange—how long since he'd touched another person? "Come look. Please. I'm not imagining this."
Something in his voice must have convinced them. Or maybe it was the look in his eyes—the first real emotion they'd seen from him in years.
They followed him back to the lab. Others came too. Word spread. Within an hour, seventeen researchers crowded around his workstation, watching the data in stunned silence.
"My days on fishing for fish," someone whispered with a British accent. "He's right. That's bloody lovely people."
The next month dissolved into chaos—the beautiful kind. Tests. Replications. International peer review. The discovery was confirmed by laboratories in Berlin, Boston, Beijing. The implications were staggering. The mathematics checked out. The physics held.
Time travel wasn't theoretical anymore. The world shattered and remade itself in the space of thirty days. And through it all, Sekitanki smiled for the cameras and felt the emptiness creeping back in. The discovery that should have filled the hole inside him had only revealed how deep it really went.
Until they told him about the mission.
The Carboniferous Period. 359 million years ago. Before dinosaurs. Before mammals. Before anything resembling the world he knew. A time when Earth was alien—when the air itself was poison and paradise, thick with oxygen that made insects grow to nightmarish sizes. A place where they wanted to discover things the most. As they wanted to see it with their own eyes. As that kind of stuff interest scientists the most.
They chose him as the pilot. Of course they did. His discovery. His mission. His chance to touch the thing he'd been chasing his entire life, that empty space was him wanting to know if time travel existed all along. The night before the launch, his mother called.
He stared at his phone for three full minutes before answering.
"Hankō?" Her voice was small. Uncertain. Like she wasn't sure he'd remember her. "I saw the news. You're going through with it?" "Yes." "Are you scared?" Should I be? "No mother." "Will you... will you come home? Before you go? Your father wants to—"
"I can't." The lie came easily. "Too many preparations forward." Silence. Then: "I'm proud of you. Even if you don't believe me." Something cracked inside his heart. He didn't know what to call it.
"I have to go." He hung up before she could say goodbye.
That night, he didn't sleep. He stood at the window of his apartment, watching Tokyo breathe beneath a sky that never showed stars. He wondered, distantly, if he'd miss any of this. The city. The people. The world that had never quite felt like home.
Maybe that's why I'm going, he thought. To find the place where I actually belong. The time machine didn't look impressive. A reinforced capsule, eight meters tall, covered in quantum stabilizers and temporal anchoring arrays. Ugly. Functional. Built with mathematics instead of imagination.
Sekitanki climbed inside. The hatch sealed with a pneumatic hiss. Through the reinforced window, he saw Dr. Yamamoto give him a thumbs up. She'd cried earlier. He hadn't known what to say. "Final checks complete," a voice crackled through the comm system. "Initiating temporal displacement in sixty seconds."
His heart hammered. For once, he welcomed the sensation. This is it. The missing piece. It has to be. The countdown began. Numbers falling like rain. Ten. Nine. Eight. His hands gripped the armrests. Five. Four. Please let this mean something. Two. One. The universe screamed.
Light and sound and sensation collapsed into a single point of absolute agony and absolute ecstasy. Sekitanki's consciousness fragmented across four dimensions—stretched, compressed, inverted. He saw his younger slef and death of old age simultaneously through visions of distortion. He heard colors. He tasted time itself.
And then—Silence. The kind of silence that existed before sound was invented. Sekitanki opened his eyes.
The air was thick. Not metaphorically—actually viscous, heavy with moisture and oxygen that made each breath feel like drowning in sweetness. Green light filtered through a canopy of plants that looked wrong—too geometric, too alien, like nature designed by something that had never seen Earth.
He was here. Actually here. 359 million years in the past.
He opened the hatch with shaking hands. Humid air rushed in, carrying scents of rot and growth and something chemical he couldn't name. The ground outside was soft—layers of decomposing plant matter forming a carpet that shifted beneath his boots as he stepped out.
"So this..." His voice broke. "This is what I've been chasing. Amazing, this is the primal world we've lost."
The forest stretched endlessly in every direction. Giant club mosses rose like towers. Ferns the size of buildings swayed in wind that tasted prehistoric. Somewhere distant, something chittered—a sound like knives being sharpened against stone.
Sekitanki smiled. Really smiled. The emptiness inside him, for the first time in years, felt like it might finally have an answer. Then he heard it. A metallic crack. He spun around. The time machine—his only way home—shuddered. Metal groaned. Something was on top of it. Something massive. Something that moved with the mechanical precision of interlocking segments.
A centipede.
But calling it a centipede was like calling the ocean damp. It was the size of a train car, each segment armored in black chitin that reflected green light like oil. Hundreds of legs, each tipped with hooks. Mandibles that could crush stone. And it was eating his machine.
The creature's mouth parts closed around the quantum stabilizer array. Metal shrieked. Sparks fountained into the prehistoric air. The centipede's body undulated with pleasure, chittering to itself as it consumed humanity's greatest achievement like a child eating candy.
Sekitanki couldn't move. Couldn't breathe. Couldn't process what he was seeing. The centipede's head swiveled. Compound eyes—each one the size of his fist—focused on him.
It stopped eating. Time became honey. Then the creature lunged.
Sekitanki ran. Pure animal instinct overriding everything else. His legs pumped through mud that tried to swallow him. Roots tore at his clothes. The air was too thick, each breath a battle. Behind him, he heard the sound of hundreds of legs churning earth, coming closer, impossibly fast—he dove behind a massive fern tree. The centipede crashed past, its body a living wall of chitin and nightmare. The ground shook. More chittering—this time from multiple directions.
There were more of them. Sekitanki pressed against the tree trunk, his whole body shaking. Blood ran down his leg from where a root had opened his skin. His white lab coat was already brown with mud and plant matter.
The sounds of the Carboniferous forest closed in around him—wings beating in the canopy, things moving through undergrowth, the wet sounds of an ecosystem that killed without malice.
And somewhere in the distance, metal gave one final shriek before going silent. His way home was gone. He was alone. He was trapped. And for the first time in his empty life, Sekitanki Hankō suru hito was terrified.
TO BE CONTINUED... [NEXT EPISODE: "The Swamp of Titan Insects"]