Three hours in, I was starting to suspect that half the internet was secretly obsessed with time travel; provided it never actually happened to them.
There was a guy on a forum claiming he'd lost six 6 minutes walking to his mailbox, spawning a dedicated blog on "temporal hygiene."
Another thread was forty pages deep, debating whether the Mandela Effect screenshots counted as evidence of temporal displacement.
Then there was the YouTube vide titles "I PROVED TIME LOOPS ARE REAL (Gone Wrong)" which turned out to be a guy microwaving his phone.
I closed the tab so hard I winced.
Mara wanted leads on anything linked to temporal anomalies in the last year. What she hadn't mentioned was that ninety percent of the community was either terminally, delusional, or both.
By the second hour, the humor in it wore off. By the third, I wasn't laughing at the conspiracy theorists anymore; I was starting to feel like one of them.
I leaned back and let my eyes drift to the corner of my screen, where the group chat icon sat with no new notifications.
I hadn't opened it since morning, but I knew exactly what was waiting— Mara's clipped updates, Jonah's noncommittal "okay"s, and the particular flavor of politeness that's worse than silence.
No one said anything cruel. But nobody had to. The tone just… shifted.
I told myself I wasn't avoiding, I was just busy.
My phone buzzed against the desk, as if reading my thoughts.
Mara: Cross-referenced Reinhard's old university page against an archive cache. Confirmed he taught two semesters before going dark.
Jonah: … okay.
That was it. Two messages, no follow-up.
I held the phone waiting for a tag, a question, any reason at all to re-enter the conversation.
Nothing came.
I set the phone face-down and went back to the search bar. If they weren't going to invite me back in, I'd just have to earn it.
I changed tactics. Stopped searching for "time travel" like an idiot and started searching the way Mara would. I dug past the UFO crowd and the simulation theorists, into smaller threads, abandoned blogs, a subreddit with maybe four hundred members who all seemed to actually believe each other.
It still wasn't much. But it felt like real work instead of doom scrolling with extra steps.
Somewhere in there, I stopped pretending this was just about being useful.
I wanted to walk into the next meeting and drop something on the table that mattered. I wanted to at least try to redeem myself in the eyes of the only two people that could understand what I've been going through these past few weeks.
To see Jonah look at me like I wasn't some broken puzzle piece, and make mara stop waiting for me to become a problem.
I'd spent days being the reason the group chat went quiet. If I could hand them one solid thread—one real lead—maybe that silence would stop being about me.
Hours turned into the next day, and the next day turned into more of the same.
I read about a woman in Ohio whose kitchen clock allegedly ran backward every solstice.
Found a defunct Discord server where a user swore their shadow lagged a second behind them before deleting their account.
A single-entry blog from three years ago read only: They don't warn everyone. Ask yourself why they warned you.
No name. Nothing I could trace.
Nothing held water. None of it connected to Reinhard or the E. Paradox. The path Mara had given me felt like a hallway that refused to lead anywhere.
By the third afternoon, I was done. The sun was slicing across my desk with an indifferent, golden glare. My eyes burned. My search history looked like a conspiracy theorist's dream diary.
I reached for the laptop lid to close it—finally admitting I had nothing—when the screen froze.
The cursor vanished. My entire room fell into a wrong, heavy silence. Like all life had just become absent, as if the air itself had gone stagnant.
And then, I wasn't in my room anymore.
I wanna say it happened slowly, but there wasn't a transition I could point to.
One second; my desk, the frozen laptop, and the afternoon light.
The next; a different room entirely, gray and low-ceilinged, lit by the hum of aggressive fluorescents.
My presence almost felt phantom like. Nothing in the room reacted to me. Like a transparent apparition in a lab I didn't even recognize.
Something about the place seemed familiar, like déjà vu. If only I could fully trust my senses these days.
I looked around to see thick black cables coiled like vipers across the floor.
The console against the far wall blinked in a rhythm I didn't recognize, syncing perfectly with the raging thunderstorm echoing just outside the windows.
In the center of the chaos stood a man. Tall, graying at the temples, glasses shoves into his hair as if he'd forgotten they were there. He wore a wrinkled lab coat, and pinned to his chest was a plastic name tag.
I squinted, even though squinting shouldn't have mattered for something I wasn't actually seeing with real eyes. The letters resolved clearly.
R. REINHARD
He wasn't alone. A younger man stood across from him.
Maybe an assistant or a grad student, jacket sleeve shoved up like he'd been working for hours.
They were arguing.
I couldn't hear the words, not really, just fragments riding on a kind of static, like a radio caught between stations, thunder swallowing half of every sentence before it reached me.
"–not stable—", "the number's don't—" , "running the test now would—"
Reinhard wasn't listening.
He had that look. The one people get right before they do something they've already decided is worth the consequences.
He reached for the console.
His assistant tried stopping. Pointless endeavor. Reinhard's hand came down on the console like he was about to set off Armageddon.
Surprisingly, there was no explosion, no cinematic roar.
Just a ripple—a visible distortion in the air, moving outward like a stone dropped in a dark pond.
Outside, the thunder cracked.
A percussive blast that felt less like a storm and more like an answer to a question no one should have asked.
The younger man's mouth opened. Whatever he was shouting got swallowed whole, by the static, by the storm, by all of it.
I didn't get to see what happened next.
The lab folded away from me the same way it had appeared—no fade, no warning.
One blink and I was back at my desk, laptop unfrozen, cursor blinking patiently where I'd left it, like nothing ever happened. As far as the rest of the world is concerned at least.
I sat there with my hands flat on the desk, breathing like I'd actually run somewhere. Everything around me was completely, aggressively normal.
I wasn't.
My phone buzzed. I thought it was the group chat. I lunged at it knowing this was the lead I needed and I wasn't gonna have a moment playing doubting Thomas with myself. Mara could definitely use this.
[UNKNOWN NUMBER]
I almost didn't open it, knowing who it was already. He always texts at the worst of times.
My heart was still hammering against my ribs. But I was done being afraid of some mystery persona. I just wanted to see the truth of it.
Lot 4-B, Hemlock Creek Access Road. The abandoned laboratory.
I read it twice, waiting for it to make sense.
It didn't.
But it also didn't feel random anymore. Nothing about any of this felt random anymore. It almost felt, dare I say, destined. Well shit, No one told me I was gonna be Anakin skywalker.
I opened the group chat before any hesitation could take root.
ME: Guys… I found something. I think.
The typing bubble appeared instantly. I didn't give Mara the chance to respond.
ME: Can we meet tomorrow?