From the Ashes of Tomorrow
Logline: A brilliant but obsessive mechatronics student accidentally hurls himself 90 years into the past. Forced to rebuild his life in the pre-WWII era, he must use his futuristic knowledge to survive, only to find his greatest challenge is not winning the war, but living with the consequences of altering its timeline.
Premise:
Robert Cornelius Vale, a mechatronics master student addicted to warplane games, takes a foolish bet to build an "impossible" time machine. Pushed to the brink of exhaustion, a critical error in his calculations leads to a catastrophic success. Instead of a small spatial shift, he is thrown back to 1935, stranded nearly a century from his own time with nothing but the clothes on his back and the vast, dangerous knowledge in his head.
Awakening in a world of coal smoke and rising political tension, Robert is a ghost from the future. His first challenge is sheer survival: forging a new identity, finding work, and blending into a society on the brink of collapse. He uses slivers of his advanced knowledge—a deeper understanding of physics, materials science, and engineering principles—to make a name for himself as a brilliant but eccentric "fixer."
As the clouds of World War II gather, Robert is faced with an unbearable moral dilemma. He knows the horrific cost of the coming war down to the day. He holds in his mind the blueprints for technologies that could end the conflict years earlier and save millions: jet engines, advanced radar, and computing. But every innovation he introduces is a gamble with the timeline. Will he save the world, or unravel the very future he came from?
Drafted into the army, his genius quickly redirects him from the front lines to the heart of the Allied war machine. From improving tank armor to guiding the birth of the jet age, Robert becomes the secret weapon the Allies never knew they had. His journey is a relentless climb from a desperate survivor to the leader of Research & Development, shaping the very arc of the war.
But his past is not done with him. Haunted by memories of a future that may be fading away, and tormented by the ethical weight of every decision, Robert must navigate a world of military secrecy, political intrigue, and his own rising fame. He walked into the past as a student, but he will have to become a master—of war, of time, and of his own conscience—to navigate the century he was never meant to live in.
