There was no beginning.
The black singularity did not receive Elena with light, or gravity, or any form of the familiar. There was no tunnel. No flash. No welcome.
There was only absence.
No weight.
No sense of movement.
No breath.
And then—awareness.
Elena became aware that she was aware.
The implant’s interface failed to display any environmental metrics. There were no coordinates to speak of. No celestial bodies. No up or down. Not even time ticks.
Only void.
But it was not empty.
Somewhere within the void, Elena existed. Her thoughts had form. Her fears had echo.
And the echo answered.
// Welcome, traveler. You are not the first. You are not the last. //
Elena tried to speak, but the words were stolen before they could surface. Her thoughts swirled in chaotic patterns, like memories caught in a storm, each fragment a piece of her past reshaped by the void.
Then, a ripple.
Not in space.
In meaning.
The void changed.
A memory rendered around her. Not her own.
She stood now in a burnt forest beneath an ashen sky. The smell of ozone and scorched earth gripped her senses. Around her: charred trees bent like mourners. Black snow fell slowly, eerily.
In the center, a man knelt before a shattered time cradle.
The man.
The same figure from her future jump. His coat—ripped and stained. Face—still indistinct, but somehow clearer. Like a resolution slowly resolving.
He looked up.
“Elena Voss,” he said. Voice clear. Human.
“You’re real.”
He smiled faintly. “Not in the way you understand. But I was.”
Elena stepped closer. The crunch beneath her feet wasn’t real, yet it responded.
“What is this place?”
“A stitch in the weave. A zero point. A scar.”
“You left the message. The signal.”
He nodded. “I needed you to find it.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Why? Who are you?”
He rose, slowly.
“I am what happens when the machine is used too many times. When observation becomes control. When cause forgets it once had an effect.”
Elena stared, unblinking. “You’re… a traveler?”
“Was. Am. Will be.”
She frowned. “That doesn’t make sense.”
He turned away. “It’s not supposed to.”
———————
The forest vanished.
Now they were in the lab.
But not hers.
The architecture was off. Older. More brutalist. Wires spilled across the floor like veins. The cradle was exposed—its core half-melted.
Elena stepped cautiously.
“Where are we?”
“The first machine,” he said. “The one that worked by mistake.”
She scanned the room. Dust hung in the air. On a far wall, old logbooks littered the shelves. She stepped forward, pulling one free.
Handwritten entries. Schematics she didn’t recognize. And then, a name at the top corner:
VOSS, M.
She froze.
“My grandfather?”
“He opened the first crack. He never told anyone.” “Your grandfather’s machine cracked time’s surface,” he said. “His notes, hidden, guided my path to warn you.”
Her heart thundered.
“You were sent here to see this,” he said. “To understand that time was tampered with long before you.”
She turned toward him. “Then why hide it? Why lure me here with riddles?”
He looked at her fully for the first time.
And now she could see his face.
And it was hers.
———————
Elena staggered backward, breath caught in her throat.
“No. That’s not possible.”
He… she… he didn’t deny it.
“The loop began with you. It ends with me.”
She shook her head. “I don’t understand.”
“That’s the point. You never did. You tried to fix the system. You thought the past could be preserved. The future, mapped. But the act of observing it reshaped it. Each jump rewrote a line. Each visit redrew the frame.”
Elena felt dizzy.
“You are the decay pattern,” she whispered.
“I am the result of it,” he corrected. “The last remnant of your original line. I have been running backward, through collapsing timelines, trying to warn you.”
He reached out.
“But now you’re here. And there is still a choice.”
———————
Suddenly, the room dissolved again.
They stood in a corridor that wasn’t made of walls, but of decisions. Each side branched infinitely: corridors of light, shadow, memory, silence. One showed Elena as a child, discovering her father’s chronograph. Another, Elena never entering the program. Another still, her dead on the first jump.
She turned in place, overwhelmed.
“What is this?”
“The stream of unchosen paths. You see, the singularity doesn’t just erase time—it reveals its scaffolding.”
“You said there was a choice.”
“Yes.”
He extended his hand. A simple gesture. But weighted with everything.
“You can return. Let time resume its fracture. Let the world spiral toward entropy. Or…”
“Or?”
“Close the loop.”
She stared at him. “I don’t know what that means.”
“Destroy the technology. Wipe the data. Let time heal the wound we opened.”
“And what happens to you?”
He smiled. “Then I vanish. As I was meant to.”
She hesitated.
“You’re me.”
“A version. The final one. The one that stayed too long, asked too much, and finally forgot why it began.”
———————
The corridor dissolved.
She was alone.
The implant flickered. The singularity groaned.
Three minutes.
The retrieval protocol was activating.
She had to decide.
Elena paused, her thoughts flickering to the lab’s lost years. Each jump was a chance to redeem her failures, to prove the cost was worth it.
Return.
Or rewire the ending.
Elena turned inward, where logic ended and conviction began.
She remembered the stillness of the past. The chaos of the future. The void of the singularity.
And the echo of a self who had been everything she might become.
She reached into the implant’s command core. Triggered the hidden failsafe Raj had buried deep under the anchor sequence.
// INITIATE FULL DATA PURGE
// ERASE ALL JUMP COORDINATES
// SELF-TERMINATE TEMPORAL INTERFACE
// CONFIRM
Her hand trembled.
YES
The singularity rippled.
———————
Back in the lab, alarms flared.
“Her signal’s gone!” Lila shouted. “She’s not returning.”
Raj stared at the cradle. Static bled from the display.
Then—silence.
The systems rebooted.
And every file related to temporal navigation was gone.
Erased.
Marcus stormed in, breath ragged. “What the hell happened?”
Raj didn’t answer.
Lila only whispered, “She closed the loop.”
———————
Somewhere outside time, a corridor blinked out of existence.
And a scar began to heal.
