The next morning arrived with a grim sky, clouds sagging low over the city like a weight that mirrored the tension in Ethan's chest. He hadn't slept again. His eyes were bloodshot, but the adrenaline of discovery kept his mind sharp. The glow from the machine still pulsed gently in the corner, its rhythm almost...alive.
Ethan moved through his lab with the precision of a surgeon. Each tool, each console, each line of code—he knew them by heart. Still, something felt different. As he reviewed the data again, he began to question what the machine had done. Had it predicted the coordinates? Or had it accessed them from somewhere?
He typed rapidly, cross-referencing the jump coordinate—2574 BCE—with historical datasets. Nothing concrete. No exact location, no anomaly records, nothing to suggest a significant event had triggered the time lock.
"Why that year?" he muttered.
He paused to sip cold coffee, then reached for a thick leather-bound journal—the one that hadn't left his side since graduate school. Inside were scribbled theories, mathematical formulations, erratic sketches of spiral loops and branching timelines. One page, marked with a crimson ribbon, held an idea that once terrified him:
"If time has consciousness, then the machine is not a vehicle... it's a negotiator."
He closed the journal slowly.
Ethan had always believed time was more than a sequence of moments. The math hinted at something recursive, something responsive. What if the machine had not chosen 2574 BCE, but been invited to it?
The thought chilled him.
He sent an encrypted message to Lily.
"I need your eyes on something. No questions. Just math."
He didn't expect an answer quickly. Lily had moved to Prague months ago, buried in some deep academic post. But if anyone could find significance in ancient years and strange quantum echoes, it was her.
He turned back to the console. Another anomaly flickered—a barely noticeable data signature embedded in the timestamp. He widened the output window. There it was: a faint irregularity buried beneath layers of machine logic.
"Encoded data?" he whispered.
It looked like...a message. Not in words, but in pulse intervals. Ethan wrote them down and spent the next hour decoding it by hand. Binary. Converted to ASCII.
One word: "Remember."
He stared at it for a long time.
Remember what?
A knock at the door startled him. His heart jumped. No one ever came up. He rushed to the peephole and saw nothing. The hallway was empty.
But a note had been slipped under the door.
It was handwritten on yellowed parchment. The ink was dark, jagged—yet unmistakably his own handwriting.
"You're not the first you."
He dropped the note.
"No. No, no, no," he murmured.
Had he sent this? From the future? From the past?
He ran to the bookshelf, pulled down his oldest journals, and began flipping through the earliest entries. As his fingers trembled across the pages, he found it—an entry from when he was sixteen:
"Sometimes I dream of other versions of me. Older. Wiser. Scared."
The spiral in his chest turned tighter.
Ethan opened a new file and began compiling everything: the anomalies, the note, the jump coordinate, the encoded message. One by one, he layered them like sediment. Beneath the logic, beneath the numbers, something was growing.
Time wasn't broken.
It was waiting.
And it remembered him.
He leaned back in the chair, exhaled slowly, and whispered, "Phase Two begins now."