The Professor's Folly
Dr. Adrian Voss adjusted his spectacles, his gaze fixed on the glowing schematics projected before him. The basement of the old university was cluttered with anachronistic artifacts—bronze gears beside microprocessors, parchments detailing steam engines next to sleek quantum computing nodes. To him, it all made sense. The only way to save the future was to arm the past.
Humanity had wasted centuries fumbling through the dark. Plagues, wars, stagnation—avoidable tragedies, if only they had the right tools. But now, he had the means to rewrite history, to seed the past with knowledge far beyond its time. The first shipment of modern metallurgy had already been placed in the 13th century. Soon, antibiotics in the 14th. A steam engine blueprint smuggled into Ancient Rome. The changes were subtle at first, but they would build, cascading into a golden age centuries ahead of schedule.
Or so he believed.
The first crack in the timeline appeared outside his own lecture hall. One moment, students bustled between classes. The next, flickering distortions rippled through the air. A man in 19th-century garb blinked in confusion, his pocket watch frozen mid-tick. In the street beyond, horse-drawn carriages phased in and out, interwoven with autonomous electric cars. The air was thick with the scent of oil and parchment, a past and future colliding.
Then they arrived.
A gust of displaced air announced them—Time Keepers. Clad in nondescript but impeccably crafted attire, they moved with the certainty of those who understood time itself. The leader, a tall woman with piercing gray eyes, stepped forward, holding a small device crackling with contained energy.
“Dr. Voss,” she said, her voice both knowing and exhausted. “You’ve gone too far.”
He straightened, defiant. “I’ve saved centuries of suffering.”
“You’ve unraveled them instead,” she countered, gesturing to the distortions around them. “Time wasn’t meant to be accelerated this way. You’ve stacked matches atop dynamite.”
Before he could respond, the air warped violently. The corridor around them blurred as history fractured further. The Roman Empire reappeared in the skyline, its towering aqueducts woven through glass skyscrapers. A medieval knight stepped through a digital turnstile, glancing around in abject horror.
Dr. Voss clenched his fists. “This is just the turbulence of change! Once things settle—”
“No,” the Time Keeper said, raising her device. “Time doesn’t settle. It corrects.”
With a sharp pulse, a wave of energy spread outward. The distortions flickered, histories rewriting themselves in an instant. The knight vanished. The aqueducts crumbled into the ether. The confused man with the pocket watch faded back to his proper century. And Adrian Voss…
He stumbled, his body flickering. The Time Keeper watched, expression unreadable.
“I was only trying to help,” he whispered, realization dawning as his existence unraveled, swept away into the currents of time.
The basement laboratory fell silent. The Time Keepers glanced at one another before vanishing into the timestream, their work done. History was whole once more, its golden ages left to bloom at their own pace.
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