281 Time Travel Machine
281 Time Travel Machine
[POV: Nick]
Amelia stepped closer, watching my face. “What happened?”
I exhaled slowly, grounding myself before answering. “I have somewhere else to be. But first, I need to recover.”
That took time.
Hours, not minutes. My body was still damaged, my reserves drained to a level I hadn’t felt in years. I sat, focused, letting what little energy I had rebuild itself piece by piece. It wasn’t comfortable. It wasn’t fast.
But eventually, it was enough.
Before leaving, there was one more thing to do.
I looked at Amelia. “Stay clear of the ground.”
She didn’t question it.
Her body shifted, reforming into the massive griffin, wings spreading wide as she adjusted her stance. She lowered herself just enough for the others to climb on. Cordelia moved first, then Tony, then Abner, who barely managed to hold himself upright even with assistance.
With a powerful motion, she took to the air, clearing the battlefield entirely.
I knelt.
My palm pressed against the Martian surface, and I let my power sink downward. Intangibility spread outward in controlled waves, phasing through everything it touched. The ground, the debris, the bodies, all of it began to shift, sinking, dissolving into a space that existed just beyond perception.
It took minutes.
Longer than it should have.
The strain built quickly, draining what I had just recovered, but I pushed through it. Every piece of the battlefield was drawn in, buried, removed from the surface in a way that left nothing behind.
A grave.
When it was done, I was breathing hard, my body threatening to give out again as I remained kneeling there. I stayed like that for a while, and then I stood up.
I looked up at Amelia, still circling above. “I’ll go ahead,” I said. “I’ll pick you up, when I’m done.”
Without waiting for a response, I activated my power. Intangibility deepened, space folding around me as I locked onto the coordinates. Then I moved.
The transition was immediate.
Mars vanished, replaced by something entirely different.
I stood in the middle of an abandoned coastal town, the air thick with salt and decay. The buildings were worn, weathered by time and neglect. It wasn’t my world. I knew that instantly. The Source within me reacted, subtle but undeniable, confirming what I was already feeling.
Different world.
A voice crackled nearby.
A radio.
“—all civilians are advised to proceed to the nearest bunker immediately. This is not a drill. An unidentified meteor is projected to impact within minutes. We repeat, this is an extinction-level event. Please, remain calm and pray—”
The signal distorted and then cut.
Something moved in front of me.
A robot, crude in design, its head shaped like an inverted bucket. It didn’t speak. It simply raised an arm and pointed toward a house down the street.
I followed.
The door creaked as I pushed it open, the interior dim and silent. Blood marked the floor immediately, a trail leading deeper inside. I stepped over it, following the path until it ended at a chair, spinning slightly.
A man sat in it.
Guesswork.
A clean hole through his forehead, the gun still in his hand.
I stared at him for a moment, then at the computer in front of him as the screen flickered to life.
“Hey, Nick,” his voice came through, calm as ever. “I’m dead.”
I didn’t move.
“Now, I’m going to tell you how to beat the SRC,” he continued. “I’ll also tell you everything I learned about Dr. Time. I’m sorry we have to meet like this, but it’s the only way I could pull the rug out from under them.”
The screen shifted slightly, data scrolling behind his recorded image.
“This world will perish in the next two minutes and thirty-five seconds. An extinction event, if you would.”
I glanced toward the window instinctively, though I didn’t need to see it.
“There’s only one way you’re getting everything I know,” he said. “Do you see my body? I want you to possess it. Learn everything you can.”
A pause.
Then, softer.
“I’ll leave the rest to you, my good friend.”
The recording ended.
Silence returned.
I looked back at him, at the stillness of his body, at the finality of what he had done to make this possible.
Then I stepped forward.
My hand rested on his shoulder, the contact cold and unmoving.
“I won’t waste this,” I said quietly. “Your sacrifice won’t be forgotten.”
With a single thought, I let my power take hold.
And I entered.
…
..
.
[POV: Guesswork]
Two hours since the invasion ended, and I’m on the streets of another world.
A man shoved a suitcase into the back of a car while shouting, “We are not staying, do you hear me, we are not waiting for them to come back!”
Another voice cracked nearby as someone kicked in the glass of a store. “Just take it, take whatever you can before someone else does!”
A woman dragged a child along the sidewalk, her voice trembling. “Get in the car, right now, do not look back!”
Engines roared. Tires screamed. Somewhere deeper in the block, a group rushed out of a looted shop with armfuls of supplies, arguing over what was worth carrying and what was not. It all blurred into a single desperate rhythm.
The invasion on my homeworld had ended roughly two hours ago. Now I had less than thirty five minutes before I died, and I was standing here, far removed from anything that should have mattered to me.
Dr. Time stood beside me, perfectly at ease.
“Do you want one?” he asked.
I took the cigarette from him. He raised a hand and a small flame formed at his fingertips, steady and controlled. I leaned in and let him light it.
It was ridiculous, honestly.
He held Pyrokinesis-20 at the highest tier here, while elsewhere he wielded Cryokinesis-20 at the same level. A monopoly of power spread across worlds, layered and excessive. At his core, though, he was a Researcher at the peak of Rated-30. Someone like him having access to all of that made sense. He was a monster in ways that the Entity or Eclipse would never be able to replicate.
It still felt absurd.
I exhaled and glanced at him. “You are not going to stop me.”
“I have no use of the SRC anymore,” he said. “I already have what I wanted.”
My gaze shifted to the infant in his arms. He held the child carefully, almost delicately. Nick and Nicole’s son rested there, unaware of the scale of what surrounded him.
Dr. Time looked down at the boy with quiet satisfaction.
“With this perfect vessel in my possession, my ascent to true godhood is all but just a step away.”
I let out a slow breath. “All of this just because you are hungry for more power.”
He scoffed, the sound sharp with amusement. “Why do you think I committed the first sin? Humanitarian reason?”
His eyes turned to me, measured and cutting.
“You are no different. Your choices were just as selfish.” A low laugh followed. “You systematically eliminated every intangibility class cape on your world so that Eclipse would awaken at the highest threshold. Do not pretend you stand apart from me.”
The accusation settled without resistance.
…
..
.
[POV: Nick]
I was not standing anymore.
I was watching.
No, I was inside it.
Guesswork stood across from Two D, calm in a way that made everything worse. The air around them felt thin, stretched by tension that had already reached its breaking point.
Two D raised her hands, her form flickering at the edges. “You do not have to do this, we can still fix this!”
Guesswork did not respond. He raised the null ray gun and fired.
There was no spectacle. No drawn out collapse. Two D simply vanished, erased so completely that even the space she occupied felt wrong afterward.
I tried to move. I could not.
Dr. Time stepped past the aftermath, holding Ron. My son. Small. Alive. Unaware.
“Come along,” he murmured, almost gently.
I reached for him. My body did nothing.
The scene shifted again without warning.
Phasecrash this time, caught mid movement, slipping in and out of alignment with reality. Patchwork stood to one side, his presence distorting everything it touched. Gloryhole remained still, watching, ensuring there was no escape.
Phasecrash shouted, her voice breaking as she tried to phase away. It did not matter.
Guesswork fired.
The null ray consumed her just the same.
I felt every moment of it, forced to relive the path that led here, every calculated removal, every necessary step that had been taken in my name.
No wonder a lot of intangibility-class around the world was suddenly missing.
…
..
.
[POV: Guesswork]
“It was selfish,” I said, my voice steady. “But at least the people I cherished would not die for it.”
The baby began to cry then, sharp and insistent.
Dr. Time adjusted his hold immediately, producing a bottle with practiced ease. He began feeding the child, his tone soft, almost indulgent.
“There now, do not cry.”
The image was almost convincing. He looked like a grandfather tending to his grandson, patient and attentive. The illusion would have held if not for everything I knew.
My power stirred.
Something was wrong.
I focused on the child again, letting the information settle into place. The body was Ron. That much remained true.
But something deeper had been altered.
It was not exactly Ron.
“Is there a problem?” Dr. Time asked.
“None,” I said.
The answer came easily, even as my thoughts fractured around what I was seeing. My power traced the interference and pointed toward a source that should not have been involved. George. How that had happened did not line up. I had no memory of setting anything like that in motion. No instruction, no conversation, nothing that justified the result in front of me.
It did not make sense.
I stepped forward, my patience thinning. “Give me what I want. I have played along with you long enough.”
“Be patient,” he replied.
He reached into his coat and produced a small blue pill, holding it out to me.
I took it, turning it slightly between my fingers. “What is this.”
My power answered immediately.
Time travel.
Real.
Not an imitation, not a divergence.
Dr. Time sighed, almost disappointed.
“What people in my generation called the first sin was nothing more than an exaggeration. Their imagination was rather lacking.” He gestured lightly toward the pill. “This is your‘time travelling machine’ as far as you could throw it. Do you know how to use it?”
The world around me began to settle into clarity.
The warnings. The fractures. The quiet certainty that everything had been leading here. Cutting ties with Nick had not been a choice made in isolation. It had been guided, shaped, inevitable.
I had always been heading toward this.
Today was the day I was going to die.
The realization came without fear.
Dr. Time continued, his tone returning to that of a lecturer explaining something fundamental.
“After you consume it, your soul, or information if you prefer, will be transferred into a distant past. Something akin to time travel, though far more precise.” His gaze fixed on me. “This is not the crude approach other civilizations rely on, the kind that creates parallel worlds or fragmented realities.”
He allowed a brief pause.
“This is the real deal.”
There had always been a reason time travel stood above parallel world transfer in difficulty. Moving sideways into another branch only required energy and access. Moving backward demanded something far more exacting, something that resisted intrusion at every level. It was not just about reaching the past. It was about surviving the correction that followed.
I turned the pill over between my fingers and looked at Dr. Time. The chaos outside had dulled into a distant hum, like the world had accepted its own collapse.
“Do you really want to do this?” I asked. “What if I sabotaged you?”
He regarded me with mild amusement, as if I had asked something already answered long ago.
“I have seen this play out many times,” he said. “You will try. You will believe you have found a way. In the end, everything will come cascading down into your failure. It always does.”
I let out a quiet breath and nodded once. “Thanks for the tip.”
He almost smiled at that, though it carried no warmth.
“It would be such a waste to lose a unique Precog at your level,” he said. “Farewell.”
Then he was gone, taking the child with him as easily as one might step out of a room.
The silence he left behind felt heavier than the invasion.
I turned back toward the house and walked inside. The familiar walls felt distant, like I was already removed from them. I sat down, set up the recording, and spoke my piece for Nick. Each word placed carefully, timed precisely so it would reach him at the exact moment it needed to.
When it was done, I set the device aside and looked at the pill again.
The implication settled in fully now. Time travel was not a journey one survived in the conventional sense. The body did not go. The self did not persist in any continuous way. To move backward, I had to end here.
Death was the mechanism.
I could still feel him watching me. Even without turning, I could guess the exact angle, the distance, the quiet certainty in his gaze. He wanted to see this part through.
Everything aligned at last.
A memory surfaced, distant and almost unreal now. A time traveler speaking to me, laying out something vast and inevitable, calling it destiny. I had followed that thread without fully understanding it.
Now I did.
I placed the pill in my mouth.
For a brief second, I hesitated, not out of fear but out of recognition that there would be no correction after this point. No adjustment. No second attempt.
Then I raised the gun and pulled the trigger of the gun aimed at my head.
…
..
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[POV: Nick]
I woke with a sharp intake of breath that was not entirely my own.
Guesswork’s body responded before I fully settled into it. My hand moved to my mouth on instinct, and I spat the pill out into my palm. It landed there, whole, real, and untouched.
A rough laugh escaped me.
“Guesswork, you son of a bitch,” I muttered.
He had done it.
I could feel his power still active, still functioning, woven into my perception like an extra sense that refused to turn off. I focused on the pill and let Guesswork’s power run its course. Possibilities unfolded, branching and collapsing until a clear outcome formed.
If I took it in this state, I would travel through time with little consequence.
And with the Source anchored within me, I would not drift so easily. I would not fragment. I would remain tied to my origin, no matter how far I moved.
Reckless did not begin to cover what that allowed.