Chapter 1

Where We’re Going, We Don’t Need Roads.

Mannahatta Island (Modern Day Manhattan) — August 12, 1000 CE.

Time travel wasn’t anything like the movies. No flash of light. No swirling colors. Just the world going blurry—and then Grady was standing in a field. He looked down. His smartwatch had lost its Wi-Fi connection, which never happened in a city blanketed by signal. A quick check of his phone showed no service, no GPS. No network meant no towers. No towers meant no city.

He laughed nervously. Then he smelled the air—green, fresh, almost wild. A scent that didn’t belong in the modern world. Far off, an eagle cried. But there were no honking cars, no people shouting, no low thrum of civilization. Just grass and sky. He was standing, he realized, on the future site of his apartment building. But the building didn’t exist yet, not for over a thousand years.

The device had worked. He threw his arms in the air and danced—badly—through the field, laughing like an idiot. When he caught his breath, he looked down at the device in his hand. He'd have to name it now. First, though, he made a mental note to fix the "Engage" button. The Star Trek reference was cute, but maybe a little much for something that could break the universe.

A mosquito landed on his neck. He slapped it reflexively—then tapped the return button.

Just twenty-four hours earlier, Grady had stood over the three-inch-thick, tablet-like time travel device as it blinked back into existence from its first test run. Moments before, he had nervously placed the final piece into it and marveled at its simplicity. There wasn’t a mess of tangled wires, or a cheesy analog clock glued to the front. The display was divided into two fields: Home Time, which ticked forward in real time, and Destination—fixed and waiting. A keypad sat below, numbered like an old landline, but with two new buttons: AM/BCE and PM/CE. At the bottom, a smaller screen labeled Return remained blank. Its button was greyed out—until activated. Once a trip was made, it would auto-populate with the original departure time plus ten seconds. Grady called it a safety buffer. Quietly, he knew it was also psychological.

Time travel shouldn’t feel instant. He also added a drift feature to that return protocol. Every time a trip lasted longer than ten minutes, the return feature would start rolling forward. It kept that visible pause but also could serve as a signal for something going wrong. Still, he knew the waiting would be brutal. So, anticipating his own anxiety, Grady built in a form of reverse time dilation. The delay wouldn’t be one-to-one. Those waiting in the present would experience less time passing than the traveler would in the past. In theory, at least.

The only feature it lacked was a screen showing the last time traveled from, but Grady had never seen the need. Since he was the only one using the device, that detail felt unnecessary. He’d also never liked the idea of daisy-chain traveling; jumping from Destination A to Destination B without returning home in between. Still, he’d planned for it because the Return screen always tracked the Home Time when the device was first activated, even if he had to daisy-chain, he could always blink back home safely.

Grady had decided the first test would be somewhat of an homage to his favorite classic movie on time travel, Back to the Future, and would be to send the device on a short trip forward in time. Grady had programed it to travel only backward from the present and then forward from there to the moment after original departure. He also locked out the ability to travel to any time within 50 years of the “home” time, essentially within his parent’s lifetime. He had a fear of accidentally creating a paradox and causing time to break.

Because of the lockouts, he had to install a one-time piece of code that removed the restrictions to test the device. Once the travel was complete, the code would delete itself, reboot the device and return the travel restrictions. He had held his breath for the entire minute it took for him to catch up to the device and wait for it to reboot. Now here he was, staring at the first-time travel device outside of science fiction. Then and only then did he start breathing, before screaming at the top of his lungs with excitement.

Next up would be his first attempt at traveling. He’d decided to travel to the year 1000 CE and use the date to fill in the rest. Tomorrow he would become the first human to time travel.

Grady’s Apartment — August 26, 2055

Grady stared at himself in the full-length mirror. He looked lanky, gaunt even, after the weight he’d lost over the past two weeks. And while he appreciated being back down to 200 pounds for the first time since college, the cost had come from an unexpected failure on his part. Despite the weight loss, he still looked a little too bulky for his five-foot-six frame. At least his glasses still fit. He’d hate to have to switch to a new pair, one more thing to make him look like the world’s biggest nerd.

He hadn’t planned on getting sick. The nausea, the fever, the listless days where even brushing his teeth felt monumental, they weren’t part of the schedule. He had tried to keep a log of the symptoms and duration and visited the internet far too much to try and figure out what he had gotten and where it had come from. He was scared that it was something that he wouldn’t get better from until the fever broke and his appetite started to return.

His hair was a mess. It looked like he’d need to dye it again. He preferred the green over his natural brown. Two weeks of not having the energy to care for it left it looking like he used a powder drink mix to dye it. He could worry about that later though. The good news was he was finally feeling better. That meant he could start planning his next trip, his first real business trip. But he wouldn’t make the same mistake twice. He reminded himself that many diseases had been eradicated long before his birth in 2022. From now on, he'd need to prepare to experience them firsthand, unfiltered, unmuted, and utterly foreign to an immune system that had never met them before.

The bug he’d picked up on his first trip had been nasty. Probably mosquito-borne, judging by the welt and the fever that followed. But not lethal, thankfully. Smallpox was still the big fear. If he brought that home, it wouldn’t just be embarrassing; imagine being the unknown index case in a news cycle gone nuclear. It could be catastrophic. He wanted to observe and save history, not be a central part of it. Or its end.

There were other dangers, too, water quality, foodborne illness, fungal spores. He’d protect himself as best he could. And if that failed, he’d limit exposure. Isolation was cheaper than a funeral.

On the worktable next to the Anti-Chronometer Device, the name he’d finally settled on, sat two short plastic tubes: high-end nasal filters, forged from the best tech the late Communist Chinese government had ever produced before its collapse. He’d taken inspiration from that collapse, and from the chaotic rebirth that followed, when building the Anti-Chronometer. It struck him how well that event had been documented, down to phone calls and satellite feeds, while other moments in history were just smoke and whispers. That’s what he wanted to fix.

He picked one of the tubes up, turning it over in his hand, trying to imagine what it would feel like shoved up his nose. He wondered if the claims were true, they’ll last forever! Or if he’d need to find more. They were rare now. And expensive. With the motivation of uncovering lost history, he got to work. His plan was deceptively simple: travel back to important moments that lacked firsthand accounts and document them, quietly, carefully, using only the tools that made sense for the time. Then, he’d either bring the material back and discreetly pass it to underfunded historians, or leave it behind, hidden in places no one would think to look until just the right person stumbled across it.

He didn’t want to rewrite history. Just sharpen its focus, pulling clarity from centuries of smudged margins or missing pages. Money wasn’t his main motivation. But if he was going to devote his life to this, he’d have to eat somehow.

First, though, came the practical concerns. The past was a disease vector waiting to happen. And being the cause of a global pandemic, even a brief one, wasn’t something he wanted on his résumé. So, he made the decision. The thing he’d been putting off. He contacted the broker. Transferred the crypto. Memorized the location. He was going to get vaccinated. Needed it. But not at a clinic and not legally. He couldn’t get it officially, too many questions with not enough answers good enough. Grady wasn’t sure what scared him more: the virus, or the man who claimed to have its prevention.

The “clinic” he found himself at looked more like an abandoned quickie mart than anywhere medical services beyond getting bandages would happen. The rolldown doors were closed and covered in graffiti. The stench of old oil, garbage and piss clung to the air. The only thing that confirmed he was in the right place was found in the encrypted email: Follow the yellow arrow.

Grady scanned the graffiti again until he spotted it, tucked beneath layers of angry symbols, a crude yellow arrow pointed around the side of the building. Grady hesitated at the edge of the alley. Everything about this screamed mistake. It wasn’t just illegal. It was irreversible. Once he took the shot, he was at the mercy of this “doctor” and whatever motivated him. His legs moved, but his brain was still catching up.

He’d never done anything like this before. The crypto transfers, the burner email, every step felt like it should’ve been fiction. And now, here he was, ready to have an outlaw with a war crime history jab him with a century-old cure in the back of a dingy convenience store. It wasn’t just fear, it was disgust. With himself, a little. With how easily necessity had pushed aside morality. But if it meant protecting the future from what he might drag home, it was a line he’d have to cross.

Oleg Sidorov was waiting inside. Grady had done his homework. The name Sidorov showed up in every deep-web horror thread involving bioweapons and ghost labs. The man had been a doctor, or a monster, depending on who you asked. Maybe both. This disgraced doctor had once been a decorated researcher at the Vector Institute in Siberia. That was before he’d smuggled both virus and vaccine out of Russia in a diplomatic crate and sold them to Chechen rebels. No one could prove whether he’d pulled the trigger or just handed over the weapon. But Grady had read enough to know that either way, Oleg survived. And the Chechens did not.

Now, Oleg was a man without a country but still with access to the kind of things governments swore no longer existed. And for the right price, he was willing to share.

Grady sat in the cracked vinyl chair, still warm from the overhead fluorescents, trying not to gag at the antiseptic stench mixed with the ghost of corn syrup and stale grease. Oleg hummed softly, some Slavic lullaby warped into something that didn’t sound like comfort. The Russian leaned over a battered laptop, checked the Bitcoin wallet, and nodded without expression. “So, my young friend,” he said in crisp, unaccented English, “it appears all is in order.”

Grady gave a tight nod. His mouth was dry. His fingers tapped against his knee with just enough rhythm to betray the anxiety crawling up his spine. Oleg moved deliberately now, pulling out a sealed vial from a lunch cooler tucked behind the register counter and a syringe from a steel tray similarly pulled from behind the counter. The vial was unlabeled, just clear glass, capped with a black stopper.

“I assume you understand the nature of what you’re receiving,” Oleg said, loading the syringe. “This is not... CDC approved. But it works. It has worked for me.”

“I’m not here for reassurance,” Grady muttered trying to sound as brave as he thought a person seeking out a man like Oleg Sidorov should sound.

“Good. Because you will get none.” A brief smile tugged at Sidorov’s lips before he slipped back behind the cold, professional mask. Did he see it? That Grady didn’t belong here, not really? That no matter how calm he pretended to be, he was a tourist in a world built on illicit money and silence? He tapped the syringe twice.

Grady turned his head. The needle bit into his arm. Cold spread under his skin like a slow burn. “There,” Oleg said, stripping off the gloves. “Now you are a ghost of the future. Try not to bring back anything that howls.”

Even vaccinated, whenever possible, he would take added precautions to avoid catching antique diseases, starting with wearing the filters on every trip. He’d already paid a handsome price for the smallpox vaccine. His other immunizations were current, those, at least, had come from a legal clinic. Some periods were off-limits entirely. The era of the Black Death, for instance, there just wasn’t much you could do about fleas, and even less about bubonic plague once you had it and couldn’t explain how you had caught it.

For trips far enough back, say, to witness a teaching by Aristotle, he had another policy: if he found himself stuck in a crowd, he’d self-quarantine for up to two weeks after returning, just to monitor for symptoms. He carried purification tablets for water and stuck to a Kosher or vegetarian diet whenever possible. Not out of faith, but pragmatism. It wasn’t perfect, but there was logic in the religious food laws. Not eating pork or shellfish wasn’t just about belief, it was survival by ancient design, practical in a world before refrigeration and antibiotics.

He imagined that, after a few discoveries made with The Archivist’s—the name he made for himself—help, he could offer his services directly to museums and researchers, anonymously and online, using his personal photographs to prove what he could do. He’d considered several ways to go about it, but the fear of creating a paradox was always in the back of his mind. Especially the grandfather paradox.

The grandfather paradox was the easiest to understand, and the most important. If someone traveled back in time and accidentally killed their grandfather, they’d never be born, meaning they couldn’t have gone back in time to commit the act. Which means their grandfather lived, they were born, and... so on. A loop with no resolution.

To avoid these paradoxes, Grady created strict rules and policies that could never be broken or bent. The first: never remove a known primary source from its own time and bring it to the future. Doing so could erase the very knowledge that led to its discovery. For example, if a client requested a pristine copy of the Rosetta Stone and he removed it, that client wouldn’t know it existed and would never make the request, paradox. Never mind the ripple effect of the knowledge lost by its absence.

Instead, he would document items and deliver the documentation through time, never the item itself. He also swore never to interfere in a way that created something entirely new, like a photograph of Abraham Lincoln in the Presidential Box at Ford’s Theatre. He didn’t know what damage that might cause, but if the event had never happened before, injecting new depth into it could produce consequences that had nothing to do with paradoxes at all. He’d get that photo, sure, but it would stay in his personal collection.

Before he could offer this as a service, though, he needed proof. Real, irrefutable proof that time travel was not only possible, but that he could do it. His plan was to travel to a well-documented archaeological site and leave a mark, something placed carefully, in a spot that would remain undisturbed for centuries. He’d then return to the present, “discover” the mark, and present it to potential clients along with supporting evidence: photos, radiocarbon dating, and anything else that could help prove that the object had been there for hundreds or thousands of years. Of course, fakes were possible. But if it built trust, the delivery of real historical data would seal the deal.

He’d considered locations like Stonehenge, the Pyramids, even the Blarney Stone, but ultimately settled on the most daring option: Pompeii. He would travel to the day of the eruption, lift a cobblestone, and place his marks. He planned three things: first, he would carve his initials and the date of the jump into the underside of the stone, using a modern alphabet and date format that didn’t exist in antiquity. Second, he’d place two coins beneath it, one modern, and one ancient. The modern coin would be a clear marker that someone from the future had been there. The ancient coin, however, wouldn’t be pulled from circulation. To avoid contaminating the timeline, he’d buy a sealed, contemporary coin, one of those plastic-cased collectibles, and leave it exactly as is. The plastic would show its age and could be tested for authenticity. It was the perfect blend of old and new, impossible to fake without time travel.

Once he got the stone documented showing that the stone was undisturbed, he ducked into a nearby alley, set the date and time, activated the device, and blinked back to 79 CE, hoping he was going to arrive before the pyroclastic flow, the destructive wave of super-heated gasses, volcanic rock, and ash, hit the city, snuffing out all life including his own.

Pompeii

His plan was to travel to a well-documented archaeological site and leave a mark, something placed carefully, in a spot that would remain undisturbed for centuries. He’d then return to the present, “discover” the mark, and present it to potential clients along with supporting evidence…

Once he got the stone documented showing that the stone was undisturbed, he ducked into a nearby alley, set the date and time, activated the device, and blinked back to 79 CE, hoping he was going to arrive before the pyroclastic flow, the destructive wave of super-heated gasses, volcanic rock, and ash, hit the city, snuffing out all life including his own.