Framed In Time Part 2

Two days before the verdict, the courtroom froze.

“Project Static,” Eli Navarro said aloud, and the words seemed to fracture the air itself.

Judge Harmon, poised and no-nonsense, leaned forward on the bench. “Mr. Navarro, you’re invoking a program so classified it doesn’t officially exist. You’d better explain.”

Eli stood tall—not as a man scrambling for a defense, but as someone who had just realized the full scope of what had been done to him.

“It’s not a theory,” he said. “It’s a patch in time—meant to rewrite mistakes. I think someone used it to frame me.”

Gasps rippled across the courtroom. Even Prosecutor Chen stopped her objection mid-sentence.

Eli continued, “I’ve found corrupted case logs. Glitched memory files. Evidence that was never submitted—but still used. Someone altered the timeline, and I was the scapegoat.”

Judge Harmon narrowed her eyes. “Do you have proof?”

“No," Eli admitted, "because that's the whole point of Static. It doesn't leave trails. It cleans them.”

That was when Marcus Wren—Eli’s former supervisor, now the prosecution’s key witness—broke his silence.

“You won’t find it in the system,” Marcus said. “You’ll find it in the gaps. The people who don’t exist anymore. The events that no one remembers.”

The judge studied him. “And you’re confirming this... as what? A participant?”

Marcus nodded. “I tried to protect the program. I thought it was necessary. But now... I think it’s broken something we can’t fix.”

Later that night, Eli sat in a holding cell, staring at the reflection of himself in the one-way mirror. The fluorescent lights buzzed above him like static in his skull.

He remembered the training vids: always keep your timeline clean, avoid emotional interference, and never, ever look too closely at anomalies. But anomalies were all that remained of his life now.

A voice interrupted his thoughts. “You don’t look as tired as you should.”

It was Marcus, holding two vending-machine coffees like peace offerings.

“I’ve been sleeping in a court-issue jumpsuit for a month,” Eli said. “Don’t mistake my stillness for peace.”

Marcus handed him a cup. “You were right about Static. I didn’t want to admit it. Hell, I helped build the cover-up protocol.”

Eli blinked. “Why come clean now?”

Marcus leaned against the wall. “Because something changed. Static was only supposed to patch. Minor resets—erase a bad call, correct a near-fatal misstep. But someone’s using it to rewrite people.”

He paused. “Whole lives. Whole relationships. Gone like a corrupted file.”

Eli’s jaw tightened. “And what does that make me?”

Marcus didn’t answer.

Two days later, Judge Harmon delivered her verdict with the weight of history behind it.

“This court finds no legal grounds to continue the prosecution of Officer Elias Navarro,” she said. “All charges are dropped. Effective immediately, you are reinstated with full privileges—pending further inquiry into the circumstances surrounding this trial.”

Eli exhaled for the first time in what felt like weeks. But it wasn’t relief. Not entirely.

The courtroom didn’t celebrate. There were no cheers. Just quiet tension. Because everyone now knew: the real problem hadn’t been solved.

As the room emptied, Judge Harmon gave Eli a long look before exiting—like she knew something had just been unburied, and whatever it was had teeth.

Outside the building, Marcus approached Eli beneath the cold blue sky of 2100 Detroit. The city hummed like it always had—autonomous trams gliding along magnetic rails, screens blinking across glass towers, and yet, something felt... out of rhythm.

“I’m sorry,” Marcus said. “They had leverage. I thought I could keep you safe by playing along.”

“But then the bleed in court,” Eli muttered. “You didn’t expect that.”

“No. That wasn’t part of the design.”

Eli turned to him. “You were part of it.”

“I was,” Marcus admitted. “But I think I can help you now.”

“Why the change of heart?”

Marcus looked up toward the horizon. “Because if Static isn’t stopped, next time it won’t just rewrite a file. It’ll erase the people in it.”

A long pause passed between them.

“I’ve been keeping track of the gaps,” Marcus said. “People who shouldn’t exist. People who should. A tech named Liora showed up in the precinct logs last week, but there’s no record of her birth. No ID scan. Just... a placement.”

Eli frowned. “Planted in the system.”

“Or pulled from another timeline,” Marcus said.

Eli looked down at his hands—calloused, scarred, and still trembling slightly. “Then we start digging.”

Marcus nodded. “Not just digging. We follow the tear.”