Shadows in the Forum

The time pod hummed with low, steady energy as Dr. Marcus Ellison adjusted the calibration dials. The mission was precise: one week in ancient Rome, 54 A.D., just months before the suspicious death of Emperor Claudius. Marcus was a classicist turned temporal anthropologist, and this was his first sanctioned jump. The objective: observe Roman politics at their boiling point, nothing more.

With a flick of a switch and a white flash, he was gone.

He emerged in the shadow of the Capitoline Hill, the heart of imperial Rome. The air was thick with incense and livestock, with shouted Latin and the scrape of sandals on stone. Sunlight bounced off marble statues and columns, washing the Forum in gold. Marcus wore a replica toga made of carbon fiber cloth, threaded to look and feel authentic while providing temperature regulation and light protection.

His translator implant buzzed lightly in his ear, converting the street Latin around him.

He kept to the margins, watching senators stride through the Forum, observing plebeians selling figs and falafel-like snacks, listening to whispers about Agrippina, Claudius’s wife, and the boy Nero, already gathering supporters in his mother's shadow.

But what caught Marcus’s attention most wasn't a senator or soldier. It was a woman.

She stood at the edge of the Forum, barefoot, dressed in simple white linen, watching the crowd with the same analytical eyes Marcus thought only he possessed. She noticed him staring. Instead of turning away, she walked toward him.

"You don’t belong," she said plainly, in unaccented Latin. "Not in this time."

Marcus stiffened. “I could say the same.”

Her eyes flicked down to his chronopad, barely concealed beneath the folds of his toga. She gave a slight, knowing smile. “You’re from the future. I’m from the past... and a little bit of somewhere else.”

She introduced herself as Tullia, an oracle by trade, but something more in practice. Marcus quickly realized she wasn't just a seer; she was a temporal anomaly. A traveler of sorts — though her method was less mechanical than his. She spoke of time as if it bent to thought, not machines.

Tullia led him through winding alleys off the main thoroughfare, where Rome pulsed with life unseen by marble-clad senators — potters, teachers, widows, and thieves. She showed him graffiti scrawled behind temples warning of poisoned emperors, whispered names he knew from history books: Locusta, the famed poisoner, and Burrus, Nero’s future Praetorian Prefect.

“You’re here to observe. But tell me this,” Tullia asked, “What will you do when you see something wrong?”

Marcus hesitated. “Intervention fractures timelines. I’m not allowed.”

“But you’re human. If you saw Claudius drink death from his own cup, would you just record it?”

He wanted to say yes. He needed to say yes. But something inside shifted.

That night, Tullia brought him to the Palatine Hill. They watched from the shadows as a figure crept into the imperial kitchens. Marcus recognized the woman: Locusta, the infamous poisoner.

She poured a vial into a bowl of mushrooms — Claudius’s favorite dish.

Marcus’s hand clenched around a rock. He could stop her. He could change everything. But then, would Nero never rise? Would the Great Fire never burn? Would centuries of history he knew so intimately collapse like a forgotten dream?

“I can’t,” he whispered.

Tullia nodded. “That’s the burden of knowing.”

When Marcus returned to the time pod, the air in Rome felt heavier. He had not changed the past — but he had changed.

Back in his sterile lab, surrounded by glowing data walls and carbon-chilled floors, Marcus submitted his report.

Mission complete. Timeline preserved. No interference.

He paused, then added one final note:

"There is more than one kind of traveler in time. Not all need machines. Some walk its streets as ghosts, or oracles. Some change history not with action, but with memory."

Then he closed the file and looked out at the skyline of Neo-Rome, wondering if, in some alley of the past, Tullia still wandered — watching, waiting.