The Chronophage Cache

Prologue: The Whisper in the Permafrost

In 1972, Soviet drillers in Siberia fled their rig after pulling up a core sample that screamed. In 2007, Canadian miners discovered a 400-million-year-old hammer made of alloy no modern lab could replicate. But the true Pandora’s box opened in 2023, when the Kola-13 superdeep borehole struck the Door.

Chapter 1: The Bone Clock

Dr. Elara Voss’s mother vanished in 1994 on the Kola Peninsula, a geologist hunting whispers of“the Door. Now Elara stood in the same hellscape, staring at the obsidian slab her team had just exposed. It wasn’t natural. The surface shifted when touched, fractals rearranging into Rorschach blots of screaming faces and collapsing stars.

Radiation’s clean, said Jax, her tech, lowering his Geiger counter. “But the thermal cam’s fried. That thing’s reading minus 300°C.

Impossible. Absolute zero is -273.15°C.

The lock—a heart-shaped indentation—throbbed. Elara’s own chest ached in sync. She unclasped her necklace, a locket holding her mother’s photo, and pressed it into the slot.

The Door dissolved.

Cold, unlike anything known to physics, poured out. So did the smell of lavender and burnt hair.

Chapter 2: The Non-Euclidean Nursery

The chamber defied logic. Stalactites grew sideways. A stream of liquid mercury flowed uphill into a hole in the ceiling. And the bones—human, but *assembled* wrong. Skulls with triple jawbones. Spines fused into Mobius strips.

Grave-robbing Picasso’s nightmares, Jax muttered.

Elara focused on the stone table. The jars’ contents floated in mercury: a child’s lungs (dated 12,000 BCE), a Neolithic liver, a brain labelled Property of Tesla, 1896. The largest jar held a heart, its valves moving sluggishly. The tag read: H. sapiens successors - 2157 AD.

A sound like grinding teeth echoed. The shadow of a man in a bowler hat appeared on the wall, holding a pickaxe.

Mama? Whispered a voice. A child’s skeleton crawled from a crevice, its ribs woven into a birdcage holding a live sparrow.

Jax vomited. Elara’s locket grew hot.

Chapter 3: The Tesla Transcripts

They fled, sealing the Door. That night, Elara dreamt of her mother standing in the chamber, writing in a journal that bled ink.

The Cache isn’t a tomb. It’s a suture —sewing time’s wounds shut. Break it, and the threads unravel.

Elara awoke to find her arms covered in equations she’d never learned. Jax called, panicked: The child’s skeleton had followed them. It now sat in the lab, reconstructing itself with scrap metal and a dead geologist’s femur.

Worse: The Door had reappeared 300 miles west, embedded in a Walmart parking lot. A viral video showed a teenager licking it. His tongue crystallized.

The Pentagon took over. Elara, deemed “compromised,” was detained.

Chapter 4: The Quantum Quarry

They interrogated her in a bunker lined with lead. General Rhodes slid photos across the table:

- A Viking ship buried under Miami skyscraper pilings, its hull made of a metal that repelled water.

- A diamond coffin in the Congo, its occupant a 7-foot hominin with quartz teeth, clutching an iPhone 27 prototype.

- Her mother, frozen in ice nearby the Door, perfectly preserved.

She’s alive, Rhodes said. We thawed her. She asked for you.

Elara’s heart flatlined. They’d found her mother’s body in ‘94.

The skeleton child tapped on the two-way mirror, now wearing a hazmat suit and Jax’s face as a mask.

Chapter 5: The Living Leverage

Petra Voss looked like a memory forced into flesh. Her skin glowed with the waxy sheen of a candlelit corpse, and her irises flickered like faulty holograms—one moment hazel, the next black voids stippled with stars. When she hugged Elara, her embrace crackled with static, and her breath smelled of burnt circuit boards and wet limestone.

You’ve torn the suture, Petra said, gesturing to the bunker’s shuddering walls. The concrete bled a translucent ooze that pooled into tiny, self-erasing rivers. The Cache isn’t buried. It’s the scab over reality’s wound. And you’ve picked it.

Elara recoiled. On the floor, the choanocyte—no longer a skeleton but a shifting mass of mercury and bone splinters—had commandeered a Marine’s rifle. It reassembled the weapon into a grotesque marionette, using nerve tissue stripped from Jax’s twitching body as puppet strings.

That’s not a white blood cell, Elara snapped. It’s a butcher.

Petra’s laugh buzzed like a dying radio. It’s cleaning the infection. We’re the infection. She peeled back her sleeve, revealing skin that pulsed with bioluminescent veins. They built the Cache to warn us. Every ‘discovery’—Viking ships in Miami, Neanderthals with iPhones—it’s a scream trapped in a bottle. But we’re too primitive to hear it.

The bunker lights dimmed. Shadows pooled into a shape on the floor—a door, its edges fraying like burned film.

Post-humans? Elara muttered. You mean… aliens?

Aliens are for people who think the universe is kind. Petra pressed a hand to the wall; the concrete rippled like water. The Cache’s architects are us. The version that survives the extinction we’re too arrogant to avoid. They’re screaming back through time, but we keep mistaking their warnings for treasure.

The choanocyte lurched toward them, its puppet now a perfect replica of Elara’s mother—circa 1994, down to the frayed Journey band tee. It spoke in Petra’s voice, but warped, as if played through a corrupted speaker: “Elara, don’t trust—

Petra smashed it with a fire extinguisher. The choanocyte shattered, then reassembled into a swarm of clockwork scarabs.

They’re learning, Petra hissed. Soon, they’ll stop cleaning and start sterilizing.

The shadow door solidified. Its surface wasn’t obsidian any more—it was a mosaic of frozen screams, faces Elara recognized: Jax, the Walmart teen, her mother’s ice-preserved corpse.

Why does it look like that? Elara whispered.

Petra’s pupils dilated into black suns. Because the Door’s not a thing. It’s a noun. And we’re the verb.

The scarabs surged. The Door opened.

Inside wasn’t darkness, but a kaleidoscope of elsewheres: A dinosaur grazing under neon skies. A Silicon Valley server farm overgrown with coral. Elara’s own face, aged 90, mouthing Don’t—

Then the heart jar shattered.

Not from impact.

From inside.

Chapter 6: The Fractal Fracture

The chronocyte screeched as mercury-filled jars phased through the walls. The heart jar cracked.

It’s re-suturing! Petra yelled. The heart’s a keystone!

Elara grabbed the jar. The heart pulsed, matching her arrhythmia. The Door’s fractals swirled into a vortex.

Throw it in!” Petra begged. Reset the timeline!

But Elara hesitated. The heart wasn’t post-human.

It was hers.

The choanocyte lunged. Jax took the hit, his body unravelling into yarn-like tendons. Elara smashed the jar.

Epilogue: The Undug

You won’t find Kola-13 on maps now. Or Miami. Or Petra Voss.

Elara wanders the tundra, her chest hollow. The choanocyte follows, feeding her berries that taste of forgotten birthdays. Sometimes, she digs. The Cache is always deeper.

Last week, she found a vinyl record labelled Final Broadcast - 2157 AD. The B-side plays her mother’s voice:

Elara, if you’re hearing this, you succeeded. The timeline’s stable. But stability requires… pruning. I’m sorry. The choanocyte isn’t a monster. It’s your daughter.

The child's skeleton taps its chest, where a heart-shaped lock glows.

Elara digs faster.