Trapped in Time

They say time is a river, but I’ve learned the hard way that it’s more like a maze—one you can get lost in forever. My name is Elen Tavor, and I was a junior temporal engineer aboard the Aion—a vessel designed not to travel through space, but through time itself. My job was to monitor the stability of our chronometric drive, ensuring the timelines we pierced didn’t fold in on us. The mission was supposed to be a simple diagnostic hop to the year 2307, a one-week scan, and then home. But something went wrong.

It started with a flicker—just a flicker in the lights. We’d seen that before. Minor hiccups, like a brief migraine in the fabric of spacetime. But this time, it didn’t stop. The flicker became a flash, and then suddenly we weren’t in the smooth glide of chronospace anymore. We were stuck.

When the systems stabilized, the computer said we had landed in “Approximate Temporal Coordinates: Unknown.” A glitch. The chronometers spun without anchoring, and the sky through the viewport was a shade of violet I’d never seen in any recorded spectrum. We’d arrived somewhere—or somewhen—that shouldn’t exist.

That’s when the crew began disappearing.

First was Cadwell, our chief pilot. One second he was running diagnostics, and the next, only his tool belt remained. No sound. No warning. Just gone. Then Dr. Meng vanished mid-sentence during a meeting. Each loss felt like a piece of our reality unspooling. I spent hours alone in the engine room, checking the containment protocols, searching for clues. Time doesn’t like to be bent, I thought, and we had bent it into a knot.

I wasn’t just scared—I was unraveling. I began hearing things: whispers in languages I didn’t understand, the echoes of people I hadn’t met yet. I dreamed of future selves who warned me to run, of past selves who screamed at me not to come here. Was I losing my mind, or was time showing me its true form?

On the fifth day—at least, what I counted as the fifth—only I remained. I kept the journal going. Pages of time-stamped anomalies, random equations, and increasingly desperate entries. “I’m still here,” I wrote. “I am the last observer.” The phrase felt sacred. If no one observes time, does it still flow?

One night—or night-like phase, since the violet sky never dimmed—I saw movement outside. A figure, unmistakably humanoid, was walking toward the ship. I nearly broke the airlock to reach them. When I did, I froze. It was me. An older version, hair streaked with silver, face hardened by what I could only guess was decades of solitude. We stood there in silence before she whispered, “You don’t leave. Not ever.”

She faded like smoke before I could touch her.

That moment broke something inside me. I realized I hadn’t just gotten lost in time—I had become a prisoner of it. The Aion wasn’t malfunctioning; it was caught in a recursive fold, a moment endlessly collapsing and resetting, like an eternal temporal heartbeat. I hadn’t just seen future versions of myself—I had become part of the loop.

I stopped counting days. There was no point. Instead, I began studying the patterns. The whispers became clearer, the visions more focused. I discovered that time has seams—fragile places where realities brush up against each other like pages in a book. And I found one.

I built a device from salvaged parts—an improvised anchor, not to break free of time, but to send one message. A single pulse backward, encoded into the diagnostic log of the Aion’s launch. A warning: Do not initiate the 2307 jump. Temporal rift detected. Abort.

And then I waited. If the message arrived, maybe the mission would be scrubbed. Maybe I would never enter this loop. Or maybe I already had. That’s the trouble with causality: it folds over itself like origami, beautiful and infuriating.

One final log entry: “If you’re reading this, I was successful. Or I failed and this too is part of the loop. Either way, remember this: time is not your playground. It is a living, breathing thing—and it remembers who wounds it.”

I never found the end of the loop. But one day, the sky turned blue. Just for a moment. I wept.