Time Walker

The year was 2129, and the world had entered its “Restoration Age.” After centuries of climate crises, wars, and near collapse, humanity turned back to its roots — both figuratively and, thanks to the invention of the Aeon Lens, literally.

The Aeon Lens was a revolutionary time-observation device, allowing brief, non-intrusive physical entry into the past. No alterations. No interference. Just the chance to witness. Or so they believed.

Dr. Kiran Amani, an anthropo-technologist from Mumbai, had one obsession: the origin of fire. Not just when humans first used it, but the precise moment someone created it — that sacred instant when the impossible became real, and a spark changed everything.

It had never been found. Archaeologists had theories, scattered charred bones, blackened hearths dating back 700,000 years. But the first fire-maker? A ghost in the fossil record.

Kiran had a theory: it happened around 1.6 million years ago in the East African Rift Valley, where early Homo erectus roamed. The Aeon Lens was tuned, calibrated, and finally activated.

She emerged under a pale African sun, amid whispering grasslands and the distant calls of creatures long extinct.

Her body remained cloaked in a semi-transparent stasis field. She could move, breathe, walk — but nothing could touch her, and she could touch nothing. A ghost in time.

She wandered the region for days, scanning small nomadic groups. Mostly scavengers. Stone tools, crude shelters, but no controlled fire. Just thunder and storms.

Then, she saw him.

A young man — or rather, something between man and ape — alone. His tribe had moved on, and a storm was rolling in. He sat beneath a tree, pounding two stones together in frustration, teeth bared, eyes desperate.

He wasn’t trying to make fire. He was trying to sharpen a tool. But then — crack — the rocks met just right.

A spark leapt onto dry moss. Smoke. Kiran held her breath.

The boy paused. Watched. The wind teased the ember — it might die, might vanish.

But it didn’t.

He leaned close, fanned it gently with trembling hands. The spark grew. Flames rose. And his face — oh, his face — transformed. Not with fear, but with wonder.

Tears filled Kiran’s eyes. This was it. The first controlled flame. The threshold between prey and predator, dark and light, myth and science.

She recorded everything — body posture, wind direction, materials. The sound of the first human laugh echoing in firelight.

But something strange happened.

The Aeon Lens — meant only to observe — glitched. Her field flickered. And he saw her.

The boy blinked, tilted his head, and smiled.

He reached out — not with fear, but welcome. As if he knew her. As if something deep in his ancient brain recognized her as a story to be told around fires to come.

Their eyes met. No words. Just a spark between souls, across time.

Then the lens yanked her back.

Back in 2129, the data was hailed as the greatest scientific find in human history. Museums, documentaries, even a new calendar age began — Ignis Anno, the Year of the Flame.

But Kiran knew something they didn’t. Something she never reported.

When she returned, she found a cave painting in the Rift Valley, newly discovered. Faint, but unmistakable: a figure bathed in light, surrounded by stars, standing beside a fire — a woman with hair like flowing sparks.

Painted 1.6 million years ago.

Somehow, she had become a myth.