The Parallel Mistake

It was a dark and stormy night when Edward decided to test his latest invention: a time machine. He had spent years perfecting it, and now he was finally ready to travel back in time to correct his old mistakes.

Edward had always been haunted by the memory of his wife, who had died years ago. He had always felt responsible for her death and had been consumed by guilt ever since. But with the time machine, he believed he could go back and change the course of history.

As he stepped into the time machine, Edward felt a rush of excitement and fear. He set the dials to the year 1995, the year his wife had died, and pressed the button. The machine hummed to life, and Edward felt himself being pulled back through time.

When he emerged from the time machine, he found himself in a familiar place: his old house. It was just as he remembered it, down to the last detail. But as he looked around, he noticed that something was different.

There were pictures on the walls that he didn't recognize, and furniture that he had never seen before. He walked around the house, trying to make sense of what was happening. He found his old diary, and flipped through the pages, searching for clues.

And then he saw it: a page that he had never written. It was filled with strange symbols and phrases that he didn't understand. He tried to read it, but his eyes began to blur, and the words seemed to shift and change before his very eyes.

Edward began to feel a growing sense of dread. He had thought that he could go back and change the past, but now he realized that the past had already been changed. He had altered the course of history, and now he was trapped in a world that was completely different from the one he had known.

He wandered the streets, trying to find someone who could explain what had happened. But everyone he met was a stranger, and no one knew who he was. He went to his old workplace, but the building was gone, replaced by a sleek new office tower.

As he walked, he began to notice other strange things: the sky was a different colour, the air smelled different, and the people spoke in a strange dialect that he couldn't understand. He had travelled back in time, but he had gone too far. He was no longer in his own world, but in a parallel universe.

Days turned into weeks, and Edward was unable to find a way back to his own world. He had made a terrible mistake, and now he was paying the price. He was trapped in a world that was not his own, haunted by the memory of a life that he could never have.

Eventually, Edward gave up. He realized that he would never be able to go back to his own world, and he resigned himself to his fate. He spent the rest of his days wandering the streets of the parallel universe, a ghost in a world that was not his own.

And so it was that Edward, the man who had wanted so badly to change the past, ended up changing the future instead. He had set in motion a chain of events that had led to his own downfall, and now he was paying the price for his folly.

As for the time machine, it remained in the basement of the old house, a silent witness to the tragedy that had unfolded. And no one knew how to use it, or what it was for, or why it had been built in the first place. It was just a relic of a past that no one could remember, in a world that had been forever changed.