The Paradox Protocol

They told Dr. Elara Voss the project was canceled.

They said the ChronoCore was too unstable, that time manipulation was ethically and scientifically impossible. The lab was shut down, her team scattered, and her clearance revoked.

But they never really shut it down. Not all of it.

Elara knew because she had shut it down herself—ten years in the future.

Now, standing in the hollow shell of Lab 7B beneath Geneva’s surface, the hum of energy that shouldn’t exist anymore vibrated through the floor. Her boots crunched glass shards from broken monitors that still sparked blue. Dust floated in the low light, swirling in unnatural patterns, as though disturbed by more than her presence.

The ChronoCore was still running.

And someone had turned it on three hours ago.

The same moment the anomaly reports started: collapsed timelines, looping days in Prague, entire hours missing from city-wide surveillance systems. Like the fabric of causality had been torn.

She stepped closer to the control terminal, heart pounding. The main console was unlocked—an amateur mistake. She pulled up the command logs.

INITIATE PROTOCOL: PARADOX

User: Dr. E. Voss

Timestamp: July 18, 2035, 02:44 UTC

Elara froze.

She hadn’t been in Geneva at 02:44 UTC. She had been asleep in her apartment in Tokyo, dreaming of forests that never existed.

But the logs didn’t lie.

Someone—some version of her—had activated the Paradox Protocol.

The Paradox Protocol was never meant to be executed. It was a failsafe, a theoretical escape hatch embedded deep within the ChronoCore’s code. It allowed a one-time traversal into any point in the past or future—but it came at a cost. The traveler’s timeline would overwrite the original. Only one would survive.

A time duel. A war between versions of yourself.

Elara gritted her teeth. If someone was using it… it meant she was already at war, and losing.

She turned to leave the lab—and stopped cold.

A figure stood at the end of the corridor. Backlit. Motionless.

"You're earlier than I expected," the woman said. Same voice. Same tone. But there was something colder, more precise, like the years had stripped away the warmth Elara still carried.

The woman stepped forward into the light.

She wore Elara’s face.

Older. Scarred. A thin metallic implant ran from her temple to jaw. Her eyes glowed faintly blue.

"You activated the Protocol," Elara said. “Why?”

The older version gave a half-smile. “Because I’ve seen what happens if we don’t.”

They moved to the glass table in the observation room.

Between them, a 3D hologram spun: fragments of timelines—splintered, frayed, knotted. Some ended abruptly. Some twisted into themselves.

“In 2043,” the older Elara began, “the ChronoCore destabilized. A recursive loop collapsed the Geneva Arc. Millions died in seconds. The world governments retaliated against each other—thinking it was sabotage. A war of timelines began.”

She tapped the hologram.

Images formed: a Tokyo crater. London buried in ice. Cities with duplicate versions of themselves flickering in and out of time.

“I came back to erase it. To change everything.”

“You’re creating a paradox,” Elara whispered. “That’s exactly what we designed it to prevent. You’re playing god.”

“No,” her older self said. “I’m playing surgeon.”

Suddenly, sirens wailed. Red lights pulsed overhead.

The younger Elara leapt up. “What did you do?”

“I brought something back with me,” the older one said softly. “A temporal fragment. It’s unstable. It’s leaking into this timeline.”

The walls began to shimmer. The lab flickered, showing different versions of itself—intact, burning, flooded.

Reality was tearing.

“You wanted to fix things by erasing me?” Elara shouted. “That’s not saving the world. That’s rewriting it!”

Her older self didn’t flinch. “One of us has to survive. The one who remembers the war.”

“No,” Elara said. “The one who remembers how to stop it.”

She lunged for the console, hands flying across controls. The core began to power down.

Her older self drew a small device from her coat. A pulse grenade—set to erase local spacetime. It would destroy them both.

“Don’t!” Elara yelled.

They locked eyes. Two versions of one soul. Two beliefs. Two futures.

The older Elara hesitated.

Then—

A flash.

Elara awoke on the floor.

Smoke. Sparks. A ringing in her ears.

The ChronoCore was dark. Silent. Broken.

She looked around.

Only one body lay near the console.

Hers.

The other version.

Dead.

She didn’t remember who threw the grenade. Or which version she was now. Past or future. Right or wrong.

She staggered out of the lab, past cracked screens and broken time.

Somewhere in the sky above, the timelines began to mend.

But she couldn't shake one thought:

What if she was the wrong Elara?