Here, time doesn’t exist. Past, present, future—tense is meaningless. And I accept that. You measure time, parcel it out in seconds, minutes, hours. Me? I live outside of time. I sit like this for minutes, centuries, eons. Maybe the birth of universes has passed me by, but it doesn’t matter. Now is all that exists.
My breath stretches beyond moments, beyond time.
The hum from the engine room fades into the background of my consciousness. I let it drift away, unimportant. Stillness. Emptiness. Time doesn’t dictate here—at least, it didn’t. No choices, no interactions, no realities but this. But now… time is inescapable, unfolding step by step, pulling me into its relentless flow.
It begins as a faint sound—a featherlight tickle at the edge of my awareness. Strange, out of place. I try to ignore it. Like so many distractions before, I embrace it at first, roll it around in my mind, and release it, waiting for it to fade. But this one clings, refuses to dissolve. It sticks, pulsing, growing.
It intensifies, becoming rhythmic, insistent—pulling me. Not wrong, exactly—just off. Deeply, unnervingly so.
Something shifts inside, and I resist—time. It forces its way into my perception. It was once a passing cloud—now it presses, demanding my attention. Time’s echo rings in my mind, pulling me into awareness. I have eyes, and I open them. Squint through the light filling the room that is now here. Time unravels the stillness I once held, step by irreversible step.
The sound swells, growing from a single note into a cacophony of echoes. I tilt my head—or do I? This body is unfamiliar, the motion uncertain, as if it doesn’t quite belong to me yet. I listen more carefully. They’re not just sounds—they’re voices. Strange, alien voices.
I don’t know who they are. A woman’s voice, warm but fractured, carried on the air like a whisper from a place I’ve never been. Another follows—harsher, more jagged. A man, I think. The words blur together, slipping just out of reach, as though they’re speaking through layers of glass. I can’t grasp what they’re saying, only that they speak.
But they’re not here. They’re not now.
I can feel it—whatever they’re saying comes from elsewhere, from another moment. It’s all wrong. Disjointed. Time itself feels fractured, out of sync with whatever this is. Their voices slide over each other, threads from different moments, fragments of conversations colliding, echoing. They ripple through me like currents in an unfamiliar sea.
Time presses on me again. I feel it—its weight, its demands. These voices, these broken fragments of people I’ve never met, pull at me from different moments. They don’t belong together, but they overlap, entangled, as if time itself is unraveling around them.
Who are they? Why are their voices tangled in the air, reaching me before I’ve even fully existed?
I want to go back. I want to close these eyes and embrace oblivion again, but the pull of time is too strong, and the stillness slips further away with every passing moment. I know I can’t ignore it, yet fear grips me—what if these voices reveal something I’m not ready to understand?
The echoes aren’t random; they’re fractured loops, repeating, but never exactly the same. Fragments of something larger, pressing in on me, twisted by the chaos that tries to rewind what should only move forward. I can feel the weight of their irreversibility, the damage of something tampered with. A puzzle I never chose but now can’t turn away from.
I rise, the motion foreign and wrong, as if I am forcing a body into existence around me. Body, limbs, senses, ego—unfamiliar tools, responding clumsily, like pieces of a puzzle that don’t quite fit together. To stand feels wrong, like gravity itself is a new weight pressing on me. Existence is learning. Time does not relent, shoving me forward, or backward.
An engine room’s hum has now replaced stillness. The vibration presses in from all sides, swelling with the pulse of the echoes. It shakes the room—or maybe just my perception of it.
Some sounds separate from the hum. I step toward them, and they become distinct voices. But I don’t know them. They’re strangers to me. A woman. A man. Their words are garbled and distorted, like they’re being spoken from somewhere out of sync with now—disjointed, out of order. These voices—distorted, overlapping—are threads from different moments, echoes of timelines brushing against each other. They shouldn’t converge, but here they do. The realization unsettles me, as if I’m standing at the intersection of something far larger, where every possible thread of time pulls at me, demanding recognition.
I find myself standing before the control panel, though I don’t recall moving. My fingers hover over the instruments—strange, clumsy extensions of this body I’m still learning to inhabit, as though I’m moving through someone else’s skin. The hum of the room synchronizes with the rhythm of the echoes now, a steady vibration that pulses through me, pressing into my mind. The pull of time is stronger, more urgent than before, as if I am bound by something I can’t perceive. Time is no longer abstract, but a force tethered to my limits as an observer, pushing me forward even though I resist.
The echoes aren’t just sounds—they’re fragments. Fragments of something larger, something pressing in on me. A puzzle I never chose but now can’t turn away from.
And then, I hear it.
My own voice, carried through the echoes, distorted yet unmistakable.
“This moment remembers you.”
A chill races through me. That’s my voice—but I haven’t spoken those words. Not yet. How can a moment, something so fleeting, hold memory? And how could it know me? A future echo. My future, slipping back into my present, blurring the edges of time itself.
I can’t look away now. Whatever this is—whatever’s happening with time, with this ship, with these voices—it’s pulling me deeper into its web. There’s no returning to the stillness I once knew. I have to find out what these echoes are trying to tell me, why they’ve come to me.
Time surges forward, like a river I’ve been swept into. I can’t fight the current—only surrender, let it claim me, and hope the answers lie ahead.
My hands move to the dials, instinct driving me before reason catches up. I turn the controls, tuning into the echoes, feeling them sharpen, their pull undeniable. The hum of the room deepens, resonating in perfect harmony with the echoes as they swirl around me.
And as I listen, I understand. These aren’t just fragments of the past—they’re glimpses of futures waiting to unfold, threads of possibility stretching out before me. But they’re fragile, uncertain… and I know now that they can be changed.
I brace myself, unsure of what lies ahead, but certain of one thing: these futures are already pressing in on me, and I am caught in the flow of what must come next.
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