Phase Four: The First Time Travel Jump

  Experiment 4: Observing the Past

  Objective: Travel 10 minutes back in time and return without affecting anything.

  The air in the apartment was still, heavy with tension. Sebastian sat cross-legged in the center of the living room, surrounded by chalk-drawn sigils, exposed copper wires, and several humming oscilloscopes. Every window had been blacked out with thick curtains, turning the place into a bunker. The smell of ozone hung in the air from their earlier calibration runs. Alistair Finch hovered near the workstation, monitoring Sebastian’s vitals on a modified EEG scanner that pulsed with green and yellow lines.

  "You ready?" Alistair asked, his voice tight with caution.

  Sebastian didn’t open his eyes. “Ten minutes. No interaction. Just observe.”

  Alistair nodded, though Sebastian couldn’t see it. “Stick to the plan. You’re not supposed to exist back there. If you bump into yourself, if anyone sees you—”

  “I get it. Ghost mode.”

  Alistair checked the makeshift array of copper loops and quartz fragments embedded in a circular frame around Sebastian. The capacitor array buzzed softly, building toward resonance. They had tuned the system over weeks, syncing pulsed magnetic fields with Sebastian’s neural patterns. They called it the Bridge—an interface between will and probability, the arcane and the empirical.

  Sebastian drew in a breath and focused.

  The living room melted.

  Colors inverted. Time unraveled like a ribbon caught in the wind.

  Then—

  He was there.

  The apartment was brighter now. Morning sun streamed through the windows. Ten minutes earlier. He floated outside of time, watching as a previous version of Alistair scribbled the word “TEST” onto a clipboard, completely unaware of the temporal phantom observing him. The world was fluid, trembling at the edges, like oil on water. Sounds were muffled, almost underwater. Every motion left a faint echo—a ripple of reality adjusting to accommodate the observer.

  Sebastian felt disembodied, weightless, as though he were a thought rather than a man.

  His presence was nonintrusive, and the environment didn’t seem to resist—yet. A sliver of awe broke through the mental strain. It worked. They had successfully broken the wall between now and then.

  With practiced focus, Sebastian willed himself back.

  The return was effortless—an inhale.

  The reentry was a hammer.

  Sebastian collapsed, clutching his skull. Agony lanced through his brain like lightning. His temples throbbed, and he gagged from the pain.

  Alistair was by his side in an instant. “Easy. You’re here. You’re back.”

  Blood trickled from Sebastian’s left nostril. “I saw it. You wrote ‘TEST.’ I watched it happen.”

  Alistair’s eyes were wild with exhilaration. “You just became an observer of time. If you can observe, you can eventually interact. And if you can interact… You can change history.”

  Phase Five: Traveling to the Hidden Past

  Experiment 5: The Prehistory Jump

  Objective: Travel to a period before recorded history—before the Younger Dryas.

  The room was darker now. Their equipment, once jury-rigged in haste, had taken on a form of semi-organized chaos. Circuit boards were soldered into antique frames, tuning forks harmonized magnetic pulses, and a Tesla coil crowned the kitchen counter like some sacred obelisk. Their temporal experiments had advanced with cautious ambition.

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  They had taken it slow after the first success, centuries back in time, always returning before altering anything. Sebastian had stood in the shadow of the Colosseum, walked the Athenian agora, and glimpsed the ancient shrines of Yamato, Japan. But Alistair wanted more. They both did.

  “If we’re going to answer the real questions,” Alistair said, hunched over the growing mess of notebooks and sensor logs, “we need to go before history. Before Sumer. Before Egypt. Back.”

  “Pre-Younger Dryas,” Sebastian agreed, his voice thick with the weight of it. “Before the flood myths. Before the reset.”

  They mapped out a progression: 5,000 BCE. Then 10,000. Then 15,000. With each leap, Sebastian’s body paid a steeper toll, and the space they returned to felt slightly… different. Nothing overt. A mug is out of place. A chair was turned the wrong way. Small inconsistencies that could be chalked up to fatigue or subconscious interference. But they both noticed.

  When the equipment was finally calibrated for the most ambitious jump yet—20,000 BCE—they paused.

  “Just observe,” Alistair reminded him. “Stay detached. No interaction.”

  Sebastian lay back within the lattice of copper and quartz. The array pulsed in low, droning tones that resonated with the cavity of his chest.

  His breathing slowed.

  The room fractured like broken glass, and light swallowed him whole.

  The Earth Before the Younger Dryas

  He emerged into warm air—humid, rich with the scent of blooming flora. He stood at the edge of a vast plateau, staring at a world untouched by modern civilization. But this was no wild, unclaimed wilderness. This was civilization in bloom.

  Towering crystalline spires reached into a cerulean sky, refracting sunlight through panels of polished quartz. Energy pulsed visibly through the structures—veins of light traveling between buildings, roads, and skyways. Above, airships, unlike anything in modern understanding, glided silently across the firmament. They resembled manta rays of translucent steel, guided by pulses of radiant energy.

  Below, citizens in robes of woven light walked along symmetrical boulevards. The air buzzed faintly—not with electricity, but with something older. Organic. Like the world itself breathed.

  Sebastian’s breath caught.

  “Tartaria,” he whispered.

  He didn’t know how he knew. But he did. The name came unbidden, yet resolute.

  To the west, vast gates marked the entrance to a subterranean world. Spiral columns led deep underground into what could only be the Agarthan Network. Blue lights shimmered up from within, as though the very earth was alive with intelligence.

  In the distance, over an ocean that shimmered with metallic hues, great triangular ships soared toward the horizon—Lemurian vessels, sleek and biomechanical, disappearing into a sun-kissed fog.

  Sebastian’s knees nearly buckled. The implications were staggering.

  These weren’t primitive hunter-gatherers. This was a civilization. A unified planetary structure powered by forces unrecorded in modern history books. Mana? Scalar resonance? Some undiscovered physics? It didn’t matter.

  Because he saw it.

  He was watching a forgotten utopia.

  Then the sky screamed.

  A flash of light—not from above, but from the ground itself. Towers collapsed in sequence, like dominoes made of glass. Explosions of white-blue energy surged through cities, fracturing the ley lines that powered the world.

  A beam shot upward, cutting the sky.

  Then another from across the ocean.

  This wasn’t natural.

  This wasn’t an impact event.

  This was war.

  Sebastian fell to his knees, shielding his eyes as the world began to rupture.

  Entire continents convulsed. Great mountain ranges collapsed. Oceans evaporated into steam. The sky burned.

  A voice boomed—not with sound, but with presence.

  "You were not meant to see this."

  Sebastian’s heart stopped.

  A towering shadow loomed over the horizon—an entity of pure geometry. Shifting angles and rotating dimensions that defied comprehension. It's form bent space itself, like a four-dimensional being projected into three.

  It turned to him.

  Not with eyes, but with attention.

  It saw him.

  Panic exploded in Sebastian’s chest.

  He pulled.

  Pulled on every ounce of will he had.

  The array. The apartment. The now.

  He snapped back into the present.

  He woke gasping on the apartment floor. Every inch of his body throbbed. His ears rang, blood smeared beneath his nose and eyes.

  Alistair was over him, speaking—but the words didn’t register right away.

  Finally, they cut through.

  “What happened?! Where did you go?!”

  Sebastian tried to speak. Tried again. Then—

  “Tartaria… Lemuria… Agartha…”

  Alistair blinked. “Those are myths.”

  Sebastian shook his head weakly. “Not myths. Memories.”

  He stared at the ceiling, his hand trembling.

  “They were advanced. Beyond anything we’ve imagined. The Younger Dryas wasn’t a comet strike. It was a purge. A war.”

  Alistair went pale.

  Sebastian turned to him, his voice hoarse. “Something’s still out there. Something that erased them.”

  “And now it knows I saw.”

  They spent the night dismantling the array, piece by piece, with trembling hands.

  Neither of them spoke again until the morning light broke through the blackout curtains.

  They both knew the truth.

  The past was no longer passive.

  And the next jump might not let them return.