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He couldn't believe it. From the readings on his holoscreen, Trevor Fultz was watching the impossible happen in the particle chamber. Could there really be no instrument error? He spent a few hours writing up analysis algorithms to process the exobytes he was receiving from the machine, cross-referencing results with past runs with similar parameters to reduce background noise. Yes, the particles were disappearing, without a shadow of a doubt. This was just as concerning as the particles appearing out of nowhere. Matter couldn't be created or destroyed, everyone knew that. So,what was happening to the particles in the streams? It was chaos in there. He rubbed the base of his neck, avoiding his neural socket implant, currently unused while he worked his job in real life. He would have to study this more. Weeks passed for Trevor with this new steadily growing obsession. This phenomenon, going unreported to his superiors, started impacting his social life as he studied it in secret.

He stopped investing in his online appearance, letting his profiles slip out of fashion. He ghosted his date to the eSports tournament, and he couldn't concentrate on his stream of AI generated neo-jazz. All of the tests he was performing on the side while he worked days at the particle lab were telling him the same thing: time travel is real and was happening in front of him. Something, some anomaly in the cabinet, was generating a field, he theorized, and with the help of his virtual agents and custom scripts, it was looking more and more like it could be manipulated, maybe even to send a complex structure through time. The day came at last. He gave the directions to his artificial assistants and coded the destination date on the holoscreen interface. Exploiting a hole in the physical security, his approach went undetected. As he pulled open the metal cabinet door to step into the streams, he thought that now he’d be the only one to know for sure what dinosaurs looked like.

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“Operating the way it is currently, it's a closed loop. A self-keeping secret.” The host of the network feigned what appeared to be, for all the world, actual interest in Henry's babble. The host was fueled in part by the knowledge that his tinfoil hat wearing audience would eat this whole thing up. “I'll give an example,” Henry said, “but bear in mind that this is only a metaphor for a best guess.” The host took his cue, saying to his stage crew, “Put it up on screen for the people at home, Charlie.” The display on the screen between them changed from the logo of the program to a green and toothy hydra and Henry gestured to it, saying, “Venus fly traps emit a pheromone that's attractive to insects. The insect, this unfortunate fly here, has adapted to respond to specific signals, which normally result in the fly having a healthy attraction to what is emitting them, like food, or other flies.”

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

He adjusted in his chair, which was attractive on television but highly impractical for any actual sitting, and his host took the pause to inject a comment. “But these aren't plants, going back the topic of your research. These are, according to current knowledge, massive reptiles which died out years ago. And you’re saying they're emitting a pheromone people are picking up in the future?” Henry stifled a cringe at the technical inaccuracies and gross understatement. The host added no sarcasm but gave a look to the camera for his audience to read into. Henry knew the man was purposefully misrepresenting his message, but conspiracy theory peddling whackjobs like this host were the only people with a platform who would listen to him.

Henry spent a lot of time thoroughly questioning his own claims, but the random artifacts were as resilient to analysis as they were to the march of time and the pressures of geography. Previously researched sites were starting to find man-made materials they hadn't noticed before. A bit of a frame of glasses, what looked like a 6.35 mm audio jack port, and a scrap of what looked textile but was actually something like woven electrical wire. None of it biological, and never anything big or operational, but all of it mysterious. The way they kept being found, even among long researched bones, reminded him of the mandala effect. People used to misremember company designs and say it was proof that timelines were merging. He wondered how many times his own timeline had been written over in the last few minutes. He shifted again in the uncomfortable chair while the host verbally danced off Henry's topic and into an announcement from his sponsors.