The Endless Time

Story is an incoherent piece of text by By Mark Belovan.

It was 2086. The world had long since moved beyond the basic questions of time travel—whether it was possible, whether paradoxes could be avoided, whether reality itself would collapse under the weight of such manipulation. I was part of the Institute for Temporal Studies, and I was the first human to travel through time and return. Or, at least, I thought I had returned.

The machine hummed quietly as I sat in its padded seat, fingers tracing the control panel. Everything was ready. The equations checked out. Time, as we understood it, was linear, but there were certain points—"nodes," we called them—where multiple possibilities overlapped. These nodes existed outside of the regular flow of time, like threads weaving in and out of a cloth. And those nodes were where things got dangerous.

My mission was simple: travel back to 2076 to witness the signing of the Global Peace Accords. A historical moment, nothing more. Just an observer. A clean jump. I wasn't supposed to touch anything, interact with anyone. Easy, right?

But time doesn't care about your plans.

I felt the familiar lurch in my gut as the machine activated. For a moment, I was nowhere. The sensation of falling without gravity, of floating through a black void, was always unnerving. Then, with a sharp jolt, I found myself standing in the conference hall of the United Nations, just as I'd planned.

Everything was perfect. The sunlight filtered through the windows, casting long shadows across the room. I watched the leaders, their faces tense but hopeful. The world was about to change forever.

But then I noticed something wrong. My watch—a crucial piece of equipment that synced with the time machine—flickered. It showed the date: July 14th, 2076. But the seconds weren't advancing. They were stuck, blinking. I tapped the watch nervously, trying to reset it.

And that's when I saw him.

Me.

Standing at the far end of the room, blending into the crowd, there was another Mark Belovan. My heart stopped. How was this possible? I hadn't broken any of the cardinal rules of time travel. I hadn't touched anything. And yet, there I was—watching the same moment unfold, just like me.

The machine. Something must have gone wrong with the machine.

I panicked. The room spun as reality seemed to shift around me. The other me didn't notice me, or at least he pretended not to. I quickly activated the emergency return sequence on my watch, praying the machine would pull me back to 2086.

But instead of snapping back to my present, I found myself... somewhere else.

The room was the same. The leaders were still there. The sun still filtered through the same windows. But something was off. The colors felt wrong, slightly muted, like looking through a tinted glass. I checked my watch—it was working now, but the date was... different. August 14th, 2076.

Somehow, I had jumped forward, but not to my timeline. I was in an alternate version of 2076. And I wasn't alone.

Another version of me stood by the window. He turned slowly, meeting my gaze, his eyes wide with the same shock and horror I felt. Time wasn't just unraveling. It was splintering.

I quickly realized the problem. The linear paradox. By creating alternate timelines while still anchored to the original, I had become the variable that disrupted the flow. The more I tried to fix it, the more realities I spawned. Each version of me was reacting, making its own choices, and with every decision, another timeline fractured off from the original.

I couldn't control it.

I attempted to return to 2086, but each time I activated the machine, I only created another timeline. In some, I arrived seconds too early, others, years too late. Each jump brought me face to face with more versions of myself—some younger, some older, all trapped like me. The theory of a linear paradox had been debated for years, but no one expected this. Time wasn't looping. It wasn't resetting. It was expanding, creating an infinite number of alternate realities, and I was at the center of it all.

In each reality, the world was slightly different. Some were dystopian, ravaged by war. Others seemed eerily perfect, almost too peaceful. The differences were subtle at first—an extra tree here, a different shade of sky there—but the more I jumped, the more drastic the changes became. In one timeline, the Global Peace Accords never happened. In another, the world had never known conflict. And through it all, I was always there, another version of myself, stuck in the same endless loop of trying to return home.

I began to lose track of time. My body ached from the constant jumps. My mind, once sharp and calculating, began to fracture. I couldn't remember which version of me was the original. Was I the first Mark Belovan, or was I just another splinter, doomed to repeat the same mistakes?

The machine was never meant to handle this kind of strain. With each jump, it groaned and hissed, the lights dimming more with every activation. It wouldn't last much longer. Neither would I.

The last jump I made brought me to a version of 2086 that was nearly identical to my own. But something felt off. The city was the same, the people the same. Yet, as I stood in the center of it all, I couldn't shake the feeling that this wasn't my home.

The linear paradox had consumed me. I was no longer part of a single timeline—I was everywhere and nowhere, scattered across countless versions of reality, each one slightly different, each one more unfamiliar than the last.

I sit here now, in this place that looks like home, wondering if I will ever truly return. The timelines are closing in on themselves, folding like the pages of a book I can't escape. Every time I move, every breath I take, another version of me does the same somewhere else. And one day, perhaps soon, they will all collapse into one.

And I don't know which version of me will survive.