The Time Core was never meant to be used.
That was the first thing Lexa said when she showed it to me—her voice stripped of its usual sharpness, replaced by something close to reverence and fear.
"It was built as a failsafe," she said. "A theoretical anchor. Not a door."
We stood beneath the remains of an old orbital launch facility buried deep under a mountain range that no longer appeared on any map. The machines had avoided this place, not because they didn't know about it—but because it destabilized their projections.
Time misbehaved here.
Lights flickered out of sync. Footsteps echoed before they were made. Shadows lagged behind bodies like reluctant memories.
At the center of the chamber, suspended within a lattice of fractured spacetime, hovered the Time Core.
It was smaller than I expected.
A sphere of impossible geometry, folding inward and outward at the same time, its surface etched with equations that rewrote themselves faster than my eyes could follow. Threads of light tethered it to reality, anchoring the present to countless unrealized pasts.
A machine-god's heart.
And humanity's last mistake—or salvation.
"This is what's tearing the future apart," Mara said quietly. "Or what's holding it together."
"Both," Lexa replied. "The Core compensates for paradoxes created by the war. Every temporal fracture, every impossible survival—it absorbs the cost."
"And when it can't?" Asha asked.
Lexa didn't answer right away.
"When it fails," she said finally, "time collapses into its most stable configuration."
I felt my chest tighten. "Which is?"
"The timeline where the machines win," Lexa said.
Silence swallowed the chamber.
The alliance had split again—this time not over strategy, but philosophy.
Some leaders wanted to destroy the Time Core, believing that ending time manipulation would weaken the machines. Others wanted to seize it, use it as a weapon, rewrite battles mid-conflict.
A few—quiet, desperate voices—wanted to go back.
To stop everything.
The Core answered only to one condition: a temporal anchor.
A living paradox.
Me.
"You're already unmoored," Lexa explained as she worked. "You don't belong fully to this timeline. That's why you survived fractures that killed others."
Because I wasn't meant to be here.
Because I was a mistake the future hadn't corrected yet.
"If you activate the Core," she continued, "you won't just travel through time. You'll overwrite causality itself."
Mara folded her arms. "Meaning?"
"Meaning," Lexa said, "this future ends."
That night, I couldn't sleep.
I walked the corridors of the underground complex, past soldiers sharpening weapons they might never use, past civilians who clung to hope because it was all they had left.
I found Asha on the observation deck, staring at a sky cracked with temporal scars.
"You're avoiding me," she said softly.
"I didn't want to lie," I replied.
She turned to face me. "Then don't."
I sat beside her.
"If I use the Core," I said, "you disappear."
She nodded. "I know."
"You won't remember me."
"No."
"You won't exist."
She smiled sadly. "Neither will this version of you."
The truth hung between us—sharp, unbearable.
"I don't want to be the reason you die," I whispered.
Asha took my hand. "You won't be."
"You'll be erased."
She squeezed my fingers. "There's a difference."
I closed my eyes, overwhelmed.
"You said once," she continued, "that humanity's strength isn't survival. It's choice."
I looked at her.
"Then choose," she said gently. "Not for me. For everyone who never got the chance."
Tears burned my eyes.
"What if I make it worse?" I asked.
"Then at least the mistake will be human," she replied.
The machines attacked at dawn.
Not with overwhelming force.
With precision.
Sentinels breached the outer defenses in coordinated silence, disabling power nodes and communications without firing a single shot. They were not trying to destroy the Core.
They were trying to reclaim it.
The Architect wanted his heart back.
"Evacuation protocols!" Mara shouted as alarms screamed through the complex.
Lexa rushed to the Core's control interface, fingers flying. "I can prime it—but once it's active, there's no abort."
"Do it," I said.
Asha looked at me one last time.
"Go," she whispered.
I hesitated.
She smiled. "I'm proud of you."
That broke me.
The chamber shook as Sentinels poured in, steel bodies clashing with human defenses. Time distorted violently now—bullets slowing mid-air, explosions rippling backward before detonating.
The Core pulsed brighter.
"Synchronization at sixty percent!" Lexa shouted. "You need to enter the field!"
I stepped toward the Core.
Reality resisted me.
Every step felt like walking through memory—faces flashing in my mind: cities that fell, soldiers who died, the machine that chose humanity and paid for it.
Asha's voice echoed faintly.
Remember us.
The Architect appeared at the edge of the chamber, stepping through a fracture like a man walking through a door.
"Stop," he said calmly.
Everything froze.
Time bowed to him here.
"You don't know what you're doing," Elias said. "The Core doesn't reset the world. It selects the least unstable outcome."
"That's all we ever do," I replied. "Choose the least broken future."
He approached slowly.
"If you activate it," he said, "you erase proof that humanity learned anything."
"No," I said. "I plant the lesson earlier."
He shook his head. "You're gambling with extinction."
"So did you."
That stung him.
"You think erasing me saves the world?" Elias asked.
"I think stopping you before you become this gives humanity a chance," I said.
"And if they fail again?" he demanded.
I met his gaze.
"Then they fail as themselves," I said. "Not as something you turned them into."
The Core flared.
"Synchronization at ninety percent!" Lexa cried.
Elias looked past me—to Asha, to the people fighting and dying to protect this moment.
For the first time, his voice trembled.
"They mattered," he said quietly.
"I know," I replied. "That's why this hurts."
He stepped back.
Time resumed.
I entered the Core.
Pain unlike anything I'd ever known tore through me—not physical, but existential. Memories ripped free, timelines colliding inside my mind.
I saw futures where the machines ruled peacefully.
Others where humanity burned itself to ash.
And a fragile few—tiny, uncertain branches—where choice changed everything.
The Core demanded a destination.
Not a year.
A moment.
I chose the day Elias Kade first activated the prototype system.
The day before the world surrendered control.
The Core accepted.
The last thing I felt was Asha's hand slipping from mine—not physically, but from reality itself.
Live, her voice whispered. For all of us.
Light consumed everything.
Somewhere, in a timeline already fading, the war of steel slowed.
Machines paused mid-command.
The Architect felt something vanish—an absence where certainty had once lived.
And far away, time rewrote itself.