In the year 3022, I met a baker in a small corner of the Andromeda colony who complained about the lack of good flour. The stars shimmered through the translucent walls of her shop as she kneaded dough that wouldn’t rise in the low gravity. She told me it was tough to get fresh ingredients across light-years, but stale bread was better than no bread at all. Time flowed differently there, and it slipped through her fingers like the cosmic dust settling on the bread loaves.
I handed her a packet of traditional yeast from 2125, just a vial of grainy promise in a high-tech world. She smiled, knowing that I’d traveled years to drop it on her counter. I left her with a fading smell of ancient kitchens and rising warmth.
Fog lingered over London in 1887 when I first encountered the diplomat lost between eras. He was dressed impeccably, but his shoes were query marks against his Victorian garb. We met near the Thames that morning; it felt like both the turning of a century and a fleeting hour. His tales of forgotten treaties and whispers of time’s hand reshaping his written words were mesmerizing, binding us momentarily across eras.
I scribbled notes for him on parchment, reminders of impossible conversations. Each of our meetings left a stitch in time unravelling slowly, the city’s fog wrapping us in eternal mystery.
I was knee-deep in sediment on Mars in 2245, searching for remnants of a bygone civilization amidst rusted machinery buried deep. The sun hung low in the Martian sky, casting red shadows over the excavation site. We unearthed fragments of texts, half-written stories of their dreams to return home, dusty remnants left untouched by time’s hands.
Here, in this desolate world, the ghosts of their aspirations lingered. They were writers and dreamers, navigating their own timelines as we do now. I wondered if the past had looped for them, as it so often does for us, the future carved in the delicate lines of their handwriting.