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Time machine in the style of 1970s pulp science fiction, exploded view, details :: atompunk laboratory filled with gadgets, background is an enormous blackboard covered in arcane equations :: full shot, eye level, soft focus :: hyperrealistic, hyper detailed, photorealistic :: masterpiece, incredible composition, amazing depth, imposing, meticulously composed, high definition
It began as most dangerous ideas do: not with urgency, but with too much spare
time. A question that wouldn’t sit still. A handful of parts already on hand. Notes
scrawled faster than they could be organized, equations left half-erased because
they were still thinking. The machine was never intended to be monumental—only
interesting. Something to see if the numbers were lying, or if the universe really did
behave the way it looked like it ought to when you weren’t paying attention to
accepted wisdom.
By Sunday afternoon it was warm to the touch. Not unstable—just awake. The glow
in its core was treated as a success indicator rather than a warning, the way young
geniuses always do before experience teaches them the difference. No safety
protocols had been violated because nothing had yet been written for a situation like
this. No authorities had been notified because there was, at that moment, nothing to
notify them about. The chalkboard still carried yesterday’s doubts alongside today’s
answers, and neither had yet been told they would soon be obsolete.
Later accounts would argue about when the future actually changed—whether it was
at first activation, first displacement, or first failure to put everything back the way it
had been. The builder, for his part, would always insist it happened earlier than that.
It happened when the machine worked just well enough to suggest that Monday
could wait, and that one more adjustment—just one—might make the whole thing
behave perfectly.
