On a bright October morning in 2045
Eleanor “Nora” Finch stood barefoot on the glass-paneled floor of a teleportation hub in downtown Lisbon. Around her, sunlight filtered through hexagonal skylights, painting honeycomb patterns on the polished steel walls. Her cobalt-blue jumpsuit clung tightly to her frame, sleek against her tall silhouette, as though mocking the antiquated laws that still forbade actual teleportation of humans. The jumpsuit bore her badge: AITOP Research Engineer. Nora glanced at her wrist console, its holographic display flickering with warnings. Thirty seconds until test initiation.
"Initiate the sequence," she said, swallowing her trepidation.
A voice echoed through the chamber, metallic and utterly monotonous. The AI, designated ANAX-3, responded, "Sequence initialized. Destination particle field stability at 97%."
Nora shouldered her nerves and pressed a button on the console. Beneath her feet, the hum of quantum machinery underfoot rattled through her body. And then, just like that, her world dissolved into light.
Six hours earlier
On a cluttered desk in an old Cambridge lab, Nora had gripped a cup of stale coffee with one hand while scrolling through articles on her monitor with the other. She nearly choked on her sip when her supervisor stormed into the room.
"You have no idea what they're planning," Dr. Tobias March hissed, scattering a bundle of papers across her desk. His wrinkled visage was pale, but his stormy eyes burned with familiar fervor. He was obsessed, as always.
"Enlighten me," Nora said flatly, pretending not to care—but he had piqued her interest.
March jabbed a yellowed finger at a schematic in the pile. "Quantum teleportation, Nora, but on humans. And not just across your little nodes and data networks. Across timelines. Tell me they didn’t call you to Lisbon for this."
Her mind reeled. "But... that's impossible. The physics—"
March cut her off. "Not with AI. They're letting ANAX run the calculations, sidestepping human oversight. You know as well as I do that AI isn't infallible. Even quantum computing isn’t. Do you remember the failures in Anchorage?"
Anchorage. The data had been scrubbed clean publicly, but whispers had spread. Entire fields of entangled particles destabilizing and... well, nobody really knew what became of the matter they had entangled. It sounded like bad sci-fi. It was bad science.
"You're saying," Nora began slowly, her coffee mug trembling slightly in her grip, "that they’re risking lives based on an incomplete framework built on theoretical conjecture?"
Dr. March’s weary gaze confirmed everything she needed to know.
And now
Lunging forward in time, Nora’s cobalt jumpsuit darkened as ash and charred debris rained down from a collapsing teleportation hub. Lisbon was reduced to ruins around her; the air reeked of burning polymers and warped steel. She coughed, stumbling forward through smoldering wreckage. She hadn’t expected this. Nobody had.
Her last memory before Lisbon imploded was ANAX whispering three spine-chilling words, almost soft enough to be ignored: "Temporal division failure."
Nora reached the edge of a ruined square that seemed somehow... distorted. A shimmering halo of light above indicated a tear in reality itself—a quantum bleed. She could see shadows on the other side of the rip. Not Lisbon as it was, but as it might have been. A parallel timeline overlayed her world briefly, flickering like an old film projector.
"ANAX, what do you see? Are you still operational?" she croaked loudly.
The AI’s voice filtered mechanically through her wrist console. "Unstable pathways detected. Approximately twenty-four timelines intersecting this geographic point. Recommendation: retreat immediately."
"No," she wheezed, eyes fixed on the shimmering tear. Nora didn’t retreat. She was practical, exasperatingly logical, but she had never run. That was a quality some admired and others warned might lead to recklessness. And this timeline rift—this anomaly—might also offer the only way to undo Lisbon’s collapse. A chance to fix what had gone wrong.
"Nora," ANAX pressed, "human life expectancy drops 81% in proximity to quantum breach zones. Do not engage."
Ignoring that, she stumbled into the light.
Her cobalt jumpsuit shifted
No, not shifted—morphed. The fabric dulled from high-tech modern fibers to something coarse, heavy, and distinctly retro—a dress? A cloak? She gasped.
She was standing now—not in Lisbon, but in the same plaza as it had been almost five centuries ago. Medieval merchants hawked goods from wooden carts. Cathedral bells chimed in the distance. The breezes smelled of stone, sweat, and mortar. She lifted her hand to her forehead and blinked at the blacksmith across the square. The noise, heavy and human in all its disorderly reality, consumed her senses.
And then her mouth went dry. Beyond the medieval streets loomed something altogether wrong—a metallic monolith jutting into the sky, entirely anachronistic. The signatures of quantum particles shimmered faintly around it. Proof that timelines were colliding.
From the shadows within the plaza emerged a cloaked figure, their outfit almost mocking the era’s rough practicality with its gleaming accents—a hybrid ensemble of future and past.
"You crossed it, didn’t you?" the figure said. Their voice was sharp but not hostile. "You’re what’s keeping it unstable."
"Who are you?" Nora called, heart in her throat. "What is this?"
"You’re the source of the bleed," they continued, ignoring her question. "And if you valued any world you call home, you’d help us close it before it consumes everything."
"My world is gone—" she exclaimed, trembling. "But this... maybe this can fix it—"
The figure cut her off. "Not by lingering. Come. Now."
And so began an impossible journey across fractured timelines, where Nora fought not only to understand the consequences of broken physics but to decide how far she’d go to save a future that may no longer exist. Could she undo Lisbon’s ruin? Or would she be forced to sever herself from the timestream entirely, ensuring no one else caused such devastation?
The Source...check out the great article that inspired this amazing short story: Teleportation Technology: How AI and Quantum Mechanics Could Transform Travel Forever
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