[RATING MA 15+]
The burned flesh stopped weeping on the twelfth day.
Sekitanki sat at the entrance of his shelter, watching his right arm with the detached interest of a scientist observing an experiment. The cauterization had worked—mostly. Black infection had given way to angry red burns, which had given way to pink scar tissue that looked like melted wax.
The arm was still useless. Nerve damage, probably permanent. But it wasn't killing him anymore. Small victories.
He flexed his left hand, watching tendons move beneath scarred skin. Twelve days had transformed his body into something else—lean muscle over prominent bones, skin darkened by sun that filtered through the canopy, calluses thick as leather on his palms. He looked like someone who'd been carved from the forest itself.
I'm adapting, he thought. Evolving in real-time.
The irony wasn't lost on him. He'd come to study the past and instead was living through a personal evolutionary pressure that would have fascinated future scientists. But fascination didn't build time machines.
And building a time machine—impossibly, absurdly—was exactly what he needed to do.
The remains of the original device were still scattered in the clearing where the centipede had destroyed it. Sekitanki had avoided the area since arrival, some part of him unable to face the magnitude of what he'd lost. But survival had burned that squeamishness away along with his infected flesh.
He needed to go back. Needed to see what could be salvaged.
Needed to believe that hope was something other than a hallucination. The journey to the crash site took two hours. Sekitanki moved differently now than he had on day one. Then, he'd stumbled through the forest like a drunk tourist, crashing through undergrowth, announcing his presence to every predator within a kilometer.
Now he moved like the forest itself—silent feet finding purchase on muddy ground, body flowing around obstacles, eyes constantly scanning for threats. The bone spear—his third iteration, crafted from an arthropod he'd killed three days ago—was an extension of his left arm.
His grandfather would have been proud. Or horrified. Possibly both.
The clearing looked different in daylight without panic coloring his perception. Smaller. The twisted metal that had seemed like the corpse of civilization itself was just debris scattered across ancient peat. Broken dreams rendered in aluminum and quantum circuitry.
Sekitanki approached slowly, checking for predators. The centipede's body was gone—scavenged to bones by the forest's cleanup crew. But its work remained: the time machine reduced to components, some crushed beyond recognition, others merely damaged.
He knelt beside the largest intact piece—part of the temporal stabilization array. The casing was cracked, circuits exposed to air that shouldn't exist yet. But the core housing looked intact. Maybe. Possibly.
Can this work? The question felt absurd. He was one person with Stone Age tools trying to rebuild technology that had required a team of hundreds and a laboratory full of equipment that wouldn't be invented for hundreds of millions of years. But absurdity had become his daily reality. He started gathering pieces.
By noon, Sekitanki had salvaged what remained of the critical components: part of the temporal core housing, fragments of the quantum oscillator, twisted pieces of the tachyon emitter array. Each piece was a puzzle with missing edges, a equation with variables scratched out.
His mind—finally clear after days of fever—began working in patterns he'd almost forgotten. Not the creative leaps that had won him awards, but the methodical problem-solving of basic engineering.
The core is intact. Maybe 60% functionality. The oscillator is damaged but theoretically repairable. The emitter array is... He picked up a piece of twisted metal that had once been part of the array's focusing mechanism. It looked like abstract art. Like pain given physical form.
The emitter array is destroyed. Which meant he needed to build a new one. From scratch. In the Carboniferous Period. With no tools except sharpened bones and desperation.
The laugh that escaped him was only slightly unhinged. "Sure," he said to the empty clearing. "Why not? I've already cauterized my own arm and fought giant amphibians. Building quantum technology from prehistoric materials is perfectly reasonable."
His voice echoed back: perfectly reasonable reasonable reasonable He was definitely losing his mind. But insane determination was still determination. The attack came while he was working, hands deep in circuitry, mind lost in calculations.
The wasp descended from the canopy like a falling nightmare—body segments black and yellow, wings translucent and veined with patterns that caught light like stained glass. Two meters long. Stinger the length of his forearm, dripping venom that sizzled where it hit vegetation.
Sekitanki looked up just as it struck.
Training—weeks of survival compressed into muscle memory—saved him. He rolled left, the stinger punching into earth where he'd been kneeling. The wasp shrieked, a sound like tearing metal, and launched itself at him again.
This time he was ready.
The bone spear came up in a smooth arc, catching the wasp mid-flight, driving into the soft junction between thorax and abdomen. The creature's momentum carried it forward, impaling itself deeper, mandibles snapping inches from Sekitanki's face.
They crashed down together. The wasp thrashed, its stinger stabbing wildly. One strike grazed Sekitanki's shoulder—just a scratch, barely breaking skin—but pain exploded through his entire left side.
Venom. The venom is paralytic—his left arm went numb. The spear fell from suddenly useless fingers. The wasp, still impaled but very much alive, began pulling itself forward along the shaft, mandibles clicking with murderous intent.
Sekitanki's right arm was still crippled. His left was now paralyzed. He had seconds before the wasp freed itself and finished him. Think. THINK. His legs still worked. Barely. The paralysis was spreading but hadn't reached his core yet.
He kicked. Hard. Caught the spear's shaft and drove it deeper into the wasp's body. The creature convulsed. Its wings beat frantically, lifting them both slightly off the ground in a grotesque dance.
Sekitanki kicked again. And again. Each impact driving the spear through vital organs, through whatever passed for a spine, through until the point emerged from the wasp's head in an explosion of ichor.
The creature's movements became spasms. Then twitches. Then stillness.
Sekitanki lay there beneath the corpse, left arm completely dead, right arm useless, legs barely responding to commands. The venom spread through his system like ice water.
Not like this. I didn't survive infection and fever and amphibians to die from a wasp sting. But survival wasn't about wanting to live. It was about the ability to continue living. And his ability was draining away with every paralyzed muscle fiber.
His vision blurred. The green canopy above swam like watercolor. Sounds became distant—the eternal chittering fading to white noise. Mom, he thought. I'm sorry. I tried. Then darkness, warm and complete.
He woke to rain.
Not the gentle rain of Tokyo, but Carboniferous rain—drops so large they felt like being pelted with stones. Each impact on his exposed skin was a small violence, shocking his nervous system back into something like awareness.
The wasp's corpse still pinned him. But feeling had returned to his left arm—painful, pins-and-needles feeling, but feeling. The paralysis had worn off. The venom had run its course without killing him.
Sekitanki lay there in the rain and laughed. Proper laughter this time, not the manic edge of madness but genuine amusement at the absurdity of his existence.
He'd been paralyzed by prehistoric wasp venom and woke up because of prehistoric rain. His life had become a series of impossible events linked by sheer stubbornness.
I should be dead ten times over. Why am I still alive?
No answer came. Just rain and the forest's indifference and his own heartbeat insisting on continuing. He pushed the wasp corpse off him with effort, rolled onto his hands and knees, and vomited rain water and bile. When the spasms stopped, he sat back and looked at what he'd killed.
The wasp was gross even in death. Perfect geometry. Evolutionary artwork painted in chitin and venom. And its stinger... Sekitanki's scientific mind, never truly quiet, began calculating. The stinger was hollow. Conductive, probably—insects used electrical impulses for various functions. And its shape, tapered and precise...
It could work as a focusing rod. For the emitter array. It's not ideal but it's conductive and the dimensions are close to what I need...
He started laughing again. Couldn't help it. He was literally going to build a time machine component from a giant wasp. "This is my life now," he said to the rain. "This is actually my life."
The rain didn't answer. Just kept falling, washing prehistoric blood into prehistoric peat that would become coal that would power generators in a future that felt increasingly fictional.
By evening, Sekitanki had dragged both the salvaged technology and the wasp corpse back to his shelter. The journey was agony—his body protesting every movement, the venom's aftereffects making his muscles spasm randomly.
But he made it. Because making it was what he did now.
He spent the night by firelight, hands steady despite exhaustion, mind focused despite everything. Carving. Shaping. Problem-solving with materials that shouldn't solve these problems.
The wasp's stinger became a crude focusing rod. Strips of chitin armor became insulation. Organic compounds mixed with metallic fragments became something that might—might—conduct quantum fluctuations if he could generate them in the first place.
It was insane. Impossible. A genius prodigy's final desperate act before the forest claimed him. But as his hands worked, as components began taking shape, Sekitanki felt something he hadn't felt since discovering the initial temporal ripple back in Tokyo.
Hope. Not certain hope. Not confident hope. Just the smallest spark—the mathematical possibility that survival might mean more than just not dying. Might mean actually returning. Actually completing the loop. Actually getting to tell his mother he was sorry. His grandfather's voice surfaced one more time: Hope is not a plan. But plans without hope are just suicide wearing a schedule. "Then I guess I'm planning hopeful suicide," Sekitanki muttered, connecting a piece of quantum circuitry to a hollowed-out insect stinger using plant fiber as wire.
The universe didn't respond. Just kept being indifferent and ancient and utterly unconcerned with one human's impossible project. But Sekitanki kept working. Because impossible was just another word for "hasn't happened yet." And "yet" was all the hope he needed.
TO BE CONTINUED... [NEXT EPISODE: "The Swarm Event"]