Dr. Sarah Chen existed in seventeen different timestreams simultaneously, but only one of them was about to discover the truth.
The Temporal Research Station orbited Earth at a Lagrange point where spacetime had been carefully weakened, allowing her team to peer through the veil of causality. It was delicate work—one miscalculation could unravel cause and effect for light-years in every direction. But after decades of careful excavation through the layers of time, Sarah had found something that shouldn't exist.
"Run the scan again," she told her assistant, Dr. Marcus Webb, not taking her eyes off the holographic display that filled the observation chamber.
"That's the fifth verification, Sarah," Marcus said, but his fingers were already dancing across the quantum interface. "The results haven't changed. There's a gap in human history. A deliberate one."
The display showed Earth's timeline like a vast river flowing from past to future. But at a point roughly 2.5 million years ago, the river... stuttered. It was as if someone had carefully edited reality itself, removing a crucial chapter from the story of human evolution.
"Not just a gap," Sarah whispered, leaning closer to the display. "Look at the quantum scarring around the edges. Someone used technology we don't even have names for to hide something. And whoever did it wanted to make sure it stayed hidden."
She gestured, and the display zoomed in on the anomaly. The missing time wasn't empty—it was actively obscured, wrapped in layers of quantum encryption that hurt to look at directly.
"The Prometheus Archive," Marcus breathed, recognizing the signature. "But that's just a legend. A cautionary tale about playing with temporal mechanics."
"Every legend has a seed of truth," Sarah replied. She pulled up her private research files, years of work that had led her to this moment. "What if the Archive isn't a cautionary tale? What if it's a lock, and we've just found the door?"
⚬ ⚬ ⚬
The Station's Director, Kenji Tanaka, stood with his back to them, gazing out at the Earth below. In the two centuries since humanity had developed temporal viewing technology, they'd uncovered countless secrets. But nothing like this.
"You're asking me to authorize a temporal incursion into a deliberately hidden period of history," he said, his voice carefully neutral. "Do you have any idea what you might unleash?"
"Do you have any idea what we might learn?" Sarah countered. "Director, this isn't just some historical curiosity. The energy patterns around the gap match the signatures we detected from the Andromeda Signal two hundred years ago. This is connected to humanity's first contact."
Tanaka turned, his augmented eyes shifting through multiple spectrums as he studied her. "The Andromeda Expedition won't reach its destination for another century, even with our fastest FTL drives. You're suggesting we might find answers here, in our own past?"
"I'm suggesting," Sarah said carefully, "that our past and our future are more connected than we realized. The gap in history, the signal from Andromeda, the fact that human DNA contains sequences that don't match any terrestrial evolution pattern—it's all connected."
She called up another display, this one showing the famous Andromeda Signal that had changed humanity's destiny two centuries earlier. Side by side with the temporal gap, the patterns were unmistakable.
"Same quantum signature," Marcus added. "Same encryption methodology. Whoever hid our history is the same civilization that sent the signal."
Tanaka was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke, his words carried the weight of someone about to change history. "Do it. But carefully. Use the new protocols—minimum intervention, maximum observation. And Sarah?" He met her eyes. "Whatever you find in there, remember: some doors are closed for a reason."
⚬ ⚬ ⚬
The Temporal Dive Chamber was a sphere of perfect mirrors, each one reflecting not just space but time itself. Sarah floated in the center, her consciousness tethered to the present by quantum filaments thinner than thought. Marcus monitored from outside, ready to pull her back if the timestream became unstable.
"Initiating dive," Sarah announced, closing her eyes. "Target: 2.5 million years BCE, focusing on the anomaly's edge."
The mirrors began to spin, faster and faster, until they blurred into a silver cocoon. Sarah felt her consciousness stretch, flowing backward along the river of time. Millennia flashed by in heartbeats—the rise and fall of civilizations, ice ages, the slow dance of continental drift.
Then she hit the edge of the gap, and everything changed.
Instead of the expected resistance, she felt... welcome. The quantum encryption parted like a curtain, and Sarah found herself observing a scene that rewrote everything she thought she knew about human origins.
Earth, 2.5 million years ago. But not the Earth from any textbook. The sky was full of ships—massive vessels that dwarfed any technology from Sarah's time. They hung above the African savanna like metal clouds, their hulls marked with symbols that triggered recognition in some deep part of her mind.
Below them, early hominids gathered in the shadow of the ships. But as Sarah watched, she realized these weren't primitive creatures. They moved with purpose, with intelligence, as if following instructions from the beings in the ships above.
"Phase One complete," a voice spoke directly into Sarah's consciousness. Not in any language she knew, but she understood it perfectly. "Genetic seeding successful. Subjects show optimal adaptation to local conditions. Beginning memory suppression protocol."
Sarah tried to focus on the speakers, but they existed in a state of temporal flux, appearing as shifting shadows of possibility. The only clear thing was their purpose: they were engineering humanity. Creating us. Shaping us.
But why? And why hide it?
As if responding to her thoughts, the scene shifted. She saw flashes of another place—a galaxy of impossible beauty, with stars arranged in perfect mathematical spirals. Andromeda. And at its heart, a civilization so advanced that their technology was indistinguishable from the fundamental forces of the universe.
"The children must forget," the voice continued. "They must grow in isolation, develop their own path. Only when they are ready will they remember. Only when they can choose freely will they return."
More images flooded Sarah's consciousness. A war—not of weapons but of ideologies. A civilization split between those who would transcend physical existence and those who valued the flesh. The solution: exile. Not as punishment, but as preservation. Send the ones who chose humanity to a place where they could be human, where they could grow and evolve without the pressure to ascend.
Earth. A nursery. A school. A second chance.
"In two million years, they will be ready," the voice said, fading now as the vision began to collapse. "They will hear the call. They will make the journey. And then, finally, they will choose their own destiny."
Sarah felt herself being pulled back, the quantum tethers reeling her consciousness home. But as she returned to her own time, one last image burned itself into her mind: the generation ship Aspiration, launched in secret decades ago, carrying a million souls on a journey that would take two million years.
A journey that had already happened. Would happen. Was happening now.
Time, she realized as she gasped back to awareness in the Dive Chamber, was not a river. It was a circle.
And humanity was about to complete its first revolution.
⚬ ⚬ ⚬
"Sarah! Sarah, can you hear me?" Marcus's voice cut through the disorientation as she returned to her body.
"I can hear you," she managed, her throat dry. "How long was I gone?"
"Three minutes, seventeen seconds," Marcus said, helping her out of the chamber. "But your neural activity suggests you experienced significantly more."
"Two and a half million years more," Sarah said, accepting a glass of water gratefully. "Marcus, we need to contact the Director. And then we need to send a message to the Andromeda Expedition."
"They're still thirty years from their destination," Marcus reminded her.
Sarah smiled, the expression feeling strange on her face after what she'd witnessed. "No, they're not. They're already there. They've always been there. We just forgot."
She looked up at the main display, where Earth spun in its ancient dance. Somewhere among those clouds, in laboratories and homes, seven billion humans went about their lives, unaware that their entire species was about to remember its true heritage.
"The echo is sounding," Sarah whispered. "And when it reaches us, everything changes."