Writers Jam

I. The Beginning That Was the End

they say the machine was built by accident.

he was a physicist - mad, meticulous, mourning. he spent decades folding theorems into metal, wiring heartbreak into algorithms. a machine meant to calculate time… began to warp it instead. not with sparks or wormholes. but with memory. and grief.

when she died, he built it to remember her. when she lived again, he built it to forget.

you touched me in a yesterday that hasn’t happened yet and now I wear the echo of your fingerprints like prophecy.

he called her mars. not her real name but the one he whispered in his sleep. her real name was lost in a file corrupted by time, a name erased by paradox. all he remembered was her laughter that sounded like a violin straining against silence.

and so he travelled not through space but regret.

II. Year 2412, In the City of No Clocks

time was outlawed in this year.

people walked without watches. the sky had no sun, only artificial gradients. the government, a council of amnesiacs, forbade the concept of “before.”

he arrived here, his machine disguised as a spinal implant, bleeding poetry into his veins. Mars was there too but she did not remember him. she was a codebreaker now, employed to crack paradoxes and kill timelines.

she looked at him the way strangers look at strangers. and he-

i loved you before i could name you. i hated you once i did. your absence is a god that keeps resurrecting itself in me.

III. The Betrayal

he told her. everything. the loops. the deaths. the soft mornings that shattered. the bruised kisses. the broken versions of them that loved each other in 1864, 1999, 2055, and once during a comet’s passing when names didn’t exist.

she did not believe. then she believed too much. and then she tried to destroy the machine.

you built a coffin and called it a memory. you stitched me into it and dared to call it love. you were never traveling through time. you were running from the moment I stopped loving you.

the machine wept that night. a real tear from a steel eye. it short-circuited. and opened a portal to the first moment God felt lonely.

IV. The Final Loop

he woke up in a world where language hadn’t been invented. he had no mouth. but he wrote her a poem in dirt, in stars, in the blood of extinct animals.

there is no version of me that survives you even gods fall into patterns. i fell into you.

she arrived again. somehow. always. in every lifetime. but this time she didn’t try to stop him. she sat with him by the machine. she touched its wires like she once touched his ribs.

“i hate you,” she said. “i know,” he whispered. “but I’d rather hate you across a thousand timelines than love anyone else in one.”

they turned the machine on one last time. it didn’t travel. it untraveled. history peeled back like rotting wallpaper. the Big Bang screamed in reverse.

and all that remained was a kiss.

not in time. not out of time but exactly in the moment where pain and poetry become the same thing.

somewhere in the void, they still travel. not to escape. not to fix. but to feel each other again in hate, in love, in every paradox.

the machine broke. the story didn’t.