Chapter 1: The Machine

    

    The Rolex was warm against Eli’s wrist, warmer than it should have been after sitting on the lab bench all night. He’d taken it from his apartment at 4 AM, when the city was still dark and quiet, when even the delivery trucks hadn’t started their rounds. Now, at 5:37 according to the digital clock on the wall, he sat alone in the pre-dawn stillness and let his thumb trace the engraved initials on the steel case back.

    W.V.

    William Voss. His grandfather. Dead eleven years now, and the watch had stopped six years after that—five years ago, frozen at 3:17, the hands locked in place like they were pointing to some moment that mattered, though Eli couldn’t remember what had been happening at 3:17 on that particular afternoon. He’d meant to get it fixed. Had meant to for five years. But somehow he never had.

    The metal was smooth under Eli’s thumb, worn down by decades of the same motion. His grandfather had done this, traced these letters with his own thumb, probably thousands of times. Tens of thousands. The thought should have been comforting. Instead, it made Eli’s chest tight.

    He shouldn’t have brought it. He knew that. You didn’t bring something irreplaceable to an experiment that might—would—go catastrophically wrong in ways you couldn’t predict. But he’d grabbed it anyway, in that strange, suspended hour before dawn when the rational mind sleeps and something older takes over. The part of you that reaches for talismans. The part that believes in luck, or fate, or whatever you wanted to call the feeling that some objects carry weight beyond their physical mass.

    The lab was silent except for the hum of the equipment on standby. Outside, the sky was beginning to pale, that particular shade of gray that wasn’t quite light but wasn’t darkness anymore either. The in-between time. The threshold.

    Eli turned the watch on his wrist, studying the face.

    The crystal was scratched but clear, the hour markers still crisp and legible despite the years. The hands were frozen at 3:17, the second hand stopped mid-sweep between the

 

forty-two and forty-three second marks. Dead. It had been dead for five years, and he’d kept wearing it anyway, this broken reminder, this stopped symbol of moments worth living. He’d watched this same motion as a child, sitting on his grandfather’s lap, mesmerized by the tiny mechanism that could capture something as slippery as time and make it visible, countable, real. But now it captured nothing. Now it was just a corpse of a watch, wearing the shape of what it used to be.

    “You know what this is, Eli?” his grandfather had asked him once.

    “A watch,” he’d said, because he was seven and literal.

    “No.” His grandfather’s hand had been spotted with age even then, the skin thin enough to see the blue rivers of veins beneath. “It’s a reminder.”

    Eli closed his eyes now, and the memory rose up with the particular vividness of moments you’ve replayed so many times they’ve become more real than real, polished smooth by repetition until they shine.

    He was sixteen. The hospice room smelled like antiseptic trying to cover something organic and inevitable, but his grandfather had insisted on having the window open, and the spring air helped. It was late afternoon, the light golden and thick, and his grandfather was propped up in the adjustable bed, looking small in a way that still shocked Eli every time he visited. William Voss had been a big man once, broad-shouldered and solid. Now he was angles and hollows, but his eyes were still sharp, still present.

    “Tell me about the lights again,” Eli had said, because he was sixteen and obsessed with mysteries, with the unexplained. Because his grandfather’s stories about the war were better than anything on TV, and because some part of him already knew, even then, 

 

that these conversations were numbered. That each one was being subtracted from a finite sum.

    His grandfather smiled, the expression tired but genuine. “The lights.”

    “The ones over Germany. The foo fighters.”

    “We called them that, yes. Though God knows why—nothing to do with fighting, and certainly nothing to do with fools, unless you counted us for chasing them.” His grandfather shifted in the bed, trying to find a comfortable position that probably didn’t exist anymore. “They were beautiful, Eli. That’s what nobody talks about. Everyone 

 

wants to know what they were, where they came from, whether they were ours or theirs or something else entirely. But what I remember most is how beautiful they were.”

    Eli had been sitting in the chair beside the bed, leaning forward the way you do when you’re afraid of missing something. “What did they look like?”

    “Like nothing else. Balls of light, we said, but that doesn’t capture it. They moved like they were alive. Like they were curious. They’d pace us, match our speed, dance around the wings. Sometimes they’d be orange, sometimes white, sometimes this strange green color I’ve never seen anywhere else. And they were silent. That was the eerie part. Everything else in the war made noise—engines, guns, bombs, men screaming. But these were silent as stars.”

    His grandfather had paused then, looking out the window at the spring afternoon, at the ordinary world going about its ordinary business.

    “I saw them dozens of times,” he continued. “Every pilot did. We’d report them, and the brass would nod and write it down and do precisely nothing. After a while, you 

 

stopped reporting them. They were just… there. Part of the strangeness of it all. Part of the war.”

    “Did you ever figure out what they were?”

    “No.” His grandfather’s smile had turned rueful. “And I tried, Eli. After the war, I tried. Read everything I could find. Wrote letters to other pilots. Spent hours—years, really—chasing that question.” He’d looked at Eli then, really looked at him, and something in his expression had made Eli sit back a little. “Some questions can consume you if you let them. They’re like a fire. You think you’re feeding it to get warm, to get light, but if you’re not careful, you wake up one day and realize you’ve been burning your life for fuel.”

    Eli had nodded, not really understanding. Not then.

    “But I want to tell you about something else,” his grandfather had said. “Something that happened in London, not Germany. May of 1943. Do you want to hear it?”

    “Yes.” Always yes. Eli had been a hungry audience, soaking up every story, every detail.

    His grandfather had settled back against his pillows, his breathing a little labored but his voice steady. “It was during the buzz bombs. The V-1s. You know about those?”

    “The flying bombs. Unmanned.”

    “Right. Nasty things. You could hear them coming, this puttering engine sound, and as long as you heard it, you were fine. It was when the engine cut out that you had to worry, because that meant it was coming down. You’d have maybe ten seconds before impact.”

    His grandfather had paused, remembering.

    “I was on a 48 hour pass, walking through Bloomsbury in the evening. It was late, maybe ten o’clock, and the sirens had just started. You could hear one of the bombs coming, that distinctive sound, like a motorcycle in the sky. Everyone was heading for the shelters, but I’d stopped to light a cigarette—stupid, but you do stupid things in war. You get fatalistic.

    “And that’s when I saw them. A young couple, running. The man was in civilian clothes, maybe thirty, dark hair. But it was the woman who caught my eye. She was wearing…” He’d frowned, trying to find the words. “Her clothes were wrong. Not wrong like she’d dressed poorly. Wrong like they didn’t belong. The cut was strange, the fabric too smooth, too modern somehow. And she was wearing trousers, which wasn’t unheard of by ‘43, but these were different. They fit differently. And her shoes—trainers, I think you’d call them now, but we didn’t have anything like that then.”

    Eli had felt a chill run down his spine. “What do you mean?”

    “I mean she looked like she’d stepped out of a different time. The man was pulling her along, and she was looking around like she’d never seen London before, even though London was all around us. And then the buzz bomb’s engine cut out.”

    His grandfather had closed his eyes, seeing it again.

    “They stopped running. Just for a second. The man pulled her close, and they looked at each other, and I saw something in that look that I’d forgotten existed. In the middle of all that death, all that destruction, with a bomb falling out of the sky toward us, they looked at each other like nothing else mattered. Like that moment—that single moment of being together—was worth everything.”

    “What happened?”

    “The bomb hit three streets over. We all survived. I turned and walked on and never saw them again. But I couldn’t stop thinking about them. About that look. About how they’d stopped running to be present with each other, even with death falling from the sky.”

    His grandfather had opened his eyes then, and they’d been wet.

    “The next morning, I went to a jewelry shop on Piccadilly. It had been hit by shrapnel, but it was still open—everything stayed open if it could, that was the spirit of it. And I bought this watch.” He’d lifted his wrist then, showing the same Rolex that Eli now wore in the pre-dawn lab. “I bought it because I realized something. I’d been so obsessed with the lights, with the mystery of them, that I’d forgotten to pay attention to my actual life. The moments that mattered. The people who mattered. I was chasing questions in the sky while life happened on the ground.”

    He’d begun unfastening the watch from his wrist.

    “I bought it to remind myself to be present. To mark the moments worth living. Every time I checked the time, I’d remember: this moment, right now, is real. This is what matters. Not the mysteries I couldn’t solve. Not the questions that would haunt me. But this. Now. The people I love. The life I’m actually living.”

    Eli had taken the watch, feeling the weight of it, the cool steel of the band.

    “I’m giving it to you,” his grandfather had said, “because I see something in you, Eli. That same hunger for answers. That same obsession with the unexplained. And I want you to have this reminder. Questions are good. Curiosity is good. But don’t let them consume you. Don’t chase mysteries so hard that you forget to live your life. Don’t become so obsessed with understanding time that you forget to experience it.”