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bonds of time

(7 articles)

Bonds of Time - P009 - The Rising

The metal doors open. I don't move. My feet won't let me. There is a box inside the wall, a small room with no windows or no visible exit. The floor is polished so bright I can see Jingsen's reflection standing in it, waiting for us. He steps inside. Marcus hesitates. His hand moves, I see it out of the corner of my eye, touching something beneath his strange wrapped garment. A prayer, maybe. Then he steps forward. I am alone in the bone-white corridor. The box waits. Jingsen waits. Marcus waits. I put one foot in front of the other. The threshold. The cold of the metal walls. The floor solid under my cloth shoes. The doors close behind me. *Trapped.* The word rises in my throat but I swallow it. Trapped like an animal. Trapped like the time the cook locked me in the grain cellar and forgot. Three days in the dark, drinking condensation from the walls, counting heartbeats until someone remembered I existed. Then the floor *moves*. It's moving, UP! My stomach drops before my mind understands. We are rising. The box is rising. I am being lifted by magic. My ears hurt. A pressure building, shifting. Marcus has his eyes closed, lips moving in what might be prayer. Jingsen stands with his hands at his sides, breathing evenly, like this is nothing. The box stops, then a small sound can be heard, a bell, and the doors open. I step out so fast I nearly trip. The corridor here looks the same as below, but we are somewhere else now. I don't know how I know. The air tastes different. Doors. So many doors. All the same shape, the same distance apart, repeating in both directions until the corridor turns. I count them: one, two, three, four... thirteen, fourteen. What do the doors mean? Jingsen stops at one of them. Fourteen paces from the box that lifted us. He puts his hand on something beside the door, a flat surface, darker than the wall. I hear a sound like a lock clicking. Does the lock know it's him? The door opens and beyond it... a room. I stand at the threshold, waiting for permission to enter. Jingsen looks back at me. His face is tired. So tired that the skin around his eyes seems to sag. But he gestures, the same gesture from the metal beast, from the street, *come*. And he waits until I move before he turns away. I cross the threshold. The door closes behind us with a soft click. The world goes quiet. For the first time since the metal beast, nothing is moving.

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Bonds of Time - P007 - Mars

The scrubber array in Sector 7 was running hot. I noticed it the way I noticed everything. Couldn't turn it off if I tried. CO₂ conversion above optimal meant sensor drift or a load spike. Extra bodies on the overnight detail, probably. Someone authorized overtime without telling atmospheric. Made a note on my forearm display. Flagged it for Chen. Kept walking. The hub sprawled around me, conduits fat as tree trunks, the big scrubber units humming overhead. Air tasted the same as always. Flat. Iron. That red-dust undertone Mars works into everything. Seventeen years back I'd rebuilt the primary unit from scrap, stayed up two days straight to do it. Colony gave me a commendation. Earth sent an auditor to make sure I hadn't skimmed parts. Breath counter pulsed at the edge of my vision. *Remaining: 412 L. Rate: 8.2. Deficit: -24.* Running hard this cycle. I'd pay next month. Everybody paid. Crawlway empty. Good. Keyed the access sequence, waited for biometrics, opened the channel to Tharsis. *Yun dark. Assume full compromise. Protocol Seven. All assets relocate* The hum stopped. Forty-four years breathing recycled air. Never heard silence. Processors, fans, scrubbers, pumps, the whole system keeping everyone alive. Gone quiet. Two seconds. Three. My body figured it out first. Heart hammering, muscles locked. The part older than thinking. Engineering brain caught up a beat later: that wasn't maintenance. Wasn't a diagnostic cycle. That was something else. Alarm hit. Triple pulse, rising. Structural breach. Decompression. Not here. Close. Display flooded with red: Sector 7, Transit Junction East, pressure dropping fast. The airlock I'd passed twenty minutes ago. Route home. Route where forty-some workers were pulling overtime. Already running. The thing didn't belong here. Rubber tires. Cracked. Metal body gone to rust. Windshield made of actual glass. I could hear the engine, rough, mechanical, burning something that smelled like... Gasoline. Word surfaced from old files. Museum stuff. Century-dead. Couldn't breathe. Not shock, real atmospheric failure, pressure tanking, lungs grabbing at nothing. Counter screaming: *EXTERNAL CONTAMINATION. CONSERVE.* It rolled forward. Characters on the cab. Japanese. Faded trucking logo. A *truck*. From Earth. From before. Headlights found me. Thirty seconds left. Maybe. Pressure ripping air from my lungs, cold clawing in, vision graying at the edges. But I understood something worse than dying. This wasn't an accident. This wasn't anything that should exist. It accelerated. --- Impact. White. But not white. White needs light and this was before light. No body. No breath. No weight. Mars gone. Colony gone. The revolution, the names, all of it. Voice. Not outside. In. Speaking Creole. Martian Creole, dome cadence, work-crew slang, the rhythm I grew up with in Olympus Mons. No Earther ever spoke it right. This was perfect. Too perfect. Not ai generated fake, just perfect in a way that made my skin crawl. "You're going to be interesting," it said. "I can tell." And then it showed me...

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Bonds of Time - P006: Others

Qi Jingsen's legs ached. Three months in Earth gravity. By hour three he'd stopped noticing the strangeness. By hour forty-seven, he just wanted to sit down. Every step cost twice what it should, his knees protesting the constant work of not collapsing under his own weight. Mars-born and Mars-raised, and the planet of his ancestors wanted to crush him flat. He stopped in a side street off the main plaza. Low foot traffic. A vending machine humming against one wall, its glow casting blue-white light across the narrow space. Good enough. The Roman and the girl caught up, both breathing hard. The Roman's eyes were everywhere—the vending machine, the electrical lines overhead, the distant roar of a truck passing on the main road. Taking inventory. Probably ranking everything by how fast it could kill him. The girl was watching *him*. That caught Jingsen off-guard. Most new arrivals were too overwhelmed to focus, spent their first hours spinning in circles, jumping at sounds. This one had her terror locked down tight. Her eyes tracked his movements the way no thirteen-year-old should know how to watch. "邵嫦," she said. Pointing at herself. The name she'd given the Roman earlier. "Qi Jingsen," he replied. "戚景森." Her face shifted. Not quite recognition—his Mandarin was fifteen centuries evolved from hers, the tones flattened, the vocabulary alien—but something had landed. She understood *name*. She spoke again. Fast, musical, with rising and falling tones that modern Mandarin had smoothed away centuries ago. Middle Chinese. Tang dynasty, probably, given the clothes. His literary training caught fragments: *place*, maybe. *What* or *where*. A question about location. "Tokyo," he said slowly. "日本。東京。" Her eyes widened. The words meant nothing—Japan hadn't existed when she was alive—but she caught *answer*. He was responding to her question. She tried again. Pointing at herself, then at him, then at the Roman. A gesture that meant *us*. Then a broader sweep at the city around them. *Why here? Why us?* *That*, Jingsen thought, *is the right question.* "I don't know," he said in Mandarin, knowing she wouldn't understand. "I really don't." The Roman cleared his throat. Loud. Theatrical. Demanding attention like a patron in his atrium. Jingsen turned to face him. Marcus—that was the name the Roman had shouted at the girl earlier, audible even from across the barrier. "*Tu es*—" Marcus started. More Latin. Useless. "Non parlo Latino," Jingsen tried. Modern Italian, descended from Latin through two millennia of drift. "Io sono... un amico. *Amico*." Marcus's face screwed up. Processing. Something landed—*amico* was close enough to Latin's *amicus* that the meaning traveled. "*Amicus?*" Marcus repeated. Suspicion and hope both, somehow. Jingsen nodded. "Sì. Amico." It wasn't much. It was almost nothing. But Marcus's shoulders dropped half an inch, and that was worth something. Shao Chang was still watching him. Still calculating. Jingsen met her eyes and saw something he recognized: a survivor assessing whether this new variable would help or hurt her. *Fair enough*, he thought. *I'm doing the same thing.* He needed to move them somewhere safer. Somewhere he could think. But his legs ached, and his head ached, and two new arrows floated above two new heads, and the weight of that was— *Three arrows now.* *Seven total since I arrived in this century.* He'd tried not to count. Counting made it real. But the numbers were there anyway, whether he wanted them or not. *Seven marked. Seven arrows scattered across this city.* Four others were out there somewhere. The Taiwanese engineer who'd vanished into the subway system, convinced he could find a pattern in the train schedules. The samurai who'd walked off toward the Imperial Palace without a word. A Greek philosopher who sat in Ueno Park asking questions no one could understand. And the American woman—clever, that one—who'd taken one look at Jingsen, decided she didn't need allies, and disappeared into Shinjuku. *Seven arrows. Seven agendas. And none of us know the rules.* Jingsen looked at Marcus Valerius Maximus, Roman merchant, thirty-seven years old, helpless in this world. He looked at Shao Chang, Tang dynasty slave girl, thirteen years old, watching him the way no child should. These two hadn't run. Hadn't decided they were better off alone. They'd followed him into an alley because he was the only thing in this world that made even a little sense. *The Driver is still collecting.* The memory hit him before he could stop it. That white void. That voice. Jingsen had been dying when the Driver found him. The decompression alarm screaming, the airlock breach, his lungs already burning as the pressure dropped. He'd had maybe thirty seconds left. Maybe less. And then— He shut the memory down. Not now. Not in front of them. But the Driver's words echoed anyway, the way they always did. That patient voice. Amused, even. Speaking Jingsen's native language with such perfection it was almost impossible. *"You're going to be interesting. I can tell."* What happened next—what the Driver had shown him, what he'd been offered, what he'd— *Not now.* Jingsen looked at the Roman. The girl. Two more pieces on a board he couldn't see. *You wanted to know why I came back*, he thought. *I came back because I've seen what the Driver does to people who try to play alone.* *And I'm not ready to find out what happens when he gets bored.* #bonds-of-time #bondsOfTime

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Bonds of Time - P005: Lightning Man

The guards are three paces away when lightning-man moves. He doesn't run. He walks toward us with the measured stride of a man approaching a business negotiation, not a crisis. One hand raised—not in surrender, but in the universal gesture of *wait*. The guards slow. Stop. Exchange a glance. Lightning-man speaks. The words mean nothing to me. They tumble out in a strange, clipped rhythm—nothing like Greek's flowing cadences or the Germanic barking of the northern tribes. But I recognize *skill* when I hear it. This is a man who speaks to officials regularly. The deference is there, carefully measured. The apology built into the tone without groveling. The guards' postures shift. Their hands move away from their belts. One of them says something. Lightning-man nods, producing that small flat rectangle from his pocket—that same device everyone in this world seems to carry. He gestures at Shao and me. More words. The guards' suspicion hasn't vanished, but it's softening into something more like bureaucratic inconvenience. I watch his face as he speaks. Tired. So tired that even the muscles around his eyes seem to sag. But underneath the exhaustion, something sharper. This man knows what he's doing. He touches his rectangle to something on the barrier. *Chirp*. Does it again. *Chirp*. A third time. *Chirp*. The guards step back. One waves his hand—*go, go*. Done with us. Lightning-man looks at me. Not at Shao. At *me*. A single gesture. Fingers curling toward himself. *Follow*. I move before I can think. Shao is already at my shoulder. We pass through the barrier—that same *chirp* of permission for each of us—and then we're through, walking fast, and the guards are already looking elsewhere, already finding new problems to solve. We follow lightning-man through the crowd, up stone stairs, toward light so bright it hurts.

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Bonds Of Time - P003: In this together

The girl's face goes pale, then red, then pale again. She clutches her rough yellow robes and stammers out something that sounds like music mixed with fear: "我在哪里？这是什么地方？" I don't understand a word, but I know terror when I hear it. She's backing away from me like I'm a leper. The lightning-clothes man lets out this long, exhausted breath, the kind I used to make when dealing with particularly stupid clients. He looks at me, then at the girl, then shakes his head. The iron beast starts slowing down. That woman's voice comes back, 「新橋、新橋です」this time. The serpent hisses louder and grinds to a stop. Where in the world am I? The doors, sweet Mercury, the doors just slide open by themselves! No slaves, no pulleys, nothing! Lightning-man stands up. He mutters something in... well, I don't know what language that is either. He steps through the magic doors without looking back. The doors start making a warning chime, and suddenly everyone around us surges toward the opening. The girl's eyes dart between me and the exit - she's calculating something. Not just scared. Thinking. That's when I notice the crowd isn't moving randomly. They're flowing around us like water around stones, giving us both a wide berth. Even in their rush, nobody wants to get close to the people with the floating arrows. The girl decides first. She grabs my arm - strong grip for someone so small - and pulls me toward the doors. Smart. Whatever this place is, being trapped in a moving metal box isn't going to help us figure it out. We spill out onto a platform that defies all logic. Stone arches soar overhead like the Pantheon, but the walls are covered in glowing pictures that move and change. People stream past us in rivers, all heading somewhere with purpose I don't understand. The girl releases my arm and starts scanning the crowd with the focused intensity of a hawk hunting mice. The girl's head snaps toward me. She doesn't understand the words, but she caught my tone. She nods once, sharp and knowing, then points upward over my head. I look up where she's pointing, and my blood turns to ice water. There it is - my own purple arrow, hovering three feet above my head like some divine judgment. The girl sees my expression and nods grimly. She understands. "We're being watched," I mutter in Latin. Whatever marked us, we're in this together.

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Bonds Of Time - P002: Purple Arrows

The people around me... Jupiter's beard, what are they wearing? Everything's black or gray, like they're all in mourning. Did someone important die? Is color forbidden here? They're all hunched over, staring at these glowing rectangles in their hands. Some are moving their fingers across them, and the light changes. Are they... are they scrying? Reading omens in the glow? I scan the metal beast's innards and freeze. Two of these strange mourners have... by Mars, they have purple arrows floating above their heads! Like divine markers pointing down from the heavens themselves. Nobody else seems to notice. The first is a child-woman, no older than thirteen winters, with the slanted eyes of those silk traders from the far east. But her robes! Yellow like fresh-churned butter with strange knots and loops, the kind of rough cloth we'd dress our field slaves in. Her hair is bound up with wooden sticks, actual sticks! The other... gods preserve me. A man whose very clothes seem possessed by trapped lightning. Blue fabric that shimmers like the finest Damascus steel, with threads of pure light running along every seam like tiny rivers of fire. His arms bear flat obsidian mirrors that flicker with moving pictures. Omens? The underworld itself? "Salvete!" I call out. "Intelligitisne linguam Latinam?" Nothing. The child-woman's eyes go wide as a spooked horse. I try again in Greek: "Χαίρετε! Ἑλληνιστὶ λαλεῖτε?" The entire belly of the beast goes silent. Every last person stops poking their glowing rectangles and stares at me like I've grown a second head.

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Bonds of Time - P001: The belly of an iron serpent

I wake up, hearing the sound of rain against a window, my head is pounding harder than that night when Decimus got married and we drank till dawn. This bed I'm lying on is so soft, what fabric is this? Not even Syrian silk feels this smooth, I must still be dreaming. No, not dreaming, I must have hit my head pretty hard. And what's this smell? Where in Hades am I? I can hear a melodious voice seemingly coming from nowhere and everywhere, 「有楽町、有楽町です」. What did she say? Before I can react, an invisible force throws me to the left, followed by a serpentine hiss that chills my blood. I look around and gasp. I'm trapped in the belly of an iron beast! Standing quickly, the memories flood back. *** Just a few hours ago, I had awakened in my villa on the Aventine to Syrus, the morning light came filtering through the compluvium as it had for thirty seven years. My clients packed the atrium like flowers turning towards the sun, the people, as always depended on me. The daily inquiries were interrupted by Lucius Antonius who arrived with news that changed everything; after a long time waiting, Trajan wished to discuss my aqueduct proposal. I would spend twelve million sesterces to extend Aqua Claudia, the water rights alone would repay the investment tenfold. By evening I was walking home through the velabrum, having secured my fortune and having my legacy carved in stone, and water. But that’s when I saw it. The metal demon with blazing eyes, and a roar like Tartarus itself. No oxen, horses, nor slaves were moving it, and yet its speed was just impossible. The impact lifted me up in the air, and then… darkness followed by that white void and the mysterious figure with perfect Ciceronian Latin telling me not to disappoint him, and that I better be entertaining. *** Now I stumble in this iron serpent's belly, trying to steady myself as it hisses and shudders around me. The sensation of movement is undeniable. By the gods... am I traveling inside this beast?

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