The first time I ran into myself, I was sat in a Camden café with bad tea, worse lighting, and the kind of smell that said bacon had been burned there every morning since the Thatcher years. My marriage had just collapsed like a cheap garden chair, and I was pretending not to notice.
The second time? Ten minutes later. Same café. Same table. But that time, I was the one doing the walking in.
Time doesn’t move straight. It loops. Stalls. Doubles back like it’s lost. And sometimes, you find yourself sitting across from a version of you that remembers things you haven’t done yet.
“You look rough,” I told myself.
“You’re not exactly brochure-ready,” I replied, easing into the seat opposite with a soft wince and a faint limp I didn’t yet recognise.
The older me looked worn at the edges—voice slower, more clipped. Like memory had weight.
Meeting yourself breaks six protocols. I’d stopped caring by jump eight. Or nine. The numbers get blurry after you’ve stepped outside them too many times.
“They’ll catch you,” he muttered, folding a sugar packet with more force than necessary.
“They already have.”
He looked up. Same face, less wear. “What do you mean?”
I tapped my timepiece on the table—silver, scratched, its crest long faded to a whisper.
“In fifteen minutes, Agent Fletcher walks in. She’ll give you a choice: come with her, or get erased.”
“For what?”
“This conversation. That crystal in my pocket. Carrying too much memory.”
“I haven’t done anything.”
“Not yet. But you will.”
He frowned. “Why would I?”
“Because the Agency lied. And because of Sarah.”
His breath caught. That flicker behind his eyes—I remembered that too well.
“You know where she is?”
“I know what happened.”
I slid the crystal across. Smooth, iridescent. Faintly pulsing.
“Three weeks from now—your timeline—you’ll learn the truth. The Agency doesn’t preserve time. It harvests it.”
He blinked. “Harvests what?”
“Unrealised futures. Branches of possibility. They extract the energy and erase the rest. It powers their Ark—a single, stable timeline, polished and pruned.”
“That’s survival?”
“That’s control.”
He touched the crystal, hesitant. “You tried to stop them?”
“Six times.”
“And failed?”
“Catastrophically.”
He swallowed. “So what now?”
“You’re going to loop it. Create a recursive broadcast through all strands. Something they can’t isolate or sever.”
He narrowed his eyes. “Why me?”
“Because I’m giving you everything.”
I reached across. Skin to skin. The air thickened—wrong, dense. The café shimmered like a memory about to slip.
“What was that?” he said, eyes widening.
“Resonance. We’re tuned. That’s why they picked us—not just to jump, but to shape things.”
A shiver ran through him.
The transfer began.
The Archive fire. The siphon in the Arctic. The Neolithic node—sabotaged, crumbling, but almost enough. Each failure carved deeper. And Sarah. Always Sarah.
He jerked, face pale, breathing shallow.
“I feel like I’ve lived years in a second.”
“You have.”
Then, quietly, “Sarah didn’t leave because she stopped loving you. She found out. Tried to stop them. They dissolved her thread. That hole in your chest? That’s not heartbreak. It’s absence from time.”
He gripped the edge of the table.
“Is she alive?”
“She’s displaced. Off-strand. But if you succeed, she comes back.”
The bell jingled. A student walked in. Not yet Fletcher.
“I’ve done this six times. They always catch the signal.”
He looked at the timepiece. “What’s different now?”
“You. I’ve changed the inputs. You’ve got what I didn’t.”
He studied me.
“They’ll come after me.”
“They always do. That’s how you know it matters.”
He hesitated. “They erase people?”
“They start with the memories. Faces go first. Then your own name. Then you’re just air.”
He went still.
“They think memory is fragile,” I said. “But it’s what we cling to when everything else is rewritten.”
A pause. Then: “The timepiece. Modified?”
“Broadcast-enabled. Resonance-amplified. It uses our imprint—rebounds across every loop.”
The bell jingled again.
Agent Fletcher entered—coat damp, expression tight. She scanned the café. Paused.
“You’ve got seconds,” I said, standing. “When you see Sarah—tell her I’m sorry it took so long.”
He nodded, jaw clenched.
I hit recall.

WHITEHALL – TIME REGULATION AUTHORITY
“Sir, recursive loop in Sector Seven,” a tech said. “Agent Reid. Twice. Same ID.”
Director Holloway entered, stiff-backed. “Confirmed?”
“All Ark nodes linked. Broadcast via resonance loop.”
The timeline display pulsed, folding and twisting like metal under pressure.
“He’s not collapsing it,” Holloway murmured. “He’s making it remember.”
His hands trembled—barely—as the ripple spread.
Outside, the sky fractured like slow lightning—threads of colour unwinding across collapsed time.
And in the Ark’s deepest core, a lock began to unclick.

Camden, again.
Same café. Same table. But quieter now. Brighter. The fridge hum gone. The tea? Hot. Almost good.
The bell jingled.
Sarah walked in.
Not an echo. Not a trick.
Her.
She smiled. Sat across from me. The small gold bracelet I’d given her on our third date caught the light—the one I thought had been erased with her.
“Sorry I’m late,” she said.
I took her hand. “It’s alright. I’ve got time.”
Her thumb tapped mine—three times. That old habit when she was thinking. I’d forgotten until now. And the memory hit—full force, folding everything inward.
She leaned in, eyes kind. “Did you ever fix the leaky tap?”
I laughed—choked on it, really. That tap had dripped through three timelines. And now, suddenly, it mattered again.
“Yeah,” I said. “Finally did.”
The scent of lavender from her coat. The clink of mugs. The hush of rain fading outside. And something I hadn’t felt in years—a future that belonged to me.
She squeezed my hand.
“You’ve got the look of someone who’s walked through a thousand places,” she said.
“Maybe more,” I replied.
She smiled again.
And I remembered what Eliott wrote—“Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future.”
Maybe time doesn’t forgive.
But sometimes… it remembers you back.