“I invented Time-Travel”

Time travel was a paradox wrapped in triumph, a machine built for a single use. Dr. Vale had not considered its consequences—only that he had invented it, only that he was now first.

He had no apprentices, no partners. He feared such companions. Those who could steal his legacy. Wealth insulated him from the leeches of academia, the scavengers of discovery. The machine was his alone, and he would die with its secrets.

His daughter, Mira, listened to his stories like they were fairy tales, spun in the hush of bedtime and candlelight. She memorized them, clutched them close..

And when she was grown, and her father had passed. She used the machine.

She went back—not far, just far enough to make herself a legend. Just far enough to invent time travel, as her father had.

“I invented Time-Travel,” she claimed.

And the praise followed.

But something was wrong.

At first, she thought it was an error, a mistake in calculation. She had gone to see her now un-late father. To glimpse at the man who had raised her from afar. His childhood home should be standing, what was once aged should now stand pristine. She should find traces of him in the town where he grew up, in the school where he graduated, in the echoes of a rare last name.

But there was nothing.

The house was gone. Not condemned, not abandoned—gone, no foundation was ever set. The street was different, unfamiliar. A family lived near where he should have been, but they had never heard of the Vales.

She searched the university where he had studied, certain she would find a record—an old photograph, a graduation announcement. She scoured libraries, newspapers, and primitive digital archives. But Elias Vale had never been enrolled.

She expanded her search, following the thread of their bloodline. Vale was an uncommon name, one that should have left some trace in the world. She dug through birth records, census data, and obituaries.

Nothing.

No long-lost relatives, no distant cousins. It was as if her lineage had been swallowed whole.

Mira stared at her reflection in the mirror of a nameless hotel room, breathing through the panic. 

The machine sat in the corner, silent and smug.

She could not undo what had been done. The only path was forward.

So she lived. She built an empire as her father had. She became a legend, just as he was.

But the absence never left her.

In the thick fog of old age, she whispered her guilt to her grandchildren.

“I think I erased him,” she murmured, breath rattling between pills. “I think it was me.”

The grandchildren exchanged glances. Time travel was hers alone now. She had destroyed the machine, ensuring no one else could follow.

Unless…

More medicine. More questions. More answers.

She told them how.

And so they built it.

And so they would claim “We invented Time-Travel”. 

And so they went back.

And so they arrived in a world without voices, without history, without time.

The past had been rewritten, rewritten, rewritten—until there was nothing left to write.

There was no one left to invent time travel.

There was no one left at all.

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