The Man Who Left Yesterday
The Man Who Left Yesterday
Elliot Blake had never been
good at goodbyes. That’s why he built a time machine.💪
The first time he used it, he
only went back a day—just long enough to undo a regrettable conversation. Then
he went back a week, a month, a year. He tweaked, fixed, and mended until his
past was flawless. But the problem with perfection is that it never lasts.
One night, standing in the dim
glow of his machine’s control panel, Elliot realized he was afraid of the
future. No matter how many times he rewrote the past, the unknown still loomed
ahead, untouchable. So, he made a decision.
He would keep moving backward.😊
Elliot leaped past his
childhood, beyond his birth, further into history than any human should. The
machine hummed around him, vibrating with an eerie resonance as the years
peeled away in a blur.
At first, it was familiar—a
rewind of his life’s backdrop. Cities shrank, technology regressed, and cars
turned to horse-drawn carriages, and then vanished altogether. The voices of
history whispered around him, speeches unspoken, wars unfought, civilizations unravelling
like a frayed tapestry.
Faster.
The great skyscrapers of the
world crumbled, not in violent explosions, but as if they had never been. Glass
turned to sand, steel to ore buried deep beneath the Earth. Forests surged
forward like a tide, swallowing roads and ruins, reclaiming what had been taken
from them. The air grew fresher, untainted by industry, thick with the scent of
wildflowers and ancient earth.
Faster.
The oceans rose, not in
disaster, but in reversal. Bridges dissolved into the mist, harbours filled,
coastlines redrew themselves with patient inevitability. Islands sank back into
the embrace of the sea, their existence unwritten. The continents themselves
shifted, subtly at first, then violently as millennia unravelled at an
accelerating pace.
Faster.
Empires fell before they could
rise. The pyramids of Egypt deconstructed stone by stone, returning to the
hands of nameless labourers, only to be scattered back into the desert sands.
The Great Wall of China unspooled like a ribbon, bricks sinking into the earth.
Rome, Athens, Babylon—all reversed into whispers and dust.
Faster.
The stars moved in the sky,
celestial bodies shifting in patterns no human eye had seen in thousands of
years. Constellations twisted into unfamiliar shapes, the moon drifted further
away, then closer again. The North Star changed guard a dozen times. Then a
hundred. Then a thousand.
The night sky flickered and
pulsed, and for a moment, Elliot thought he saw something impossible—a deep,
unfathomable darkness beyond the universe he knew, an abyss untouched by time
itself.
Still, he pressed on.
Faster.
The first humans faded into
beasts. Villages turned to wilderness, fire returned to lightning and chance.
The last echoes of language dissolved into guttural sounds and then into
silence.
Faster.
Glaciers swelled and receded,
ice ages came and went in the blink of an eye. The great beasts of prehistory
roamed again—mammoths, sabre-toothed cats, creatures he had only seen in museum
exhibits. But even they did not last.
Faster.
The lush green of Earth turned
harsh and primeval. Swamps swallowed the land, then dried into deserts. Strange
and monstrous creatures dominated, towering reptiles that roared and hunted and
ruled. And then, in a blinding instant, a fireball streaked across the sky.
Elliot barely had time to
react before everything changed. The blast that had ended the reign of the
dinosaurs reversed itself—the smouldering crater unmade, the creatures
resurrected as if the disaster had never happened.
Faster.
Life itself became simpler,
stranger. He watched the world blur past its first crawling things, its oceans
thick with creatures too alien for human minds to comprehend. They receded into
microscopic nothingness, and then even further back—before cells, before DNA,
before the first stirring of life.
And then, nothing.
Elliot stood at the dawn of
time, staring into a void of unformed possibility. There was no Earth beneath
his feet, no stars in the sky, no past to retreat to. Elliot stood alone in a void of nothingness,
at the very beginning of time. He had outrun everything—the mistakes, the
regrets, even himself.
Just silence.😓
For the first time in his
life, he had nowhere left to go.😥
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