-14003 Parsec Error -

Negative distance.

The new date: 2143.08.01. 09:47.

Let me say that again.

I was the one who typed that number into the incident log. My fingers trembled then, and they tremble now, not from fear, but from the sheer, impossible poetry of it.

I am the remainder.

I have spent six months in this “past” – a past that is now our present. The constellations are wrong. Orion has a club that hasn't yet been chipped by a supernova. Earth’s radio shell is a thin, young whisper. I can tune in to broadcasts of the Korean War.

Forty-four years before we were born.

And I am the ghost of that mistake, drifting in a year where I have not yet been born, carrying a logbook that will not be written for another four decades.