Page 1The Last Journey
Léa had always been fascinated by time. At twenty-six, the young physicist spent her days and nights building a machine that could travel into the past. She wanted to repair humanity’s mistakes, stop wars, and prevent the catastrophes that threatened the planet.
After three years of work, her invention was finally ready.
In her underground laboratory, cables covered the walls and blue lights lit the immense metal machine. At its center, a ring several meters across hummed with a low rumble.
Léa placed her fingers on the keyboard.
“If I can stop the catastrophe, no matter when… it’s worth the risk.”
She had found a strange date in old weather reports: August 12, 2012. On that day, an unexplained event had caused a worldwide magnetic anomaly. Thousands of people had vanished for a few seconds, while electronic devices all over the planet had shut off at the same moment.
No one had ever understood why.
Léa entered the date and pressed the button.
A white light flooded the room. The air turned freezing. The walls shook as if the building were about to collapse.
Then she heard a sound.
A whisper, just behind her.
“You should never have done this…”
Léa spun around. There was no one there.
The machine lit up again and a whirlwind of light swept her away.
Her journey had begun.
Page 2The World Falls Apart
When Léa opened her eyes, she was lying on a sidewalk covered in ashes.
The sky was blood red.
The buildings rose as black silhouettes, gutted by explosions. Cars burned in the middle of deserted streets. In the distance, sirens wailed, then cut off abruptly, replaced by an almost unearthly silence.
Léa struggled to her feet.
“Where am I?”
She checked her time bracelet. The date it showed was indeed August 12, 2012.
And yet the city looked like a world after the end of all civilization.
A rumble sounded beneath her feet.
In a nearby street, a silhouette moved through the smoke. Then a second. Then a dozen.
They were too tall to be human. Their abnormally long limbs bent in impossible directions. Their faces were nothing but pale surfaces, with no eyes and no mouth. And yet Léa could feel them looking at her.
She backed away.
One of the creatures slowly turned its head toward her.
A piercing scream tore through the air.
All of them began to run.
Léa darted between the abandoned cars. Behind her, the creatures leaped onto the facades and crawled across the rooftops. Their claws scraped the concrete with an unbearable racket.
She took refuge in a subway station and pulled a rusty gate shut.
The footsteps stopped on the other side.
Then a voice echoed in the darkness.
“Léa…”
She froze.
The voice was coming from the tunnel.
“Léa, you’ve finally arrived.”
A human figure appeared at the end of the platform.
And when it raised its head, Léa felt her blood run cold: the stranger had exactly her face.
Page 3The Truth
The man approached slowly. He wore a torn coat, and his face was marked with deep scars. His dark-ringed eyes seemed to have crossed centuries of suffering.
“Who are you?” Léa asked.
“I’m you. Well… a version of you.”
She shook her head.
“That’s impossible.”
“You built the machine to save the world. But you never understood what it was really doing.”
The man explained that time travel did more than carry you across eras. Every jump weakened the boundaries between different realities. By trying to change the past, Léa had torn open a breach between several timelines.
The creatures ravaging the Earth had come from that torn space.
And they were not the only ones to have crossed through it.
“For years,” said her double, “I’ve been trying to close the breach. But with every attempt, the world starts over. The same catastrophe, the same deaths, the same screams. An endless loop.”
“Then why not destroy the machine?”
Her double lowered his eyes.
“Because it has become the only link between realities. If you destroy it at the wrong moment, everything that exists will vanish with it.”
A rumble shook the walls of the subway.
Shadows pressed against the glass.
The man grabbed Léa by the arm.
“Listen to me carefully. The breach will open completely at midnight. You have to go back to the exact moment where it all began.”
“And if I fail?”
He stared at her for a long time.
“Then there will be no one left to remember that the world ever existed.”
Suddenly, a howl echoed through the tunnel. A creature burst out of the darkness and lunged at them.
Léa’s double pushed her behind him.
“RUN!”
They plunged into the corridors as the lights burst one by one above their heads.
Page 4The Choice
Léa found her machine in the ruins of an old laboratory, a few miles from the subway station. Her double had guided her there, but he had vanished during their flight, taken by the creatures.
She was alone now.
The bracelet read 11:47 p.m.
Thirteen minutes before the breach opened completely.
She activated the controls. The screen crackled, then displayed a succession of impossible dates: years that did not yet exist, centuries already erased, realities where Earth had never harbored life.
Among all this data, one message was flashing:
ORIGIN OF ANOMALY: AUGUST 12, 2012, 12:00 A.M.
Léa finally understood.
She had not created the catastrophe by traveling into the past. The catastrophe was already underway. Her arrival had simply accelerated a phenomenon that otherwise might have stayed invisible for years.
She could still close the breach.
But she would have to destroy the heart of the machine from inside the time vortex. She would have only one chance, and no way of knowing whether she would survive.
A silhouette appeared at the entrance of the laboratory.
Her double.
Or what was left of him.
His skin had turned gray, and glowing cracks ran across his face.
“Don’t do this,” he murmured. “I’ve tried thousands of times. We’re doomed.”
Fear overtook Léa. Part of her wanted to run, to give up, to hide until everything stopped.
But she thought of the people who had never had the chance to choose. Of the children who would grow up in this world of ashes. Of everyone who had never even understood what was happening to them.
She looked at her double.
“Maybe you’ve tried thousands of times. But for me, this is the first.”
She started the countdown and stepped into the glowing ring.
The world tore apart.
Images flickered past her: drowned cities, black oceans, faces screaming into the void. The creatures appeared by the hundreds, suspended in space like insects caught in a web.
At the center of the vortex, Léa saw a black sphere beating like a heart.
She reached for the safety mechanism.
A voice, like her own, echoed in her head:
“If you destroy this, you will forget everything.”
She hesitated for one last second.
Then she pressed.
An immense light exploded in the vortex.
The creatures let out a collective cry, so powerful that Léa felt her very soul might shatter. The timelines closed one after another. The red sky disappeared. The buildings rebuilt themselves with a deafening roar.
And suddenly, there was nothing.
Page 5A New Beginning
Léa woke on the cold floor of her laboratory.
The silence was total.
The machine was gone. In its place remained only a few pieces of blackened metal and melted cables.
She sat up, trembling, then checked her phone.
August 12, 2012. 12:03 a.m.
She had done it.
Through the window, the city slept under a starry sky. No siren wailed. No fire ravaged the streets. People went on with their lives, never knowing they had come within a breath of annihilation.
Léa began to cry.
She did not remember everything. The things she had lived through came back as fragments of a nightmare: silhouettes in the smoke, ruined cities, a familiar voice ordering her to run.
But she knew something had changed.
Days passed. Then weeks.
Léa gave up her research on time travel. She devoted her intelligence to more modest projects: climate warning systems, clean technologies, and devices that could protect people from natural disasters.
She could not repair all of humanity’s mistakes.
But she could help prevent the next ones.
One evening, as she was leaving her laboratory, she noticed a small envelope slipped under her door.
No name. No address.
Inside was a photograph.
It showed Léa, standing before a sunset, in the middle of a city in ruins. Beside her stood her double, the one she had met in the future.
On the back, a sentence was written in black ink:
“Thank you for choosing to live.”
Léa turned the photograph over. A date was written in one corner: August 12, 2042.
A shiver ran down her spine.
Had her double survived? Did another reality still exist? Or was this photograph only the last remnant of an erased world?
She might never know.
She raised her eyes to the sky. The horizon was blazing in shades of orange, and the first stars were appearing above the rooftops.
For the first time in a long while, she smiled.
The future was no longer a prison. It was a promise.
And even if the past kept its secrets, she had understood one essential thing: you must not destroy yesterday to save tomorrow. You have to find the courage to build a different world today.
Léa slipped the photograph into her pocket and walked off into the evening light.
Behind her, deep in the abandoned laboratory, a tiny blue light blinked once.
Then it went out.
The End.