This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/LiquidDongorong on 2026-08-05 02:50:58+00:00.

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We built the machine from scratch. Something that worked. A large rig which ran on time dilation, utilizing the controlled orbit of a miniaturized black hole. The only catch was that you could only go forward, never back.

When it came time for human testing, most of my colleagues turned their backs on the prospect. My family had estranged me years before. Whatever life I had led, it wouldn’t have meant anything if this machine didn’t work. So, I ended up being the first one to raise my hand. There was nothing left for me here.

Our plan was careful and calculated. Incrementally longer jumps through time. We would begin with minutes, then hours, and work our way up to days, weeks and years. Ava, my only friend throughout this years-long endeavor, would stay in contact with me between each jump. I would report to control, calibrate how I felt, how the experience was, etc. She would, in turn, report our findings to the necessary authorities while I underwent the next jump.

Earlier jumps went as predicted. I’d go in and out, usually within a few seconds or minutes, and find myself in the same coffee-stained office each time. I’d report to Ava, grab some snacks and a refill on my water, and head back into the pod minutes later for the next trial. There was definitely a tangible sense of dilation. I would go into the pod at 5 p.m., and coming out seemingly minutes later, it would be 6:30. Our initial calibrations seemed to be off by a few minutes, but it was nothing enough to lose sleep over. We’d just have to keep adjusting things as we went.

Our confidence was great enough at one point that we tried our longest jump yet—one week in the pod, which would translate to roughly two hours for me.

I was gone for a month.

Ava’s face had grown aged with worry by the time I got back. She told me that the calculations had been way off. Time inside the distorted field was stretching beyond what the initial models could account for. Each discrepancy was accelerating me through dramatically larger increments of time each time we booted up the machine. The next jump could be extremely dangerous for me.

I didn’t care. I told her to set the machine for one year. My life had already ended when my mother stopped speaking to me. I had to be remembered for something, maybe it would be this.

Ava fought with me for days. I reassured her that my calculations were correct this time. I couldn’t tell her the real truth, that I hadn’t planned on coming back.

As the pod doors closed, and the gravitational field engaged, I gave my goodbyes, treating them as though they really would be my last. Ava hugged me. It was the first time I’d felt one in ten years.

I waited in the pod. Sizable enough for long-time travel, with the accommodations you’d find in your standard RV. A bed, a small kitchen, a desk for work, and a refrigerator to store my meals. In the back, for those really long jaunts, a cryogenic life pod could sustain me for hundreds of years, theoretically.

Minutes turned to hours, turned to days, turned to weeks. Something had gone wrong, as I predicted. My food began to run low. So did my patience, as I recorded log after log, my sanity decreasing and my claustrophobia growing.

The ride did eventually come to a stop. The terminal inside the pod confirmed that I had been inside of it for over 200 years.

Everything, and everyone I knew was gone. I hate it, but I felt relieved, knowing that.

I stepped out of the pod, and found myself surrounded by rubble. The walls had collapsed. The scorched rooftop gave way to a grey sky. I could taste rust on the roof of my mouth, and my eyes stung from the ashes constantly falling around me. On the pod itself were deep gashes and fire-blackened spots, someone having tried to bust their way inside. There were no remnants around me of what the project was, where it had gone, if any progress had been made or any papers published. And even if there was evidence of what I had done, what did it matter now? So soon in the future, it appeared as though the world had been reduced to dust. My contempt for the world I left behind only strengthened.

For a few days, I explored the ruins, scavenging for what I could. A few cans of food that hadn’t spoiled, bottled water that didn’t taste clean. Every night, I returned to the safety of the pod, cooking myself meals on the somehow-functioning stove and filling my computer with increasingly bored logs. It was the only sense of structure I appeared to have left. Nothing else mattered anymore. Nothing but whatever waited ahead.

And I felt lonely. So, very lonely. Lonelier than I’d ever felt. I hadn’t realized how bad it could get, without a single person to talk to, even if those conversations were generally unpleasant for me.

I missed it. The imperfection of my life. I felt like a fool for taking advantage of my time.

After a few weeks, I sat down with my notebook, doing the math by hand. Calculating the time I was losing, the way the pod’s math didn’t line up with the outside world. The dilation was worse than any of us had even considered. If I was going to get anywhere, I decided I couldn’t do it alone. I was going to need help, help from whatever civilization rose from the ashes of these ruins.

I would need to jump much farther. So, I set the timer for ten years, knowing it would likely be more along the lines of ten thousand. I figured that someone would find me at some point, figure out how to stop the pod and get me out, and we would go from there.

The machine booted up. I felt the strong pull of g-force as the inner chambers accelerated my molecules faster and faster until the field of time distorted around me. I ate for a while. Read my own logs. Weighed my options. It took me until I ran out of the last can of peaches before I decided to enter the cryogenic chamber. Gas filled it, putting me to sleep, before a freezing cold overtook my body. It did not feel like I had been unconscious for even a second. I did not dream. I did not wonder. But I did wake up, much sooner than I expected.

When I woke, the chamber gave me a shrill warning. Power was low, an ambient red light surrounding me. I felt so weak. I could barely raise my arms to push against the glass. It wouldn’t give, the interface simply screaming another warning at me about low pressurization and oxygen integrity.

That’s when I noticed I wasn’t in the pod anymore. Surely the lights of the chamber would have shown me my surroundings, but there was nothing but blackness. No pod, no laboratory, no Earth in sight. All I could make out in the distance was the light of a few stars, long since dead, and quickly panning out of view. My chamber was spinning in the void of space.

I asked the chamber how long I was asleep. It told me “in excess of ten million years.” I panicked. It did nothing but make me more afraid. I screamed. It did nothing but waste precious oxygen.

Something moved in the dark, covering the illusory light of the distant stars. Only a faint curvature, a suggestion of shape. The form grew, with the patience of something beyond infinity. The curve became paler as it came into the faint light. It was covered in creases and dimples and the occasional freckle. The ridge of a brow came into focus. Then two, vast, still eyes, illuminated by the pinprick of light that was my chamber.

A face, the size of a planet, its scale wrong in a way that made my mind fray.

It drifted closer to me. I saw the texture of its skin, pores the size of lakes, scarring that stretched for miles. I could see now that it had a fixed grin on its face, as empty as its eyes. Yellowish plaque clung to the edges of its continent-sized teeth.

My body curled in on itself, though my movement was restricted by the tight confines of the chamber. I could feel the cold of space seeping through its vacuum seals. The face radiated nothing.

I begged it not to hurt me.

It didn’t blink, or twitch, continuing its slow momentum toward me until the face was all I could see. Its nostrils looked deep enough that no light could escape them. Each strand of peach fuzz reached out like sea anemone, nearly touching my pod.

I begged it to let me go home.

My voice cracked. Please, I would say, please let me go home. I repeated the words until they lost their meaning, until they become incoherent sounds in the dark. The face did not answer beyond parting its teeth, its jaws unhinging. I could feel my chamber moving, pulled into the abyss that was its gullet. It came at me, fleshy dark filling every direction until I was contained within a throbbing maw of blackness. I only caught a glimpse of the stars behind me before the mouth fully closed. The power to my chamber cut out right then and there.

I woke up in bed the next second.

The morning light edged through the curtains, burning my irises until I had the strength to look away. My phone buzzed on the nightstand. A message from Ava. When I went to pick it up, to check what she had sent, my heart stopped.

My hands were wrinkled. Spotted. The skin hung loose from my bones. I stood and stumbled to the bathroom mirror, upon thin legs that felt like they’d turn to dust with each step. When I looked at myself, all I saw was a man past his prime, aged beyond recognition, with stark white hair and a near-skeletal face.

I checked my text from Ava. She wondered where I was.

She said our first launch was in thirty minutes.