—November 20, 2137, 10:05:29—

  The Chrono Loom chamber housed the same humming chorus of capacitors and cooling fans that he remembered. The edges were less worn. Scuff marks still marred the floor where technicians had dragged heavy equipment, and the diagnostic screens were framed by the faint yellow halos of aged electronics, but age had not worn into the Loom quite like the last time he saw it. To Adam, it felt like walking into a photograph of a place he once knew, the memory sharper than the reality.

  A woman sat on a high stool with her back to him, her posture straight as she studied the main console. Her hair was still jet black, pulled into a loose bun secured by a single, stick-like skewer. Even from across the room, he could see it wasn't as thick or as lustrous as it must have once been. As she turned, a flicker of pain crossed her features, a subtle wince as she stepped down from her stool. She was pretty, in a quiet, understated way, but her eyes held a weariness that went beyond fatigue, as if something inside her was slowly being chipped away.

  "Adam Walker," she said, her voice a low, pleasant alto. A warm smile spread across her face, reaching her eyes and softening the tired lines around them. "Dr. Maxwell said you'd be arriving right about now."

  "Dr. Li," Adam replied, his own voice feeling rough and inadequate in the calm hum of the lab. "He said I would be starting a new mission today."

  The smile tightened for just a fraction of a second, a subtle, almost imperceptible shift. "It's just Maxine, Adam. Please," she said, gesturing for him to come closer. "I never finished my PhD, so we get to stay on familiar terms together with the rest of the normal people around here." Her smile loosened again and he felt the warmth return in her eyes.

  He nodded, not knowing what to say to that. He crossed the room, the hum of the Loom vibrating through the soles of his boots.

  "Can I get you some water? Anything?" she asked with a disarming demeanor. "The first jump can be a little unnerving."

  "I'm alright, thank you. And I’ve been through that machine before, so I should be ok."

  "Of course." She leaned back against the console, her posture relaxed. "Dr. Maxwell filled me in. I'll be your point of contact on both sides of this jump. I'll enter the destination, and I'll be on the other side to greet you when you arrive. You'll receive further instructions from me when you get there."

  She turned to the console, her movements fluid and practiced. "This is the Loom's interface. It's not just a date and time, you know. We have to account for spatial drift, gravitational variance, even the local electromagnetic frequency. It's more of an art than a science, really." She tapped a few commands, and a three-dimensional chart bloomed in the air above the console. "The stabilization field keeps your atoms from... well, let's just say it keeps you from becoming a splash of cosmic paint."

  Adam's eyes scanned the complex equations scrolling across the display. This was the part he hadn't seen. "Dr. Maxwell just gave me a destination and a time," he said, his voice flat. "He didn't show me any of this. What do the calculations do? How do they keep it stable?"

  Maxine nodded, appreciating the precision of his question. "They find the path of least resistance through the temporal flow. Think of it like finding the calmest current in a turbulent river. The math tells the Loom where that current is. It minimizes the stress on the traveler. Without it, you'd be torn apart."

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  Adam pointed at the display. “What’s that listing right there?”

  “That’s what we call the temporal separation. We track it in microseconds. It’s just the time between now and wherever we’re sending you. Positive numbers are in the future. Negatives are in the past” She moved her finger to the next line. “This is the stream number. We call each fork in a timeline that branches out on its own a stream. We can only move you to the current timeline, what we call the nominal stream, or we can move you up a single stream or down a single stream.”

  Adam thought for a moment. Obviously he knew that there was some way Judith had found a way to break that rule. “I know my original timeline was more than one stream away from this one.”

  Maxine just closed her eyes and nodded. “I know.” She said, opened her eyes back up to stare into his. She let out a small laugh that indicated disbelief more than amusement. “And even though I understand how, it still makes my brain hurt to think about what allowed her to do that.”

  “She told me she has some sort of gift. But that it’s different from mine.” Adam confessed.

  Maxine shook her head. “I wouldn’t call it a gift. I’d use a much different word for it.” She trailed off, the smile slowly fading from her face. Catching herself, she refocused. “Are you ready to become a needle?”

  “A needle?” He asked, confused at the question.

  “Well, you’re about to start pulling the most impossible threads through space and time with this Loom.” Maxine winked at him. “It’s just what we call all of our fellow time-travelers.”

  He nodded, satisfied with that description of his mission and returned a smile toward her.

  "Good," she said.

  Maxine paused. Her professional demeanor softened back into simple curiosity. She leaned against the console, her arms crossed. "Can I ask you something, Adam? Dr. Maxwell told me where you're from. 2160. That's... a hell of a jump. I've seen agents train for years for leaps a fraction of that distance. How long did it take you to acclimate?"

  Adam looked at her, confused by the question. He answered matter-of-factly, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. "I didn't train at all."

  The warmth vanished from Maxine's face. Her smile froze, then died completely. She stared at him, her body rigid. The friendly, disarming woman was gone, replaced by a sharp, clinical analyst.

  "What do you mean, you didn't train?" Her voice was flat, stripped of its earlier warmth.

  "I... just didn't," Adam stammered, taken aback by her sudden shift. "Judith just told me to step through the Loom. So I just walked through."

  "Adam," she said, her voice now laced with a kind of urgent, professional dread. "Rapid neurological decay is the number one risk of any jump, let alone one that spans that distance. It's why we spend years on phased acclimation. A jump of that magnitude without it... it should have turned your brain to soup. You should be a vegetable."

  The word hung in the air, cold and clinical. A new kind of horror, sharp and immediate, pricked at Adam's skin. He felt a sudden, dizzying wave of vertigo. "My brain... what? I don't... I feel fine." He instinctively touched his head, as if he could feel the decay she was talking about, as if his skull might suddenly give way.

  Seeing the genuine panic in his eyes, Maxine's expression softened. The professional mask fell away, replaced by a look of profound sympathy. "Hey, hey. Look at me." She reached out and placed a gentle hand on his arm. "If you feel nothing, then you're fine. You're more than fine. It's just... in all my years, I've never seen anything like it. And I know very well what stepping through that machine does. I’ve done it many times, myself."

  He tried to steady his breathing, his heart hammering against his ribs. He grasped for the only piece of information he had, the only thing that made any sense. "Dr. Maxwell said..." he began, his voice shaky. "He said my special ability will allow me to save the world more times than I can know."

  Maxine looked at him, her gaze no longer one of simple pity. She saw him now—not as a lost young man, not as an asset, but as something else entirely. Something impossible. She slowly nodded her head, a look of dawning, almost terrifying understanding in her eyes.

  "He told us that you are the perfect needle. And now I know why.”