Excerpt

The forest hummed faintly in the background—wind in the trees, insects droning—but to me it was nothing more than white noise. My real symphony was in the fizz, crackle, and hiss of chemicals reacting in my flask.

“Alright,” I muttered, rolling my sleeves to the elbow, thin wrists stained from a dozen test runs. “Two hundred billion percent sure this formula holds. Distilled nitric acid… balanced with alcohol… ratio at 7:3. Any less and we get inert sludge. Any more and it’s kaboom city.”

A sharp grin tugged at my lips as I swirled the concoction, watching it froth with just the right violence. This was it—the key that could chip away the Stone Age and hand it back to me in flesh and blood.

I crouched by the statue, another frozen human trapped mid-breath. Face slack, hands frozen at the sides. Every one of them carried a whole world of memories sealed behind that stone. Every one of them was a gamble.

“Science doesn’t do miracles,” I reminded the silence, my voice cutting the air. “It’s cause and effect, proof and result. If this doesn’t work, I’ll tweak it. If it does, we drag another human back from a thousand-year nap.”

I tipped the flask. The liquid kissed the cracks in the stone with a hiss, creeping like veins of lightning. Steam curled upward, sharp and metallic, pricking my nose. I leaned in, eyes sharp, heart steady.

Cracks spidered. Stone hissed and flaked away. Fingers twitched. Toes broke free. Then—skin. Pale, bare, vulnerable.

I didn’t flinch. Didn’t glance away. Nudity? Please. After a few millennia, modesty ranks dead last on the scale of human priorities. What mattered was the heartbeat. The lungs pulling air. The eyes opening.

And there it was—the gasp, ragged and desperate, like a drowning soul breaking the surface. My grin widened.

“Bingo. Another one back in the land of the living. Works a hundred percent of the time when you’ve got the formula nailed.” I wiped my hands on my trousers, already calculating yield, dosage, future trials. “Alright, you’re awake. Congratulations—you just joined the Kingdom of Science.”

Only then did I finally meet her eyes, alive now, bewildered. The human result of my experiment.

“…You.” My voice came steady, matter-of-fact. “Welcome back to the future.”