Alex looked at the taxi still running backwards outside. He looked at his coffee, now safely back in the mug. Then he looked at the bridge project, his career, and the terrifying, beautiful power to rearrange the building blocks of cause and effect.
"What the…?" Alex whispered.
And somewhere in the cloud, a very confused Oracle licensing server flagged an anomaly: User accessed non-existent time-revision layer. Invoice generated: $0.00. Note: Reality does not accept refunds.
His screen flickered. The typical Windows interface dissolved into a deep, navy-blue terminal window. Text scrolled up in a monospaced font:
"Try it," said the machine. "But fair warning: the free version has pop-up ads. They manifest as minor paradoxes. You might find your left shoe on your right foot. Or your boss might suddenly remember a meeting you never attended."
He hadn't known. But the Gantt chart on his screen showed a red milestone labeled "PIER FAILURE" set for 3:17 PM next Thursday. Right next to it was a little icon: a padlock. And above the padlock, a single button that read: