What we find may cost much more than we know.
📦🕰️🖼️📖
It was another evening of no social calls or friends for Albert Monterio — the introverted historian genuinely preferred archiving subjects for historical research.
Everyone had gone home to their families for the evening — all but him.
The archives were empty — and profoundly silent.
Too silent.
He combed the stoically silent shelves.
In the strange quiet there was a stack of photographs from the 1946 bombardment of Haiphong.
One photograph stood out.
A photo that disobeyed its own era.
An anomaly hiding among sepia images.
And a strange rustling that he shouldn’t have felt.
🔍📷🕵️♂️
Albert grabbed a magnifying glass and focused on the odd,
out-of-place mark.
Everything was in ruins.
Pieces of zinc roofing were scattered on the pavements.
Smoke billowed from surrounding debris.
Two soldiers lifted a seriously wounded comrade who was attempting to walk.
Amid it all stood a child, grasping an object that was out of place for its time — a modern smartphone.
Albert shook his head.
Probably some debris the kid picked up, he thought.
But the anomaly only sharpened —
on Logic’s defying path.
🖼️⌛🖌️
A second envelope fell from the archive bookshelf.
A similar photograph.
With him, fully present, in the frame.
The child’s device showed a timestamp — the present day’s date.
The photo shimmered, and tiny sketches appeared at the corners.
A temple he was familiar with — bombed.
A street, newly built, shattering in pieces.
Smoke billowing from the debris.
The young boy showed disaster.
Showed change.
⏳💀📱
And true to that, the photograph —
Changed.
The child’s gaze had shifted —
Through the screen.
Ever so slightly, staring Albert in the face.
And then —
His outline materialising where it should not have been.
Standing, motionless, beside the child’s.
With tomorrow’s date flashing on the screen’s right.
Albert hadn’t been merely observing history — he had become it.
🕰️💔📖
The child’s device showed a timestamp — today’s date.
The time — a minute into the future.
Albert lying slumped in his chair in the archive.
A smile etched on his face.
He had found what he had to.
And become what he had found.
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