It began, as most things do, with a misplaced cog. Not a mechanical one, though the thought occasionally flitted through the nascent consciousness. No, this was a displacement of perception, a fracturing of the linear. Elias Thorne, a clockmaker of unremarkable talent and a profound melancholy, was attempting to repair a grandfather clock – a behemoth of dark oak and unsettlingly accurate mechanics. He’d been obsessed with time, with its relentless march, and the impossibility of truly controlling it. The clock, however, refused to synchronize. Its pendulum swung with a frantic, irregular beat, and the chimes sounded not as a comforting rhythm, but as a fractured lament. That night, during a particularly violent thunderstorm, Elias witnessed a shimmer in the air, a distortion of light, and a fleeting glimpse of…something else. He couldn’t quite grasp its form, but it felt profoundly ancient, intimately connected to the clock’s erratic rhythm. He began to record his observations in a series of meticulously detailed sketches and notes, filled with diagrams of impossible gears and notations on the “temporal dissonance” he experienced. He called it “The Fumble.”
“The clock doesn’t tell time. It *unwinds* it. And I… I’m caught in the threads.” - Elias Thorne (1902)
The Fumble, as it had become known (though Elias vehemently resisted the label), began to manifest in other locations, subtly at first. Delayed footsteps in crowded marketplaces, objects momentarily appearing in different places, the unsettling feeling of déjà vu intensified to an almost unbearable degree. Elias, now a recluse, had built a complex apparatus of brass, glass, and strangely resonant crystals, designed to amplify and record these temporal anomalies. He theorized that the Fumble was a tear in the fabric of reality, a doorway to… somewhere else. During the chaos of World War I, the Fumble became increasingly volatile. Reports surfaced of soldiers vanishing without a trace, of entire squads inexplicably displaced in time, appearing briefly in the trenches of the Somme before dissolving back into the present. Elias, driven by a desperate need to understand, built a device capable of directing the Fumble, attempting to stabilize the temporal distortions. He believed he could use it to prevent the war, but his efforts were tragically misdirected, amplifying the chaos instead of containing it.
“Control is an illusion. Time simply *happens*. And sometimes, it happens spectacularly.” - Elias Thorne (1938)
After the war, the Fumble remained, a persistent, low-level hum beneath the surface of reality. It became linked to significant historical events, not as a cause, but as an observer. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were accompanied by reports of temporal echoes – fleeting images of alternative timelines, of cities that never were, of faces lost to history. Elias, now an incredibly frail and enigmatic figure, continued his work, driven by a haunting sense of responsibility. He established a secluded research facility in the Scottish Highlands, populated by a small, devoted team of mathematicians, physicists, and… individuals who seemed to exist outside the normal constraints of time. The facility’s primary goal wasn’t to control the Fumble, but to *understand* it, to map its patterns, to anticipate its movements. It became increasingly apparent that the Fumble wasn’t a single entity, but a network, a vast, interconnected web of temporal anomalies. The research facility itself began to shift subtly, its layout changing inexplicably, rooms appearing and disappearing, corridors lengthening and shortening. It was becoming… part of the Fumble.
“We are not masters of time. We are merely… reflections.” - Dr. Alistair Finch (2012)