by ShaneAllanCarlson
Synopsis In the year 2081, governments no longer rule. Corporations do. A handful of mega-corporations have merged governance, industry, and law into a seamless machine where efficiency is virtue and history is a resource to be exploited. Time travel exists, but only in one direction and only for corporate use. It is brutal, one-way, and carefully rationed. You are sent back to fix problems that threaten profit, stability, or control. You do not come home. Buck Payne knows this system intimately. He enforces it. An internal affairs agent for the corporate authority that regulates time travel, Buck is trained to investigate anomalies, root out dissent, and make sure the past stays useful to the present. When his questions get too sharp and his instincts too close to something powerful, the solution is simple. Exile him. Buck is shoved into the Corporate Temporal Accelerator and hurled into 1848 New York City, a violent, filthy, rapidly growing world of dock gangs, immigrant neighborhoods, and raw survival. Corporate time travel nearly breaks him. His body rebels. His mind fractures. He collapses in an alley and almost dies. That is when something wakes up. An AI buried in his skull since childhood reintroduces itself. So do the nanobots threaded through his body, dormant for decades, suddenly supercharged by the massive energy of the accelerator. The AI calls itself B.U.C.K., and it has been watching Buck’s entire life. Together, they discover something that should not be possible. Buck can move forward in time. Not through corporate machines, but by surging, a nanobot-driven form of temporal movement that follows the natural order of the universe rather than fighting it. Surges follow the Fibonacci sequence. Growth, rest, balance. Each jump forward requires time spent living, working, learning, and integrating into the era he occupies. Force it, and time pushes back. To survive, Buck must stop being a weapon and start being a person. He sharpens knives to earn coin. He invests carefully. He builds quiet wealth and quieter trust. He becomes part of an Irish immigrant community struggling under rising anti-immigrant violence, Protestant street gangs, and political movements that would rather blame the vulnerable than confront the powerful. He helps turn a boarding house into a thriving inn. He makes friends, enemies, and promises he knows he may not be able to keep. As Buck surges forward in careful increments, the world changes around him while he remains the same. The AI grows snarky and protective. The nanobots evolve. Artifacts from the future appear where they should not exist. Time itself seems to watch him more closely. Somewhere ahead lies the Technologia, a techno-religious movement obsessed with accelerating the singularity and enforcing the Continuance, a future where humanity is reshaped by an all-powerful intelligence. Buck has crossed paths with its shadow before, without understanding why. He will learn the truth. He will lose it again. And with every surge forward, Buck must choose between the clean certainty of systems and the messy, dangerous act of caring about people. Because in a world where corporations own time itself, the most radical act may be learning how to live inside it. Time doesn’t bend for Buck.It negotiates.
