Rain hammered the windshield as Daniel Reeves arrived at the Echo Rehabilitation Center. The facility sat on the edge of a forgotten forest, its stone façade streaked with moss, its windows dark and recessed like watching eyes. He was thirty-four, a former army medic discharged after a roadside IED left him with a fractured skull and a memory that bled at the edges.
He didn’t remember signing up for Echo. Didn’t remember the intake interview, the consent forms, or the drive here. But the man in the white coat—Dr. Malcolm Halden—spoke with the calm authority of someone who knew Daniel better than Daniel knew himself.
“You’re here to heal,” Halden said. “To remember. To reconcile.”
Daniel nodded, though the word reconcile felt like a threat.
They called it the Chamber.
A sensory deprivation tank modified with neural feedback loops and a cocktail of experimental drugs. Twice a week, Daniel was strapped in, injected with a serum called Virex, and submerged in the tank’s viscous fluid. The sessions were supposed to help him access repressed memories, to confront the trauma buried in his mind.
But Daniel didn’t just remember.
He traveled.
The first time it happened, he woke up in a hospital corridor lit by flickering fluorescents. The air smelled of antiseptic and something sour. A nurse passed him without seeing him. He followed her to a room labeled Reeves, Daniel – DNR. Inside, he saw himself—older, gaunt, dying.
The second time, he found himself in a city he didn’t recognize. The sky was bruised purple. People wore masks not for disease, but for identity. A girl named Claire grabbed his hand and whispered, “You came back. You said you would.”
Each trip lasted minutes. Each return left him gasping, convulsing, screaming.
Dr. Halden called them “hallucinations.”
Daniel knew better.
Claire appeared in every vision after that. Sometimes she was a child, sometimes a woman. Always with the same silver pendant around her neck—a spiral etched into obsidian.
She spoke in riddles, “You’re the echo, Daniel. The ripple. You’re not supposed to be here yet.”
He tried to ask her who she was, what she meant, but the visions collapsed before he could get answers. Back in the real world, he began sketching her face, the pendant, the city skyline he’d seen. The other patients mocked him. The orderlies sedated him.
Only one person believed him: a janitor named Marcus.
Marcus had worked at Echo for twenty years. He’d seen patients disappear, reappear, speak languages they’d never learned. He told Daniel about the original purpose of the Chamber—developed by DARPA to test temporal cognition in soldiers with PTSD. The project was shut down. Echo was its grave.
“You’re not crazy,” Marcus said. “You’re unstuck.”
Daniel began to piece it together.
The visions weren’t dreams. They were fragments of a future—his future. The city was called Novis. The war he’d fought in had escalated. The world had changed. And Claire… she was his daughter.
He remembered her birth in a flash of pain and light. Remembered holding her, naming her. But in the present, she didn’t exist. Not yet.
Dr. Halden found his sketches and confined him to isolation. No more Chamber. No more Virex.
But Daniel had learned to trigger the visions without it. Meditation. Sleep deprivation. Pain.
He bit down on his own wrist until the blood flowed. And then he was back.
Novis was burning.
Claire led him through the ruins, past soldiers in exosuits, drones scanning the rubble. She was older now—twenty, maybe. Her eyes were fierce.
“You left me,” she said. “You said you’d fix it. That Echo was the key.”
Daniel didn’t understand. “Fix what?”
She showed him a building—Echo, rebuilt as a research hub. Inside, a machine pulsed with light. The Chamber evolved. It was being used to manipulate time, to rewrite history. But each use fractured reality further. Daniel had been the first subject. The prototype.
“You’re the breach,” Claire said. “You’re the reason the timelines are collapsing.”
Back in the present, Daniel knew what he had to do.
He convinced Marcus to help him access the Chamber one last time. They broke into the lab at night, bypassing the security protocols. Daniel injected himself with a triple dose of Virex and submerged.
This time, he didn’t wake up in Novis.
He woke up in Echo, ten years earlier.
Dr. Halden was younger. The Chamber was still in development. Daniel watched himself—fresh from combat, broken, desperate—sign the intake forms.
He had minutes.
He found the server room. Found the files. Deleted everything. Smashed the drives. Set fire to the lab.
As the flames rose, he felt himself being pulled back.
Daniel woke in a hospital bed.
No restraints. No Chamber. No Echo.
A nurse entered, smiling. “You’re lucky, Mr. Reeves. The fire at the rehab center didn’t reach your wing. You’ve been unconscious for two days.”
He asked about Dr. Halden. She frowned. “Who?”
He asked about Marcus. She shook her head.
He asked about Claire.
She paused, “Your daughter? She’s waiting outside.”
Daniel sat up, heart pounding.
Claire entered. Eighteen. Silver pendant. Same eyes.
“You did it,” she whispered. “You closed the loop.”
He didn’t understand. Not fully. But he felt it—the fracture healing, the echo fading.
For the first time in years, Daniel Reeves was whole.
Bio:
L Christopher Hennessy lives in Coffs Harbour NSW, Australia, He is the author of poetry, short stories, and novels, and has been published since the 1990s. His writing covers many genres.