Neon rain slicked the streets of Los Angeles, 2099. The city pulsed with synthetic life—holo-ads flickering across broken skyscrapers, drones humming like insects, and the scent of ozone and decay hanging in the air like a memory no one could place.

   Detective Jared Kross lit a cigarette with a trembling hand. He hadn’t slept in three days. Not since the bombing at the ChronoRail station. 

   Forty-seven dead. Hundreds injured. The blast had ruptured the temporal conduit, scattering fragments of time across the city. Some victims aged into dust. Others reverted to infancy. One man was caught mid-scream for eternity, his mouth open in a silent loop.

   The bomber had vanished. No trace. No motive. No demands. Just a signature: a symbol etched into the blast radius—a Mobius strip wrapped around an eye.

   Kross had seen it before. Not in this timeline. In another.

   The Bureau of Temporal Integrity had protocols for this. 

   Kross was one of the few licensed to investigate across time threads. He wore a chrono-shunt embedded in his spine, a black-market mod that let him slip forward or backward through time. Usually illegal, but effective.

   He stood in the ruins of the station, scanning the debris with his neural lens. The symbol pulsed faintly, as if alive. He reached out. Touched it.

   The world inverted.

   He was standing in the same station. But it was pristine. No damage. No bodies. A child laughed nearby. A train whooshed past.

   Kross blinked. Checked his chrono-shunt. He’d jumped back exactly 72 hours.

   The bombing hadn’t happened yet.

   He had three days to stop it.

   The Bureau assigned him a handler—Agent Vivienne Ross, cold as cryo-steel and twice as sharp. She didn’t trust him. Few did. Kross’s record was stained with anomalies. Cases that ended in paradox. Witnesses who vanished. A partner who aged backwards and forgot him.

   They reviewed footage. Interviewed temporal refugees. Ran simulations.

   One name kept surfacing: Sygil

   No other name. Just Sygil.

   A ghost in the system. No birth record. No biometric trace. But he appeared in every timeline where the bombing occurred. Always near the blast. Always watching.

   Kross stared at the grainy footage. Sygil wore a hood. His face obscured. But something about him felt… familiar.

   He tracked Sygil through the undercity—where time was cheap and reality bent like plastic. He bribed a chrono-hacker named Amos to access forbidden threads.

   “You’re chasing a paradox,” Amos warned. “Sygil isn’t a man. He’s a recursion. A loop that thinks it’s human.”

   Kross didn’t care. He needed answers.

   He found Sygil in a derelict chapel, praying to a god that no longer existed. The symbol was carved into the altar.

   Kross drew his weapon, “You’re the one I'm after. Stay where you are!”

   Sygil turned. His face was Kross’s face. Older. Scarred. Eyes like broken glass.

   “I’m you,” Sygil said. “From the end.”

   Kross staggered back, “No! That’s impossible.”

   Sygil smiled, “You think time is linear. It’s not. It’s recursive. Every choice you make echoes forward and back. I tried to stop the bombing. I failed. So I became it.”

   “Why?”

   “To break the loop.”

   Sygil pressed a device into Kross’s hand. A chrono-bomb. Compact. Elegant. Designed to rupture causality itself.

   “You’ll try to destroy it,” Sygil said. “You’ll fail. You’ll become me. Unless…”

   “Unless what?”

   “Unless you detonate it before the bombing. Before the loop begins. Kill the thread. Kill yourself.”

   Kross returned to the present. The station loomed. The symbol pulsed.

   He had minutes.

   Vivienne Ross dialled him in, “We found Sygil. He’s heading to the station.”

   Kross ignored her.

   He stood in the center of the platform. Held the chrono-bomb. His hands shook.

   If Sygil was telling the truth, detonating now would erase the loop. Erase him, but save everyone. If he was lying, it would cause the bombing. Make him the terrorist.

   He saw the child again. Laughing. Innocent. He pressed the trigger.

   Neon rain slicked the streets Los Angeles, 2099. The city pulsed.

   Detective Jared Kross lit a cigarette. He hadn’t slept in three days.

   There had been no bombing. No Sygil. No symbol.

   But sometimes, in dreams, he saw a man with his face. Praying in a chapel, holding a bomb.

   And he wondered—Had he stopped the loop?

   Or become it?