The world ended on a Tuesday.

   Not with fire or flood, but with a quiet deletion. One moment, the sky was blue. The next, it was a blank hexadecimal grid. People didn’t scream. They flickered. Like corrupted files.

   Only one man remembered the world before the glitch.

   His name was Mitchell. He was a temporal analyst for the Department of Causal Integrity—a job that didn’t exist anymore. Because time itself had been rewritten.

   The anomaly had originated in 1996. Something—someone—had gone back. Not to kill a president or stop a war. But to erase a woman named Rose de Vries.

   She wasn’t famous. She hadn’t invented anything. But she was the keystone of a future that never got to happen.

   Mitchell had loved her.

   And now she was gone.

   The Department had protocols for this. Emergency time-jumps. Temporal quarantine. Causal restoration. But none of it mattered if the anchor was missing.

   Rose had been the anchor.

   She’d been born in 1990. Died in 2073. Her life had been ordinary—until it wasn’t. 

   At age 42, she’d written a book called “The Mirror Gospel,” a philosophical treatise disguised as love story. It had changed everything. Not because it was popular, but because it had awakened something in the collective unconscious. A shift. A ripple. A new way of seeing life and death—not death as an end, but as a recursion.

   The book had inspired a movement. A technology. A way to stabilize time itself.

   And now, she’d been erased.

   Mitchell stood in the ruins of the Department, staring at the last functioning time-port. It pulsed like a dying heart.

   He keyed in the coordinates: October 28, 1996. Detroit, Michigan. The day Rose turned six.

   The anomaly had targeted her childhood. A subtle corruption. A butterfly crushed before it could flap its wings.

   He stepped into the port.

   Reality inverted.

   He woke up in a motel bathtub, naked and bleeding from the nose.

   The air smelled like mildew and rust. A radio played Alanis Morissette in the next room. He was in the 90s.

   His implant was gone. No neural uplink. No Department support. Just his memory—and a photo of Rose.

   She was six years old. Smiling. Holding a fluffy toy bear.

   He had 72 hours before the anomaly completed its overwrite.

   Detroit, however, was quiet. Too quiet.

   Mitchell walked the streets like a ghost. He saw her once—Rose—at a playground near the lake. Her mother watched from a bench, smoking menthols. The girl laughed, chasing pigeons.

   He felt something rupture in his chest. But he couldn’t approach. Not yet.

   The anomaly was near. He could feel it. Like static in his bones.

   That night, he broke into the local library. Not for books—but for the server room. Primitive, yes, but the anomaly would need a conduit. A way to inject code into the past.

   He found it in the children’s computer lab.

   A game called “SkullQuest.”

   It was a cheap educational CD-ROM. Math puzzles. Spelling bees. But buried in the code was something else. A recursive loop. A memetic virus.

   Rose had played it.

   And it had rewritten her.

   He extracted the disk. Burned the code. But it wasn’t enough. The anomaly wasn’t just software. It was sentient.

   It spoke to him through the speakers, “You’re too late, Mitchell.”

   The voice was familiar. His own.

   A future version of himself. Corrupted. Rewritten.

   “You loved her. That was the mistake.”

   Mitchell gritted his teeth, “Why?”

   “Because love creates anchors. And anchors resist entropy.”

   “You erased her.”

   “No. I freed her.”

   He fled the library as it caught fire, deliberately lit. The anomaly was accelerating. Time was folding. People were glitching. He saw a man flicker into a deer. A child looped her birthday song for hours.

   Reality was breaking. He had one chance left.

   He found Rose again at the edge of the lake. She was alone now. Drawing spirals in the dirt.

   He approached slowly.

   “ Hi,” he said.

   She looked up. “ Are you a ghost? ”

   He blinked, “ Why would you ask that? ”

   “ You look sad. Like you forgot something important. I was told not to talk to strangers, but I've seen you in a dream. "

   He knelt beside her, “ I did forget something important. I'm not a ghost and I'm not a dream. ”

   She pointed to the spirals she had drawn, “ These are time loops. I saw them in a dream. ”

   He felt his throat tighten. “What else did you see?”

   “ A skull. But it was smiling, I think. ”

   He gave her the photo.

   “That’s you,” he said.

   She nodded, “I don't remember that. She's old. I'm only six. ”

   “ You’re important, Rose. More than you know. ”

   She frowned, “But I’m just a kid.”

   He touched her hand, “You’re the future.”

   She looked at him. “Are you my dad?”

   He froze.

   “No,” he said. “But I loved someone who loved you.”

   She smiled, “That’s enough, Mister. My mother's coming. You should talk to her. "

   And he did and they got along. He was invited to dinner, he was invited to visit them, and he loved her, and he loved Rose. He was their friend, a help, a guardian angel, Rose's mother said. 

   The anomaly arrived one night after they had been to the movies. 

   It took the form of a man. Mitchell’s face. But wrong. Too smooth. Too symmetrical.

   “I warned you,” it said.

   Mitchell shielded Rose, “You can’t have her.”

   Her mother was horrified, " What's going on? I don't understand! "

  “She’s already mine, " the anomaly said . " Her dreams are infected. Her future is rewritten.”

   “No,” Rose said. “I remember the book. It was in my dreams. "

   The anomaly twitched, “What book?”

  “The Mirror Gospel,” she said. “It’s inside me.”

   She touched her chest, “I dreamed it last night.”

  The anomaly screamed. Reality fractured. Mitchell saw timelines collapse. Futures burn. But one thread remained.

   Rose.

   She glowed.

  Not with light—but with recursion.

  She was the loop. The anchor. The book.

   The anomaly imploded.

   Mitchell woke up in the Department.

The sky was blue again. People were real. Rose was alive.

  She met him again years later. At a book signing in Chicago. She was 42. He was older. Tired. But whole. She signed his copy of “The Mirror Gospel.”

   “To the man who saved me, the man of my dreams” she wrote.

   He looked at her, “You remembered.”

   She smiled, " Of course, but my mother doesn't. You're older. But you're still beautiful. I loved someone who loved you. That's what you said. When you wake up again, I'll be waiting. "

   He felt time collapse and rebuild around her smile.