"Rule one," Kaelen said, leaning over my shoulder as I sat in the humming chair. "If it's a personal message—someone warning their past self to buy Bitcoin or avoid a car crash—let it through. The timeline corrects for greed and grief. It's the systemic ones we kill."
The golden thread sank into the present like a needle into silk. The world didn't explode. The timeline didn't shatter. But somewhere, in a lab that wouldn't be built for fifty years, a scientist had a dream about a fusion reactor that worked. A teenager in a bad home wrote a song so beautiful it would end two wars. A doctor, mid-surgery, suddenly knew where to cut. lightspeed agent filter
I hesitated.