The Time Bender!

The first thing Angoh Gideon ever learned about the universe was that it did not care whether he understood it. The second thing he learned was that he could not stop trying. On a humid afternoon in Buea, under a sky swollen with the threat of rain, Gideon stood before a classroom of thirty-two restless undergraduates and drew a circle on a fading whiteboard. The board squeaked in protest. “So,” he said, adjusting his glasses, “if time is not linear—” A chair scraped loudly at the back. Someone laughed. A phone buzzed. Gideon paused, marker mid-air, and swallowed his irritation. He was twenty-seven years old. Slim. Slightly stooped from years bent over notebooks and secondhand textbooks. His beard was neither thick nor fashionable—just present, as if undecided whether to commit to adulthood. His glasses slid down his nose whenever he grew animated, which was often. He pushed them back up now. “If time is not linear,” he repeated, “then causality becomes… flexible.” Silence. Blank stares. A yawn. The private university had hired him because he worked cheaply. Because he had graduated top of his class from the University of Buea. Because he was brilliant, and brilliance is affordable when it comes wrapped in desperation. They had not hired him because they cared about theoretical physics. A hand rose lazily. “Sir,” a student asked, “is this going to be in the exam?” There it was. The ritual question. The ceiling of ambition. Gideon forced a small smile. “Understanding will always be in your life’s exam.” More laughter. He lowered the marker. The bell rang before he could recover the room. Chairs screeched as students rushed for the door. The air filled with chatter in English and Pidgin. “Sir too like complicated thing…” “Na why he no get job for abroad…” The door slammed. And Gideon stood alone. He stared at the circle on the board. The crude loop he had drawn to represent non-linear time. It stared back at him like an accusation. You think you can bend me? He capped the marker slowly. He knew what they thought of him. He was the lecturer who spoke too fast. Who scribbled equations nobody asked for. Who said words like “spacetime curvature” in a classroom where most students were only trying to pass. He did not blame them. But he could not shrink himself either. Outside, thunder rolled over Mount Cameroon like a distant drum. — By the time he reached home, the sky had broken open. Rain poured through the red-dust streets of their neighborhood, turning everything into slick clay and shining puddles. Motorbikes hissed past, splashing water onto his trousers. He did not notice. His mind was elsewhere—as always. What if the error was not in the equations, but in the assumptions about energy thresholds? What if localized gravitational distortions could be simulated not through astronomical mass but through rotational electromagnetic compression? He nearly walked into a parked taxi. “Ah-ah!” the driver shouted through the window. “Professor! You wan kill yourself?” Gideon blinked. “Sorry.” He hurried on. Their house stood modest and aging, its pale-yellow paint peeling in quiet surrender. A guava tree leaned over the compound wall like a watchful elder. His mother was in the kitchen when he entered. He could tell from the smell. Egusi soup thick with ground melon seeds and palm oil simmered on the stove. The scent wrapped around him like childhood. “Gideon?” she called without turning. “You are late.” “Rain.” “That rain has been there since morning.” He set his worn leather bag on the small wooden table. “I stayed after class.” “For what?” He did not answer immediately. She turned then, wiping her hands on her wrapper. Her face was soft with age and endurance. Her eyes held a quiet intelligence that did not require university degrees. “You stayed for what?” she asked again. “For the universe,” he said lightly. She frowned, but there was affection in it. “Did the universe pay you transport?” He smiled faintly. “No.” She stepped closer, studying him the way mothers do—beyond words. “You look tired.” “I’m fine.” “You are thinking too much again.” “That’s my job.” She touched his cheek. “No. Your job is teaching. The thinking one is what you do to yourself.” He almost laughed. If only she knew. His father’s cough echoed from the sitting room. Sharp. Irritated. “Is he back?” his father called. “Yes,” his mother answered. “Tell him to come here.” Gideon inhaled. He walked into the sitting room. His father sat on the old sofa, newspaper folded on his lap, glasses perched low on his nose. The television flickered silently in the background, showing a news report about fuel prices. “You are late,” his father said. “Yes, sir.” “You are always late.” Gideon remained standing. His father removed his glasses slowly. “I spoke to Pastor Nyambe today.” Gideon’s shoulders tightened. “He says there is a position in the secondary school near Mile 16. Physics teacher. Stable. Government salary.” “I already teach physics.” “You play with theories,” his father snapped. “You need stability.” Gideon kept his voice calm. “I’m working on something.” “Working on what?” Silence. His father’s gaze hardened. “You are twenty-seven. You still live in my house. Your mother cooks for you. You read books all night like some wizard. And you call that working?” The word wizard lingered unpleasantly. Gideon’s fingers curled slightly at his sides. “I am close to something important,” he said quietly. His father laughed without humor. “Important? Important is paying bills. Important is marriage. Important is building a house.” “I will.” “When?” His father leaned forward. “When time bends for you?” The room went still. Thunder cracked outside as if in response. Gideon met his father’s eyes. “Yes,” he said softly. “When time bends.” His father stared at him for a long moment. Then he shook his head and waved him away. “Go and eat.” — That night, long after his parents had slept, Gideon sat at the small desk in his bedroom. The room was cluttered but organized in its own logic. Notebooks stacked in careful towers. Printed research papers taped to the walls. A dismantled microwave sat on the floor beside coils of copper wire. In the corner, beneath a cloth cover, rested something larger. He stood and pulled the cloth away. Metal framework. Rotational rings. Cables. A cylindrical chamber just large enough for a man to stand inside. It was incomplete. Raw. Dangerous. It was beautiful. He ran his hand along the outer ring. “You are possible,” he whispered. His calculations were not fantasy. He had reworked established equations. Modified energy compression models. Used discarded components salvaged from scrap markets in Douala. Rewired transformers. Built a makeshift capacitor array from layered conductive plates. He had done what no one had asked him to do. He had tried. He opened a notebook and flipped to a page filled with tight handwriting. If temporal displacement required extreme energy density, then perhaps the trick was not increasing energy—but reducing the local resistance of spacetime. A door knock startled him. He covered the machine quickly. “Gideon?” It was his mother. He opened the door slightly. “Yes?” She studied his face. “You have not slept.” “I will.” She hesitated. “Sometimes,” she said softly, “God gives people heavy thoughts. But He does not give them so that they carry them alone.” He looked at her. “I’m not alone.” “You are.” The truth of it cut deeper than his father’s scolding. She touched his hand. “Sleep.” He nodded. She left. He did not sleep. — Three weeks later, the bunker was ready. It was not truly a bunker—more an abandoned colonial storage structure at the edge of a forest outside town. Concrete walls. Rusted door. Forgotten. He had spent months clearing it quietly. Transporting equipment in parts. Telling his parents he was tutoring extra classes. He stood outside it now at dusk. The forest breathed around him. Insects hummed. Leaves whispered secrets to the wind. He felt fear. Not of failure. Of success. If this worked— If even a fraction of his calculations were correct— He would no longer be a lecturer in a small classroom. He would no longer be a son living under his father’s disapproval. He would become something else entirely. He stepped inside. The door closed with a metallic groan. Inside, cables ran along the floor like roots searching for earth. Batteries hummed faintly. The machine stood at the center like an altar. He checked each connection methodically. Hands steady. Mind clear. Outside, the sky darkened. Storm clouds gathered as if summoned. He stepped into the cylindrical chamber. It was tighter than he remembered. He exhaled slowly. “If time is not linear,” he murmured, “then somewhere, sometime… I already survived this.” He activated the primary sequence. The rings began to rotate. Low at first. Then faster. Electricity crackled along the copper coils. The air thickened. Pressure built against his ears. Outside, lightning struck. The bunker trembled. The machine screamed as energy surged through circuits never meant to hold such strain. Gideon gripped the internal brace. “Please,” he whispered—not to God, not to physics, but to possibility itself. Light erupted. Not bright. Dense. Blue-white distortion folded inward. The world bent. The floor vanished. Sound imploded. And Angoh Gideon— Unemployed physicist. Disappointing son. Relentless dreamer. —fell through time. The forest outside the bunker burned with sudden silence. When the storm ended, the door hung open. Inside, the machine was twisted metal. Empty. And somewhere, centuries away— He landed.