The Final Shift | $TIME Micro Story #36

This is $TIME micro story #36, a glimpse into the greater world of the epic story coin we are creating. Enjoy and if you like it, find out more about the project below.

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The air was thick, stinging and acrid. The Time Keeper stepped through the shimmering veil of time and into devastation. Her boots crunched on brittle ground, sending up plumes of fine gray dust that hung in the still air like ghosts. Around her, the world was ash and silence. Buildings lay shattered, their skeletal remains reaching skyward like broken fingers. Shadows burned into walls spoke of lives erased in an instant.

This wasn’t her destination. A scrambled jump had landed her here—a timeline she’d studied but never wanted to see. 2071. The war that should never have happened.

Her wristwatch blinked faintly, its charge low. There would only be enough energy for a single return. But her training whispered in her ear: Observe. Record. Leave.

She crouched, brushing ash away to reveal a scorched photograph half-melted into the ground. The faces were unrecognizable, but she could see the outlines of a family. The child’s stick-figure drawing beside it twisted her stomach. She didn’t cry—there wasn’t room for grief in her work. Instead, she felt the sharp pang of failure. A Keeper’s mission was to preserve the threads of history, but this moment had unraveled beyond repair.

She stood and inhaled deeply, the air searing her lungs like fire. It didn’t matter; she needed to breathe it all in—the weight of the tragedy, the enormity of the loss. The world deserved someone to witness what had been stolen. What she didn’t know, as the radiation wove its invisible fingers through her body, was how much of her it would take in return.

The wristwatch buzzed, warning her of its depleted charge. She tapped it and closed her eyes, allowing the world to twist and blur as she jumped.

Back in the sterile brightness of her outpost, she collapsed into a chair, her head spinning. Her fingers trembled as she reached for a cup of water, but it slipped from her grasp, shattering on the floor. A wave of nausea hit, and she stumbled to her knees, clutching her stomach.

She recognized the symptoms immediately—radiation poisoning. She’d read about it, seen it in the timelines she’d visited, but never imagined she’d bring it back with her.

Her training screamed for her to report, to upload her observations, to pass on the lessons of the failed timeline. But she didn’t move toward the console. Instead, she turned to the wristwatch on her arm. It glowed faintly, still operational, still capable of jumping. Her fingers hovered over its faceplate.

She could go back. Not to 2071, but further, to before the war. To the moment it all started. Maybe she couldn’t undo the poison in her veins, but she could ensure no one else suffered what she’d seen.

The thought steadied her hand. She set the coordinates, closed her eyes, and let the hum of the watch carry her away one last time.

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If this piqued your interest, come check out the project. Here’s why $TIME is worth your, well, time:

• MC-based chapter unlocks

• A token that ties into a story

• Community milestones with cool rewards

• Awesome art, including an upcoming NFT collection

• A team of 4 equal owners with publicly shared wallets and a profit-taking strategy that does not initiate until $10M MC (at which point we only unlock 1M tokens)

• An organic growth strategy. We do not like fake volume and “KOLs” with bot armies. We’re keeping it real and we’re looking for real investors

• A unique project TG bot that’s part of and grows with the story

Come chat with us if you’d like to know more! The ca will lead you to all our socials.

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