Dr. Aris Thorne sat in the sub-basement of the Beacon Hill Athenæum in Boston, the air conditioner humming its monotonous, artificial breath. In front of him lay the Codex Aeterna, a vellum manuscript theoretically dated to 850 AD, smelling of centuries-old mold and the faint, coppery scent of iron-gall ink.
Aris was a chronological forensic analyst. In the academic world, that meant he was the guy museums called when they suspected a donor had bought a forgery. In the real world, it meant he was a glorified accountant of time.
He adjusted his spectacles, magnifying the marginalia on page 204. The monk who had written this, a Benedictine named Brother Thomas, had been meticulous. He had recorded the daily prayers, the grain yields, and the weather.
And on this specific page, Brother Thomas had described a solar eclipse.
“The sun was swallowed by the wolf at mid-day, turning the fields to twilight, on the Feast of St. Jude, in the year of our Lord 852.”
Aris frowned. He turned to his laptop, opening a piece of software called StarMap Pro, used by NASA and astrophysicists to retro-calculate planetary positions. He punched in the date: October 28th, 852 AD. Location: Northern France.
The simulation loaded.
On the screen, the sun was shining bright. No wolf. No twilight. There wasn’t even a partial eclipse recorded in Europe for that entire decade.
“Strange,” Aris muttered. He widened the search parameters. He scrolled back, year by year, looking for a match to the monk’s description.
He found it.
The exact total eclipse Brother Thomas described—the path of totality, the time of day, the season—had occurred.
In 534 AD.
Aris sat back, the leather of his chair creaking. A three-hundred-year gap.
He knew the “Phantom Time Hypothesis.” It was a fringe theory, the kind of thing Reddit conspiracy boards loved. The idea was that the Holy Roman Emperor Otto III, in collusion with Pope Sylvester II, had fabricated the years 614 to 911 AD. They wanted to rule during the spiritual milestone of the year 1000, so they simply invented three centuries of history, inserting “Charlemagne” as a fictional backstory to legitimize their reign.
Aris had always dismissed it as pseudo-history. But here was the Codex Aeterna, a document carbon-dated to the 13th century (a copy of an older text), recording an astronomical event that happened three centuries before the date written on the page.
The math didn’t lie. Stars didn’t have political agendas.
He reached for his phone to call Sarah, his contact at the Harvard Observatory, but stopped.
His calendar app on the phone screen read: Monday, February 2, 2026.
A cold shiver, completely unrelated to the air conditioning, slid down his spine. If three hundred years had been inserted… then it wasn’t 2026.
It was 1729.
The implications were nauseating. It meant the architecture of human history was a Jenga tower with the middle blocks missing.
The next morning, the world looked different to Aris. He walked through the Boston Common, watching tourists take selfies by the statues. He felt a sense of vertigo. He was walking through a simulation—not a digital one, but a narrative one.
He met Sarah at a crowded coffee shop in Cambridge. The clatter of espresso machines and the indie folk music provided a chaotic cover.
“You look like you haven’t slept,” Sarah said, blowing on her oat milk latte.
“I haven’t.” Aris slid a flash drive across the table. “Run the models, Sarah. Don’t ask me why. Just verify the eclipse cycles against the Gregorian reform of 1582.”
“The Gregorian reform?” Sarah raised an eyebrow. “Pope Gregory XIII dropped ten days from the calendar to realign Easter. Everyone knows that.”
“He dropped ten days,” Aris whispered, leaning in. “But the math required for the Julian calendar drift suggests he should have dropped thirteen days. Unless…”
“Unless the time period the calendar was correcting for was shorter than we think,” Sarah finished, her eyes narrowing. She was an astrophysicist; she spoke the language of raw data. “You’re talking about the missing centuries.”
“I found a primary source, Sarah. The stars in the book don’t match the year on the cover. We’re living in a timeline that has been padded.”
Sarah took the drive, but she didn’t look at it. She looked past Aris, toward the door. Her expression tightened.
“Aris, don’t look now, but there are two men in grey suits by the counter who have been watching you since you walked in.”
Aris stiffened. “University security?”
“No,” Sarah said softly. “They look like Feds. Or corporate.”
“Take the drive,” Aris said, standing up. “Go. Run the numbers. If I’m crazy, call me and tell me to seek help. If I’m right… don’t call me at all.”
Aris didn’t go back to the Athenæum. He went to his apartment in Beacon Hill, a small walk-up filled with books. He began to pack.
Why would they hide time? That was the question that plagued him. Why invent the Dark Ages?
He pulled down a heavy volume on the history of the First Millennium. He looked at the entries for the 7th, 8th, and 9th centuries. They were suspiciously vague. Archaeological layers for these periods were often missing or misidentified. Roman architecture seemed to transition directly into Romanesque, as if no time had passed between them.
A knock on the door made him jump.
It wasn’t a knock, really. It was a polite, authoritative rap.
Aris moved to the window. A black sedan was idling at the curb. He was trapped.
He opened the door.
Standing there was a man who looked like he had been carved out of New England granite. Older, wearing a suit that cost more than Aris’s tuition, with a lapel pin shaped like an hourglass.
“Dr. Thorne,” the man said. His voice was smooth, like expensive scotch. “May I come in? We need to discuss the Codex.”
“Who are you?” Aris blocked the doorway.
“I am a curator. Of sorts. My organization ensures that… certain continuities are maintained.”
Aris stepped back, letting the man in. He knew he had no choice.
The man walked into the living room, glancing at the open history books with a look of mild amusement. “You’re trying to solve the puzzle. The Phantom Time.”
“It’s not a theory, is it?” Aris said, his heart hammering. “The eclipse data proves it. You added three hundred years. Why? To let Otto III feel special?”
The man laughed, a dry, humorless sound. “Otto? No. That fool was just a beneficiary. The lie wasn’t for vanity, Doctor. It was for survival.”
The man sat on the edge of Aris’s sofa, interlacing his fingers.
“Civilization is a fragile narrative. In the year you know as 614 AD, there was a collapse. Not a political one, but a cataclysm. A cometary impact in the Atlantic. It darkened the sky for a decade. Crops failed. Plague followed. 90% of the population of Europe died. Literacy vanished. We fell into a hole so deep that the survivors forgot who they were.”
Aris stared at him. “A reset.”
“A gap,” the man corrected. “When society began to rebuild, the rulers—the Church, the remnants of the nobility—realized they had a problem. If they told the people that the world had ended and they were starting from scratch, there would be chaos. Despair. People need to feel they are part of an unbroken chain. They need destiny.”
The man gestured to the books.
“So, the scribes bridged the gap. They took myths, folklore, and pieces of Roman history, and they stretched them out. They invented Charlemagne as a symbol of unity to aspire to. They filled the void with phantom kings and phantom wars so that the people would believe that God’s plan was still unfolding. We didn’t steal time, Dr. Thorne. We gifted it. We gave humanity a bridge over the abyss so they wouldn’t look down and lose their minds.”
“It’s a lie,” Aris said, his voice shaking. “Everything we know about the Middle Ages… the architecture, the art…”
“Reinterpretations,” the man said. “Roman buildings repurposed. The timeline is a construct. A necessary fiction to maintain order.”
“And 1582?” Aris asked. “The Gregorian calendar?”
“A patch,” the man said. “A software update. The math was getting too messy. The calendar was drifting too far from the seasons because of the added years. Pope Gregory fixed the solar year, but he couldn’t delete the phantom centuries without admitting the lie. So, we adjusted.”
The man stood up. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a check. It was blank.
“We want the drive you gave to Dr. Sarah Evans. And we want the Codex. In exchange, you get a tenure-track position at Yale. Or Oxford. Wherever you like. You become the premier historian of the ‘Carolingian Renaissance.’ You teach the lie, and you live a very comfortable life.”
“And if I refuse?”
The man didn’t threaten violence. He didn’t have to. “Then you become a crackpot. We will discredit you. We will ensure that every paper you publish is laughed at. You will spend the rest of your life on internet forums, typing in all caps about how the calendar is fake, while the rest of the world ignores you. You will be erased from history, just like those missing years.”
The room was silent. Outside, a siren wailed—a sound of the modern world. Or the 18th-century world wearing a modern mask.
“It’s 1729,” Aris whispered.
“Does it matter?” the man asked softly. “Look at your phone, Aris. Look at the skyscrapers. Look at the medicine that keeps you alive. Does it matter what number we assign to the year? The progress is real. The lie allowed us to build this.”
He placed the check on the coffee table.
“You have until the morning to decide. Do you want to be right, or do you want to be part of the story?”
The man left. The door clicked shut.
Aris stood alone in the apartment. He looked at the check. Then he looked at his phone.
He picked up the device and dialed Sarah.
“Aris?” she answered on the first ring. “I ran the numbers. You were right. My God, the stars show a massive discontinuity. We have to publish. We have to tell the world.”
Aris closed his eyes. He thought about the panic. He thought about the religious zealots, the political upheavals, the sheer existential dread that would follow if seven billion people realized their history was a fiction. He thought about the abyss the man had described.
If he told the truth, he would break the world.
“Sarah,” Aris said, his voice hollow.
“Yes? I’m uploading the data now.”
“Don’t,” Aris said.
“What? Why?”
“I… I made a mistake,” Aris lied, a tear tracking down his cheek. “I entered the wrong longitude for the eclipse. I re-checked it. It matches. It matches 852 AD perfectly.”
There was a long silence on the other end.
“Are you sure?” Sarah asked, disappointed. “The first data set looked so convincing.”
“I’m sure,” Aris said. “It was just a glitch. A conversion error. Delete the files, Sarah. It’s nothing.”
“Okay,” she sighed. “If you say so. I guess history is safe.”
“Yeah,” Aris said, looking at the blank check on the table. “Safe.”
He hung up.
He walked to the window and looked out at the city of Boston. The lights were twinkling against the winter sky. It was a beautiful, advanced, complicated world. A world built on a foundation of vapor.
He picked up a marker and walked to the wall calendar hanging in his kitchen.
February 2026.
He stared at it for a long time. Then, he took the marker and wrote, in small letters in the corner: Anno Domini 1729.
He capped the marker. He would take the job at Yale. He would teach the history of Charlemagne. He would guard the lie.
Because the truth was, time was just a story we agreed to tell each other to keep the dark away. And Aris Thorne had just decided to become one of the storytellers.
The timeline continued, unbroken, false, and safe.
