"I made it!" her past self shouted in the recording. "I'm actually here!"
He tapped the screen. The video opened to a screen recording of a chaotic group chat, messages flying by too fast to read in real-time. On screen, a cursor hovered over a video call link that had long since expired.
In the present day, Leo watched as his past self on screen zoomed in on Maya’s face. He remembered the exact feeling of that morning—the relief, the terror, and the absolute certainty that things were going to be different now.
Leo locked his phone and looked out the window at the city moving below him. Filenames like Screenrecording_20230122_100801.mp4 were just random strings of numbers to the rest of the world. But to the people who kept them, they were time machines.