A look into the origins, creative decisions, and time travel architecture that shaped Fractured Echoes.
The seed of Fractured Echoes came from imagining a future where biology itself collapses, and society responds in the worst way possible: by turning time into a commodity. The Hormonal Plague, which wipes out 90% of women, creates a scarcity so extreme that civilization teeters on collapse.
But the question that became the book was this:
What would happen if time travel was weaponized not for exploration but for repopulation—and control?
From there, the idea grew into a system where women moments before their deaths are retrieved from time, not to save them, but to “preserve” them for a new future. What begins as humanitarian quickly descends into authoritarian.
To build the world realistically, the retrieval system needed rules:
subjects must be taken only moments before death
a single shard can open a single timeline
retrieval pods anchor to specific “death pulses”
each action creates displacement
the docks serve as the processing center for new arrivals
time is a resource, not a wonder
The mechanics had to feel grounded enough that the horror came not from the technology, but from how ordinary people misused it.
Time travel in Fractured Echoes is never whimsical.
It’s logistical.
Cold.
Instrumental.
Every “rescue” becomes a moral transaction—someone plucked from their timeline without consent, placed into a future that sees them as a resource.
The Retrieval Initiative began as humanitarian aid but quickly became a controlled gateway for the powerful.
Shatner is a man who believes in the system because he helped build it. He clings to the idea that his work saves lives, even as the emotional cost of each retrieval weighs on him. His arc begins with trust in authority and ends with the realization that authority manipulated him entirely.
Ramses is not a cartoon villain. He represents the danger of charismatic leadership mixed with technological monopoly. His betrayal of Shatner is not personal. it’s structural. Shatner was simply in the way.
Reed is the most tragic figure in the story. He is a desperate man reshaping time to save his wife and child, unaware that his bargain with Ramses feeds an authoritarian future.
The docks became one of the most important settings as the world solidified. Dark, metallic, submerged beneath the ocean, the perfect metaphor for what the society above refuses to acknowledge:
The future is built on stolen moments from the past.
Every arrival through the pod creates a silent ripple—another life displaced, another life commodified.
