"The future is shaped by those willing to take risks."
A mantra I repeated in my mind every day as an entrepreneur. But the truth? The future feels like a treadmill, moving faster every year, yet I couldn't stop feeling stuck. In an age where every decision was made with algorithms, where big tech had outgrown its initial vision, the battle seemed lost before it began.
I'd built something—a business of scale. Yet in this hyper-connected world, I began to feel like a cog in an endless machine, spinning out of control. As the digital age expanded and transformed the world, opportunities no longer felt like "the future." They felt like reruns.
I looked out of my apartment window as the rain fell heavily over San Francisco. There was an odd sense of calm, maybe a moment of clarity I hadn't felt in years. My office on the 20th floor had always felt like the pulse of the world, the hum of the Silicon Valley titan beating in time with the wind.
And yet, the more I saw the world change, the more everything seemed… tired.
This city, with all its endless ventures, had slowly turned into something I couldn't relate to anymore. Tech startups promised greatness, but every time someone spoke about "revolutionizing" the next great thing, it only felt like tinkering with a formula. A new phone here, an app there—but none of it changed the deep roots that were holding everything in place.
I should've been happy—I had more resources than any entrepreneur could ever dream of, yet it felt hollow.
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"A man is defined not by the money he makes, but the impact he leaves behind."
I couldn't remember if it was my grandfather's words, or some motivational speech I'd seen online. But they came to me suddenly as I prepared for the last meeting of the day, one of the many "predictive meetings" about blockchain technology. Predicting the future of a technology that seemed more like the answer to a problem no one had yet faced felt absurd.
Before I entered the conference room, my phone buzzed—an anonymous email subject line in bold: "Time is Relative". The body of the email was a cryptic set of coordinates and a time: 5:00 AM, the day after tomorrow.
I tried shaking it off as nonsense, the kind of spam that people in Silicon Valley often get when dealing with venture funds, but a flicker of curiosity nudged me to open the file attached. It was a document—a blueprint for an experiment or… time-travel machine? As ridiculous as that sounded, the document listed instructions on where to find the machine, along with warning signs about its unpredictable nature.
"For the bold and the curious… Once activated, nothing will be as it seems."
The tone of the message sent a cold shiver down my spine, but there it was—the nagging feeling that some path forward was beyond the constraints of technology and spreadsheets.
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I couldn't explain it, but after a night of anxious deliberation, I made the decision to visit the address given in the email. I tried to reason with myself—it could be a hoax. But there was something about it that felt urgent, like a missing puzzle piece in a life I didn't understand.
I wasn't sure what I had hoped to find in that abandoned alley, tucked away behind a nondescript warehouse, but when I arrived at 4:59 AM, a buzzing sound filled the air, and the atmosphere felt thick—almost tangible.
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I stepped forward, not knowing what awaited me. The machine before me was almost ancient in its design—no sleek gadgets or bright lights, just massive gears and arcs, humming with power I couldn't comprehend. An intense pull radiated from it, like I could feel its influence on every bone in my body.
With a breath, I stepped inside.
Suddenly, there was an ear-splitting crash.
Everything went black.
When I regained consciousness, it wasn't the cool, metallic world of my future. The walls had a rust-colored stain, and there were no touchscreens, no high-tech devices. My smartphone was dead in my pocket, and the distant sound of horns honking didn't belong to the cars I knew.
I pushed myself up slowly, groggy but suddenly aware of something vastly different about the world around me.
The date on a newspaper under a pedestrian's arm said it all: August 22, 1985.
And just like that, I realized—I was no longer in 2023.
I had time-traveled back to India in the midst of its economic upheaval.
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That was the moment everything changed. This was my chance. I was in a time when India was ripe for change—a country at the brink of its transformation into the global powerhouse it could have been. The next few decades would hold unimaginable shifts, and in this moment, I had the knowledge, the foresight, to make it all happen.
The question remained, though: how much could one person—armed with the knowledge of the future—really change the course of history?
I wasn't sure, but this time, I wasn't going to let the future just happen to me. I was going to make it happen.
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End of Chapter 1