Suyash Island International Airport was more than just an aviation hub; it was a multi-billion-dollar show of wealth. A sweeping terminal of glass and steel, it rose from the tropical coastline and existed entirely to service the Shrivastav empire. On any given day, its pristine runways welcomed chartered Gulfstreams, cargo heavy-lifters, and A-listers hiding behind oversized Dior sunglasses.
Today, however, it was welcoming a flying junkyard.
Suyash Shrivastav stood in the VIP arrivals lounge with his hands clasped loosely behind his back. Through the floor-to-ceiling windows, he watched a battered turboprop aircraft make its wobbly final approach. It bore the flaking livery of a defunct university and trailed a thin, wheezy plume of black smoke from its left engine. It didn't look like an airplane. It looked like a noise violation with wings.
Beside him, Komal practically vibrated out of her sneakers. "Is that it? Is that a time machine disguised as a plane? If I built a time machine, I'd totally camouflage it. Like a dosa cart. Or an aggressive pigeon."
"It's not a time machine, Komal," Suyash said, though the corner of his mouth twitched upward.
"I'm just saying, if I were a mad scientist—"
"You are a mad scientist," Anita cut in smoothly. The security chief stood a few paces back with her arms crossed and her eyes hidden behind aviators. She had insisted on a level four security detail for this arrival. Four of her elite operators were stationed around the lounge, looking entirely too lethal for the situation at hand.
"I'm a mad enthusiast," Komal corrected, pointing a finger without looking away from the glass. "Scientists have degrees and peer reviews. I have a soldering iron and intuition."
Outside, the turboprop slammed onto the tarmac with a metallic crunch that sounded like a washing machine tumbling down a flight of stairs. Through the cockpit glass, Suyash could just make out the hired pilot, who looked like he was praying fervently, while a man with wild white hair in the copilot's seat argued violently with the dashboard.
"JARVIS," Suyash murmured, keeping his voice low. "Did you finally punch through their scrambled flight manifest?"
The AI's voice glided from a concealed speaker. "Yes, sir. Facial recognition confirms our guest is Dr. Yash Raj, age seventy-two. Age: seventy-two. He is a former visiting professor of theoretical chronodynamics. His tenure at various institutions was historically brief. For seven years, he has been tracking anomalous energy signatures globally. Three days ago, his readings locked onto this island.
Anita's posture stiffened. "Anomalous energy signatures? Define."
"A massive, localized frequency," JARVIS replied, ever clinical. "The epicenter of this temporal harmonic perfectly aligns with Mr. Shrivastav's private garden."
Komal gasped in delight. "I knew our tomatoes were overachievers!"
"The garden is well-cultivated," Suyash smoothly corrected, his voice a calm river over a sudden spike of adrenaline.
He kept his face carefully blank, but his mind raced. The Reiki crystal grid. It was his one absolute secret. Months ago, driven by an instinct he couldn't explain to his board of directors, he spent nights burying highly charged Reiki stones in a complex geometric pattern beneath the topsoil of the estate. It was a private indulgence, a spiritual grounding exercise for a man who spent his life dealing in cold, hard logic. Not a single soul on the island—not Anita, not Komal, not even JARVIS—knew it existed.
Now, a rogue scientist had somehow tracked his private meditation project from across the globe.
The plane shuddered to a halt, coughing out one last puff of smoke. Shrivastav Aviation's ground crew pushed a mobile staircase to the door. It took three heavy kicks from the inside before the cabin door finally popped open.
The first person to emerge was a young man in his late twenties. He had the disheveled, hollow-eyed look of a recently rescued hostage. He stumbled down the stairs, dropped to his knees, and pressed his palms against the tarmac.
"Solid ground," he whispered, pressing his cheek to the concrete. "Blessed, non-aerodynamic earth. I will never leave you."
A stunning young woman stepped out behind him. She had the kind of perfect hair that defied humidity and the exhausted patience of a woman deeply accepting of her chaotic life. She looked down at the man and sighed. "Bunty, please. You're embarrassing us in front of the billionaire."
"Tanya," Bunty wheezed, looking up at her with haunted eyes. "Your grandfather tried to navigate using a napkin. He drew clouds on it. Actual clouds, Tanya. To tell the pilot where the sky was."
Tanya grabbed him by the collar and hauled him up. "He's eccentric. It's his process."
He asked if we could fly into a thunderstorm to 'borrow some juice'!"
"That," Tanya conceded, wincing slightly, "was a tense twenty minutes."
Then, the star of the show emerged.
Dr. Yash Raj was a walking explosion in a lab coat. His white hair stood up in jagged peaks, looking more electrocuted than styled. His heavy spectacles were held together by medical tape on the left hinge and sheer stubbornness on the right. His lab coat was buttoned incorrectly, draping like a toga.
But it was the socks that truly sealed the deal. Above his scuffed loafers, one sock was sensible gray wool, and the other was blindingly bright lime green covered in purple polka dots.
Komal squeaked and clutched Suyash's arm. "I love him. Can we keep him?"
Spotting the welcoming committee through the glass, Dr. Yash broke into a grin so bright and gap-toothed that it momentarily melted Anita's glare. He practically skipped down the stairs, stumbled on the last step, did an uncoordinated pirouette to catch himself, and burst through the lounge doors.
Behind him, a sweating assistant struggled with a baggage cart piled high with Pelican cases. The warning labels read: CAUTION: TEMPORAL OSCILLATION, DO NOT SHAKE: FRAGILE TIMELINE, and NO.
"Mr. Shrivastav!" Dr. Yash bellowed, throwing his arms wide. "The man! The myth! The geographical anomaly!" He stopped inches from Suyash and squinted hard. "Wait, you're very young. Are you his son? An intern? A clone?" I have theories on cloning, by the way—"
Suyash offered a warm, steadying hand. "I'm Suyash Shrivastav. The original. Welcome to my home, Doctor."
Dr. Yash seized Suyash's hand with both of his and shook it with frantic energy. "Original is best! I met three other Suyash Shrivastavas on the way here: Plumbers, mostly. They're good people, but they have terrible temporal resonance. But you! You built an airport! Most billionaires buy yachts, but you built a runway for my terrible airplane!"
"Actually, I started with an airline," Suyash noted politely.
"Sensible!" Dr. Yash dug wildly into his pockets and produced a device that looked like a graphing calculator hot-glued to a radar dish. "Now, the garden. I must see it. My Chrono-Sniffer—patent pending, sanity fleeting—is going absolutely feral! Look at this waveform!" He shoved the screen toward Suyash. "It's singing! Unusually vibrant plant life, yes? What on earth is causing it?"
Suyash felt Anita's gaze lock onto the side of his face. She didn't like the unknown.
"Our soil is uniquely cultivated," Suyash said, his tone deliberately dismissive. "Though, whatever anomaly your machine is picking up, I would prefer it remain a private matter."
Dr. Yash tapped the side of his nose knowingly. "Discretion! Say no more. Yash Kumar Raj is a vault. A steel trap!" He whirled around and pointed at Bunty. "Have I breathed a word about the temporal singularity to anyone, boy?"
Bunty stared blankly. "You told the Uber driver in Mumbai."
"He was an amateur physicist!"
"You told the baggage handler."
"We bonded over string theory!"
"You yelled it at a seagull in clouds."
Dr. Yash deflated slightly. "The seagull had an intellectual aura. It maintained eye contact."
Anita slowly lowered her aviators. Her expression screamed, "Boss, let me put him back on the plane."
Suyash just smiled. He was accustomed to fending off dangerous businessmen and criminals, so a crazy scientist who talked too much was entertaining. Deep down, though, Suyash had already made up his mind: There was no way he was letting this old man leave the island.
He had recognized the wild, messy energy the moment the man stepped off the plane. The man was exactly the weird scientist from the Bollywood movie Action Replayy. Sure, Suyash had his own secret powers. He could probably create a time portal by himself if he really tried.
However, having power is useless if you don't know where you're going. Suyash didn't want to guess and end up randomly in the past. Specifically, he wanted to go to the fun, retro world of the 1970s. More importantly, he wanted to find Mala.
To do so, he needed the mad scientist's math to determine the exact time and place to reach her.
"Dr. Yash," Suyash said, gesturing toward the doors. "Let's get you to the villa."
The drive to the estate was an exercise in controlled chaos. Anita insisted on a three-SUV convoy. Suyash and Dr. Yash took the lead car while Tanya, an exhausted Bunty, and Komal took the second.
Inside the plush, leather-scented cabin of the lead SUV, Dr. Yash pressed his face against the tinted glass like a toddler.
"Fascinating! Look at the flora! The sub-molecular stability of these coconut trees is staggering!" He smacked the Chrono-Sniffer against his palm. "The ambient harmonics in the soil are unnatural. It's perfect. Mr. Shrivastav, what in God's name are you feeding your petunias?"
Suyash watched the scientist for a long moment. He considered the risks of letting a madman dig around his prized, highly secret soil. He reached forward and pressed a silver button on the console. With a soft hum, a soundproof partition with privacy glass slid up, sealing them off from the driver.
Dr. Yash leaned in, his eyes wide, ready for the secrets of the universe to be unveiled.
"Doctor," Suyash said, his voice dropping its polite corporate veneer and becoming quieter and more absolute. "Whatever is in that garden is none of your concern. You will not dig up my flowers, scan my subsoil, or ask me what powers it. Is that understood?"
Dr. Yash blinked. He looked like a child who had just been told that Santa Claus was a CIA operation. "But...the resonance! The sheer output! You must have buried something! A localized magnetic generator? A meteorite? Did you trap a localized singularity under the rhododendrons?!'
"It's proprietary," Suyash said smoothly.
"You can't patent a temporal anomaly! It defies the laws of physics!"
"Then the laws of physics will have to sign an NDA," Suyash replied with a dangerous smile. "The only question that matters, Doctor, is whether my garden can anchor your machine."
Dr. Yash let out a frustrated, strangled noise, his scientific curiosity warring with his life's ambition. He took off his taped glasses and rubbed his eyes. When he spoke, his voice cracked slightly.
"Mr. Shrivastav... I have been laughed out of every university in the hemisphere. I have spent thirty years trying to stabilize a temporal field. Do you know what happens when you try to open a door in time without an anchor?" He swallowed hard. "I accidentally sent my lunch three days into the future. It came back with frostbite. If it had been a human..."
He looked out the window at the approaching garden, his eyes shining. "You didn't just build a greenhouse, sir. You built the most stable temporal anchor on Earth."
"What about your machine?" Suyash asked softly.
"If I plug my quantum drives into whatever impossible, maddening secret you have buried in that dirt..." Dr. Yash let out a breathy, disbelieving laugh. "It won't just work. It will sing."
The SUV slowed to a halt in front of the main villa. The lush, impossibly vibrant garden stretched out beside them. Even through the glass, the garden seemed to hum with a warm, golden vitality.
Dr. Yash practically scrambled out of the car. He didn't walk, but stumbled toward the nearest flowerbed as if he were a dying man finding an oasis. He dropped to his knees, heedless of his slacks, and held his bare hands just inches above the rich, dark soil as if he were afraid of breaking the spell if he touched it.
"Oh, it's beautiful," he whispered to the dirt. "It's so heavy. So anchored. I'll spend the rest of my life wondering what you are."
Suyash stepped out of the car and adjusted his cuffs. He felt the familiar, soothing pulse of the Reiki stones beneath the earth. It was his sanctuary. Now, it might be the launching pad for the most dangerous and greatest leap in human history.
"How long?" Suyash asked.
Dr. Yash looked over his shoulder. His manic grin was back—sharp and hungry. "Give me your AI, an extension cord, and a week. We're going to tear a hole in yesterday, Mr. Shrivastav."
Behind them, the doors of the second SUV slammed shut. Komal trotted up to Suyash's side and eyed the scientist, who was currently whispering sweet nothings to a fern.
She leaned in, dropping her voice to a theatrical whisper. "So, on a scale of one to ten, how long before I get to take the time machine for a joyride?"
"You are absolutely never riding the time machine, Komal."
"That wasn't a number."
"It's a company policy."
"I'm manifesting a joyride," she informed him cheerfully, patting his arm. "I'm putting it out into the universe. Have fun with your new weird grandpa!"
She bounced away toward the villa. Suyash let out a long, slow sigh, though he couldn't entirely fight the smile pulling at his lips. He looked down at the soil where his hidden crystals lay dormant, waiting to be awakened.
He had a feeling that things on the island were about to get very complicated.