No Sholont. Time = Memory within Space - Timothy Alan Bleasdale

Behind the counter: a man named Viktor. Beside him: a grey cat with amber orange eyes that have been burning quietly for longer than either of them will say.

In the back room, past the STAFF ONLY door, down a corridor that shouldn't fit in the building, is the machine. It doesn't look like a time machine. It looks like a walk-in double-door fridge that has been welded to an oversized espresso unit by someone having a nervous breakdown. It hums at a frequency only the cat can hear.

The price is one memory. A chosen one. You choose.

The machine is a vehicle, it is also a mirror. It looks through you - through the plan, the desperation, through the very specific idea you've had about which century would fix everything - all the way down to the thing you haven't been able to say out loud. And it sends you there. Not where you want to go, but where you need to be.

Through its doors have stepped an influencer who needed to make something real, an artist who needed his century, a hitman who needed a notebook instead of a trigger, a boy who needed to see his father clearly, a smuggler carrying stolen mercy, a comedian who needed to hear himself, a child who decoded the universe over an espresso, and others still - each one carrying the only map the machine can read: the whole weight of a human life, and everything it remembers.

No Sholont is a novel about time. About memory. About the specific, stubborn miracle of being alive in a moment and not knowing it until you've left.

About what we carry. And what we leave behind.

The bell above the door rings half a second late.

It always does. Come in. Close the door.

You're letting the decade in..