Future Bob

The bell rang like it was personally offended to still be doing this every weekday.

Bobby Stokes slouched his shoulders and moved quickly through the familiar hallways of Edison High. He kept his eyes evenly low and his hoodie up, but it didn’t matter. It never did. They always saw him. It seemed inevitable.

“Yo, Stokes!” A heavy thud struck his backpack. It was Derek, a Football varsity, future dropout and part-time tormentor.

Bobby swayed unsteadily, heading forward before maintaining balance. “Nice aim,” he spoke softly, too quiet for anyone to hear, almost as if he barely uttered any words. That was the trick. Be invisible, not noticeable. Be quiet, not loud. Be nothing, act like you don't exist.

The halls had the smell of sweat, floor wax, and normal teenage drama. Lockers slammed open and shut, producing the sound of a metal beat. Bobby carefully walked past a group of cheerleaders blocking the stairs and ducked his head lower as another wave of laughter swirled in his direction.

“I bet dude probably talks to aliens in his basement. What a freak!” another voice sneered. Laughter followed. It was the usual—what happened often. A couple of rough pushes. A sarcastic comment about his weight. A notebook seized, thrown around, done in repeated succession. Bobby didn’t fight back. The reason is not because he was scared, they just weren’t worth the time and energy.

He bent down and picked up his notebook from the floor, dusted it with his hands, and kept walking, looking straight ahead.

Things used to be different. It was rather better. Back in elementary school, he had friends—the type that was nice to him. He laughed. He talked. But something changed when middle school hit. Kids got troublesome, problematic, and smarter about where to hit. They became so cruel, hostile and menacing. Bobby became a popular target—not just for being overweight or large in size, but for being different— unique. Too quiet. Too smart. Too intelligent. Too into things that didn’t matter to anyone else— things that made others to consider him a weirdo.

Time travel videos. Quantum physics blogs. Old forum threads about paradoxes and multiverse theories. Bobby devoured them like candy. They made more sense than people did and they very much worth his time and attention.

At home, it wasn’t much better. His dad worked long hours and rarely said more than six words a day. His mom was glued to her phone like it was life support—as if she can't survive without it. So Bobby drifted, spending most of his hours online, watching lectures and decoding several scientific debates, convinced that maybe—just maybe—there was a way to escape this timeline.

And if not escape it… maybe change it. Hopefully!

But at the moment, he just kept his head down, escaped another shoulder bump, and draggingly walked toward his last class.

When he got home, he felt like a peeled banana, stressed out, soft, raw and full of plastered bruises nobody could see— almost as if they're literally invisible to the eyes.

Home wasn’t better. His dad was still at the store, pulling doubles to keep the lights on. His mom was locked in her home office with her headset on, furiously typing for some tech support job she hated. Dinner was always a maybe. Conversation was a no.

The house stands in one of those stilled California suburbs where everything looked dead and clean at the same time. Rows of homes that seemed identical, trimmed hedges, and the exact same three SUV models parked in almost every driveway. A place made to look safe, having the sense and atmosphere of normalcy. But Bobby knew better.

He crawled quietly into his room, closed the door firmly, and exhaled lightly with a sense of finality. He was now in his safe haven, his place of sanctuary which was filled with the soft glow of three monitors, walls covered in captivating artistic time travel diagrams, and a coloured poster of Einstein funnily sticking his tongue out—he could breathe peacefully and feel happy.

He threw his backpack aside, let it hit where it landed, then fell heavily into his chair. The soft welcoming sound of his custom-built rig greeted him like a good old friend. In few seconds, he had booted it up and opened a video file labeled:

“Temporal Communication: Data Echoes Through Time”

A crisp British voice filled the room. “What if time is not linear, but a constantly shifting loop of digital imprints waiting to be accessed?”

Bobby leaned forward, arms on the desk, eyes reflecting strings of code and glitchy diagrams of spacetime.

He’d watched it at least six times already, but this stuff never got old. Time machines? Too bulky and theoretical. Wormholes? Too unstable. But data—now that had potential. He had a theory.

See, if light could bend around gravity, and memory could exist in quantum states, then maybe—just maybe—information could slip through time. Not a person, not a machine—just raw data. A signal.

He opened his battered spiral notebook titled:

"Personal Hypotheses: Temporal Layer Messaging"

To the untrained eye, it looked like nonsense: scribbles, graphs, arrows pointing at phrases like “photonic decay drift,” “entropy bleed,” and “temporal echo frequencies.” But to Bobby, it was a map. A journal of the impossible. His lifeline.

He flipped to the latest entry and began adding new thoughts:

“If a strong enough signal rides a naturally occurring EM wave, and if that wave intersects with a local time distortion, could it embed a readable imprint into the past?”

Maybe nobody could travel through time, but what if someone figured out how to send a message?

It was far-fetched. But not impossible. And impossible was just a challenge waiting to be solved.

Bobby paused the video and glanced at his phone. He’d built a crude app—something that constantly scanned nearby signals for anomalies. It checked for strange patterns in electromagnetic fields, flagged unregistered digital broadcasts, and monitored for unexplained data bursts.

He’d had it running for months. So far: nothing but noise, static, random and unexpected alerts from close by Wi-Fi routers or microwave ovens.

Still, he checked it. It had become a habit. A ritual.

No messages.

He inhaled sharply, seated relaxed in his chair, and gazed at the ceiling. The few cracks in the plaster resembled veins in an old map. “One day,” he whispered to no one. “Someone will crack it.”

Suddenly, the lights fluttered. Once. Twice. Then the lamp on his desk hummed severely, filling the room in a bizarre strobe—bright yellow, then pitch darkness, then yellow again.

Bobby sat up straight. “What the hell...?”

His laptop screen flashed twice, then rebooted itself with a high pitched-mechanical cry. Icons rearranged. Folders glitched.

Then, the radio. The old one. The one he hadn’t touched in over a year. It was more paperweight than electronics now. The power cord wasn’t even plugged in. And yet—

chhhhkkkktt...

It sputtered to life with a hiss of static, sharp and unnatural. Not a song. Not a station. Just jagged noise. It sounded like a distant thunder struggling to form words or a breathing that is broken.

Horrified—Bobby jumped to his feet in a hasty manner and took a step back. His heart pounded heavily like a drum in his ears—he could hear it loudly. Every hair on his body stood up—he had goosebumps. It felt like the air had been charged with static electricity.

The lamp throbbed again—once, then held, humming in a low-pitched mechanical tone. Then his phone buzzed. Once. Twice. A third time, he looked down. The screen glowed softly in his palm. 1 new message. No name. No preview. Just Unknown Number.

His thumb trembled above the screen. He didn’t want to open it. But he had to.

With a deep breath, Bobby tapped the notification. The message opened. And everything—his thoughts, his breath, his reality—froze.

"Your life is in great danger. A tall black man with a bald head, and a brown stylish mustache is coming after you. Please, avoid him at all costs. I’ll contact you again. —Bob, from the future."

He stared at the screen. Once. Twice. Three times.

He didn’t blink. Didn’t breathe. What the hell was this? A joke? A virus? Bob, from the future? Was this someone messing with him? Or was it—?

The light snapped off. His room was swallowed in instant darkness. And then—

CRACK!

His phone screen shattered—right there in his hand. No drop. No pressure. Just a series of cracks across the glass, giving it a spiderweb pattern. It seemed like it had been struck by something invisible.

Bobby stood—dumbfounded, mouth agape, brain short-circuiting, trying to register the situation or what he had just witnessed.

Silence returned. The lamp died. The radio went mute. The laptop’s screen blinked to black. But the message still burned in his mind:

"Please, avoid him at all costs... I’ll contact you again... —Bob, from the future."