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- Herausgeber: Felix Seilerz
- Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
- Sprache: Englisch
The story follows Dr. Jack Fortune Midas, a brilliant but grief-stricken 44-year-old physicist from the 21st century. Haunted by the death of his wife, he invents the "Chronos Key," a wristwatch capable of time travel, with the sole purpose of going back a few hours to prevent her fatal accident. However, during its inaugural activation, a critical malfunction sends him hurtling uncontrollably through time, stranding him in the harsh and unforgiving landscape of the American West in 1876.
Wounded and disoriented, Jack finds himself near the struggling town of Redemption, which is being slowly choked to death by the tyrannical cattle baron, Silas "The Vulture" Kane. After a violent first encounter with Kane's men, Jack is saved by Elara Vance, the town's tough and resourceful blacksmith. Hiding in her forge, Jack realizes that his survival, and the town's, depends on his unique knowledge.
Forced to adapt, Jack transforms the 19th-century forge into a secret laboratory. He uses his understanding of physics and chemistry to create anachronistic technology, becoming a "Mad Professor" of the Old West. He and Elara forge an alliance, building advanced weapons like scoped pistols for impossible accuracy, incapacitating smoke bombs, and sophisticated explosives. By tapping the telegraph wire, they uncover Kane's larger conspiracy: he is trying to seize the land not just for its water, but for secret silver deposits and an impending railroad deal.
The conflict escalates from small acts of sabotage to a full-blown ambush at Crimson Creek, where Jack's strategic traps and advanced gadgets lead to a humiliating defeat for Kane's forces. In response, Kane hires a ruthless army of Pinkerton mercenaries to wipe Redemption off the map.
Facing annihilation, Jack and Elara undertake a desperate, near-suicidal mission to attack Kane's fortress-like ranch. Guided through the treacherous Badlands by a native tracker, they infiltrate the compound, liberate a secret camp of slave laborers from Kane's illegal mine, and lead the townsfolk in a climactic battle. Jack confronts Kane in a final showdown, defeating the baron not with superior firepower, but with a brilliant application of physics.
In the end, with the town saved and Kane's empire destroyed, Jack manages to repair the Chronos Key, affording him a single jump back to his own time. He is faced with a choice: return to the lonely, sterile future he came from, or stay in the past where he has found a new purpose, a community, and a deep connection with Elara. Choosing to embrace his new life, he destroys the device, sacrificing his past for a chance to help build a new future in Redemption.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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Table of Contents
Chapter 1: The Quantum Schism
Chapter 2: The Blacksmith and the Sawbones
Chapter 3: The Vulture's Shadow
Chapter 4: Of Gears and Gunpowder
Chapter 5: The Ambush at Crimson Creek
Chapter 6: Whispers and Wires
Chapter 7: The Ghost of the Badlands
Chapter 8: The Devil's Foundry
Chapter 9: High Noon for Tomorrow
Chapter 10: The Sundown Trail
Chapter 1: The Quantum Schism
The world did not end with a bang, nor a whimper, but with the quiet, insistent hum of a machine that should not exist. In the heart of a laboratory buried deep beneath the Nevada desert, a place of sterile white walls and the cold blue glow of monitors, Dr. Jack Fortune Midas—a man whose intellect was matched only by his recklessness—was about to punch a hole through God’s own continuum.
At forty-four, Jack looked every bit the part of the "Mad Professor Midas," a moniker bestowed upon him by colleagues who viewed his work with a mixture of awe and terror. His salt-and-pepper hair was a chaotic storm, perpetually standing on end as if in a state of constant electrocution. His eyes, a piercing shade of cobalt blue, hid behind thick-rimmed glasses and held the manic gleam of a man who saw the universe not as a set of rules, but as a series of suggestions. A perpetually coffee-stained lab coat hung from his lanky frame, its pockets bulging with tools, pens, and cryptic notes scrawled on napkins.
Tonight, the culmination of his life’s work, his obsession, was strapped to his left wrist. It was a watch, though calling it that was like calling the sun a nightlight. The "Chronos Key," he called it. Its face was not glass, but a swirling vortex of liquid crystal displaying numbers that seemed to shift between dimensions. The case was a burnished bronze, etched with equations that made physicists weep, and its guts were a nightmarish fusion of quantum processors, micro-coils of exotic matter, and a power source that harnessed the ambient energy of spacetime itself. It hummed with a low, predatory thrum, a caged god waiting for release.
His research had been born from tragedy. Ten years ago, a car accident had stolen his wife, Amelia. It was a stupid, senseless event—a drunk driver, a patch of black ice. In the sterile silence of the hospital, holding her hand as she slipped away, Jack hadn't just felt grief; he'd felt an unholy rage at the linear, unforgiving nature of time. It was a bully, a tyrant that marched in one direction, and he, Jack Fortune Midas, would be the man to finally make it kneel.
"System diagnostics?" he barked to the empty room.
A synthesized female voice, which he'd named 'Amy' in a moment of sentimental weakness, replied from the lab's central computer. "All systems nominal, Jack. Tachyonic particle emitters are stable at ninety-eight percent. Gravimetric anchor is synced. The probability of catastrophic paradox is… well, it's non-zero."
Jack grinned, a flash of white teeth in a face shadowed by exhaustion. "Non-zero is my favorite kind of zero, Amy. It leaves room for adventure." He flexed his wrist, the Chronos Key feeling impossibly heavy. His target was not the distant past, not the age of dinosaurs or the birth of civilization. It was a much more personal, selfish destination: two hours before Amelia’s accident. A simple phone call, a warning to stay home. That was all. He wouldn't change history; he would just nudge it.
He calibrated the temporal coordinates on the watch's miniature interface. The numbers on the liquid crystal face spun with dizzying speed.
"Destination locked," Amy's voice said, a hint of digital concern in her tone. "Temporal displacement initiated in five… four…"
Jack took a deep breath, the air tasting of ozone and burnt sugar. The hum of the watch escalated into a deafening shriek.
"…three…"
He thought of Amelia's laugh, the way she'd roll her eyes at his wild theories. This was for her.
"…two…"
The lights in the lab flickered violently. The air around his wrist began to shimmer, warping like heat haze on asphalt. A vortex of iridescent light, no bigger than a fist, erupted from the face of the watch, swirling with colors no human eye was meant to see.
"…one."
The world dissolved.
It was not a pleasant sensation. It felt like being flayed, atom by atom, and reassembled by a blind and furious deity. He was everywhere and nowhere at once. He saw the birth of stars and the heat death of galaxies. He felt the weight of millennia and the fleeting flutter of a mayfly's wing. His consciousness stretched across the fabric of spacetime like taffy, thin and screaming.
Then came the error message, a crimson flash in his mind's eye. EXTERNAL GRAVIMETRIC INTERFERENCE. TEMPORAL TRAJECTORY COMPROMISED. RECALIBRATING… ERROR! CASCADE FAILURE!
The controlled jump had become an uncontrolled fall. The precise surgical strike into his own past had turned into a shotgun blast into the unknown. The universe, it seemed, did not appreciate being nudged.
The reassembly was even worse than the dissolution. It was a violent, brutal crunch. Jack felt bones snap into place, organs slam back into his torso. He smelled dust and sagebrush and something acrid, like burnt metal. He was falling.
He slammed into the ground with a force that drove the air from his lungs in a ragged gasp. For a long moment, he lay there, face down in coarse dirt and prickly scrub, his body a symphony of agony. Every joint screamed in protest. His head pounded with the mother of all migraines. The shriek of the watch had subsided, replaced by a faint, sickly crackle.
Slowly, painfully, he pushed himself up. He was in a shallow crater of scorched earth. The Chronos Key on his wrist was dark, its liquid crystal face a spiderweb of cracks. A thin wisp of smoke curled from its casing.
"Amy?" he croaked, his voice raw. "Status report."
Only silence answered.
He staggered to his feet, his vision swimming. The sun was a merciless hammer in a vast, achingly blue sky. He was in a desert, but it wasn't the familiar, comforting desert of Nevada. This was… wilder. Jagged red rock formations clawed at the sky like the bones of dead giants. Saguaro cacti stood like silent sentinels. The air was clean and sharp, devoid of the faintest hint of smog or civilization.
He patted himself down. His lab coat was torn and scorched. His glasses were miraculously intact. In his pockets, he found a multi-tool, a high-powered LED flashlight, a sealed protein bar, and a half-empty flask of what he generously called 'thinking fuel'—15-year-old single malt scotch. It wasn't much.
Where was he? Or more importantly, when was he?
His gaze fell upon something half-buried in the dirt at the edge of his crater. It was a simple wooden sign, weathered and riddled with what looked like bullet holes. The painted letters were faded but legible.
WELCOME TO REDEMPTION. POPULATION: 312 (Give or Take)
BEWARE OF SNAKES, SCOUNDRELS, AND SILAS KANE.
Beneath the text, a crude drawing depicted a vulture perched on a skull.
Redemption. The name meant nothing to him. Neither did Silas Kane. He looked around again, his scientist’s brain finally kicking back into gear, cataloging, analyzing. The flora, the geology, the complete and utter lack of power lines, contrails, or distant road noise. His heart sank with a chilling certainty. The cascade failure hadn't thrown him off by a few years, or even a few decades. The gravimetric interference… maybe a solar flare, a cosmic ray burst… it had acted like a stone skipping across the surface of a temporal pond, sending him careening into a distant, unplanned ripple.
His theory was confirmed when he heard the sound of approaching hoofbeats.
Three men on horseback crested a nearby ridge. They were silhouettes against the brutal sun, but their forms were unmistakable. They wore wide-brimmed hats, dusty vests, and carried rifles in their scabbards. As they drew closer, he could see their hard, sun-creased faces, their suspicious eyes squinting at the bizarre sight of him—a man in a singed white coat standing in a smoking hole in the ground.
The lead rider, a burly man with a thick, tobacco-stained mustache, reined in his horse a few yards away. He rested a calloused hand on the butt of the revolver holstered at his hip.
"Well now, Clem," he drawled, his voice like gravel grinding together. "Look what the buzzards dragged in. Or maybe… what fell out of the sky."
The man named Clem, a lanky fellow with nervous eyes, spat a stream of brown liquid onto the dirt. "Don't look like no angel I ever seen, Jed."
Jack stood his ground, trying to project a confidence he absolutely did not feel. His mind was racing. He was a theoretical physicist, a quantum engineer. His most dangerous encounter in the last decade had been a heated debate over string theory at a symposium in Geneva. These men, however, looked like they debated with lead and settled arguments with unmarked graves.
"Greetings," Jack said, his voice sounding strangely formal and out of place. "There seems to have been a… technical malfunction with my vehicle."
Jedediah chuckled, a low, humorless sound. "Vehicle? All I see is a hole you crawled out of. And you're dressed mighty peculiar, friend." He eyed the scorched lab coat. "You a sawbones? Or maybe one of them snake-oil peddlers?"
