The Jaunt Across Time
David was an unimpressive man by conventional standards. He was a middle-aged librarian, primarily engrossed in preserving and cataloguing books in his hamlet Hawthrone, nothing extraordinary but his fascinations. David had a blatant obsession for tales of time travel. His solitude paved way to his imagination knitting a realm where these fantasies came true.
One day, a strange donor bestowed an antique book titled 'The Temporal Paradox' to the library. Intrigued, David was drawn to the book like a moth to light, not aware that his life was on the brink of taking an unforeseen turn. As he traced the contours of the peculiarly dated tome, his mind was gripped by the mysterious inscription on its first page, 'To the rightful companion of time.'
The book laid out a theoretical model of time travel, so well explained that David found himself believing in its potential despite his qualifications screaming scientific impossibility. Gradually, David embarked on a unique journey of decoding the inscrutable instructions and diagrams sprawled across the pages of the book. Days turned into months while our otherwise reticent librarian metamorphosed into a fervent inventor.
Losing track of time was a common occurrence for David now, but he wouldn't have ever fathomed doing it literally until the fateful night arrived. He woke up tied to a colossal metal structure amidst a network of cables and pressured steam jets. What was earlier a cryptic piece of mechanical design in the book, now stood before his eyes as the tangible model of a Time Machine.
Without wasting any moment, he propelled the machine using a myriad of coordinates and a manual lever, his heart pounding in adjacent rhythm with the wired contraption. A surge of electric pulses and the room darkened only to be replaced by the golden hues of an unfamiliar landscape. David's fantasy turned reality, he had travelled back to 1847, exactly how his calculations depicted.
Roaming around, David witnessed the surreal experience of a time past; horse carriages, gas-lit lamposts, the people in vintage clothing. However, the novelty soon turned into horror when he stumbled upon the horrendous sight of sick and famished men, women and children. It was a deadly cholera outbreak, which he remembered had claimed thousands of lives from the history of his town.
Overwhelmed by the magnitude of human suffering, David navigated his way back to his time machine, intending to go back and fetch help. As he returned, he discovered the epidemic was also impacting his hometown. David decided the only way to stop this was by going forward in time to get the cure.
He dialed in a future date, and found himself in a technologically advanced era of 2250. Procuring the vaccine wasn't difficult as they were freely available. With the vaccine in his possession, he decided to travel back to the year of the epidemic, and, facing both acceptance and hostility, David managed to secure help from local physicians to administer the vaccine to the sick.
Exhausted but content, he was about to leave for his own time when he collided with a woman holding an antique book. Their eyes met, and the woman recognized the curious man from a painting in a book that she cherished - 'The Temporal Paradox'. David realized, perplexed and numbed, that he himself was the original author.
Trapping himself in a paradox, David understood his fate was perhaps a casualty of his own creation. But, with a new resolution, he chose to stay where he was, in the past he had saved, committed to preserving history without altering it anymore. Thus, our ordinary librarian embraced an extraordinary destiny.
Undeterred by the ripples he had stirred in the time continuum, the book was returned to the same library from where it had begun its journey, marking the story of David, the man from the future who strode across time bringing hope to the hopeless.