Time is not a line. It’s a wound.
What if your memories didn’t belong to you? What if they belonged to a timeline that never existed?
Time Lines is a gripping, genre-bending science fiction novel that blends time travel, ancient civilizations, and nonlinear memory into a story of sacrifice, resonance, and redemption.
When four astronauts are sent to investigate a catastrophic experiment near the Moon, they discover a truth that fractures reality itself. The experiment didn’t just bend time—it shattered it, leaving humanity echoing with memories from timelines that never happened. Some remember other lives. Others remember the end of the world.
One astronaut stays behind.
The others are thrown into the distant past, crash-landing in ancient Nazca, where their presence gives rise to the mystery of the Nazca Lines—giant glyphs that will one day mark the grave of humanity’s forgotten future.
As reality unravels, governments scramble to contain the phenomenon known as NTR—Neural Temporal Resonance, while cults, rogue agents, and children born with memories of alternate lives rise from the chaos. In the end, only one timeline can hold.
But the price of stability… is memory itself.
Time is not a line. It’s a wound.
What if your memories didn’t belong to you? What if they belonged to a timeline that never existed?
Time Lines is a gripping, genre-bending science fiction novel that blends time travel, ancient civilizations, and nonlinear memory into a story of sacrifice, resonance, and redemption.
When four astronauts are sent to investigate a catastrophic experiment near the Moon, they discover a truth that fractures reality itself. The experiment didn’t just bend time—it shattered it, leaving humanity echoing with memories from timelines that never happened. Some remember other lives. Others remember the end of the world.
One astronaut stays behind.
The others are thrown into the distant past, crash-landing in ancient Nazca, where their presence gives rise to the mystery of the Nazca Lines—giant glyphs that will one day mark the grave of humanity’s forgotten future.
As reality unravels, governments scramble to contain the phenomenon known as NTR—Neural Temporal Resonance, while cults, rogue agents, and children born with memories of alternate lives rise from the chaos. In the end, only one timeline can hold.
But the price of stability… is memory itself.
Usually I feel lost all the time. Now I just feel loss.
I never really understood myself until I died. Let me rephrase that: I never understood myself until I decided not to die again. That was harder.
Death—and the true acceptance that I would one day cease to exist—always scared the shit out of me. I believed that it was a wall after life that leads to nothingness. No more family, no more wonder, no more joy. Just… nothing.
Now, I admit—sometimes this life I’m moving forward with feels even scarier. The one I haven’t died in yet. The one I don’t fully understand. And I’m okay with that. Most of the time. But not always. And I’m told it’s okay to not be okay.
This was—is—the greatest story mankind has ever had to tell, and likely never will. Because the cruel truth is that only a few of us—literally a few—have glimpsed the terrifying reality we just avoided. For the first time.
How many times did we have to go through it? I honestly don’t know. How many times did we all have to die just to get it right once?
Like the Doc always said, “We only have to get it right once.”
This is a story that flows through time like a brook over a pebble—endlessly breaking it down into something smoother, something that finally makes sense. Or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe time never makes sense. Maybe it just feels like it does because we need it to. We need time to build structure into the chaos.
But moving back and forth through time? That’s something we do inside our minds. That’s memory. That’s resonance. That’s grief. That’s hope. We seek the true lines in time that define us—like lifelines on our palms, meant to guide us, meant to give meaning to something we can never fully control.
Time is a thief.
Time takes. It erodes. Little by little until there’s nothing left.
But—what if time could give something back?
What if you could reclaim what it stole from you?
Earth was always meant to be our tomb. But when? How? And could we change that fate by letting go of the future long enough to find the past?
My Next Life
Again I feel it. Again I know. Maybe this time is different.
It repeats in my mind and it won’t release me.
Or it can’t.
It repeats.
I have hope now. And I feel great loss. But before this—before now—all I felt was lost.
The thought strikes me in the dark, somewhere above the Moon, where clocks used to work. The stars outside the window haven’t moved in hours. Or days. The station hums, but I know something is wrong.
This part always comes next. The remembering. The ache. The echo that says: maybe this time, we got it right...
I’m not alone. And yet—I am.
This is the part no one planned for.
We were supposed to be the ones who made it back.
But you can’t return from what you never truly left.
Time didn’t just fracture—it multiplied. And I… I’m starting to remember all of them.
The one where Max never boarded.
The one where Elly burned in the descent.
The one where Sunita spoke the words first carved into the rock.
The one where I stayed behind. No—wait. I always stayed behind.
They say if you listen closely enough, you can hear a version of yourself screaming through the static.
Part One - Fracture
Peter Andori - Peru, February 16, 1996
As Dr. Peter Andori stepped out of the expedition van, he thought once again how wonderful it was to be here instead of back in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
He hadn’t expected the air to smell so clean. That kind of clarity only came at altitude, even though the base of the glyph wasn’t all that high. The desert heat met his face with its familiar, dry kiss—a better greeting than most of his colleagues at Harvard ever managed.
He adjusted his sunglasses and surveyed the team already gathered near the cave. Everyone stood oddly still. Tense. That kind of silence wasn’t typical—especially not with grad students. Especially not with Reggie, his excavation manager, who normally never shut up.
Peter hated surprises. And here he was.
He would’ve liked to sleep a bit more, but his head grad student had made it sound urgent—very urgent—that he get to the site immediately. They had found something. What, exactly, they refused to say. Just that he needed to see it for himself.
So here he was, standing outside a cave that had been noted decades ago when all the geoglyphs were first mapped—but never truly explored.
Thanks to some generous funding from various entities, his team finally had a chance to investigate it. Peter had always wondered why no one had bothered to take a closer look inside. At least, no one recently. And this particular cave was different—it sat at the foot of the so-called astronaut glyph. That’s what they called it for lack of a better word. Because—from the air—it actually looked like a goddamn astronaut.
He’d seen aerial photos of it dozens of times. Studied the glyph’s orientation in papers. Even entertained theories that bordered on pseudoscience—at least in private. And still, this cave had remained mostly unexplored.
Until now.
These caves, scattered throughout the Nazca Line sites, were discovered as early as 1927. The entire region had been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994. Modern people didn’t pay them much attention until airplanes came along. Were they meant to be seen from the sky? Or were they meant to send a message? Peter had wondered that to himself at least a thousand times.
We’d known about the caves for a while. Of course, like every so-called discovery, the Peruvian people had always known about them. And probably hoped the rest of the world never would.
Exploring this cave had always registered as mildly interesting—something noted in passing on old charts and shallow scans. Nothing urgent. Nothing critical. Just another unexplored line on a map.
And yet, something about it had stayed with him. A quiet thread tugging at the back of his mind. He had planned to take a look and move on. But now, standing here, it felt less like a decision and more like inevitability.
His students and site manager had all but dragged him here, insisting he needed to see it immediately.
Everyone stood waiting outside the cave. As Peter looked around and focused on the team, he wasn’t quite sure what he was seeing—but he could feel it. There was a strange current in the air. Excitement, yes. But something else too.
Fear.
Most of them seemed to be actively avoiding his eyes. And those who did meet his gaze... they looked shaken. Not in the way of scientific awe—but like something had rattled them.
“What the hell did they find?” Peter muttered to himself. Not loud enough to be heard, but loud enough to steady his nerves. Talking to himself always helped—it had for years. A habit earned through decades of quiet panic tamped down beneath layers of professionalism.
“Okay, everyone,” he said, stepping forward, “what are we looking at? Between most of you avoiding eye contact and the rest of you looking like you’ve seen a ghost... what the hell did you get me out of bed this early for?”
Reggie, his excavation manager, was the first to speak.
“Honestly, Professor... we’re not sure what we’ve found. We wanted you to see it yourself before we tried to explain.”
Peter scanned the group. No one contradicted Reggie. Most just stared at the ground, nodding.
“Alright,” he sighed. “Let’s take a look, shall we?”
He spoke with more confidence than he felt. If he was being honest, the way his team was acting—he didn’t think he wanted to know what they had found.
But there was only one way to find out.
First step. Then the next. That’s what years of therapy had taught him. Start moving, take control, face the unknown. Even if the unknown was buried under centuries of dust.
He stepped into the cave.
The air changed immediately. Cooler. Denser. Quiet.
Venturing deeper into the tunnel, the passage opened into a wider cavern—and what waited there was beyond astonishing.
“Paracas Mummy Bundles? What are they doing here?”
The bodies had been mummified in the traditional Nazca fashion—a remarkably sophisticated process. Each one placed in the fetal position. It was unclear whether they’d ever been fully buried.
There were ten people in the group. No one spoke until Peter did.
“Is this a joke?” he asked. But he already knew it wasn’t. There was nothing funny about what he was seeing.
And yet, it all felt... eerily familiar.
That made it worse.
Regardless of how fantastical this all seemed—Peter knew. This was a great find. The find. Maybe the greatest of his career. And still... something inside him recoiled. Because it didn’t feel like discovery.
It felt like recognition.
He looked around at his team—and now he understood their faces.
They were scared. And so was he.
Did someone just mention space suits?
He turned to look again, letting his eyes adjust.
What he saw was impossible.
Four space suits—aged, deteriorated, but unmistakable. Not anything from NASA. Not Russian. Not any Earth space program. These looked futuristic. Alien, even.
The helmets lay beside them, cracked and dulled with time. But somehow, impossibly, the name tags were still legible.
Names he recognized.
A memory surged forward—one he hadn’t thought about in years. A dream he’d had as a child. Faces he didn’t know, speaking languages he couldn’t understand. Stars arranged in constellations that didn’t exist.
And a man in a suit who looked like him, whispering: “Only one has to work.”
And then he remembered that man. The one who’d come to Cambridge years ago. Taylor. The quack. The lunatic with the theories. The one who’d shown Peter a drawing from this very cave—before it had ever been explored.
Peter swallowed hard.
And all he could say was:
“...Well. Fuck.”
Part of him—no matter how wondrous this all was—didn’t want to be right about what it could mean.
That lunatic had been telling the truth.
I've just finished reading Time Lines and I have to write my review straightaway in order to capture my mood and my thoughts on it. I can honestly say that I have never read anything quite like this and I'm not sure that I am going to be able to relay my awe sufficiently at Savo's vision and the way that he has managed to craft it into a book, enough to do it justice, but I will try.
Where to start? Let's talk about the atmosphere of the book. It feels like you are reading a piece of prophecy, a projection of what could be in our future (or many of them) and it has a tone which is almost ethereal, as if you're peering through time itself, like it's a gauze or a web.
If that sounds woolly, I don't mean it to be because it's very clearly written throughout with pointers and descriptively titled chapters to guide you as to what is going on and an extensive glossary and character summary at the end to provide further clarification if it is needed. I suspect that its almost dream-like quality comes from its subject matter (which is that there are multiple timelines leading to multiple endings in its simplest terms) and the fact that at times a lot of what is happening in the story is uncertain for its characters too.
Our main focus is on four astronauts called Renee, Elly, Sunita and Max and we follow them through, well, time. When four astronaut suits are found buried in the Nazca desert, it is the launch point from which we uncover how this could possibly occur, the suits having been there for thousands of years. And yet, is it really a surprise? Not for all and that's what becomes revealed as the story unfolds.
This novel has many aspects. It is science fiction but it takes us to previous civilisation too. It feels experimental whilst also being paradoxically firm in what it's trying to say. It has messages about humanity and motive and where we might be headed but it is not delivered in a didactic way- it's like exploring a dreamscape where ideas are presented and then move away again, like the folds of time that make up the threads of the book.
It is a book that is worthy of exploration for its truly unique quality.