The acrid scent of solder hit Lieselotte de Graaf first, stinging her nostrils, then the familiar thrum of a plasma coil humming from the workbench beside her ear. This was no sterile vault of the years she had fled, where repossession notices yellowed beside Kasper's vacant armchair. This was the atelier.
Lieselotte’s eyes snapped open. The clutter of the family lab rose around her: circuit boards leaned in precarious piles beside a disemboweled Chronos-Oscillator, brass pinions dull under the filament overhead. A half-eaten stroopwafel lay forgotten on a schematic for a ‘Weather-Modulating Umbrage Device.’ Five years back, crumpled against the frayed velour settee, copper wire indenting her cheek.
Ribs ached around her ribs. The air, thick with the smell of scorched metal and stale coffee, had never felt so alive. This was real. The second chance. The desperate gamble she had staked while staring at a premature plot in the municipal cemetery. She pushed herself upright, a dizzying rush making the room tilt. The ‘Chronos-Oscillator’—Kasper’s ludicrous, perpetually unfinished pet project—sat less than an arm’s length away. In her original timeline, it had finally seen completion, a week after his death, a cruel joke. Not this time.
“Right,” she whispered, her voice a reedy croak, unused to the sound of hope. “Uncomplicated. Keep it restrained.”
Her design, sketched across wakeful nights among quiet library stacks, had one core rule: minimal intervention. A butterfly flapping its wings, all that. Her social anxiety, however, had a perverse habit of turning ‘minimal’ into ‘byzantine,’ transforming modest purchases into multi-layered schemes worthy of a consulate intelligence bureau. This time, she swore, she would resist the urge to overcomplicate.
Her fingers fumbled for the battered ‘Porta-Tablet’ she always kept near. Its glass face, cracked in a fine spiderweb, sparked pale blue. The date displayed, crisp and undeniable: *14th Florin, 2897*. Five years. Enough time to save him. Enough time to arrest the rare neurological decay that had claimed Kasper, and with him, their household solvency.
She called up the regional trading portal, thumbs hovering over the haptic grid. Her modest funds, scraped from cataloging stipends and a sensible aunt's legacy, tallied eighteen thousand florins. Negligible in this city's cutthroat tech sphere, but sufficient for an opening move.
“Tulip Technologies,” she muttered, typing the name with a deliberate slowness. “Small. Laughable. Undetectable.”
In her original timeline, ‘Tulip Technologies’ had been an obscure seed-stage startup, specializing in hyper-efficient hydroponic grow-lamps for exotic botanicals. They’d floundered for two years, then, with one serendipitous partnership, exploded into a multi-billion florin ag-tech titan, their light fixtures refitting every municipal greenhouse. Lieselotte, in her original life, had watched their rise with a detached interest, too timid to ever risk capital. This time, she was getting in at the ground floor.
She located the company on the exchange. The equity hovered at a miserable five cents per share. Barely a line on any institutional radar. Perfect. So small, so utterly insignificant, her investment would be a ripple in a puddle, not a tsunami.
She hesitated, her finger trembling over the ‘CONFIRM’ button. Anonymity was key. She had taken precautions to route through anonymous shell layers in the municipal capital grid. No one, especially not Bastiaan van Dijk, could connect this move to her. If he ever suspected she had foreknowledge… the thought alone made her stomach churn.
“Just do it,” she whispered, taking a shallow breath. “One step. One tiny step.”
She tapped the glass. A green checkmark bloomed, followed by the words: *TRANSACTION COMPLETE. 360,000 shares of TULIP acquired.*
A triumphant, anxious smile stretched across her face. It was done. The first domino had fallen, precisely as planned. She pictured the coming decade drifting clear of catastrophe, Kasper pottering among his dynamos, the household balance sheet quietly solvent. This was it. The start of everything good.
She looked up at the wall-mounted terminal, which usually ran sector feeds, district news, or Kasper’s sprawling drafts. Right now it tracked the composite index, measuring the district's collective speculation.
A harsh chirp cut across the coil's baseline whine.
The composite numbers, usually a slow drip of green and amber, jittered. The glass flared.
*RED*.
Not just a little red. A violent, arterial crimson, throbbing like a wounded heart. The numbers, which had been gently rising, plummeted. Each digit a tiny, screaming dive.
*BEEP-BEEP-BEEP!*
The sector monitor, which had shown a modest fractional gain, dropped: *–5.87%*. Then *–7.12%*. Then *–9.00%*.
Bile stung the back of Lieselotte's tongue. This wasn't right. This had never happened in the recorded cycles. Tulip's ticker was too insignificant to disturb the wider bourses. Her plan was meant to be harmless. An erratic, absurd slide, unseen since the collapse of '67.
She scrambled to her feet, knocking over a stack of blueprints. The composite dropped in a sheer cascade: *–11.55%*. Sirens from brokerage towers two canals over began bleating through the leaded glass. A Correction Cascade? No, not yet. Not from *one* tiny, anonymous investment. This was a farce. A monstrous, Rube Goldberg-esque punchline to her meticulously crafted salvation.
Bootheels scuffed the floorboards by the hall entry.
Kasper stood in the frame, round spectacles askew, a pneumatic spanner dangling from his grease-stained fingers. He squinted at the pulsing crimson monitor, then looked down at Lieselotte amid the fallen schematics.
“Liesl, my dear,” he murmured with dry amusement, “did you just derail the mercantile exchange?”