Maxine Aldridge

Maxine lost her parents young and never quite felt at home in the Atomic Era. Something always seemed off, not in any way she could explain, just a persistent sense that the world she lived in didn't add up. So she turned to the ones that came before it.

She became obsessed with history, but not the version taught in corporate-sponsored classrooms. She was drawn to the anomalies. The Antikythera Mechanism, with gears too precise for its time. Structures aligned with stars their builders shouldn't have known about. Objects that didn't belong where they were found. She couldn't explain them, but she couldn't ignore them either.

In the Atomic Era, corporations control everything. Maxine grew up inside that system like everyone else. But unlike everyone else, she'd spent years digging through historical records and kept finding the same corporate names appearing across centuries. Not similar names. The exact same ones. The proof was elusive, but the coincidences were piling up faster than she could dismiss them.

Deltapath Distribution hired her because she was brilliant at logistics. She could spot inefficiencies in supply chains and delivery routes faster than entire teams, and she had a natural instinct for how complex systems fit together. It was a corporate job, and she took it like any disillusioned scholar would: paycheck first, questions later. She had no idea what Deltapath actually moved, or how.

The first time they told her about time travel, she thought it was a joke. The second time, she was standing in another era. It turned out Deltapath ran one of the most sophisticated cross-era logistics operations in existence, hidden inside its legitimate distribution network. Most people would never know. Most Deltapath employees wouldn't, either. But Maxine's skill required the clearance, and the clearance came with the truth.

Everything she had ever studied suddenly made sense. The impossible gears, the misplaced precision, the structures that shouldn't exist where and when they were found. They weren't mysteries. They were shipments. Evidence of a supply chain stretching across eras, and she had spent her whole life studying its footprints.

She loves the work. Walking through eras she'd only read about, experiencing cultures firsthand, standing in history instead of studying it from a distance. She was made for this.

But the more she sees, the more something bothers her. Every object she routes through time changes something on the other end. The eras she revisits feel less distinct each time: local culture fading, traditions flattening, everything slowly converging toward the same corporate sameness.

She scratched the surface of the what. But now the question is why. If someone is deliberately reshaping history through these shipments, then she hasn't just stumbled onto a conspiracy.

She's been making the deliveries.