Totality Through Time
Copyright© 2026 by Art Samms
Chapter 2
Sound came back first.
Not the ocean. Not the low churn of a diesel engine.
Wood striking stone. Iron-rimmed wheels grinding over cobbles. A sharp crack like a gunshot that resolved into a whip snapping through air.
I opened my eyes to motion.
The world lurched sideways and I nearly rolled into something solid—a crate, maybe, rough wood biting into my palm as I caught myself. My ears rang as if I’d surfaced too fast from deep water. For a moment I saw two skies layered over each other: the indigo corona of totality and a pale, smoke-streaked afternoon.
I sucked in a breath.
Coal. Hot metal. Animal sweat.
The air was thick with it, so different from the clean salt wind off the Cantabrian Sea that my lungs stuttered in protest.
I pushed myself upright, heart hammering hard enough to make my vision pulse. The boat—where was the boat?
There was no boat.
I stood in the middle of a broad, uneven street paved in cobblestones, my sneakers slipping slightly on grit and damp straw. A carriage thundered past so close I felt the rush of displaced air against my legs. The driver shouted something sharp and angry.
“Attention! Imbécile!”
The words weren’t Spanish. They weren’t English, either.
They were French.
Another carriage followed, wheels clattering, horses’ hooves striking sparks. The animals’ flanks were slick with sweat, leather harnesses creaking. People surged along the edges of the street in dark suits and long skirts, parasols tilted against the sun. Hats everywhere—bowler hats, straw boaters, feathered monstrosities that bobbed as women hurried past.
No one was holding a phone. No one wore a T-shirt.
I turned in a slow, disbelieving circle.
The buildings rose three, four, five stories high, their façades ornate with balconies and carved stonework. Gas lamps stood at regular intervals along the street. Posters were pasted over walls—dense French text, elaborate typefaces, illustrations rendered in ink.
My pulse began to climb toward panic.
This was wrong. This was an elaborate historical reenactment. A film set. It had to be.
But the smell—God, the smell—was too real. Coal smoke drifted overhead in lazy gray ribbons. Somewhere nearby, something metallic clanged in rhythmic repetition. A newsboy darted between carriages, waving papers and shouting headlines I couldn’t fully catch.
“Exposition! Grande ouverture—!”
Exposition. The word struck something in my brain like a struck bell. My throat tightened.
I turned again, searching for anything familiar—anything modern that would anchor me.
And then I saw it.
Above the rooftops, piercing the hazy afternoon sky, a lattice of iron rose in stark, geometric defiance. Angular, skeletal, and completely impossible to mistake.
The Eiffel Tower.
Not the finished monument I knew from postcards and skyline shots. This one looked raw, almost unfinished. Its iron ribs were exposed, the color darker—closer to brown than the warm, aged tone I remembered. Platforms were visible beneath the summit. Scaffolding clung to portions of its lower sections like barnacles.
But there was no doubt.
The Eiffel Tower.
My stomach dropped.
I knew its timeline. Every architecture student did. Completed in time for the Exposition Universelle. Hated by many Parisians at first. Meant to stand for twenty years and then be dismantled.
The nearly completed structure before me aligned perfectly with that moment in history.
“No,” I whispered.
The word vanished in the churn of wheels and voices.
This wasn’t a reenactment. There were no security barriers, no modern signage, no hidden cameras. The street surface was uneven beneath my feet, not an artificial prop. The people moved with the unselfconscious urgency of lives being lived, not performed.
A woman brushed past me, her sleeve rough against my bare forearm. She glanced at my shirt—my lightweight Houston Astros T-shirt—and her expression tightened into confusion, then distaste.
I looked down at myself.
Sneakers. Slim-fit jeans. Smartwatch still strapped to my wrist.
I looked like I’d fallen through a crack in the sky. For all I knew, I had.
My breath came shallow and fast. I pressed a hand to my chest as if I could steady the rhythm from the outside.
Think.
The eclipse. The boat. The fractured light. The surge that had felt like electricity pouring through bone.
My camera.
The thought snapped me into motion. I fumbled for the strap around my neck. It was still there. The body hung against my sternum, heavier than I remembered.
My hands shook as I lifted it. The casing felt warm. Not hot—just faintly alive.
I pressed the power button. For one terrible second, nothing happened.
Then the screen flickered to life.
The image that appeared wasn’t the harbor in Luarca. It wasn’t the corona frozen in impossible white flame.
It was a dim, grainy view of cobblestones and the hem of a woman’s skirt moving out of frame—whatever the sensor was currently seeing.
I swallowed and shifted to the settings display. The date and time were always in the upper corner.
I stared at the numbers, waiting for my brain to correct them. The digits were crisp. Unambiguous.
APR 28 1889 15:17
My thumb hovered over the screen as if touching it might smudge the truth.
“That’s not possible,” I said aloud, my voice thin against the clamor of the street.
A cart rattled past. A man cursed in French. Somewhere, a hammer struck metal in steady blows.
April 28, 1889. Not August 12, 2026.
I felt the world tilt, not physically this time but internally, as if the axis of my understanding had shifted a few degrees off true. My thoughts scrambled for purchase—concussion, hallucination, some elaborate prank—but none of them could explain the Tower rising unfinished against the sky, or the absence of a single modern artifact anywhere in sight.
I looked up again at the iron lattice cutting into the haze.
I had spent my adult life studying buildings. Memorizing their histories. Dating them by silhouette alone.
And now I stood beneath one that should have existed only in textbooks and memory.
A carriage barreled toward me and I barely moved in time, stumbling back onto the edge of the street. The driver shouted another string of French that needed no translation.
My heart pounded so violently I thought I might black out. April 28, 1889.
The eclipse hadn’t just glitched my camera. It had moved me—through both space and time.
And judging by the chaos gathering around me—by the suspicious looks at my clothes, by the muttered comments I couldn’t fully understand—Paris was about to notice that I did not belong.
I should have walked away. Calmly and purposefully, like I knew exactly where I was going.
Instead, I stood there in the middle of the street staring at my camera like it might apologize. A small crowd began to gather—not tightly, but in that subtle, tightening arc people form when something unusual interrupts their day. A boy pointed at my shoes. A woman covered her mouth and whispered to the man beside her. I caught fragments.
“Regarde ses vêtements...”
“... étranger...”
“Américain?” someone guessed, though it sounded less like curiosity and more like accusation.
I became acutely aware of the cotton of my T-shirt against my skin, the printed logo across my chest, the stitching on my jeans. My smartwatch glinted obscenely in the afternoon light.
I slid the camera strap off my neck as if that might make me less conspicuous. It didn’t.
Two uniformed men pushed through the edge of the gathering crowd. Dark blue coats. Kepi hats. Brass buttons catching the light. One had a thick mustache waxed into disciplined points. The other carried himself with rigid, economical authority.
Gendarmes.
They stopped a few feet from me, eyes sweeping from my head to my shoes and back again.
“Vos papiers,” the mustached one said, holding out a gloved hand.
Luckily, I’m somewhat of a language nut, although my French was only slightly better than my Spanish. My brain translated slowly. Your papers.
“I—” My mouth felt dry. “Je ... je suis américain.” The words came out fractured and thin. “Touriste.”
The second officer frowned. His gaze fixed on the camera in my hand.
“Qu’est-ce que c’est?” he demanded.
“Un appareil photo,” I said automatically. A camera. Which was true and yet felt dangerously insufficient.
He stepped forward and took it from me before I could react.
“Hey—” The English slipped out before I could stop it.
The first officer’s expression hardened.
“Silence.”
They turned the camera over in their hands, examining the buttons, the lens mount, the rear screen. The mustached one pressed something experimentally and the display lit up again.
He flinched when the screen glowed. A murmur rippled through the crowd.
“Magie,” someone whispered.
“C’est un appareil allemand?” another voice suggested darkly.
German.
The word snapped into place in my mind. In 1889, Europe was a web of alliances and suspicions. The Exposition Universelle was a couple of weeks from its grand opening. Foreign dignitaries would attend. Industrial achievements would be displayed to the world.
A man appearing in the street with strange clothes and an unrecognizable device that produced light?
I might as well have carried a bomb.
The second officer barked a question too fast for me to parse. I caught only “Exposition” and “espion.”
Spy.
“I’m not a spy,” I said, knowing the English was useless. “Je ne suis pas ... espion.” The word felt clumsy in my mouth.
The mustached officer gestured sharply. Another uniformed man materialized from somewhere behind the crowd. Hands closed around my upper arms—not brutally, but firmly enough to communicate that resistance would be a mistake.
Panic flared hot and sudden in my chest.
“This is a misunderstanding,” I tried again in broken French. “Je ... viens pour ... l’éclipse.” I pointed helplessly at the sky.
They followed my gesture automatically.
Above us, the sun blazed in an unremarkable blue expanse. No eclipse. No celestial anomaly. Just an ordinary Parisian afternoon.
Of course. The eclipse had been in August. Spain. 2026.
Not here, not now. The absurdity of it threatened to unmoor me completely.
The officer holding my arm tightened his grip. “Assez.”
They began to steer me down the street.
The crowd parted eagerly, curiosity satisfied and replaced by relief that whatever I was, I was no longer their problem. I stumbled over the cobblestones, trying not to trip in shoes designed for smooth pavement and climate-controlled interiors.
The camera remained in the mustached officer’s hand. He carried it gingerly, as though it might bite.
“Please,” I said, desperation roughening my voice. “C’est à moi. Important.”
He didn’t look at me.
As we moved, the noise of the street seemed to amplify—hooves striking stone, wheels grinding, vendors shouting, the distant clang of metal on metal. My heart matched the rhythm, too fast, too loud.
Then, a horn blared. Sharp, metallic, and most of all—modern.
I froze mid-step.
For a fraction of a second, the carriage in front of us flickered.
Its wooden wheels shimmered and became rubber tires. The horse dissolved into the sleek hood of a sedan. The streetlights stretched upward into glass-and-steel lampposts. The air cleared of coal smoke and filled instead with the sterile scent of conditioned air.
I saw Houston’s skyline rise where Parisian stone had been—reflective towers stabbing at a humid Texas sky. Car horns layered over the clatter of hooves. The ground beneath my feet smoothed into asphalt.
It lasted less than a heartbeat. Then it was gone.
The horse reassembled itself in front of me, snorting and stamping. The carriage driver swore in French. Coal smoke stung my nostrils.
I staggered, vision swimming.
The officer jerked me upright. “Avancez!”
Had I blacked out? Was my brain tearing itself apart trying to reconcile incompatible data? I turned my head, searching desperately for any lingering trace of the sensory overlap—an electrical wire, a traffic signal, anything.
Nothing.
The Eiffel Tower loomed closer now as they marched me along a broad avenue. Its iron framework cast angular shadows across the buildings beneath it. Workers moved like ants along its lower platforms. Even unfinished, it dominated everything around it.
A banner stretched across the street ahead, bold lettering proclaiming the coming Exposition Universelle. I could read enough to understand its promise: industry, progress, the future.
The future. My future.
The irony scraped at me as they pulled me toward a stone building with tall arched windows and a heavy wooden door. A tricolor flag hung limp above it.
Inside, the air shifted from coal smoke to damp stone and ink. The noise of the street muted behind thick walls. Boots echoed on tile.
They pushed me into a sparsely furnished room with a desk and two straight-backed chairs. One officer remained at the door. The mustached one placed my camera carefully on the desk as though it were evidence in a murder.
He turned to me.
“Nom?”