The Raven Protocol

THE RAVEN PROTOCOL
By D.C. O’Rourke

In the year 2179, the sky was gray and dull as boiled bone.

Cities weren’t cities anymore. They were repositories—cold, humming repositories of controlled light, synthetic air, and manufactured memory. A man could live to be ninety and never remember a thing he hadn’t been allowed to.

And time—well, time had become a weapon.

The government called it The Fold. Technically, it was an unauthorized manipulation of spacetime via neural imprint and quantum entanglement. But for those who used it, it was something more sinister. The Fold allowed agents to bleed backward into history. Not with machines—no, not like that. You had to be inserted, mind and soul, into a time-grown body. You became someone else to change what needed changing.

And if you strayed?

Well… that’s what The Raven Protocol was for.

Agent Adrian Reynolds lit a government stim-stick in the black-walled silence of the Terminal. The nicotine wasn’t real, but the guilt it stirred was. His hands, though steady, bore faint scars from ops gone wrong, echoes of missions he couldn’t fully remember. There were always pieces missing. Faces blurred. Words half-recalled. It was the Ministry’s way—strip the soul, shape the tool.

Then came the buzz.

A static flash across the retinal implant.

Agent Reynolds. Raven Protocol activated. Target: Edgar Allan Poe. Codename: EAP-13. Terminate with prejudice. Prevent delivery of document codenamed: “The Pale Cipher.”

Insertion: October 3, 1849. Baltimore. Human form host will auto-synchronize. Good luck.

He blinked once. Twice.

Poe.

The name echoed. Familiar. Sacred. Cursed.

Adrian whispered, “He was one of ours?”

No answer came.

The stim-stick hissed out. The Fold opened like a scream, and time swallowed him whole.

-Baltimore, 1849.

He woke with blood on his cuffs and mud on his boots.

The world smelled wrong. It was real, almost too real. Rotting meat. Horses. Drunken piss. It clung to the air like a fever. Adrian staggered forward, his lungs catching on the shift. In the mirror of a tavern window, he saw his face—period-correct, gaunt, and ghost-pale. A man pulled from time and sewn into flesh.

It was dusk when he found him.

Poe sat alone in Gunner’s Hall, hunched over a glass of something murky. His eyes were distant, and his coat hung off him like wet parchment. But his hand moved feverishly across a napkin, scribbling verse like a man trying to outrun his own thoughts.

Adrian approached with quiet steps, sliding into the seat across from him.

“I wondered when you’d come,” Poe said without looking up. “The others tried poison. One even used a straight razor. You’re the first to sit.”

“You remember the others?” Adrian asked.

“Oh yes. They’re ghosts in my dreams now. The Ministry failed to scrub me clean.” Poe looked up, and Adrian felt a jolt. Those eyes weren’t mad. They were awake.

Adrian’s voice was low. “Why did you go rogue?”

Poe smiled grimly. “Because truth, Agent Reynolds, is a dangerous addiction.”

He reached into his coat and pulled out a page—yellowed, creased, and covered in curling black script.

“This,” Poe said, laying it down like a priest revealing scripture, “is The Pale Cipher. Disguised as a poem. Smuggled between rhyme and madness.”

Adrian read a line aloud.

“When ink runs red and shadows turn,
The hourglass forgets to burn.”

Time quivered. The bar lights dimmed. Somewhere, outside, a dog began howling.

Poe leaned in. “It reveals the origin point. The first moment. The truth they buried under centuries of fabrication. The Fold wasn’t discovered, Adrian. It was unleashed.”

Adrian’s hand twitched near the bone-handled knife at his belt.

“And what do you want me to do?” he asked, voice taut.

Poe’s breath hitched. “Don’t silence me. Remember me.”

Adrian stood.

The tavern blurred. His head pounded. The Ministry’s tether thrummed in his skull. Terminate. Terminate. The mission was screaming.

But then Poe whispered, “Reynolds… it’s you who wrote this. Don’t you remember?”

The room stilled.

The world paused.

His mind cracked.

He did remember.

A page. A pen. His own hand writing the cipher by candlelight. In another life. Another body. Another time. A rebel. A traitor. A poet.

They had sent him back to kill his own past.

He turned, trembling. Poe met his gaze. “You see now. The Fold is a loop. They’ve made us murder ourselves again and again to protect a lie.”

“I… I can’t.” Adrian’s voice broke.

Poe nodded.

“I know.”

The gunshot echoed across Baltimore.

The newspapers would say he was found in delirium, wearing someone else’s clothes. A mystery death. Fever. Rabies. Alcohol. But it wasn’t any of those things. It was silence.

Ministry agents retrieved the body. The tavern was cleaned. The poem—destroyed.

Or so they thought.

-2179. New Boston.

Adrian Reynolds filed the report.
“Target eliminated. Mission successful. Cipher prevented.”

But under his bed, hidden in the folds of a smuggled pillowcase, lay a crumpled sheet of paper—one he had not destroyed.

He read it nightly. A riddle. A warning. A prophecy. And at the bottom, scrawled in ink that shimmered unnaturally under UV light:

“And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting—
Over shadows of the Fold, where truth and time are slowly splitting.”

He whispered the name one more time. Not Poe. Not EAP-13. Not a rogue.

Adrian Reynolds.
His own name.
And somewhere in the dark corners of time, another agent stirred.

The Fold trembled.

And the raven beat its wings again.