The Museum of Stolen Futures

Detective Freezan is a man adrift, haunted by a retrograde amnesia that has erased two years of his past. He has no memories before his sudden re-emergence into the present, leaving him feeling like a ghost in his own life. His latest case, the inexplicable vanishing of physicist Anna Reynolds from the enigmatic Museum of Stolen Futures, pulls him into a labyrinth of temporal anomalies that mirror his own fractured existence. The museum itself is a paradox: a grand, Brutalist structure that officially does not exist in government records, having supposedly ceased to be in 2001. Its "Stolen Futures" wing houses unclaimed artifacts—a tarnished locket, a rusted stopwatch, an ebony chess piece—each tied to a reality that never came to be. Freezan discovers that these aren't just curiosities; they are temporal anchors, leaking fragments of orphaned timelines into the present, causing security cameras to distort, and even the very layout of the museum to subtly shift. As Freezan digs deeper, he encounters unsettling phenomena: looped conversations where reality subtly alters, and victims of Past-Presence Syndrome (PPS), like Mark Jenkins, who vividly remember entire lives that never existed in the current timeline. He uncovers a hidden "Doppelgänger File" revealing multiple instances of people seeing alternate versions of themselves within the museum. His investigation leads him to the truth of his own amnesia: it's not a medical condition but a self-imposed memory implant, a desperate measure by his past self, Professor Freezan, to re-enter a dangerous, cyclical game. He learns that the museum is a temporal knot of his own making, designed to contain fractured realities, but now exploited by the clandestine Chronos Collective. This group of elites seeks to manipulate causality by acquiring Artifact Alpha, a seemingly innocuous "bullet that never fired," unaware it's a temporal bomb capable of triggering a universal reset. Freezan also confronts Sophia, the museum's "Head Curator," who reveals the ancient Curator's Pact: a grim agreement to initiate controlled resets—even a total universal purge—to preserve a singular prime timeline. With the "Hour of Collapse" rapidly approaching, Freezan, now fully re-integrated as Professor Freezan, must activate his most dangerous creation, the Paradox Engine, to perform a targeted temporal implosion and prune the rogue timelines. In the end, Freezan succeeds, saving the prime timeline from annihilation. But the cost is immense. He becomes the sole custodian of silence, haunted by the clear, aching memory of his lost family—a future he sacrificed to save the world. He remains the silent sentinel, forever guarding the fragile reality, a detective who solves crimes by understanding that sometimes, the greatest mysteries are the lives that never were.