Title: The Timeslot Paradox
Author: Jeff Womack
Publisher: NineStar Press
Release Date: 05/13/2025
Heat Level: 2 – Fade to Black Sex
Pairing: Female/Female
Length: 100500
Genre: Science Fiction, time travel, time portal, time jump, time slot, rescue, revenge, romance, lesbian romance, friends to lovers, paradox, disabilities, found family, interracial/intercultural, university, computers, hacker, temporal engineer
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Description
Empowering time travelers to communicate across decades, an eager and gifted temporal engineer develops a secret mail drop, hidden in plain sight on a university campus. Codename: the Timeslot.
A charismatic physicist and a focused, revenge-driven hacker go to daring lengths to escape the man who murdered their best friend and fiancé—his boss.
A grieving musician in search of closure uncovers her late father’s notebook, written before she was born but, impossibly, dated twenty-five years in the future.
Generations later, another engineer, brilliant but disorganized, struggles to repair the abandoned Timeslot equipment after years of disuse. Her unexpected discovery draws this disparate group of men and women into a cascade of events which echo across a century of recent-past and near-future history.
Journals from five intertwining lives, Black, White, Asian, queer, straight, disabled, and not, blend time travel with mystery, revenge, found family, vintage music, sci-fi references, and even a little romance.
The Timeslot Paradox
Jeff Womack © 2025
All Rights Reserved
I saved the crawlspace work till last. I knew it’d be tricky, and I’d need a shower after. My research found an older gym building in a corner of campus used only by the fencing team, women’s cross country, and some historical reenactment club, but it had locker rooms that I hoped to slip into and out of unnoticed.
With classes not starting until Monday, along with the frigid weather, the sidewalks were nearly empty. Tia had talked me into buying worn leather boots that looked at home in a mosh pit instead of canvas high-tops; more expensive, but thankfully my feet were warm. The rest of my 90s costume must have been effective enough because nobody gave me a second glance.
I dried my hair as best I could with the air hand-dryer thing. This exaggerated the shagginess, but it worked for a college-age woman in the grunge era. I kept my nose stud in, too, hoping it looked a little punk, one less thing to remember going back and forth.
Another of my shopping finds was a gray hoodie to layer under my leather jacket. Pulling it up over my damp hair, I snuck out into the dark winter evening.
The coffee place was big and warm, and it smelled amazing. After days alone in the Timeslot room, I needed to be around other people, even if only as an observer. Seeing advertisements for Strange Brew in the campus paper every day, I couldn’t stop thinking about coffee, after having so much tea. As far as I could tell, it was the only coffeehouse in town. Nineteen ninety-four was a decade away from the era of chain locations everywhere. With the cold weather, a hot mug of coffee sounded wonderful.
The décor was themed around “strange” in the name. Surrealist paintings and Escher prints adorned the walls, but the couches and overstuffed armchairs made it inviting and comfortable despite the peculiar art. I sank into an empty chair under a painting of a train in a fireplace and got comfortable.
Warming my hands on the wide ceramic mug, I quietly watched the students around me wearing slim-fitting jeans and bulky sweaters, university logo sweatshirts and snow boots, and an oddly layered ensemble topped with a pom-pommed knit hat. I’d worried way too much about my fashion choices.
I closed my eyes and sipped. The overpowering smell of coffee, the background music from Pearl Jam, snippets of conversations around me about classes, movies, romance, all blended together into the essence of that time in history: no smart watches, no tablets, no text alerts. Students studied from bound textbooks or read magazines and wrote in spiral notebooks. I felt myself relax for the first time since I jumped. I was really there—in 1994. With the portal work nearly finished, I’d be going to class with Crystal in two more days. From where I sat in the timeline, we had a little over three months to pull this off.
Tia and I had done everything we could to set this particular stage. I just had to walk onto it and give the improv performance of a lifetime. Except it wasn’t my lifetime in question, it was Crystal’s.
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Jeff is an architect, archer, author, costumer, hiker, home-brewer, re-enactor, woodworker, etc. etc. etc. He lives in the suburbs of Denver, Colorado, with his family.
Instagram | Bluesky
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