Doc Comm

Clint Ernest Braun was a nuclear physicist in the First World War. When it ended he put the physics down and fixed watches for twenty years, which suited him fine. Then the second war started and they came asking for him again.

Something went wrong while he was working on a temporal equation, and it went wrong loud. He woke up with a headache that never left and a brain that suddenly understood time as something you could solve for. He can run the math in his head now, fast enough to send any vehicle, a car, a boat, a dinghy if it came to it, to any year he wants. He never built a time machine. He just makes whatever he's driving into one.

The blast left a ringing in his ears that nothing turns off. He's found three things that quiet it: a tattoo needle, a drum solo loud enough to feel in your chest, and a voice screaming over a rock track. That's why his arms are covered in clock hands done in berry ink, and why Love Reign O'er Me is the only song that ever really lets him rest.

He's seen a lot. He talks about Ben Franklin and Sherlock Holmes the way you'd talk about a guy from your old job. A few of the events he set off by accident are on conspiracy YouTube now. He doesn't watch them. He says they get the details wrong.

Here's the part that gets him. He taught himself all of it, the physics, the watches, the temporal math. The only degree he ever earned is a doctorate in communications. He has never once needed it.

When it's his turn to read a transmission, he treats it like a discovery he made himself. He'll wander off into a story about tea in 1894, wash his hands mid-sentence, remember some toast he left in 1987, and still bring it home. To him every idea is just a hypothesis he hasn't gone back to test yet.