Where Tomorrow Went. The Variants Series, #4

A pilot from the future crash-lands in the wrong century and collides headfirst with the most dangerous invention ever built: a polite time machine with opinions. When Buck Rogers stumbles into the garden of H. G. Wells, history bends, manners become currency, and time itself starts issuing receipts. Together with a relentlessly practical gardener who treats causality like household accounting, the unlikely trio begin testing a device that doesn't simply move through time, but negotiates with it.
Every action carries a bill. Every shortcut demands payment. And every joke hides a consequence. As malfunctioning machines, talking hardware, mischievous motifs, and temporal paradoxes pile up, Buck and Wells are dragged into a cascading series of absurd experiments, accidental futures, and reality-bending misunderstandings. Karaoke across epochs, frozen gardens, sentient objects, and looping timelines collide in a world where comedy and dread share the same clock face.
Where Tomorrow Went blends classic science fiction homage with sharp modern satire, playful language, and philosophical mischief. Beneath the humor lies a meditation on responsibility, invention, unintended consequences, and the strange ways humans try to negotiate with time instead of living inside it. Inventive, strange, funny, and quietly unsettling, this is a book for readers who enjoy speculative fiction that laughs while it thinks.