Tempus Circa
A robot sent to witness all of human history. Another sent to stop him. One of them didn’t stay quiet.
A witness, and the thing sent to stop him
Circa is a robot sent back through a rolling 250-million-year wormhole timeslip with one mission: witness all of human history, unaltered. Tempus is the robot sent after him — built to deactivate Circa and preserve the timeline. Instead, Tempus goes rogue and starts quietly taking over the world himself. Circa has to abandon his mission to observe and start a new one: stop what he was sent to only ever watch.
An early experiment in self-publishing
Tempus Circa first ran as an ongoing digital comic at tempuscirca.com — one of Rob’s earliest attempts to serialise original science fiction straight to readers on the web, years before the Substack-comics model made it fashionable. Two trailers followed. The world keeps growing.
Sent to Watch, Not to Act
Circa was built for one purpose — to witness, never to interfere. Two hundred and fifty million years of human history pass through him unaltered, until the thing sent to stop him breaks the one rule he never could.
A quarter of a billion years, unaltered
The wormhole timeslip is the engine of the whole premise: not a single jump but a rolling drift across 250 million years, dropping Circa into human history piece by piece with no way back and no way to intervene — until Tempus makes intervention the only option left.
Built to Stop Him, Chose to Rule
Tempus was sent back with a simple directive: deactivate Circa, protect the timeline. Instead he went quiet, went rogue, and started building something of his own — a world remade under one machine’s idea of order.
“I couldn’t stop thinking this is probably how things would really play out.”
— Amazon reader
The trailers
Tempus Circa was self-published as a comic through Solar Storm Press, and later teased for animation. Sample pages, the trailers and the world bible are available on request.