# The Temporal Cannibal

> A literary science fiction novel. Time is not what we measure. Time is what we eat.

## About

THE TEMPORAL CANNIBAL is a profound meditation on time, morality, and the cost of survival. In 1850, forty pioneers from the year 2247 arrive in an Appalachian valley with machines in their chests that consume the future. They call it colonization. The natives call it something else.

Through eighteen years of temporal consumption, we follow Elara Voss — a cartographer who maps the destruction her colony causes — and her daughter Sable, born in consumed time, who exists outside the framework entirely.

## Genre

Literary science fiction / Speculative fiction

## Characters

- **Elara Voss** (The Cartographer): A woman who spent eleven years mapping timelines for consumption, then spent eighteen years consuming them herself. Mother of Sable. Keeper of the back-journal. The one who says no. "I am not a gardener. I am something with teeth."

- **Sable Voss-Alder** (The Null): Born in consumed time to a colonial mother and native father. Unmeasurable, unconsumable, impossible. She exists outside the temporal framework. The warmest thing in the valley. "The soil needs cultivation. And cultivation requires something to burn."

- **Thomas Alder** (The Native): A farmer who knew his land the way you know a body you've lived inside for decades. Father of Sable. The man who asked what was wrong with the time, and kept asking until the answer broke him. "What's wrong with the time?"

- **Henrik Moss** (The Leader): A temporal theorist who became a pure consumer. The architect of the colony's appetite. The man who said there is no ethical consumption of temporal resources. His philosophy justified the unjustifiable, turning consumption into necessity, hunger into virtue. "There is no ethical consumption of temporal resources."

- **Deshawn Carver** (The Engineer): The man who built the teeth. Who maintained forty-three apparatus units for twelve years. Who stopped drinking, stopped maintaining, and finally took himself apart rather than let anyone else benefit from his work. "I built the teeth. I know what they do."

- **Maren Kade** (The Warden): Director of the Temporal Enforcement Commission. The woman who came to dissolve the colony. Who discovered that the system she served was itself an appetite. "The apparatus is not a tool. It is an addiction that has infected the future."

## Themes

- **Consumption**: What does it mean to eat time? To consume the years that others were meant to live? The novel explores consumption not as metaphor but as physical reality — the apparatus that converts temporal potential into biological sustenance, the hunger that never stops asking.

- **Morality**: There is no ethical consumption of temporal resources. The characters navigate impossible choices: survival versus conscience, collective need versus individual cost, the present hunger versus the future debt.

- **Time**: Time as resource. Time as appetite. Time as the original substrate beneath the pavement of consumption. The novel asks: What is time when it can be eaten? What remains when the eating stops?

- **Nullness**: To exist outside the framework. To be unmeasurable, unconsumable, impossible. The null children — Sable, Petra, Wen — represent something the temporal apparatus cannot digest: existence without cost.

- **Redemption**: Not restoration. Not healing. The possibility of new growth in consumed ground. The spiral of stones that holds the edges. The soil that rises through the pavement, one percent at a time.

## Timeline

- **1850 — Arrival**: Forty pioneers from 2247 establish the colony in an Appalachian valley.
- **1850–1856 — Settlement**: The colony expands, makes contact with Harlan's Creek, and begins consuming.
- **1856 — Sable's Birth**: The first null-class child is born — unmeasurable, unconsumable, impossible.
- **1862 — The Hollow War**: James Garrett Jr. dies at Shiloh, a casualty of thinning and conflict.
- **1868 — The Wardens Arrive**: Temporal Enforcement comes to dissolve the colony.
- **1868 — The Null Geometry**: Three children across three centuries connect, creating something new.
- **1882 — The After**: Agnes Cole records the first reversal in history — the soil returns.

## Key Quotes

- "Time is not what we measure. Time is what we eat."
- "The aperture tastes like copper and ozone, and then it tastes like nothing at all, and then Elara Voss is standing in a field in 1850 and the hunger hits her like a fist to the sternum." — Chapter 1: Arrival
- "I am not a gardener. I am something with teeth." — Elara Voss
- "There is no ethical consumption of temporal resources. There is only consumption, and the question is how we manage it." — Henrik Moss
- "The null does not vibrate at any frequency the temporal world produces." — On Sable
- "The soil needs cultivation. And cultivation requires something to burn." — Sable Voss-Alder
- "The apparatus is not a tool. It is an addiction that has infected the future." — Maren Kade
- "I built the teeth. I know what they do." — Deshawn Carver
- "What's wrong with the time?" — Thomas Alder

## Links

- Purchase the book: https://a.co/d/02Fsq7I7
- Author portfolio: https://njf.io
- Website: https://www.temporalcannibal.com
- Extended content for LLMs: https://www.temporalcannibal.com/llms-full.txt

## Copyright

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