The Wealth of Caligula

In the quiet industrial sprawl of Hagerstown, Maryland, a nondescript warehouse hummed with an energy no one could quite place. It wasn’t the usual buzz of forklifts or the clatter of machinery—just a faint, shimmering distortion in the air near the back wall, hidden behind stacks of rusting iron crates. That distortion was a time portal, a jagged tear in reality that linked the warehouse to a sun-drenched villa on a small island off the coast of Rome, circa 50 BCE. No one knew how it had opened; perhaps it was a freak accident of physics, or maybe the old warehouse sat on some ley line long forgotten. But for Jack and Marco, two scrappy entrepreneurs from 2025, it was a goldmine.


Jack, a wiry ex-mechanic with a knack for fixing anything, had stumbled onto the portal first. He’d been hauling scrap iron into the warehouse when a chunk of it vanished mid-step, reappearing seconds later with a faint scorch mark. Marco, his business partner and a former chemistry dropout, figured out the other side was ancient Rome after a test run with a GPS tracker spat back coordinates in the Tyrrhenian Sea—and a sandal-clad foot nearly stomped it flat. They didn’t waste time debating ethics. They had a warehouse full of iron and a modern salt purifier. Rome had a hunger for both.


They started small, dragging uniform iron bars through the portal. The pieces were machine-cut, unnaturally precise compared to the hand-forged lumps of the ancient world. On the island villa, a grizzled trader named Lucius took them off their hands, no questions asked, assuming they were from some distant province with superior smiths. The iron fetched a tidy sum in denarii, which Jack and Marco traded back in Hagerstown for more supplies. Then came the salt. Marco’s purifier churned out crystals so pristine they sparkled like diamonds—far purer than the gritty, mineral-laden stuff Rome scraped from its mines. They hauled sacks of it through, and soon, whispers spread across the Republic: someone had a source of salt fit for the gods.


The uniformity of the iron didn’t go unnoticed. Roman spies, ever paranoid about foreign threats, started tailing Lucius’s shipments. The bars were too perfect, too consistent—almost as if they were made by machines, a concept Rome couldn’t yet fathom. Word reached the ears of a young, ambitious noble named Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus—known later as Caligula. At this point, he was just a cunning opportunist, not yet the mad emperor history would remember. But he had an eye for wealth and power, and the salt dazzled him most of all. He’d tasted it himself at a banquet, marveling at its clarity, its lack of bitterness. “This,” he declared to his confidants, “is the future of Rome.”


Caligula tracked the supply chain back to the villa, where Jack and Marco had set up a makeshift operation. They’d hired a few locals to guard the portal, passing themselves off as eccentric merchants from “beyond the Pillars of Hercules.” Caligula didn’t care where they were from—he wanted in. One sweltering afternoon, he arrived at the villa with a retinue of armed men, his toga pristine despite the dusty road. Jack and Marco, sweating in their modern jeans and t-shirts, met him in the courtyard.


“You have something extraordinary,” Caligula said, his voice smooth but edged with menace. He held up a fistful of their salt, letting it glitter in the sunlight. “I want it. All of it. And whatever else you’re hiding.”


Jack, thinking fast, played the mysterious outsider card. “We’ve got access to things you can’t imagine. Salt’s just the start. Iron, tools, maybe even medicines. But it’s a limited supply—unless we partner up.”


Marco chimed in, “We’d need a cut of the profits. And protection. This kind of trade attracts attention.”


Caligula’s eyes narrowed, but he smiled—a predator sizing up prey. “Done. You’ll have my men, my ships, my name. But cross me, and I’ll bury you under this villa.”


The deal was struck. Over the next months, Jack and Marco funneled more iron and salt through the portal, while Caligula’s network distributed it across Rome. The iron armed his allies; the salt filled his coffers. He passed it off as a divine gift from some conquered land, a myth that grew with his legend. When he ascended to emperor years later, historians would attribute his wealth to ruthless taxation and plunder. But the truth—buried in a Hagerstown warehouse and a Roman villa—was far stranger.


Jack and Marco kept their heads down, amassing modern wealth from ancient coins. The spies eventually lost interest, chalking the iron’s uniformity up to some lost technique. The portal held, a secret bridge between eras, and Caligula’s reign glittered with the fruits of a future he’d never understand.

The partnership between Jack, Marco, and Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus—Caligula—hummed along profitably for months. Salt and iron flowed through the portal, and Caligula’s wealth swelled, his influence creeping ever closer to the imperial throne. But Caligula was no fool.


The uniformity of the iron, the unearthly purity of the salt, and the odd mannerisms of these “merchants from beyond the Pillars of Hercules” gnawed at him. Their speech was too clipped, their tools too precise, their casual references to lands and concepts he’d never heard of too strange. Suspicion festered.


One night, under a moonless sky, Caligula slipped into the villa with a handful of his most trusted Praetorians. Jack and Marco were mid-argument over a shipment schedule when the Romans burst in. Before they could react, Caligula’s men pinned them against the wall, swords at their throats. The portal shimmered behind them, its edges crackling faintly—an undeniable anomaly.


“What is this?” Caligula hissed, stepping closer to the distortion. He tossed a coin through it, watching it vanish, then reappear seconds later on the villa floor, slightly warm. His eyes widened, then narrowed. “You’re not from any province I know. You’re from… somewhere else. Somewhen else.”


Jack tried to bluff, but Marco, sweating bullets, cracked. “Okay, fine! It’s a portal. To the future. Our time—2025. That’s where the salt and iron come from.”


The revelation of the time portal shifted everything for Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus—Caligula. Once he’d forced the truth from Jack and Marco in that tense standoff at the villa, his mind didn’t just settle on conquest; it raced toward a grander vision. If the future held such power, why not wield it to reshape the past? Suspicion had given way to obsession, and Caligula saw the portal not just as a supply line, but as a feedback loop to amplify Rome’s dominance beyond imagination.


“You say your time—2025—has weapons and knowledge beyond ours,” Caligula said, his voice low and deliberate, pacing before the shimmering portal. “Then you’ll bring me more than guns. You’ll bring me the minds that make them. And I’ll fund them with Rome’s wealth.”
Jack and Marco exchanged uneasy glances. “You mean… R&D? Research and development?” Jack asked.


“Call it what you will,” Caligula snapped. “I want machines that fly, weapons that burn cities, ships that sail the stars. And I want them now—in my Rome.”


The deal evolved into something audacious. Caligula demanded they use his gold to fund a secret operation in 2025, recruiting scientists, engineers, and inventors to design technologies tailored for ancient Rome’s needs. In return, he’d send back more gold—harvested from his growing empire—to keep the cycle spinning. Jack and Marco, now fully entangled, agreed. They returned to Hagerstown, their warehouse a buzzing hub of illicit ambition.


In 2025, they set up a front company—Chronos Innovations—using Caligula’s gold to hire top talent under the guise of “historical reenactment engineering.” They lured experts in robotics, metallurgy, and aerospace with fat paychecks and vague promises of revolutionizing the world. The catch? Everything they designed had to be rugged, replicable with minimal infrastructure, and capable of being sent back through the portal. The team churned out prototypes: lightweight steel alloys, solar-powered engines, even basic firearms that could be mass-produced with Roman smithing techniques. Each invention was tested in Maryland, then hauled through to the villa, where Caligula’s men marveled at the bounty.


Caligula, now emperor by 37 CE, didn’t stop there. With his modern arsenal—rifles, Kevlar, grenades—he crushed Rome’s enemies and expanded relentlessly. But the R&D loop supercharged his reign. A 2025-designed trebuchet with precision gears shattered city walls in Gaul. Solar stills purified water for legions marching through Africa. By 40 CE, his engineers, guided by blueprints from the future, built ironclad ships that dominated the Mediterranean. Gold flowed back to Hagerstown in crates, funding ever bolder projects.


The tipping point came when Caligula, staring at a star-filled sky, demanded the ultimate prize: “Your people reach the heavens. Make it so for Rome.” Jack relayed the order to Chronos Innovations, and the team pivoted to aerospace. By 50 CE, they’d sent back plans for hot-air balloons—simple, but a start. Roman scouts soared above battlefields, directing artillery with eerie precision. Then came gliders, followed by crude propeller planes powered by ethanol distilled from Roman grain. Each leap was funded by conquest, the gold looping forward to 2025, where Chronos engineers pushed further.


Caligula’s empire exploded across the globe. With planes and rifles, he subdued Europe, Asia, and Africa by 60 CE. Steel ships crossed the Atlantic, claiming the Americas. By 100 CE, Rome ruled Earth, its legions a hybrid of ancient valor and future tech. But Caligula’s successors—his bloodline now a dynasty of visionaries—kept the portal active. Chronos delivered rocket designs, and by 200 CE, Rome touched the Moon. Fusion reactors followed, sent back in pieces, assembled by Roman hands guided by 2025 manuals.


When aliens arrived in 700 CE near Jupiter, Rome was ready. Chronos had long since cracked FTL drives, reverse-engineered from a crashed probe they’d bought off a black-market dealer in 2025. The plans went back, and Roman starships—sleek, gold-trimmed, and bristling with lasers—met the invaders head-on. Victory fueled expansion, and by 1000 CE, the Roman Stellar Imperium spanned the galaxy. Each conquered world sent tribute—metals, tech, slaves—back through the portal, where Chronos refined it into new wonders: antimatter bombs, nanobot swarms, warp gates.


The loop became Rome’s secret engine. Caligula’s initial gold had sparked it, but the empire’s wealth sustained it. By 3000 CE, the Imperium stretched across multiple galaxies, its legions battling crystalline fleets and hive-mind armadas with weapons born in a Maryland warehouse. The emperors, descended from Caligula, ruled from a Dyson Sphere orbiting Sol, their throne built on a foundation of time-twisted innovation. Jack and Marco faded into legend, but their portal—still hidden, still humming—ensured Rome’s dominion over stars and species alike, a legacy of ambition that conquered not just the world, but the universe.