Your fingers tremble as you reach for the damaged comms panel, each movement sending fresh waves of pain through your battered body. The console sparks dangerously as you pry open its cracked casing, revealing a tangle of melted wiring and broken components. With shaking hands, you bypass the fried primary circuits and connect the backup transmitter directly to the temporal anchor's power source.

The machine groans in protest as energy diverts from the stabilizing spikes. The temporal eddy around you begins to distort, flashes of different eras appearing more frequently. You ignore the warning lights and focus on inputting the emergency sequence - three long pulses, three short, three long. SOS in temporal Morse code. The transmitter whines as it struggles to broadcast your signal through the fractured timelines.

Suddenly, the entire console erupts in sparks. A surge of feedback knocks you back into the chair as the display goes dark. For a terrifying moment, you think you've failed. Then, a single green light flickers to life - TRANSMISSION SENT. The relief is short-lived as the temporal anchor's countdown hits 00:01:00. Outside the dome, the swirling vortex begins to collapse inward, threatening to crush the machine like a tin can.