Fiction Friday #15

The Machine

"So, the first step was to find a way that could squeeze every moment of time to one point without also pulling all the matter to the same point." The Professor changed the slide to one showing an animation on the universe collapsing in on itself. "That would probably cause a big crunch which would, of course, kill us all, destroy the universe, and quite possibly turning all that existed into one black hole."

"But you found some way around this, right?" asked some guy in a dark suit.

"Yes, of course we did," said The Professor, smiling like he would to a four year-old who was worried he wouldn't get pizza on his birthday. "It all had to do with gravity," he said, switching the slide again, this time to an animation of a guy standing on the earth jumping up and coming back down, "and an incredible discovery my team made."

Jim turned away from the presentation. The truth was it was all bullshit. No one understood how the machine worked, they just knew it did. Thousands of different objects had gone through and come out okay. About ninety different animals had gone through and come back with nothing wrong, that the team could tell. And one human went through and claimed that nothing happened, until she saw the way her puppy had grown in the two months she was gone.

Time travel. It had always been a thing of science fiction, Jim thought. It couldn't really exist. But it did.

He turned a corner heading for the stairs to get down to the machine. He wished that the facility was more like it would have been in the movies--gleaming walls, shining steel equipment, no mice--but the place they were working in was a gutted hospital that was built in the '60s and then abandoned sometime in the '90s and was only halfway cleaned up before The Professor was forced to move his team here.

The stairway smelled like old wet wood; it wasn't a smell that Jim liked, but it was better than the basement. The Machine was kept on the top floor because it seemed to work better away from the ground. Some members of the team said it had to do with being farther away from the closest large source of gravity. Others said it was the Earth's magnetic fields. Others claimed it was none of these things, but some mysterious different force, like dark energy. Jim didn't know and he didn't care. It just seemed to work better a hundred or so feet above the ground than it did on the ground. And that's what pissed so many of the team off. There was just too much they didn't know.

The room that held the machine wasn't built large enough to house all the equipment The Professor wanted to monitor it, so walls had been knocked down to make it larger. It also made it dustier, which Jim's nose didn't like.

He was alone with the machine, a doorway of twisted greenish/orangish metal that made Jim's fillings taste tangy. Everyone else was downstairs with The Professor listening to him lie to the men and women who thought they were funding breakthrough, original research. They weren't, really, though. The Professor was trying to learn how the machine worked, but didn't really care about the whys. He didn't want to know what new technologies could be born from the machine; he just wanted to replicate it.

All Jim wanted to do was to step through into the past. See what it was like. See what could be changed. Jim wanted to find out if time was just one straight shot that no one could change or if there were infinite possible universes that existed out there. Unfortunately, everything they'd send through had only gone into the future, or the present, depending on how you look at it.

There was nothing coming from the machine to show that it was on. No shimmering in the door. No burning smell. No hum. Sometimes some thing would go through and just come out the other side. Other times things would go in and not come out for hours or days or weeks.

Jim thought he'd take a chance and stepped into the machine himself.