Kim Smith had decided today was the day. Today she would make history and go back in time. Why not? She was retired after all, she had plenty of time on her hands and in her youth she had been one of the most well-respected Temporal Physicists in the known universe. It seemed very odd to her, in retrospect, that she had not managed to invent time travel before this. Inventing time travel seemed like exactly the sort of thing she should have been famous for inventing, back when being famous for inventing things was what she was famous for. Now she was eighty-two, her voice was cracked, her movements slow, her hands shook whenever she manipulated the transphobial nodes on her autofocotron and that morning, when she’d told her daughter that she’d just invented time travel, the little pickumsnot had told her that that was nice, but not to forget to take her meds after lunch again or it would be another trip to the geriatrician, tut tut.
Kim had rather fancied smacking that condescending tut tut off her daughter’s smug, pointy, little face, but she didn’t have the energy and besides it would take her too long to get up and get over there and she’d probably forget why she was there once she did. Instead she’d smiled benignly, mumbled something which might have been ‘bite me rat face’ and waited impatiently for the brainless little strumpet to leave for work. Once she’d gone, calling meaningless things cheerily down the hallway, Kim flipped her a wobbly bird and tottered into the living room. She sat down with a groan in her favourite reclining chair – the one no one else was allowed to sit in – found the clasp hidden behind the needle-point cushion with the ugly cats on it that had been a gift from some charity or another and strapped herself in before hitting the button on the arm rest and descending to her top secret lab.
The Time Machine sat on her work bench. To uninstructed eyes it did not look much like a time machine. It looked a little like an over-wired blender with an old microwave timer attached to it. Appearances could however be deceiving. Kim’s hands might shake and her memory may be about as dependable as filial bonds when a squillion megabyte inheritance was at stake, but her intellect was still razor sharp, whatever her rodent-featured spawn might think. Under the casing, a radiometer was attached to a high-powered hydrabattery and a brand-new Temporal Spectrometer run through a Tempolaxidator wired to the timer. Oh yes, Kim knew exactly what she was doing.
When you were already eight-four there was no time to lose so Kim plugged herself to the unit, set the timer and hit the button. There was a click, a spark and then a heavy electrical whirring sound which grew steadily in intensity. The Time Machine began to shake from side to side and then the room was bathed in an intense white light which slowly receded into a pinhole dot and plunged everything into darkness.
Kim blinked. She was in a hospital room except the room was huge. Offensively big. The bed was a good metre taller than she was for a start. What was this, a hospital for giants? Speaking of which, a ten foot man stood beside her. The man giant looked down at her. He was wearing a face mask with cat’s whiskers painted on it.
“Don’t worry Kim.” The man said. “Mummy will be fine. She has the best doctors helping her.”
Four year old Kim with eighty-six year old Kim stuck in her head looked up and nodded.
Kim’s mother had died from something mysterious during the later hyperbolic years when everyone was dying from something mysterious. Kim didn’t really remember her, but standing there in four year old Kim’s shoes, eighty-one year old Kim suddenly remembered that she had very badly wanted to be a doctor. Not a scientist, not an inventor, not a temporal physicist. A doctor. Kim had wanted to save lives.
At that moment, four year old Kim said,
“Daddy, when I’m big, I want to be a doctor.”
Damn it, thought eight-seven year old Kim, did I do that?
Kim’s daddy smiled, “Doctors are just the Caretakers sweetheart. The real heroes are the scientists who discover the cures…”
Four year old Kim said something in response but the room was going strangely blurry now and next thing eighty-five year old Kim knew, she was sitting in a classroom. The classroom was not fully in focus either, Kim was pretty myopic at the best of times these days, but had she always had poor eyesight? She didn’t think so. The girl next to her was partly visible and there was the vague outline of the teacher at the front of the class. The only thing in high focus was the-girl-beside-her’s pencil case. There was something extremely fascinating about it. It had some baby cats on it. Eighty-nine year old Kim wasn’t sure why that was relevant. Then from the background the teacher said,
“Thanks to visionary geniuses working tirelessly in all branches of science, the hyperbolic plagues were defeated and the world was saved! Issuing in today’s era, known as the Era of the Hero Scientist…”
“Hey you,” Eighty-nine year old Kim snapped at her seven year old self, kicking impatiently at a passing neuron, “pay attention.”
The teacher snapped into sharpened focus.
“You are the lucky generation who will be able to live in the future!” The teacher declared. Was it Mr. Humphries…Henry…Hill, something beginning with H she was almost sure of it.
“The inheritors of a miraculous world where anything is possible and where scientific progress will reshape our lives and make them better. You can do anything, anything you can imagine. Live until two hundred, holiday on the moon, travel at light speed and one day maybe even travel through time…”
Blinking, Kim now finds herself behind the lower school gym where Fred Gilbert was trying to persuade twelve year old Kim to kiss him. He has a sheet of Clingfilm held up for the purpose – the post-hyperbolic years remained pretty obsessed with infection control until Kim was in her thirties and invincibility serum was invented. Kim remembers only too well the sticky plastic taste of Fred’s tongue as it probed her unwilling lips and tightly clenched teeth.
“Next.” Groaned eighty-eight year old Kim with a sigh.
Twelve year old Kim, grimaced and closed her eyes.
At a University Open Day now. Her father is talking but she cannot make out the words. There is a lot of information on a board in front of her but she can’t read any of it. There is a boy with a ridiculous fringe standing next to her. He has pin badges on his jacket and band stickers on his bag. This is not remotely interesting to eighty year old Kim, but for some godforsaken reason it is all fourteen year old Kim seems to be able to see. It didn’t make any sense. At sixteen Kim had obtained a PhD, graduating in the top of her class, at eighteen she had secured a much sought after scholarship to a highly acclaimed research institute and at twenty she had been taken on as the assistant to the Universe’s most renowned Temporal Scientist. She had never been an ignorant, eyelash fluttering jellybrain so what the hell was this?!
Something her father said caught the attention of fringe boy and therefore fourteen year-old Kim.
“…more important that making deer eyes at boys with ill-advised haircuts, Kimmie.” He was saying seriously. “This is your future.”
Eighty-three year-old Kim harrumphed her agreement and fourteen year old Kim blushed crimson and stared at the floor.
Years of industrious study followed which started out as very dull, but got increasingly more interesting as eighty-nine year old Kim got to re-read a lot of texts she had always found fascinating and remembered a lot of things she had forgotten she knew. Large parts of the books remained blurred and unreadable however which was frustrating.
Time now seemed to speed up: graduation, her internship with Professor Pfleeg, being named ‘Most likely to change the world (or destroy it)’ by The Governing Board of United Earth Nations at only twenty-five, accepting the grant for ‘Undisputed Geniusity’ by The Council of Innovation and Science at twenty-eight and then at only thirty-two, discovering the secret to Wavometry, thereby increasing average land travel speeds by up to 1000% and making Kim rich and famous. The first of her big breaks.
Kim would’ve liked to slow down here, really be able to sit back and enjoy her glory years, but the Time Machine didn’t have speed adjustment settings. She’d have to add them when she got back. Thirty-six now and pregnant, time speeds up even faster, one baby, two now. Her husband whining about how she should spend more time with the family, screaming children, sticky kitchen surfaces, teenage children, shouting, door slamming and she is no longer conducting research, she is the Director of the Lab overseeing other younger genius scientists in the making. She is stupidly rich and getting listless.
Faster still, children grow up, leave home, come back, leave again, get married, there are grandchildren. The husband dies of a stroke at only fifty-five. Nearly done then, good, Kim’s getting bored and wants to stretch her legs. Maybe have a cup of tea and a biscuit.
Seventy now and retired, booooring. Seventy five, another goddamn grandchild. Seventy-eight, youngest daughter moves back in ‘to help her cope’, seventy-oh-who-gives-a-shit-anymore, not long now…
And then she’s back. Back in her eighty something year-old body, sitting in her armchair in her top secret lab.
Kim Smith decides she will have a cup of tea and adjust the time speed settings, maybe tweak the spatio-dissolvarity readings to see if she could do anything about the poor visibility and then tomorrow she would have another go. Only Kim Smith never does have another go, because when she stands up, she goes very white, clutches her heart, sits back down again and dies.
The body in the top secret lab is never found – one of the hazards of top secret labs – and five years later a young scientist named Gemma Blackhurst becomes rich and famous inventing time travel.
Kim’s slightly pointy-faced descendants fight amongst themselves over her fortune before discovering to their horror that she left every penny to a cat charity.
