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Kim Smith lived with the lurking sense that something was about to go terribly, awfully and irreparably wrong. She had spent her life watching in fear as threats teetered on the brink of some terrible, immanent realisation, as black cats crossed her path and single magpies regarded her forlornly from their perches on badly balanced ladders. It hadn’t happened yet, but it would, and when it did, Kim knew it would be bad.
What was odd, was although it had always been this way, ever since she could remember, she also had the entirely contrary, but equally deeply felt sense, that it hadn’t always been this way. That somehow, somewhere, another Kim had lived another life that had radiated with promise. Kim Smith would never say it out loud, but silently, deep down in a place she would not acknowledge, even to herself, she blamed her mother.
Kim’s mother was not just Kim’s mother, she was also ‘Mother of the World’, a slightly grandiose title she had acquired from by a politician who had used her incredibly, amazingly, breath-takingly unbelievable invention: the secret to immortality, to get re-elected for, now that he was immortal, pretty much ever. Kim’s mother had been one of the medical scientists to discover some previously un-heard-of microbes in the atmosphere, thought to be a gift from a) Aliens b) God c) Mother Nature d) A different kind of God e) some manner of alien/god/natural spirit creature that for some reason really liked this one generation and wanted them to live for ever. The other scientists were not as photogenic as Kim’s mother and so she had taken all the credit and become ‘Mother of the World’ rather than just ‘Kim’s mum’. This had two major repercussions for Kim herself, one: her mother left her father and Kim and moved in with the now very rich and powerful politician, so that now Kim only saw her once a year for ‘Mother of the World Day’, and two: everyone assumed Kim would be a scientific genius as well, when really (much like her mother although of course she would never say this out loud either) Kim was not, and never would be, a genius. She was just a very smart, well-educated and dedicated scientist who now that immortality had been discovered, would not discover immortality. This left her in somewhat of a pickle, as her mother being ‘Mother of the World’ left her ‘Disappointment of a Daughter to the World’, which was a lot less fun.
So it was, that on a sunny day in June, Kim was sitting in her small, neat lab, grappling with a problem of hyperstitional relativity she had yet to solve, but which for some reason, had been troubling her ever since she graduated.
Her colleague, Dr. Heffleton Pfleeg, had marched off that morning exclaiming something about hydrogen and might not be back for hours. Kim therefore, had time to work on her own projects without being interrupted by Pleeg’s mission to invent time travel. Now that immortality had been invented that pretty much only left time travel and teleportation and with the discovery of wavometry, the speed of intercontinental tube transport these days made teleportation seem less and less worth the bother. Pfleeg was viewed as an unconventional but undisputed genius who was the most likely candidate for inventing time travel and it was Kim’s job to assist him, but more than anything, to avoid him blowing himself, the lab, the planet, or any other planet up.
Kim was just testing her relativity readings against some of the data she had recorded the day before when Jessica, the Research Assistant, tumbled into the lab gasping her name.
“Holy Spectrometer, Jess, what’s up?”
“It’s Pfleeg, he’s disappeared.”
“He’s probably just locked himself in the Microacter lab again, he says the microwaves help him think.”
“No, no, I mean he literally disappeared. He was in the canteen arguing with the lunch lady about whether or not cucumbers are a fruit...”
“Of course cucumbers aren’t a fruit.”
“No, I know, but he had some theory about the seeds or something.”
“Cucumbers are basically courgettes, are courgettes a fruit too?”
“I’m not sure, no-one thought to bring courgettes into it.”
“That man really has to learn to train his focus, you can’t just be running off on tangents all the time, you’d never get anything done.”
“Agreed.”
“So he just disappeared?”
“Yep.”
“As in: poof, gone.”
“Pretty much.”
“Puff of smoke or anything?”
“Nope. Just suddenly wasn’t there anymore. Lunch lady said he took the tray with him and he hadn’t paid for his banana or the tuna sandwich.”
“Right. OK. Well… I guess I’d better come check it out.” Kim rose wearily and followed Jess to the canteen. She would run some tests, look for anomalies, check Pfleeg’s files for clues and then run the data until something clicked. As far as she was aware, no-one had never disappeared into thin air before, but if they were going to start doing it, it would behove her as a scientist to understand how, and where possible, to prevent it. It was a simple question of focus, she told herself. Like any problem, you just start at the bottom and work up. The laws of physics were changeable and still fairly poorly understood, but there was always something to grip on to if you knew where to look for hand holds.
The canteen was empty but for the angry lunch lady who seemed to believe a trick had been pulled on her, probably for the purpose of stealing the aforementioned sandwich and selected fruit item which, she informed Kim testily, came to 3 tetrabytes and 50 militics.
After paying for Pfleeg’s lunch, Kim and Jess settled down to establish whether there had been any discernible alterations in the lunchroom’s atmosphere. After two hours they had discovered little more than a faint aura of negatively charged kilmophogs, probably largely due to the excess of boiled cabbage in the vicinity, and a slightly higher reading of nanoquadrants than Kim would expect at their altitude. Undefeated, Kim returned to the lab to see if Pfleeg’s files would turn up any clues.
This proved to be no easy task. Pfleeg’s filling system seemed to be based on a complicated algorithm which may or may not have been linked to the respiratory system of a large sea mammal, possible a walrus, but which made safari-ing through the artilleries of incredibly dense data, extremely complex. After three hours, Kim had ascertained that the filing system was not, in fact, based on the respiratory system of a walrus, but may, in fact, be linked to its digestive functionality, a discovery which did not fill her with enthusiasm.
It was at this troubling moment that Jess charged back into the lab clutching a hydrogen tank and what appeared to be a cat mask.
“Kim! I just found these in the Microacter lab, do you think they could be clue?”
Kim took the hydrogen tank, examined it carefully and then placed it delicately on the desk in front of her. Then she took the cat mask, turned it over in her hands, sniffed it, then tentatively put it on, blinking at Jess through the eye holes.
“Anything?” Jess asked hopefully.
Kim pursed her lips thoughtfully. “I don’t think so, no.”
Jess looked disappointed. “Sorry then, I thought it might help.”
“Thanks anyway. Any chance you could bring me a pot of coffee? I might be here a while.”
“Sure.”
Jess bounded off.
Through the eye slits of her cat mask, Kim caught sight of the ‘Time Machine’ sitting on Pfleeg’s work bench. Pfleeg had been working on the ‘Time Machine’ for years, but the device he had come up with didn’t look much like a Time Machine. It looked like an over-wired blender with an old microwave timer attached to it. Kim had considered it pretty harmless and had left him to play with it. Was it possible he had accidently got it working and succeeded in beaming himself into another time? It didn’t seem very likely. Pfleeg’s reputation for ‘genius’, much like her mother’s, was mainly down to having – accidently – discovered something incredible, which in Pfleeg’s case was the secret to wavomitry. The discovery of wavomitry had increased average land travel speed by 1000% and made Pfleeg a very rich and famous man. Kim had been a junior researcher in his lab at the time, and had technically done most of the calculations and, technically, been the one to suggest it’s application for increasing land travel velocity, but as Lead Researcher, Pfleeg’s was the only name to appear on the paper. Kim didn’t mind. She had a deep seated mistrust of fame and fortune anyway and following Pfleeg’s rise to glory she had been quietly promoted to Associate Researcher, which was all she really wanted anyhow.
Pfleeg’s Time Machine sat on the other side of the lab, all wires and pumps and dials which didn’t, as far as she could tell, serve any purpose. She had never taken any interest in it before, mainly because she had never believed time travel to be worth the bother. Now though, seeing as it was her job to keep Pfleeg out of trouble and he had somehow managed to disappear himself on her watch, maybe she would have a better chance of working out what had happened to him if she could arrange it so that she was there when he vanished…
Ho hum, Kim thought, worth a shot.
She started work and eight hours later, at a time in the morning that any normal person would have considered a very ill-advised moment to try and change the course of history, Kim Smith had what she considered to be a working prototype of a time machine. It was not pretty, being as it was made on the fly, but according to her calculations, and Kim’s calculations were rarely wrong, it should do the job.
The problem now though, was that she had no urge whatsoever to try it out. Kim Smith did not want to change the course of history. She did not want to upset fate or rewrite the future. That was the stuff of legends, that was for other people to attempt, not Kim. Not when she had been waiting her whole life for the Something Awful that hadn’t happened yet. It was just far too risky.
What if she had miscalibrated? What if the side effects were dangerous? What if it didn’t work? Or even worse, what if it did? What if by going back in time she causes the something terrible? Maybe she should wait until Jess comes back in the morning. Maybe they could talk it through together…
It was thoughts like this meant Kim would never be an undisputed genius herself, but that coincidently, geniuses would have a tendency to spring up around her.
Flashback to five years earlier, a fresh-faced Junior Researcher handing Pfleeg her wavometry data, shrugging awkwardly and saying that she thought, maybe, she might have something. Flashback even further to a similar conversation almost ten years before: Fourteen year old Kim, who had interested herself in her mother’s work and who had, one day, come into her mother’s study looking confused, saying falteringly that she thought she may have found something…
Kim was unsure whether her finger had somehow slipped and hit the timer or whether the thing had started by itself, but Pfleeg’s blender contraption suddenly started rocking from side to side and whirring alarmingly, the lights flashing on and off and sparks jetting from it.
“Oh…” Said Kim, “oops”
To make matters worse it seemed she had, in an uncharacteristic moment of inattentiveness, failed to equip the Timeblender with an off switch.
“Oops,” She said again and then the room was bathed in an intense white light which blinded her, before slowly receding into a pinhole dot and plunging everything into darkness.