That morning, something had gone terribly, awfully and irreparably wrong. Kim Smith had known it would and that morning, when the streaming sunlight had woken her, she knew the Bad Thing had finally happened.
There were two things that lead her to this conclusion. The first, was that she had overslept; the streaming sunlight suggested it was long past six thirty when her alarm should have woken her. The second, and slightly more alarming indication that something had gone badly wrong, was the fact that her bed was standing in the middle of an empty patch of land, when it should, by all rights, have been standing in her bedroom.
Kim sat up, pulled the covers to her chin and looked around. A lone magpie regarded her dourly from a branch and a small child with a football under his arm stood a little way off, staring at her with his mouth open.
Most people in this situation would feel a sense of alarm, confusion and might possibly begin to question their sanity. Kim Smith felt weary, a touch despondent and then somewhere deep down, a little relieved. Waiting for The Bad Thing to happen had been tiring, at least now she could stop waiting.
Kim didn’t know why she was not where she was supposed to be, or exactly why it portended the Bad Thing, but she did know one thing very clearly: That this was almost certainly her mother’s fault.
Kim’s mother was not just Kim’s mother, she was also ‘Doctor Death’, a slightly misleading and not entirely merited title she had acquired from a politician, who had been more than a little peeved when Kim’s mother stole the secret to immortality. The politician had been planning on getting re-elected – once he had made everyone who was rich and powerful immortal – for pretty much ever, and Kim’s mother had scuppered this plan in a rather big way. This had had two major repercussions for Kim herself, one: her mother had disappeared and never been seen again, and two: everyone assumed Kim would also be an evil genius, which had made it rather difficult to get anyone to let her near a lab. Kim was not, and never would be, an evil genius. She was not even a genius, she was simply a very smart, well-educated and dedicated scientist who now that the secret to immortality had been discovered, would not discover the secret to immortality, but was instead expected to try and rediscover it ‘or else’. This left her in somewhat of a pickle as she was not remotely interested in rediscovering immortality and expected that, deep down, she rather approved of her mother’s stealing it in the first place.
Kim climbed out of bed into what she suspected was a building site, wrapped her duvet around herself and waddled off to find some clue as to her whereabouts. The magpie flew off and the boy with the football made as if to run away at her approach and instead tripped over his shoe laces and fell flat on his face. Kim helped him up and continued on her way.
A couple of hours later Kim was sitting in the research facility where she worked. Her colleague, Dr. Heffleton Pfleeg, was sitting opposite her, looking at her through narrowed eyes.
“The bed’s probably still there if you want to go and check.”
Kim was seen by her colleagues as an evil genius in waiting and it was their job to stop her blowing anything up, taking over any cities, countries or new planets or otherwise endangering herself, her colleagues or the free world. It was an important role and one that Kim knew Pfleeg, in particular, took very seriously.
“Teleportation?” He suggested accusingly.
“I don’t know.”
“Well what else could it be?”
“Good question.”
Pfleeg narrowed his eyes further. “This Research Facility has strict rules about running experiments in uncontrolled environments, Dr. Smith.”
“Yes.” Kim agreed pleasantly. “Very sensible too. Highly dangerous that. Very unwise.”
“And you are not authorised to be investigating Teleportation, that is my area.”
“Quite.”
Pleeg’s mission to invent teleportation had spanned his whole scientific career. He and Kim had initially been working on it together, but after she had discovered some very interesting properties of wavometry that she had believed may provide the breakthrough they were looking for, Pfleeg had had her unceremoniously thrown off the Teleportation Team for some obscure ‘personal reasons’, landing Kim in the Immortality Team where she currently languished resolutely not rediscovering immortality.
“Why do you think you ended up on that building site?” Jessica, the Research Assistant, asked curiously.
Kim shrugged hopelessly, “I honestly have no idea.”
“Do you think you just disappeared and reappeared there?”
“I don’t know.”
“I wonder if there was a puff of smoke or something?”
“Could have been.”
Pfleeg rose, “You don’t seem to know much, Smith. It all seems a bit fishy if you ask me.”
Kim was inclined to agree, very fishy, only slightly less fishy than Pfleeg’s breath which still retained unsubtle tangs of the tuna sandwich he had recently consumed.
Pfleeg stalked over to his end of the lab, muttering something about inexperienced, reckless, glory hunters coming to bad ends and Kim turned back to Jess.
“Would you give me a hand to run some tests?”
“Sure.”
It was a simple question of focus, Kim 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. She would run some tests, look for anomalies and then run the data until something clicked. As far as she was aware, no-one had ever accidently teleported 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.
There was nothing particularly disturbing in any of their initial readings. She was emitting a faint aura of negatively charged kilmophogs, but that was probably due to having woken up on a building site and not having any breakfast. There was a slightly higher reading of nanoquadrants in her blood than Kim would have expected, but that could simply be a reaction to the kimophogs.
While they had been running their tests Pfleeg had been in the corner muttering to himself and clanging around with the teleportation machine he had been working on for the last few months, but when Kim next looked up, he had disappeared.
“Where’s Pfleeg?”
Jess looked up from her screen. “Not sure, did he go out a while ago saying something about hydrogen?”
“I don’t know, I didn’t notice.”
The Teleportation Machine was sitting on the lab bench where Pfleeg had left it. It was vibrating slightly and emitting a low hum.
“Does it usually do that?”
Jess glanced up again. “Yeah, sometimes.”
Kim got up slowly and walked over to inspect the contraption. There was something oddly familiar about it.
“Has he tested it yet?”
The wires coiled around the radiometer were all wrong, they’d never affect spatiolocomotion arranged like that and why the hell had Pfleeg attached a timer? That didn’t make any sense.
“Jess, has he tested it?”
Wasn’t that a temporal spectrometer? What an earth would Pfleeg need that for? Wiring it to the timer like that almost seemed like… If you didn’t know better it almost looked as if…
“Jess?” She turned around and was pulled up short by the empty lab. Jess was gone.
Kim blinked three times in rapid succession and then sighed deeply. Here it came, it was the Bad Thing. It was kicking in properly now and if she didn’t get a move on she suspected she’d be in some serious trouble.
Pfleeg and Jess had disappeared and/or been teleported. Either they had been sent to the building site too, that wouldn’t be so bad, or they had been sent somewhere else entirely. What if Kim’s journey to the building site that morning had simply been a test, a trial run, or a miscalibration. What if she was supposed to have ended up somewhere else and why, when Pfleeg was supposed to be investigating teleportation did he seem to be working on time travel?
It was at this point in her deliberations that the machine in front of her started to flash and whirr like it was up to 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 contraption was now rocking from side to side, lights flashing on and off and sparks jetting from it in a manner that was surely against fire safety regulations.
“Oh dear,” Said Kim.
To make matters worse, it seemed Pfleeg had, with not entirely uncharacteristic inattentiveness, failed to equip the thing with an off switch.
“Er,” Kim began and then she disappeared. There was no puff of smoke.
The machine hiccupped and vibrated to a stop. The lights went off. The lab stood empty for a bit. Then the door opened and Jess came in with two steaming mugs of coffee and stopped in surprise. She had had the sense someone would be here but the lab was empty. She looked down at the two mugs of coffee. Who the hell was the other one for?
“That for me?” Pfleeg came in holding a large hydrogen tank which he clanged down on the bench next to his machine.
“I suppose it must be…” Jess shook her head, confused, and handed him the mug.
Pfleeg took it, sipped, nodded approval and put it down. He put his hands on his hips and stared accusingly at the device in front of him. It just looked wrong somehow. He began to fiddle with the wires, unplugging them and reconnecting them seemingly at random, he couldn’t remember why the hell he’d attached that temporal spectrometer, that wasn’t going to help. He shook his head and removed it, placing it next to the hydrogen tank and the steaming cup of coffee on the bench.
In doing so, Dr. Heffleton Pfleeg, destroyed the very first operational time-machine in history. Then he sat down and drunk a mug of coffee.
- ? +