That morning, it had finally happened. Kim Smith had had an inkling that something was coming, a quiet sense that things were about to change, that something exciting was about to happen, and that morning, when the streaming sunlight had woken her, before she even switched on the news or checked her messages, she knew that the Something had finally happened.
Kim sat up, pushed off the covers and pulled back the curtains. A pair of magpies regarded her curiously from a branch outside her window and a small child with a football ran past, kicking the ball ahead of him. The world looked entirely normal, and yet, undoubtedly, something had changed.
The ‘new message’ light on her remote contactor was alight and when she hit play, her colleague Jessica appeared holographically, looking extremely anxious.
“Kim, Kim pick up. We have an emergency down here! It’s Pfleeg, he’s disappeared. He was in the canteen arguing with the lunch lady and he just… Disappeared: Poof, gone. Everyone’s in uproar, you have to get down here now.”
On hearing a message like this, most people would probably feel a sense of alarm, confusion and would possibly begin to question their colleague’s sanity. Kim Smith felt a moment of surprise and then, somewhere deep down, a flood of excitement. The Something had finally happened, she could stop waiting.
Kim didn’t know why her boss had disappeared, or how, or what this might mean for her or anyone else – least of all Pfleeg himself – but she did know one thing very clearly: That this was almost certainly Professor Gillian McDougley’s fault. Her mother was back.
Kim’s mother had once worked in the same lab that now employed Kim. She had got in trouble with a number of rather important people after stealing the secret to immortality and had subsequently disappeared, never to be seen again. Kim had known she would return one day, and that, when she did, things would get exciting. Well her boss disappearing was pretty exciting. Ergo, her mother was back.
Thirty minutes later Kim reached the research facility where she worked. The place was in uproar and she was unceremoniously ordered to wait in the lab ‘until she could be debriefed’ by the stern looking men in long coats.
Jess was already there waiting.
“Teleportation?” She suggested hopefully when Kim walked in. “Or some kind of intra-dimensionary space travel perhaps..?”
“I don’t know...”
“Well, what else could it be?”
“Good question. Have they said anything?”
“Not a thing. I think they think we’re in on it. Some kind of unauthorised experiment we were conducting under Pfleeg’s tutelage.”
Kim snorted, “Yeah right, that guy’s a stickler for the rules.”
“You don’t think he vanished himself do you? You think someone vanished him…”
Kim shrugged hopelessly, “I honestly have no idea.”
“It all seems a bit fishy if you ask me.”
Kim was inclined to agree. What an earth was her mother up to? Why disappear Pfleeg? Did she want him for something or did she need him out the way for some reason? The Governing Board of United Earth Nations had recently announced a new funding program for time travel research, could that have something to do with it?
“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 break into Pfleeg’s files, see what he was working on, run some tests, look for anomalies and then run the data until something clicked. As far as she was aware, no-one had ever 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.
There was nothing particularly untoward in any of Pfleeg’s files, the intergalactic ladyfish porn aside, but when they ran some tests on the lab itself there were some disturbing anomalies in the data. The lab was emitting a faint but steady aura of negatively charged kilmophogs, and a markedly higher density of nanoquadrants than could be readily explained by the time of year or the current atmospheric spectometrics provided by the environment board.
“It’s stronger over here.” Kim mused, squinting at the radiospectometer in her hand, “the nanoquadrants increase by 3.89 gagahorts over in this corner…”
“That’s Pfleeg’s storage vault.”
“I know…”
“It’s protected by state of the art security measures designed by Pfleeg himself.”
“True.”
“Pfleeg says it’s unbreakable.”
“He does say that…”
Four minutes and fifteen seconds later the vault was open. The contraption inside was like nothing Kim had ever seen before, yet there was something oddly familiar about it.
“What is it?”
A multitude of wires coiled around a radiometer and wasn’t that a temporal spectrometer… and a timer? That didn’t make any sense.
“Kim? What do you think it is?”
Having the spectrometer wired to the timer like that, it almost seemed like… If you didn’t know better it almost looked as if…
“Kim?”
It was at this point that the machine in front of them 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.
“Crap,” Said Jess, “That’s not good...”
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 there was a blinding flash of light. When they could see again there was a woman sitting with her back to them scribbling something in a notepad while spooning something into her mouth from a steaming bowl next to her.
Kim and Jess blinked at her uncomprehendingly.
“Wh… Who are you?” Jess stuttered.
The woman jumped and spun around, knocking what looked to be a bowl of vegetable soup on the floor. Kim’s mouth dropped open.
“What the hell?” Professor Gillian McDougley demanded angrily, “How did you get in here?”
“Mu…?”
“Get out this instant.” Kim’s mum stood up and marched to the door, swinging it open and standing by it expectantly, crossing her arms over the considerable bump of her stomach.
Kim stared at the stomach, then up at her mother’s face, then back down at the bulge of her pregnant belly. But that made no sense. Kim’s mother would be almost sixty, she couldn’t… Although, now Kim came to think of it, this woman – who was undoubtedly her mother – looked no more than thirty…
The ball dropped in agonising slow motion.
“Holy shit sticks!”
Kim’s mother and Jess both looked at her in surprise.
“I… Don’t quote me on this, but I think… I mean, I’m pretty sure we… I think we might’ve… It’s possible we’ve just gone back in t…”
Another blinding flash and the machine behind them hiccupped and vibrated to a stop. The lab was empty. The woman by the door had disappeared.
They stood there in silence for a moment.
“I… Did you… What just happened?” Jess whispered.
Tim blinked and turned to stare at the machine. “I’m not sure…” He said slowly, “But I think Something might have happened…”