That morning Tim Smith had invented a time machine. Unfortunately, instead of zapping him into the future, which had been the entire point of the bastard exercise, the stupid thing simply sat there producing time, which for someone desperate to get to the future was about as useful as an undercharged peno-enlarge-o-levitron and just as frustrating.
To make matters worse, as soon as he’d invented it, the damn thing somehow uninvented itself again, which Tim wasn’t even sure was possible.
He should have known something was up, should have had an inkling that something or someone was interfering in his work. After all, the skips had been increasing in frequency, his gammatrycolate had disappeared the day before and his lab had been emitting a faint but steady aura of negatively charged kilmophogs for weeks. That and a markedly higher density of nanoquadrants than could be readily explained by the time of year or the current atmospheric spectometrics. Something was undoubtedly up and Tim knew one thing very clearly: It was almost certainly Dr. Heffleton Pfleeg’s fault
Pfleeg, an unlanced spagwort of dubious talent and even more dubious morals, had duplicitously won the position of Head Scientist for The Council of Innovation and Science five years before, by cheating Tim out of his discovery of wavomitry. The discovery of wavomitry had since increased average land travel speed by 1000%, thereby ingratiating Pfleeg with some very important people all of whom thoroughly enjoyed being able to get places at vomit-inducing speeds. Everyone knew that The Council of Innovation and Science was basically a front for the eccentric, Multi-Billionaire, Rodreeden Zimmerhalf, who had not been seen in person for nearly thirty years and conducted all of his interviews by hologram wearing a cat mask. He was widely rumoured to be dead, living on Mars, living in an alternate dimension, a fiction of someone else’s imagination, dangerously insane or at least two of the above. He was however, monstrously, grotesquely, offensively rich and absolutely adored travelling at vomit-inducing speeds. Pfleeg, therefore, had enough funding to sink a three-decked hydropod and free rein to do whatever he damn well pleased. For the most part, what he damn well pleased was messing with other scientists he felt might one day challenge his supremacy, and Tim, being a visionary genius, was top of the list.
Tim and Pfleeg had worked together for almost eight years until the day that Tim had stormed out due to the aforementioned wavometry stealing debacle. Pfleeg had then made it very clear he would do anything he could to sabotage Tim’s career. To date he had succeeded in reversing Tim’s unreversable-jinxatron, detecting Tim’s undetectable-smeltitdealtabot and defining Tim’s undefinable-definitionater – which had been particularly irritating because Pfleeg’s definition had subsequently made it into the Galactic English Dictionary. Not content with this, however, Pfleeg had also attacked Tim’s funding streams, forcing The Council of Innovation and Science blacklist Tim, declaring him to be “An imminent danger to himself and the known universe” and accusing him of “unsafe working practises”, “unethical data management”, “maniacal persuasions” and “severe flatulence.” Only a couple of which were true.
Luckily for Tim, The Council of Innovation and Science was not the only ludicrously rich funding body out there looking to throw ghastly sums of money at dangerously speculative, scientific research. It was the era of the hero scientist, after all. Ten years before, science had brought humanity back from the brink of extinction during hyperbolic years when everyone was dropping dead from a series of sudden and mysterious nasties, each as inexplicable and nasty as the last: Green Pox, that was unpleasant; Pooping Cough, also nasty; Chollorrhoea, less said the better. Scientists were the new Gods and politicians were falling over themselves to look rabidly pro-science. The Governing Board of United Earth Nations for example, had recently announced a new funding program of truly gut-wrenching sums of cash, specifically for time travel research. People, it seemed, wanted the future and they wanted it now. Tim had been diligently trying to take them there when he accidently invented the time producing machine, which of course was of no use to man nor belching cosmic supercretin.
It now seemed however, that the maligned Time producing Machine, was enough of a threat to Pfleeg that that blistering intergalactic snotworm had seen fit to start meddling, and if Pfleeg was indeed responsible for the uninvention of Tim’s Time Machine, then that was the last straw. Tim was no longer going to take that shit lying down.
Tim Smith spent the whole morning reinventing the Time Machine and when he was done, he wrapped it up carefully in an old blanket treated with a powerful anti-forcephorescence – to protect it against further Pfleeg instigated meddling – and put it in his backpack. Then he went to Pfleeg’s untra-secret, top security lab and broke in. It wasn’t hard. It was Sunday so no one was there and someone had forgotten to lock the door.
Inside Pfleeg’s lab Tim retrieved the time machine from his backpack and switched it on. He didn’t know how long it would take him to find what he was looking for, but it wouldn’t hurt to ensure he had as much as he needed – the Time Machine did have one use after all, maybe he could flog it to students on revision deadlines…
The Time Machine burped and flickered to life, the tempolaxidator sucking in time, multiplying it and pumping it back out again in a steady guffing stream. Multiplied time was always a little stuffy and it gave you terrible dry mouth.
Tim got started. It was a simple question of focus, he reminded himself. He would just start at the bottom and work up. He would break into Pfleeg’s files, see what he was working on and go from there. As far as he was aware, no-one had ever uninvented something before, but if Pfleeg was going to start doing it, it would behove him to understand how and figure out how to prevent it.
There was nothing particularly untoward in any of Pfleeg’s files, the intergalactic ladyfish porn aside, but Tim knew all of Pfleeg’s ‘Top Secret’ work would be contained within his uncrackable storage vault, protected by state-of-the-art anti-touch technology, auto-invisibility drivers and explosive oh-no-you-don’t boobytrap systems, designed by Pfleeg himself. Pfleeg had declared it completely unbreakable. He had left the door open however.
Inside the vault was contraption Tim recognised only too well: A multitude of wires coiled around a radiometer and a temporal spectrometer connected to a timer. Tim sat back, it was as he’d expected: Pfleeg was also trying to invent a Time Machine. His design was constructed along different lines to Tim’s, but worked on the same basic principles. Had he managed to get it working? Was that how he’d managed to uninvent Tim’s own Time Machine, by going back in time? And if so, did that mean Tim had also been close to inventing a Time travelling Machine?
There was only one thing to do.
Tim swiftly uninvented Pfleeg’s Time Machine with the help of a mallet he found on the work bench. Less elegant perhaps, but equally effective. While he worked a pregnant woman dropped a bowl of soup and asked him angrily what the hell he was doing, a girl with two mugs of coffee in her hands asked him confusedly if one was for him and he briefly woke up on building site.
Tim put the mallet down and breathed out slowly. Whatever the machine he’d just uninvented had been, uninventing it had caused some kind of rupture to occur, not dissimilar to the skips he’d been experiencing in the last few weeks.
He looked at the smashed remnants of the machine and soberly decided it was time to be off. His own time machine was still pumping out time from the desk behind him and when he hit the button to turn it off, it made a noise like a cat being run over by a mechanised vegetation hackmower.
“Crap,” Said Tim, “That’s not good...”
Smoke began to coil from the tempolaxidator and a buzzing sound vibrating through the lab began to rise gradually in pitch.
“Now you’ve done it.” The pregnant woman sighed, her voice slowing down like a damaged tape. “There’s too many of us interfering with time now, the now, linearity now, now, metrics now, now, now, can’t now, now, now, now, take now, now, now, now, now, it, now, now, now, now, now, now, if now, now, now, now, now, now, now, we’re now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, not now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, careful now,
we’ll zap now, ourselves now, now, now, out of time now, All now, now, now, now, now, together. Become now, purely virtual…”